For decades, visitors of the Alamo, along with park rangers and passers-by, have described seeing a mysterious sentry walking his patrol. There have also been countless reports of unexplained noises, men screaming in pain, battle cries and voices and whispers seeming to emanate from the walls of the chapel. People passing the Alamo at night have seen distorted and disheveled human shapes forming right out of the exterior walls themselves. I'm Darren Marlar. This is Weird But True, a companion to Weird Darkness. On March 6, 1836, the defenders of the Alamo mission in what is now San Antonio, Texas, were overrun by Mexican Army troops. The Battle of the Alamo has become one of the pivotal events in American history, although Texas was not a part of the United States at the time. On February 23, 1836, a Mexican army of thousands of soldiers attacked a makeshift garrison of about 200 Texas settlers, including James Bowie, William Travis and former congressman David Crockett, who were holed up in the abandoned mission on the outskirts of town. The events that led to the battle began several months before when the Texans drove all of the Mexican troops out of what was then Mexican-owned Texas. After taking over San Antonio, the Texan forces decided to fortify the Alamo in whatever way they could. The chapel was never meant to be a fortress. It had thick walls, but they were made of simple masonry. Colonel James Neal, assigned to command the Alamo, moved 24 pieces of artillery to the walls, but the fort was still undermanned and low on both ammunition and food. Neal complained to General Sam Houston that his men were underfed and exhausted. He sent a message to the provisional government stating, unless we are reinforced and provided with food and stores, we must become an easy prey to the enemy in case of an attack. Soon after, on January 19, Colonel James Bowie arrived with a small company of men. He was impressed with the work already done and he worked well with Colonel Neal. Complaints again went out stressing the lack of horses. There weren't even enough horses to send out scouts to watch for signs of the Mexican army. Again, a meager number of reinforcements were sent to the Alamo. Colonel William Travis arrived on February 3 with a small contingent of cavalry. Five days later, David Crockett arrived with a small group of American volunteers. Travis was unhappy to be given this post, but as a career army officer, he followed orders. Sadly, they were still significantly low on supplies and ammunition. The number of soldiers positioned at one of the two forts protecting the whole of the Republic of Texas had risen to only 150 men. At noon, on February 23, 1836, Santa Ana and the forward part of his army reached San Antonio. Century's positions south of town came riding in with the hard news. With Neal absent with a family emergency, Travis and Bowie took command. Some men were sent to collect what food stores they could find and others worked to drive their few head of cattle inside the fort. Most of the Mexicans living in town were hostile to the Texans, but there were a few people living outside the walls of the Alamo who were invited inside for protection. Two hours later, after a brief respite, Santa Ana marched his men into town and sent words to Travis demanding immediate, unconditional surrender. Travis answered with a cannon shot. Santa Ana initiated a bombardment of the fort and gave orders that it continue around the clock. Travis sent off an express message to Colonel Fannin and Goliad 90 miles to the southeast, where Fannin had a contingent of 300 soldiers. Travis described the situation at the Alamo and requested immediate assistance. The 13-day siege of the Alamo had begun. On February 26, a light skirmish between the fort's defenders and Mexican cavalry erupted but amounted to nothing. The storm had blown and the temperature dropped to 39 degrees. Santa Ana brought up more reinforcements and posted more guards around the Alamo, but the Texans were able to sneak out for wood and food and return safely. While they were out, they burned a few more houses. The bombardment of the Alamo continued. Early in the day, on February 28, Colonel Fannin and 200 men with four pieces of artillery left Goliad for the Alamo, leaving 100 men to guard the Presidio of Ohio. After marching only 200 yards, a wagon of supplies broke down. They decided to return to the Presidio and fort defiance in Goliad. They would not be reinforcing the soldiers of the Alamo. On March 1, Captain John Smith snuck into the Alamo, bringing 32 Texans with him. That brought the number of men inside the walls to 188 outside Santa Ana's troops numbered 5,000. The defenders were holding, but the walls of the fort were weakening with constant bombardments. The Mexican troops were rested and well fed, while the Texans were starving and exhausted. By the 10th day of the siege, March 3, Santa Ana's men had erected a fourth battery to the north of the fort, within musket range. Travis sent off another desperate request for reinforcements and supplies. This was to be his last appeal to the President. By then, he had ceased expecting any help to come. The final day came on March 6, when just after midnight, Santa Ana pulled his entire force into town and surrounded the fort. His troops had been supplied with scaling ladders and they waited quietly for the word to attack. At 5 am, they received the word. The troops moved forward and the ladders were placed against the wall, ready to scale. But the Texans were ready and brought down very heavy fire and the Mexicans were driven back. They made a second attempt with the same results, followed by a third and a fourth. Each time, they were repulsed by the Texans. For Santa Ana, the fifth try met with success. The Mexican troops flooded up and over the wall and into the Alamo. Completely overwhelmed, the Texans had no chance, but they kept fighting. Travis was one of the first to be killed but still the defenders kept fighting. They fought until nearly all lay dead in the dirt inside the Alamo. Santa Ana had given orders that the wounded were to be killed and many bayonets were bloodied that day. The Mexicans then moved through the fort looking for anyone who might be hiding. During this search, the men came upon Colonel Bowie, still in his sickbed, knowing he was one of the commanders of the fort. They butchered him. After 12 days of bombardment, the Alamo was taken by the Mexican army in just 90 minutes. By 8 am, every fighting man who had defended the Alamo lay dead. After the dead Texans had been collected and brought into the center of the courtyard, the bodies were looted for valuables. The bodies were then stripped of their clothing and stacked like cordwood and set on fire. Witnesses related that the piles smoldered for three days. The Mexican army stood victorious but at a tremendous cost. Records vary but best estimates put the number of dead at nearly 500 and almost as many wounded. The defenders of the Alamo had been wiped out. The battle that Santa Ana thought would frighten the rebels into submission became an inspiration to the Texans. Their battle cry for freedom became Remember the Alamo, but all too soon would come Galead, another of Texas greatest tragedies. The Alamo and its mission chapel fell in and out of repair as several different uses for the structure were found, from a military outpost to a police station and jail. In the early 1900s, the land was purchased by the state of Texas and the daughters of the Republic of Texas were appointed as permanent caretakers. The site is visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year. The Alamo was already 93 years old at the time of the famous battle. The first stones for the Spanish mission were laid in 1744. There were several hundred burials in what is now Alamo Plaza. In 1793, the Catholic Church moved the religious artifacts to a nearby mission and turned the property over to the town. It officially became the Alamo, the Spanish word for cottonwood when it was used as a barracks for Spanish soldiers in 1803. The building was vacant and abandoned between 1825-1835 when general cause of the Mexican army made it into a military fort. It changed hands between the Mexicans and the Texans three more times, including the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. After that time, a variety of purposes was found for the structure until it was purchased by the state of Texas and opened to the public as a state shrine. After so many different uses by so many different people, it is not unexpected that the old mission chapel and surrounding property is considered quite haunted. However, the primary reason that the Alamo is so haunted can be linked to the battle that occurred there in 1836 when between 800 and 1100 people died violent deaths over a period of little more than two hours. Added to that, the bodies of the Texans were stripped, desecrated and burned with no proper burial. Even the bodies of the Mexican soldiers were mishandled in ways that would have been considered improper in their religion and their culture. They were either burned, thrown into the San Antonio River, or left to rot as carrion for wild animals and vultures. The land within and surrounding the old mission is essentially a cemetery. After the bodies were burned, their ashes and charred pieces of bone and teeth were raked out and mixed in with the soil. If there were a checklist for events that would most likely lead to a haunting, the Alamo and Goliads in the follow would certainly tick the top 8 or 10. There was no record of any hauntings or ghost sightings before the battle in 1836, but one of the most prominent paranormal legends stems from just a few weeks afterwards. General Santa Ana and the bulk of his forces stayed on at San Antonio de Bexar for a few weeks before leaving to chase down General Sam Houston and the Republic of Texas Army, leaving a garrison of men at the Alamo under General Andrade's command. Shortly before leaving, Santa Ana ordered General Andrade to demolish the Alamo, leaving nothing standing. General Andrade then instructed Colonel Sanchez to get the job done. Colonel Sanchez took his men to the site of the Alamo. After 12 days of constant bombardment, the place was not much more than rubble. The only recognizable structure still standing was the Mission Chapel. Sanchez ordered the men to begin demolishing the church, and the men complied, although there was some grumbling among the ranks about it possibly being sacrilege to tear down a former Catholic church. According to legend, as the men began to work, six ghostly forms emerged from the chapel walls. The soldiers immediately stopped what they were doing and backed away, crossing themselves and muttering diabolos or devils under their breath. The forms often described as monks slowly advanced on the soldiers, waving flaming swords and warning the men in inhuman voices, do not touch the walls of the Alamo. Colonel Sanchez and his men ran screaming from the chapel back to their encampment. When Sanchez told General Andrade what they had witnessed, Andrade was furious and chastised Sanchez for his cowardice. Taking matters into his own hands, Andrade collected a detail of men and marched them to the Alamo to get the work done. As added protection, he took along a small cannon and instructed the gunner to aim it directly at the front doors of the chapel. But before they could blast the doors, the six ghostly monk forms again took shape and issued their warning. Andrade's horse took fright and reared, throwing a general to the ground. Before following his men in retreat, he turned to look at the building again and saw giant flames blast up from the ground. The smoke curled and twisted into the shape of a huge man. The figure held balls of fire in each hand and threw them at Andrade. General Andrade affected a hasty retreat and the phantom protectors of the Alamo won out. But this part of the legend is not borne out by fact. Apparently Andrade was not frightened away for good since he must have returned to complete his orders. According to official records and archaeological investigations, much of what remained of the mission was demolished, including many of the fort's walls. In the 1890s, the Alamo Chapel and some of the old barracks were used as a police station and local jail. Soon after moving into the old buildings, the prisoners and guards began complaining about a variety of unexplainable experiences. They reported that a ghostly sentry walked from east to west on the roof of the police station, formerly the old barracks. This and other events were described so frequently and fervently that the hauntings became news literally. The San Antonio Express News published two articles in 1894 and again in 1897 about the ghostly goings on. These articles described several types of manifestations that were witnessed within the walls of the police station and jail. They saw mysterious man-shaped shadows moving about the rooms and corridors and heard strange moaning sounds that could not be explained. According to the newspaper reports, these were frequent and frightening, so much so that many of the guards refused to patrol the area after dark. As the stories of the hauntings became more well known, complaints were brought to the San Antonio City Council, where councilmen took the position that making the prisoners sleep in a building with ghosts roaming around and moaning amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and that it was unsafe for the public because of the guards' refusal to walk their patrols after sunset. Shortly after the second article was published, the city moved the police station from the Alamo to a building that was not haunted. Many of the same types of incidents that were reported in the 1890s are said to continue to happen today, except that now the ghosts of the Alamo no longer seem to distinguish between night and day, but prefer to conduct their hauntings around the clock. A commonly seen apparition is that of a man dressed in clothing of the early 1800s walking across the courtyard. Although visitors have described seeing this man many times over the years, the story was validated for Alamo officials by one of their own park rangers. The ranger noticed a man dressed in period costume walking toward the library. The ranger decided to follow him and see what he was up to. To his surprise, the stranger faded away to nothing as he approached the chapel. Another commonly witnessed ghost is that of a blonde boy who has been seen wandering the buildings and courtyard but is most often seen in the gift shop. He apparently likes to interact with children and has been known to carry on conversations with them. He has told several children that he was present during the battle and believes he died there. He seems to selectively appear to specific people, with children waving goodbye to him while their parents see no one. One last identifiable individual said to be haunting the site is none other than David Rockett himself. Rockett fought and died at the Alamo, either killed during the battle or slaughtered afterwards by some of Santa Ana's officers. His ghost is most often described as wearing a full set of buckskins and of course his famous coon skin cap. He has been seen all over the compound, but most frequently he is seen guarding the old mission chapel. Please subscribe so you don't miss future episodes, including my podcasts Weird Darkness and Daily Dose of Weird News. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and support the show and become a patron to get exclusive content at WeirdDarkness.com. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time, Weirdos.


Hello there. This is the family doctor. Hey, this is Dr. Adams. Ring my house for me, will you? This is Grant. I was just leaving the office and I wondered if there was anything you wanted me to bring home. Groceries? All right, honey. I'll drop you into the places on my way. What do you want? Pencil? Oh, I can remember it. You don't think I can, huh? Well, just a second. Let me see. Oh, oh, there's a pencil. Go ahead. Letters? Celery? Tomatoes? What? Oh, eggs. Sounds like a picnic. What was that? Ant paste. Still sounds like a picnic. All right, Lou, all right. I'm paying attention. And what's that? Oh, soap. All right. Is that all? Mm-hmm. Oh, about 20 minutes. All right, honey. Oh, all right. I'll tell Donk to tell his mother. All right. Goodbye. Let me see if I can remember. I couldn't find the pencil, but I couldn't let Lou know that. Letters? Celery, tomatoes, eggs, ant paste, and soap. I can remember that easy enough. Yes, Mr. Bliss? Take that order up to Maynard? Well, yes, sir. Did you pay for it? Yes, sir. I put the money in the cash register and rang it up. Come on, man. I'll close up the store. I'm going to ride in company. What did you say, Mr. Bliss? I didn't hear you. Oh, I just dropped this cracker bug. Well, well, I thought the roof had fell in. Hello, Doc Adams. Hello, Donk. Hello, Doctor. Well, I've got to get some things for Mrs. Adams' rip. Haven't closed up yet, have you? Not when I can still sell a bill of goods. Donk, you fill the order. What do you have? Well, let me see. Celery. How many bunches, Doctor? How many bunches? Well, Mrs. Adams didn't say. Oh, about half a dozen, I guess. All right. What else? What else? Oh, ant paste. Ant paste? Well, how many bottles? Well, how many do you usually sell at once? Well, no, and some folks have trouble with the ant paste, and they stock up on ant paste, powder or something. They do, eh? Well, Mrs. Adams must be having trouble if she wouldn't have told me to get ant paste. Well, give me a half a dozen bottles, Donk. All right. What else?  Maybe you should have read it down. Well, maybe I should. But I couldn't find a pencil. Half a dozen pencils, Donk. Okay. Anything else? Well, it seems to me there was something. Oh, yeah, soap. Soap. What kind? Face laundry, chips, liquid or harness. Well, Mrs. Adams didn't say what kind. Oh, I suppose just ordinary soap.  All right. Well, I hear you're going to run for mayor of Cederton, Rip. Yeah. Well, I did think something about it. Ames Day was up the other evening, and he said he'd support me in the post-Dougal if I'd run against Mayor Troper. He did, eh? Yeah, yeah. Ames Day, back of you. Anything else, Dr. Adams? They got all that stuff. Hmm? Oh, anything else, eh? Well, what have you got there now? Celery, ant paste, soap and pencils. Well, uh... Oh, I see some lettuce over there. That's it. Lettuce and tomatoes. Yeah, Mr. Friday, I'm glad I saw that. Oh, how many of each, Doctor? Oh, half a dozen, I guess. Tomatoes are sold by the pound, Doc, not each piece. Oh, by the pound, eh? Well, eh... Half a dozen pounds, Doctor? Yeah, yeah, I guess that'll be enough. Must be having quite a party after your place, Doc. Party? Oh, I know everything about that, Mrs. Adams didn't say so. Yeah, I think I will file for the job of Mayor, Doc. I've been living in Cederton now about, uh, 20 years. And I reckon I know enough about the town to run it. I ain't done so bad with my own business, you know. Oh, you haven't, Rip. Uh, will you, uh... Will you support me, Doc Adams? Well, uh... I guess it's a little early to decide about that, Rip, and I'm never the kind of man who tells anyone, least of all the candidates, who he's going to vote for. Yeah, uh, of course, I understand. But I will say this, I'm mighty glad you're going to run for Mayor. Your order's all ready, Dr. Adams. Oh, thank you, Doc. I put it in the carton for you. Yeah, that's fine. Well, Rip, I wish you a lot of luck in the coming campaign. Thank you, Doc. I reckon I'll probably need it. Oh, oh, Dr. Yes, Doc? Are you going in my direction? If you are, can I run along with you? You're through with me, aren't you, Mr. Bliss? Oh, yeah, you run right along if Doc Adams can take you. Why, sure. Come along, Doc. Good night, Mayor Bliss. Oh, quit getting me, Doc. I'll carry the box for you. Oh, thanks, Doc. Just put it in the back seat, then. Well, Doc, you've got a fine man for a boss. I know, Doc. I've got you to thank for it. Hmm? Oh. Well, yes, I have. If you hadn't knocked some sense into my dumb head when I started stealing your car that night, I'd have probably been back in the reformatory right now. How do you like your job, Doc? Fine. Only, well, someday, I'm going to try to go to college so as I can fit myself for something better. Well, that's the spirit. Say, Doctor, uh... Yes? Did you think I lived this way? Well, yes. Don't you? Gee, no. Come on, I've moved. Since Dad died, we don't need such a big house. So we moved out about two miles on the Dunlap Road. Well, I didn't know that. But gee, if it's going to take you out of your way, well, not at all, Doc. It's perfectly all right. What do you think you're going to want to take up in college? Well, you may think this to be funny, but, well, I want to be a doctor. Is that so? Well, Dr. Duncan Webb. That's great. Just great. Yeah.  Expecting somebody else? Grant Adams, do you know what time it is? Why? You've got a clock there in the kitchen. I know what time it is, but do you know? Oh, why? Well, honey, here are your groceries. What do you think I'm going to do with them at 7.30 at night? 7.30? That's what time it is right now. Oh, wow. I didn't know it was so late. Well, there they are anyway, honey. Don't you think I'm entitled to know where you've been, Grant? Well, certainly, Lou. Do you think it makes any difference? I drove Dunk Webb down to his home, and while I was there, I thought I might as well give Mrs. Webb your message myself. I guess we've got to talking a little bit. Grant Adams, do you realize dinner's been waiting for an hour and a half? That at 5.30, two hours ago, you told me over the phone that you'd be home in 20 minutes? Well, yes. I know, Lou, but I... I had a chance to talk to Duncan, his mother, a little bit about the boy's future. Oh, well, anyway, you're home now. I'll get dinner on right away. I guess we'll have to do without a salad tonight. Goodness gracious. What's the matter? Look at these tomatoes. What's the matter with them? They look all right to me. How many did you get, Grant? How many? Well, the place said they didn't sell them by the tomato, but by the pound. Well, how many pounds did you get? Six. Six pounds of tomatoes. And the celery. Six bunches. An ant-paste. Six bottles of ant-paste. What's the world of you thinking of, Grant Adams? And six heads of lettuce. Oh. Oh, gosh, I'm sorry, Lou. Did I get too much of everything? Grant, where are the eggs? Eggs. Oh, gosh, to Friday, I knew I'd forget something. Well, didn't you write down what I asked you to get? Well, you see, honey, I didn't have a pencil at the office, but I was pretty sure I could remember what you wanted. Well, after this, I'll know better. Six pounds of tomato and six heads of lettuce. Six bunches of celery. Lou. Yes, Grant? I've got a tonselectomy scheduled for tomorrow morning at 10. I wonder if you'd like to come over and do it for me. What? I say, would you like to come over and perform an operation instead of me tomorrow morning? Now, what in the world are you talking about? Well, you expect me to be able to run the house and know all about ordering groceries and things like that. Didn't you know how to perform a surgical operation? Oh, Grant Adams, you will duffer you. Well, now let's kiss and make up. No, Grant, no, no, not now. I've got my hands full of the tune. No, not Grant. No, not stop it, you will duffer you. All right, honey. All right. We've had a good laugh. And now that our digestive apparatus is in good working order again, let's have dinner. This is the family doctor. I'll be in to see you again right soon. Goodbye.


and it is Middle Game by Shona McGuire. Could you do everything that I'm doing today? Friends, welcome back to my channel. I hope you are well. My name is Megan and in today's video we're going to be going through my favourite fantasy books. I'm really excited to do this video because fantasy is definitely one of my most read genres. I read a lot of fantasy and I thought I would just go through my favourites. They're both adult and young adult. We have both here but predominantly adult. Actually I find I do prefer adult fantasy. Before we get into it make sure you subscribe if you haven't already and hit the like button and yeah there's a lot new of you. There's a lot new of you. Was she tried? At least you know she... There's a lot more of you here that I knew recently. So thank you for all your support. I'm having so much fun chatting to you all. So first I'm going to talk about by far my favourite fantasy series. I read this series before I started my booktube channel and I'm still completely in love with it. Still completely obsessed. It's still my favourite... Oh my god I want to reread this so bad. And it is The Wind and Night series of which The Bear and the Nightingale is the first one. So this is by Catherine Arden. Wow I have such fond memories of reading this. So in this we follow Vassia. She lives in Russia, kind of old Russia and it's a very difficult book to explain. Try it! Try it! Try it! It's her discovering magic and folklore and the truth of old Russian magic and the tales of the Winter King and whether the Winter King is true. We are basically following her as she grows in power and responsibility and in learning magic. She has to and this one really saved the town that she lives in and then in this one she has to save her city and and this one she kind of has to save the world and it's a brilliant coming of age series. It is so whimsical, so magical. If you enjoy feeling like you've stepped into a fairy tale I've never read a book that quite makes you feel like that. You know I've read books that have the atmosphere of the fairy tale or plot is very similar but even the way that this is written feels like a fairy tale. It is like laced with magic throughout the whole thing and I adore it. I love it so, so much and this is just criminally underrated in my opinion. Like not enough people speak about it. A fair few do but in my opinion this should be one of the most popular series on booktube and it's not. It's not. I was angry. I was angry. There's other fantasy books, other fantasy series that get way more hype when they are average and this book is just, this series is incredible. I think, I don't know what my favorite is. I've always said the girl in the tower but they're all wonderful and I, oh my god I want to reread them. So bad. The way that religion is brought into this, the way that magic is brought into this, the family relations, if you love reading about like sibling relationships there's some really interesting dynamics in here and in the last one, the witch of the witch, the magic just goes beyond anything. Like the way that the world grows with Vassia is really, really special in my opinion. There's a marked difference in the kind of expansion of the world of the magic in each book but it feels so natural and oh my god. I could speak about this series forever in my opinion. Perfect. Catherine Arden can do no wrong. My queen. My queen. This is a place for legends. Okay. It's, it's so good. It's so good. I want to reread it so bad because obviously I read it like I said before I had booktube so like I haven't read it on my channel so if you're interested in reading this maybe this winter I'm thinking I might do a bit of like a read-along for this just for fun but I don't know if anyone would want to do it so let me know if you would want to do it and we could maybe read one a month and have live shows and discussions around it because I love it. I love it so dearly. So um let me know if you'd be interested in that because I'm kind of holding off on doing it because I just don't know be something that people would be interested in. Okay so my next favorite fantasy book is one that I speak about. I speak about all these quite a lot actually but it is The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern aka the most beautiful book in existence. Nothing else can top it. Nothing even comes close. Even the inside part of me wants another copy so I can have one put this on and then I can have one just showing the the book without the sleeve. So this is a bit of a difficult book to explain. It is again very whimsical, very magical. We follow Zachary as he finds a book which has something written in it that happened to him as a child and he doesn't know how anyone else could know that happened to him and it is also like a story of other twisting tales that slowly come together and you slowly learn how they all tie in and it's a very difficult book to explain. It's a story about books, it's a story about magical worlds, it's a story about pirates, it's a story about The Starless Sea, it's a story about time and getting lost in time. It's amazing. The power that that has, the intelligence that that has, the clearance that that has, the access that that has, the influence that that has, the profile that that has. This book I felt so drawn in and it just elicited that feeling for me of wow I am completely blown away by this book which doesn't happen that often like when rude.  You can like a book and you can love a book but being completely blown away by a book is a whole different story and I just felt like this was unlike anything I'd ever read. Erin Morgan's writing is some of my favorite writing ever. I am so sad that she only puts out a book like every eight years or something. I need more from her, I need another book from her next year. If you have not read The Starless Sea yet, don't be scared off by it because I know Erin Morgan's books can be kind of intimidating. They're fairly big and just the writing is kind of a lot to take on and to understand and to take in. It is an intimidating book however it is just one of the most magical things I've ever read. So if you want that magic like these these two books that kind of whimsy are perfect for that. Quickly I want to talk about a book I don't have with me. It's because I lent it out to a family friend. Another fantasy book that I absolutely love is Night House by Lou Bardugo. I know this wasn't the most popular when it first came out like I think a lot of people had mixed feelings about it but I read it. It was the first book that I'd ever read by Lou Bardugo. I loved it. I loved it. So in this we follow Alex Stern as she is given a second chance. She has lived a really troubled life. She's lived a really difficult life and someone gives her a second chance to go to Yale and basically there's a lot of secret societies at Yale and she her job in return for getting to go to Yale is to monitor these secret societies and their magic and basically making sure they're not getting up to anything they shouldn't be getting up to. It's a really hard hitting story so make sure you check the trigger warnings for this if you need to. I thought the plot of this was brilliant. It's quite a complex story. This was again one that people said like oh I didn't understand it. I didn't get it but I think it's definitely a book you should read physically at the very least. I wouldn't recommend the audiobook because I've listened to it but I think because of its complexity and the layers that it has there's a lot going on and it shifts back and forward in time and we're dealing with all kinds of mysteries. It's kind of a murder mystery in some regard. There is a girl that has been killed right at the start and that spurs on a lot of the story but it's definitely not the main focus of it. It's kind of just the catalyst for a lot of the rest of the story to happen. When everything was revealed for this book like the ending was incredible to me. The last page. The plot was sneaking up on me. I'm so excited for the next book because oh my god oh my god it was so I can't wait I can't wait for the next book. It's just so sinister and so like based on the occult and oh I love ghosts because of this. I'm just like give it to me. This is the spooky, spooky, cocky and creepy special edition. Oh it's it's it's so good so if you haven't picked up Ninth House because you heard some not great things about it read it. I've made everyone in my life read it and they've all loved it. Next is my only YA one on this list actually I just realised and it is Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Nyang so I love this book. I speak about it quite a lot. This is about a girl called Leigh who is off the paper case in society which is the lowest oh my god is it case or cast. I always get it wrong and people always make fun of me. Cast. Paper cast. Crickets. Crickets. Every year some girls are chosen to essentially be forced to sleep with the king and they all go and live at the palace and Leigh is one of them and it's a really difficult story it deals with rape and sexual assault and so that's something you need to know going into it however I think it's so important these topics are discussed in YA and I've always said that with all the girls Natasha Nyang really shows so many different reactions to going through that trauma they all reaction different ways which I thought was a really great aspect of it because not everyone reacts the same way to going through such a terrible thing and in this is the story of Leigh trying to rebel against what she's been forced into whilst she also falls in love with another one of the girls there which is like such a beautiful thing and I love their relationship I didn't love the second one in this series quite as much I love the first one however I'm holding out hope that the final book of the series will be as great as this one because I feel like the middle one had a bit of middle book syndrome like it was just a bit ploddy a bit slow and you could feel that but I still give it four stars I still really enjoyed it however I recognise it's not as good as this I just love the characters I love the world I love Natasha Nyang's writing I think she's one of the best YA authors that are out there her world feels so vivid I think it's really hard in YA fantasy to have as vivid a world as this it feels so complex and so just like I know everything that is going on in this world in terms of politics in terms of society you know like I really understand it and I think that's a really hard thing to do so I love this book so so much I can't wait for the last one in series and I would really recommend it then my next recommendation is a book that really transcends genre and so I don't really know what genre to put it in that's why I'm putting it in this video because I think it is mainly fantasy but a bit of sci-fi a bit of everything really and it is middle game by Shonda Maguire could you do everything that I'm doing today this is one of my new favourite books we follow twins called Roger and Dodger who have been made by this kind of alchemist scientist and he wants to use them to ascend to godhood to take control of the world it's the story of them growing up separately they've been pushed apart but they can speak to each other and it's a story of them coming together and a part throughout their lives and understanding what's going on with them and the relationship between them and rebelling against what they've been forced into but also then accepting what they've been forced into it's it's it's so good it's so good it's really just like somebody pressed a button on a cultural reset Shonda Maguire is a genius we love her mind and genius you need to trust me that this book is great because I don't have the words to tell you how great it is you just have to trust me I don't make the rules and then I've left this book till last because it does kind of spoil my next reading vlog that will be coming out next weekend but it is the popular by R.F. Quang so I literally just finished this I gave it five stars kind of like a 4.75 but in my head now yeah it's a five star if we're completely honest so we follow Rin who is an orphan her fostered parents want to marry her off and she's like nah bitch I ain't doing that so she takes a really hard exam and she gets into the top military academy and it's the story of her learning about herself at that academy and then going on beyond it and learning about her power and the power of the gods in her society and it's a hard book like out any of these books this is the one that people often say you need to be aware of the trigger warnings going into this there's one particular chapter that is incredibly hard to read you probably know that already if it's been on your radar but Rin doesn't always make choices choices right from the get-go that you agree with and you know she's not going to make choices that you agree with and that's part of the brilliance of this she's not perfect I think often in fantasy they always make the right choices although you make one mistake you know the the protagonist in the book but Rin is constantly I wouldn't say I wouldn't call them mistakes but she's going down paths that you as the reader wouldn't necessarily have gone down which is a really really interesting thing to read and one of my favorite things about this Rin's growth and the growth of those around her and the situations they're put in is just incredible to read and I think the writing in this was amazing the fact that the author was only 19 when she wrote this is incredible my dad because this is my dad he just got the second one the dragon republic and it is big I thought the poppy wall was big but no what oh my god that's even scarier when I put them next to each other I couldn't wait to get around to the dragon republic it that's very scary let's not recognize how scary that is right now but the poppy wall was brilliant and I can't wait to talk more in depth about this in my next vlog so there we have it that is all my favorite fantasy books let me know down below what some of your favorite fantasy books are and whether you've read and loved any of these I'd love to talk to you about it thank you as always for all your support on this channel it means the world and I will see you very very soon with another video bye


Jesus says that my burden it's light because two oxen when they carry a yoke they don't carry the yoke for a show this is not a romantic walk this is an assignment this is to carry a burden together and when you are in the covenant with God you are carrying a burden with God as Christians we believe we have one burden the burden is not to be sick the burden is not to suffer but the burden is to bring other people to Jesus Christ what does this mean practically what I think means practically is that I want us to know that this means to live our life with an intent to see other people come to Jesus Christ live your life with an intention to see other people saved this doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go sell everything you have and move to India this doesn't necessarily mean unless the Lord tells you to sell everything you have and move to China this doesn't necessarily mean okay I'm son during summer I have to go to Mexico and I'm gonna do and be a missionary there well look it around you because your assignment is people around you live with an intention you can be in the same place that you are at right now with an intention and see people saved and see people give their lives to Jesus last Sunday a lady came to her church who saw a newspaper article about how's divided how me and my wife are divided because she's Russian and I'm Ukrainian and she came to church an article we went on that article with intention we have sometimes people I meet in the airport in the mall in the store who watch our TV show and they said man it blessed me so much and it's good and as a pastor I preached the gospel and I invite people to receive Jesus last Saturday when I was there as Friday two people gave their lives to Jesus and I live with that as a pastor a TV show does the job a newspaper did the job and flyers do the job but I want you personally to live with an intent to bring people to Jesus because sometimes it's easy to get up here and be as a pastor or to say you know I come to church I pay my tide the pastor goes and preaches another places he's on TV and he's bringing people to Jesus and I am just putting my lot by bringing my tide and coming bring myself here but I want you to do that with intention personally I want to do that personally myself my good mentor Vladimir Mantian in Ukraine who I look up to and he has a big church he put just a lot of people many churches are started and he mentioned a testimony where a few months ago he drove his car at one in the morning and sees a hitchhiker walking by and the next distance was miles and miles away from the city one in the morning and you know it's not the wisest thing to pull over and pick a person who's walking one in the morning he pulls over picks him up he says hey who are you he says I just got released from like 20 something years prison sentence well this is a good moment to say bye-bye brother and Vladimir Mantian who preaches to people on the stage he could say I don't need to witness to people let my people do that he begins to lead him to Jesus and that guy doesn't recognize that he's actually been watching Vladimir Mantian in jail and he like shakes himself he says I'm sleeping I'm dreaming he said wake me up wake me up because it's not true that I'm actually in your car one in the morning when I'm just walking out from my prison sentence nothing is impossible to God because somebody say a man live with an intention to see people saved but I want you to notice what this means is also make room for interruptions in your schedule and in your budget the problem we have is that to live with an intention requires making room for interruptions interruptions is when Jesus is preaching a sermon they break through the roof and all the dust begins to fall and they bring a man in the middle of his second point and this man is healing and interruptions Jesus is really rushing into this house where the daughter is sick and she's about to die and the woman pulls on his garment and stops him and interruption is when Jesus goes in and there is a kiosk and he stops and he looks at the kiosk interruption is when the hurting man laying and the priest man I'm so busy I'm running late I'm always late I'm not punctual next time I'll do better and I'll come and stop I don't have time for you one of the reasons why it's hard to live with an intention is because when you live with an intention you have to make room for interruptions you don't plan for these things you have your schedule planned you have your budget plan and then boom it happens I remember when I was going to lunch a long time ago in our church this particular event stands out in my mind and I already had a meeting with somebody I needed to meet with them and I was running late and as I drive off the parking lot we had a basketball hoop in our parking lot and I see a young boy playing basketball there and I already drove off of the parking lot and I hear this little whisper it's Wednesday night you gotta live with intention you gotta go tell him about Jesus and you gotta bring him to church plus he's already on the church parking lot how hard does it get but I'm like I'm running late once I come back I'll tell him but another voice told me he won't be here I'm like well I find him where he lives but I'm I just knew it I'm just playing games with God and I just got to stop I pull over my car and it was like Lord I'm gonna shy I mean just just guy playing that I want to interrupt him but I make an interruption in my schedule making interruption in his playing basketball I invite him over he comes that night gives his life to Jesus and few months later I got a got a chance to baptize him his name was Curtis Smith he moved eventually to Louisiana to help his dad with some businesses some other things but I'm so glad at that day I took a minute of my schedule and allowed interruption because the third thing and that's the most important is when you do that God will reward you with an impact see when we allow interruptions God will reward us with an impact


Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. Joining us is Glen Harlan Reynolds, the Bochamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee. He also blogs at the Instapundant site. Among other books, he is the author of The Education Apocalypse, How It Happened and How to Survive it. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Glen. Hi, thanks for having me. I guess your book is about both K-12 and higher education, so it makes sense to start at the K-12, but there's of course a connection there. But I guess the first question is, in the very broad sense, K-12 education is not doing too well, so what's going on there? Well, you know, it's not doing too well because we're in this sort of situation where, at the risk of sounding like Bernie Sanders, you know, you can go into a drug store and you can find 50 different kinds of deodorant, and yet when you go looking for public schools, they're basically all built on the same model. And one of the interesting things, you know, I talk about in the book is that public education in America was very consciously styled after the model of 19th century pressure. A Horace Mann, who was a major figure in it, was a great admirer of the Prussians. And it was specifically designed, and again, quite explicitly, it wasn't any sort of conspiracy, or at least underhanded conspiracy. It was specifically designed to turn out obedient factory workers and soldiers and things like that. And you know, the school was kind of built on an industrial revolution line. I mean, you have all the desks lined up in rows, kind of like machines in a factory, and you know, when you actually go from one class to another in a school, you're kind of like being on an assembly line, being moved on down to the next station. And it was designed on that industrial model, and to be fair, it was a great success in its time. I mean, it elevated the lower class of the working class into the middle class, and it did in fact produce good factory workers and good soldiers, which was very useful in World War II. But it's kind of a dated model now. And what's worse, it's not even that the schools have sort of stayed the same. They've actually gotten worse. They're simply not as rigorous as they were 50 or 100 years ago. So you're actually learning less while you're still quite constrained by this approach. And the other side of it is, there are now just a lot of alternatives. I mean, one reason why you put all the kids in a room with a teacher 100 years ago was because there was no other way to do it. Now we have online schools, and they're quite useful. My daughter actually switched, as I mentioned in the book, from a regular public high school to online school. And that allowed her to graduate a year early, which allowed her to start college a year early. And she thought it was pretty good, and it was much more flexible. I mean, you don't realize how under the thumb you are of the public schools, even to such things just like when you get up in the morning and when you have dinner and when you can go on vacation, until you're not under the thumb of the public schools anymore. And then it's like awesome. But there have always been alternative methods of education. I mean, my wife was until recently a public school teacher and also taught in private schools. And she's talked about some of the odd, like there were the schools with no walls where all the students were just kind of in one big room. But those didn't seem to work very well. And so maybe, I mean, couldn't the alternative narrative of this is we figured out what works, and we know it seems to be what works because even most private schools operate on this model, right? I mean, most private schools, even the very good ones, the very prestigious ones are still, you know, students in their desks and going from class to class. And so education is this big, important thing that we don't want to mess up. And so we'll let people innovate on the sides. But so far, they haven't really found anything that works better. Well, I don't know if that's really true, found anything that works better. I mean, the current system is quite unsatisfactory to a lot of people. And, you know, the reason why I use the term of the book of the K-12 implosion is that what you're seeing in a lot of large public schools right now is such an exodus of students that they're literally imploding. So layoff teachers, they're closing school buildings, and those people who could go to public school for free, I mean, I'm trying to put the word free in quotes because of course it's free in the sense that somebody else pays for it. But still, from an out-of-pocket basis, these parents could go for free and they're still paying to put their kids into private schools because they're unhappy with what the public schools have to offer. Well, sure. But you mentioned, so you said there are kind of two ways, two things going on here. There's the, you know, atrophying of the model that we're stuck with this model from Prussia. But then there's also the declining quality. And those are two, I mean, we could imagine, you know, the model might work very well if it had high quality teachers giving rigorous lessons. More money. More money. It might work or it might, you know, so it might be the model's problem or the model might be just fine. It's that the quality of the education being taught via that model is going downhill. So can we, you know, can we tease those two out? Well, actually, there are basically three things going on. I mean, problem number one is, you know, that we have the Prussian model, but it worked better when it was run by Prussians and we don't have any of those.  And then even when we ported it over to the United States in the 19th century, we had, you know, teachers had a lot of authority, parents pressured children to do well in school and to behave well in school. Children knew that was expected of them. And so, you know, you had all that going for it. And now, you know, the quality has declined. So that's one problem. And then, you know, even as the quality is declining, the barriers to exiting the public system have really gone down. You know, as recently as 20 years ago in most towns in America outside of big city, you didn't have a lot of alternatives. You had a public school system and then typically you would have, you know, a private school that sort of at least pretended to be sort of a Tony prep school, whether it really was Tony or not. And then you had a Catholic school and those were your choices. And though it also seems like the sort of old model and also the existence of 18 and then you bring in the higher education level. It's also maybe constrained our view of what childhood and adolescence is supposed to be like and what you're supposed to be doing in terms of work or school at different ages and then continuing that into the higher education. We have a very, very kind of, I guess, stilted idea of what growing up is like partially because of the school system. Well, I think that's right. And you know, it's very interesting because if you look, if you look at history, you know, we tended to treat adolescents as sort of junior adults and we didn't.  And in fact, we didn't really start talking about teenagers until we had kids in school and we took kids who used to hang out with adults in adult settings, doing adult tasks where if you wanted to be respected, which everybody does, you were going to be respected by adults for being good at doing adult things.  And you still want to be respected by the crowd you're part of, but now your crowd is all people your own age, so you do the stuff that impresses people your own age. And the problem with that is teenagers are idiots, but the stuff that impresses teenagers is usually idiotic. So instead of being really good at, you know, bailing hay or fixing a plow or something like that that you might have done 100 years before, you want to be good at drinking or, you know, dating or playing football or other things that are fundamentally more trivial but that appeal to your peer group.  But it seems like this is the result of positive trends, right? So on the one hand, part of the reason that we can send our kids to school through those teenage years as opposed to putting them to work on the farm is because we're all wealthier. And so we don't need them earning an income in order to feed the family and education is good. I mean, most of us think, you know, the more education you can have, granted it can take time from other things, but by and large education is a good thing to have. And at the same time, you know, our economy is shifting such that, sure, you could, as a 13-year-old, you could go right to work in, you know, in the blacksmith's shop or on the farm or whatever, but our economy has changed so that now more education, more knowledge, more skill is necessary to pull off the kinds of jobs that give us this enriched world. Aaron's just tried to defend the fact that he had blue hair when he was a teenager. That's what he's trying to defend here. That was in college. But that's, I mean, that we've extended teenagerhood well into undergrad at this point. But so is that, you know, is the teenagers hanging out with teenagers and so doing more stuff just kind of an unfortunate price we have to pay for the glories of a richer society? Well, I mean, there are a couple of assumptions buried in it. I mean, at one level, it's certainly true. We're a lot richer than we used to be. And, you know, 100 years ago, as I say in the book, teenagers provided about a third of family income in a typical household. And so you really needed them. And now they don't. So, and, you know, we're richer, so that's okay. But the couple of assumptions buried in that are number one, that the stuff that teenagers are doing in school is actually making them more valuable and more high functioning as adults. And that's not entirely clear. Well, and I'll tell you a story slightly sanitized. But since this is podcasts, not radio, I don't have to sanitize it. The FCC does not apply here. Yes. There you go. Of course not. So when my daughter was looking at switching from high school to online school, one of the things I said to her was, I said, well, aren't you worried that you're going to miss the socialization in high school? And she said, okay, let me tell you about socialization. On my way to math class today, I walked by the band building and I saw, and I won't name the female friend, giving a blow job to a male friend out behind the band. And she said, that's what I'm missing. How do you feel about that? And I was like, okay. So, you know, the truth is, when you put a bunch of teenagers together in that setting, the damage that's done by cramming them together may exceed whatever benefit they get educationally. And the truth is you don't learn that much in high school. I'm sorry, but I just don't believe that American high schools today turn out people who are really super well-fitted for the marketplace or for a democracy. And the studies of what they know when they get out of high school suggest that they're not learning much. And for that matter, I'm sure you've done a show on academically adrift and the studies of what people learn in college. But a lot of kids, interestingly enough, actually come out of college knowing less than when they went in. So, you know, yes, in theory, if you have a rich society, you can afford the capital investment of making your kids smarter and more knowledgeable and more competent and more capable, even at the cost of keeping them out of the workforce for an extra 10 or more years. But the fact is, it's not so clear. That's what we're actually doing. Shouldn't we be just spending more, though? Better teachers, you know, making sure we have the right studies about how kids can learn the best and then put that into place with better teachers and more money and then we can fix this problem? Well, we've certainly tried the better teachers and money approach for the last 50 or 60 years. And the results suggest that it's not producing. In the sense that we are spending more now? Yeah, I've got a chart. Charts don't translate very well on radio. But I've got a chart in the book that shows that what kids learn in school is basically flat and what we spend on them has increased exponentially over the last several decades. And indeed, we are, you know, almost at the top of the OECD in spending per student, whereas we are most definitely not anywhere near the top of the OECD in results. So it's, that's on page, these charts are on page 74, 73 and 74, the book if anybody wants to look them up. So it's not simply a case of shoveling money in. And of course, there's always the answer sort of like communism, you know, it hasn't worked before, but that's just because we haven't done it right. And, you know, in principle, that is unanswerable. But in practice, if you've tried it that many times, you haven't done it right. Maybe you need to try something different. Now, what about teachers unions? Are they not helping either? I imagine teachers unions certainly don't help.  So it's my belief that unions are no unions. Institutions are run mostly in the interest of the people who run them as opposed to their essential mission. But teachers unions certainly make that worse. And, you know, one of the things you do sort of find is that they're just some good teachers and some bad teachers. And it's actually pretty hard to turn a bad teacher into a good teacher. So what you really want to do when you run a public or any school system is basically to get rid of the bad teachers and replace them with good teachers. And the harder it is to replace people, the harder it is to do that. You discussed some of the possibilities of reform, which I think is one of the things you say is that you're not, that when you unleash the forces of innovation, there are many things you can't really predict about what will happen. But you bring up some interesting things that could happen through 12 education to make us change this Prussian model. One of them is gamification, which as someone who plays video games, I thought was particularly attractive. Can you talk a little bit about that?  And so, you know, as I say in the book, there is a whole industry that's really good at getting teenagers to learn all sorts of arcane information and really master it and be able to apply it successfully. And that's the video game industry. And if you play a video game and you get further and further into it, you learn all kinds of things and you hone your skills and you come out much, much better at what you do than when you went in. And that approach, you know, it's a huge multi-billion dollar industry that makes more money than Hollywood. But it isn't used very much in education. It's used some. There are some sort of lame educational games using K-12. Some of them aren't too bad. The Army actually has some games that it uses for training in combat. They're actually pretty good. And, you know, there's a lot of room left to be done there. And I think you could do a lot of teaching that way. The problem is that the people who are in charge of education don't think much like the people who design video games. And the people who design video games don't think much like the people who are in charge of education. And the two cultures don't seem to have merged very well. Something I've always wondered about gamification because I guess you could put me in the somewhat of a skeptics camp. Yeah, but you don't put out any video games. But no, that's actually, it's related to that is that, so yes, teenagers and kids are very good at picking up all of this really obscure information and learning it when it comes in the form of video games. But we also, they're also very good at doing that for non-video game stuff. Like kids get super into Harry Potter, right? They read these books. They pour over these 700-page novels and learn the ins and outs of all of the characters. We have huge communities around Star Trek where the knowledge of obscure things is astonishing. You have the same with Star Wars. I was wondering if you were going to say Star Wars. I wonder if you're going to give an excuse because Aaron loves Star Wars. Yeah, my knowledge of Star Wars is larger than is healthy. But the thing that all of these seem to have in common is not the gamification, right? Because these are all, there's documentary films and there's large history books and there's technical manuals that you could be learning stuff from that aren't all that different from these things that kids are memorizing. But the difference is that the knowledge in those things is, I guess for lack of a word, imaginary or pretend. And so what I wonder is that it seems like kids, teenagers, whatever, love soaking up knowledge about fake stuff.  Well, why don't you read this 700-page book about the... The Pride and Fall of the Roman Empire. Or the British schooling system and learn those same sorts of details. Kids just aren't going to be into it. Well, you know, actually, when I was in high school, I played war games which back in those anti-Diluvian days were all done with paper and little pieces of cardboard you pushed around. But I learned a lot about the Civil War and World War II and some other wars from playing those. So I wouldn't rule that out completely. But one of the reasons, I think, why kids get into Harry Potter or whatever, which goes again to my earlier thesis, is that their friends care about it too. And by working on that stuff, they get some degree of peer respect, or at least they hope they will. I'm not sure Mastery of Star Trek trivia ever got anybody laid. But it's the hope that matters, not the actuality. So I think one of the things those fictional worlds do is they give people a place to go that doesn't seem like something that's done to them. And the truth is an awful lot of kids think that school feels like jail. And if you have the experience, as I've had, of just driving through towns and driving past schools and driving past prisons, they really often look a lot alike. School is, from the perspective of most kids, not something that you do. It is something that is done to you. And I think the reason why they are more excited about things like Harry Potter or whatever is that they feel like that's something that they do. If you have a teaching approach that makes students feel like they're doing something that they do, they'll learn a lot more.  And the best thing for them may well be to shove them through a Prussian education factory where at least a modicum of basic knowledge gets drummed into their head whether they like it or not. But once again, we live in Bernie Sanders world where there are 50 different kinds of deodorants and people should be able to pick the approach that is most likely to work best for them and for their kids. Now, we don't have 50 different types of schools or 50 different types of a deodorant thing in the public education context, but we take these children, put them through this Prussian model, and then the next thing is college. And we're going to send them into higher education and create jobs so they can learn about jobs of the future and become great citizens and quote, Plato and Quip and Latin and all these great things, which of course, obviously, our college educated people are doing when they come out of college, correct? Oh, yeah, they all learn Latin.  You know, and it's sort of telling, I think, that when people want to defend government, they pick like these really sort of modest things the government has done forever as examples, rather than, you know, the Department of Education or something. The same thing is true. If you suggest that college is, you know, not really teaching people what they need to know, people often say, well, you just hate a liberal arts education. You don't want people studying Plato and learning Latin. And, you know, again, the response is, well, most of them aren't doing that now. I mean, if you're, if the purpose of college is to make sure that when students come out, they can conjugate Latin verbs, translate Caesar's commentaries and talk about Plato's dialogues. You know what? It's a failure already, because they're not doing that for the most part. Well, have we figured out then what college is for? That seems to be a subtext of the section on the higher ed in your book and a lot of people discussing. I used to think that what college was for was actually to give people a place to drink a lot and have sex, but now they're even doing away with that. So it's really hard to say. Well, it could be, but sometimes people say it's the human capital element or the signaling element, which is college, if it's not teaching people, then what is it doing? Well, there are basically three kinds of things that you can get from going to college. One of them is you can actually learn useful skills that will make you a bigger contributor to the economy and the nation and thus able to make more money. So for example, if you go in not knowing anything about electrical engineering and you come out with a degree in electrical engineering, your value has been increased substantially. So that's one thing you can get from college and plenty of people do get that and not just people who graduate in electrical engineering. Things that produce a useful major, even art history, which President Obama was making fun of, actually turns out people with a pretty good skill set who frequently wound up getting pretty good jobs. But the second thing people go to college for is signaling, which is to say even if you go to college and you in fact learn nothing useful, which happens to a surprisingly large number of people according to some of the assessment tests. Even then, just by getting in and surviving and graduating, you've actually told an employer some useful things. You've said that you're able to show up on time at least enough to get along with other people at least well enough that you weren't expelled and generally sort of to function in middle and upper middle class of American milieus. And the third thing you might get is networking where you make friends in college, you get to know people and that provides you with opportunities in the future. That's probably truer if you're going to an elite school, but not necessarily. If you go to Eastern Kentucky University and you stay in Eastern Kentucky, then that's probably a pretty good network for you too. The problem with these three things is from the standpoint of the larger society only the first one creates any actual wealth. The signaling to employers or the networking, they just determine who gets benefits. They don't actually create any new wealth for society. They're just moving it around. If you want to help society with higher education, you should focus on increasing people's value of their human capital. And yet if you look at what colleges actually do, that doesn't seem to be their primary goal. Has this changed a lot in the last 30 years or so? Would you say? College in general and what people are working for? Well, yeah, I mean a couple of things have happened. We had a huge run up in capacity in the higher education industry after World War II because of the GI Bill. And you can understand an awful lot of what's going on in higher education ever since as basically trying to find ways to soak up that excess capacity once it was there. Because the GIs came in, we hired a lot of professors, built a lot of new buildings and dorms, expanded capacity substantially. And then as that started to taper off, we got draft deferments during Vietnam which encouraged a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have gone to college to go to college. And then about the time the Vietnam War winds down in the 70s, you get Pell Grants, they used to be called BEOG, Basic Educational Opportunity. Pell Grants, you got guaranteed student loans, you got a lot of subsidies that sort of kept the warm bodies flowing into higher education so that it wouldn't have to retrench. And now what we're doing is we're kind of at a stage where we're starting to run out of other people's money.  We covered the gap for a number of years with student loans and exactly what you would expect to happen to happen. Colleges raised tuition to absorb the subsidy as student loans were expanded for a while. When you said exactly what you expect to happen would happen. I've had conversations with people where they didn't understand why you would expect that to happen. Can you explain how the student loan system helped increase the price of college? Sure. I mean, I guess people don't expect it because they don't think it through. But if you think it through, it's pretty obvious.  They've either got to have tuition that people like that can afford or they won't have very many students. If I tell you you can borrow $10,000 a year to go to college, then the colleges are immediately going to say, well, we can raise our tuition by $10,000 a year because he can borrow the money and come. And then if I say you can borrow $50,000 a year to go to college, a lot of colleges are going to say, well, we can raise our tuition $50,000 a year. And that's pretty much a short version of exactly what's happened over the last several decades. The amount of money you could borrow under federal student loan programs was increased and as it went up and there's been a fair amount of actual empirical research on this to demonstrate that every time it went up, the college tuition went up with it. It just follows pure economic truth. And so what we have now is, would you call it a bubble? Well, I do call it a bubble and I think it is. And it's a bubble that I think is beginning to show signs of bursting. For the last couple of years what we've seen are actually having trouble filling seats which never happened much before. We've seen price resistance from parents and students because yes, you can borrow the money and for a while financial advisors used to tell people oh, student loan debt isn't bad debt, it's good debt. But as tuition continued to rise while the payoff in terms of wages after graduation stayed pretty flat people eventually started to notice that you have all these college graduates who are deep in debt and can't find a job or if they can find a job it's not a job sufficient to service the colossal debt they've got. And so there's a good deal now of buyer resistance and the Obama administration is now talking about helping people with student loans who feel like they were lured into their higher education on false premises and they're not limiting that to some of the for-profit schools that have closed although that's how it's being couched and in my own field of legal education we've seen a number of applicants drop by about 50% and there are law schools closing and merging and rolling back faculty salaries for exactly the same reason the tuitions have really gone up the job prospects have actually gotten worse and students have noticed. I'm curious how this all plays in with the signaling model of education that we talked about earlier because if part of what needs to happen and it sounds like you're saying this is what needs to happen is these alternative models need to come to the fore, right? We need to be more willing to embrace alternate ways to get an education alternate models that if you couple that with the signaling thing though it seems to raise kind of a first mover problem. So this take the law schools, I mean both Trevor and I attended law school, I am convinced that law school is particularly ineffective way of learning to become an attorney that at best the first year of law school is valuable but the second and third year should likely be replaced with an apprenticeship and that most of what's taught in the first year could be taught, could be learned on your own but if I actually want to become an attorney there is no way that I'm going to follow through on that. There's no way I'm going to go to a law school that say correspondence based and then apprentice based because there's no way I'll get a job because every single employer is saying look you know in order to become an attorney you need to have gone through this first this particular model of legal education and this is the same for you know graduate school for certain kinds of jobs or certain kinds of training for other sorts of jobs it's you know someone's got to be the first one to embrace these alternatives and that person is going to be unemployed. Well that is an issue and you know in law and I should plug my colleague Ben Barton has got a great book out on the legal profession from Oxford University Press called Glass Half Full where he talks about a lot of exactly these issues and you know the the problem you have in law is the guilds have taken over I mean it's an interesting matter of history that the requirement that you attend law school and later the requirement that law school be a full three years and the limitation on how much outside work you can do while you're in law school were all things that were put in in the first couple of decades of the 20th century pretty explicitly at the time to keep the Jews out that was their goal there was a big flood of educated East European immigrants who are mostly Jewish who are getting into law and the powers that we didn't like that so they tried to make it as expensive and time consuming to get through and become a lawyer as they could so as to limit their numbers and it worked for a while they did a great job making sure there are no Jewish lawyers you never see Jewish lawyers around absolutely I guess back there yes it held back the tide for a couple of decades and you know for a couple of decades it doesn't seem like a long time but for people who are being spared the competition I think it was a plus so I think that if you wanted to improve education one of the things you want to do is to approach the employer side and we're actually in law we're not seeing that yet although we are actually just beginning to see it lawyers are having their lunch eaten sort of at two ends at the lower end things like rocket lawyer and legal zoom are killing them for a lot of low-end clients who just want to organize an LLC or write a will so what do those services do basically they're just interactive legal forms but if you go to the legal zoom or rocket lawyer site and you answer some questions and at the end you print out some papers inside them and you've got a Nevada LLC or you've written a will that's valid in your state and you know lawyers make fun of those things but the truth is as Ben Barton says in his book he says every lawyer knows a lawyer who does worse work than those online services do so they're not better than the best lawyers they're better than the worst lawyers and they're usually probably good enough and they're a lot cheaper at the high end big law firms used to make a lot of their money by having first and second year associates who didn't really know how to be lawyers very much yet but were smart who would be build out at high rates for going through huge boxes of documents as part of discovery and litigation and things like that and that has been heavily automated now using databases and OCRs and keywords and such like that so that one associate can do the work of 10 and that's really hurt their bottom lines so the practice of law is being eaten up from either end by automation and also by some paraprofessional paralegals and such who are in some areas beginning to be licensed to come in but perhaps the story with law school if we go back because I think this is a continuous story starting with K through 12 education which creates a model that probably doesn't give enough job skills give enough opportunities for students to do different things everyone thinks they have to go to college you have a huge bubble being with the subsidies on the debt everyone goes to college or a lot of people go to college that's the only possible way they get English majors and they get psychology majors and other types I was a philosophy major and of course all the philosophy factories had shut down when I got out of undergrad they come out of undergrad and they say everyone went to I don't have as much separation now between me and other employable people because everyone went to college so now I need to choose a graduate program and we have the same type of bubble occurring there and law school was chosen by many people who couldn't cut it in med school let's say to try and figure out how to go forward and make it in the world so it's a bubble that goes back to the K through 12 world one of the smartest things law schools did in the late 80s actually was they took math off the LSAT there used to be a math section on the LSAT and then the brilliant marketers at the law schools all said there's a lot of people who are afraid of math so all these college seniors who aren't sure what they want to do and start looking around they're going to say well GMAT too much math MCAT way too much math GRE that's got math LSAT no math that's what I'm going to do so voila we've reached a situation where a college degree today is what a high school diploma used to be which is sort of your basic punched entry ticket into the world of employment and a graduate degree like a law degree or MBA say is sort of the equivalent of a liberal arts BA from some decades ago which is to say it now says you're a little above the herd and that maybe you don't have a lot of super special skills but you're at least smarter than the average bear but the problem is that the market for JD's or MBA's just isn't what it used to be well does that mean that is this a bad thing or is this just a function of the increasing knowledge heavy economy has the is this a product of government intervention in a program to not allow us to adjust well enough to a changing world well I think I think the latter is the answer yes it's a bad thing if we had a knowledge heavy economy that said to get a good job you have to go through this much schooling and then when you got out you got a good job that would be one thing what we have however is we do have a knowledge heavy economy but we also have people going to school running up a lot of debt and then not getting a good job when they get out you know the old joke is you know the difference between a Starbucks barista and a Starbucks barista who went to college is 100 grand in student loan debt that's not a reason to go to college and yes I think the rigidities and sort of perverse incentives that sort of all this government money sloshing around coupled with a lot of rules on who can enter professions and employers fear of using IQ tests and things like that for selecting employees has led to a lot of malinvestment and you know people invest a lot of money in a college education that ultimately doesn't really produce value for them or for society the people who clean up are people like me I mean you know the universities are like the lenders in the subprime bubble they get their money up front and then if somebody winds up stuck with a lot of debt they can't pay off it's the federal government and the tax payers ultimately who wind up coming in to pick up the tab and of course the borrower gets screwed even worse into student loans because unlike a subprime mortgage you can't bankrupt your way out of them is there a real possibility of a collapse along the lines of the subprime mortgage collapse happening in the student loan debt market? Yes I mean there are some signs now I mean you know Sweet Briar College which is a fancy college in Virginia where rich women have gone forever is closing and that's partly because it was single sacks but it was also partly because it turned out liberal arts grads who just didn't see it as a good investment and it's not the only place in three or four liberal arts colleges in Virginia that closed just in the past couple of years and you see similar stuff elsewhere I think that all these universities are built on the assumption that there will be more customers coming along and that they can continue to raise tuition and some of them have run up a lot of debt in that expectation and if people just quit buying they're going to be in trouble and indeed as I say seeing signs of that in higher ed generally and in the legal education world it's no longer something that's possibly happening everybody agrees our bubble has burst and the only question is whether it's going to be as catastrophic as the collapse of dental schools back in the 80s. What would you say to suggestions that the government should bail out student loan debt or forgive it in some way or do other things to ameliorate the student loan problem? Well I think it's it creates a sort of perverse incentive I mean the truth is a lot of people with a lot of student loan debt are kind of victims schools flat out lie and I don't mean they paint a rosy picture I mean they flat out lie about the employment of their graduates and what their graduates tend to earn and things like that so that you can make a pretty good argument that a lot of students were basically defrauded into investing money in education that was never going to pay off. I also don't see any good excuse for having student loans not be dischargeable in bankruptcy and indeed what I would suggest and interestingly it's some Democrats in the senate mostly pushing this not Republicans I think that the institutions that issue the degrees should have some skin in the game and should be on the hook for some of that debt so if you get your student loan debt discharge the university should be on the hook for some percentage of it as an incentive not to take people's money and send them out with degrees that won't make it possible for them to pay off their loans. Well what can we do in terms of making this more of a free market system because it seems like the government has heavily skewed this away from reality and when my parents went to college in the 60s they could pay it out of pocket essentially or with a summer job and but how would this work in a free market system if we got some of the government control out how would people get their knowledge and pay for it? If you got rid of government subsidies you would find that schools would have to lower tuition or go out of business for the most part I mean a few places you know Harvard would still be Harvard because Harvard has enough money in its endowment that it really doesn't need to charge anybody tuition if it doesn't want to of course it wants to because they like the money because Harvard is Harvard but most schools would face a tough economic choice and they would have administrators they would have to get rid of fancy or at least cease building fancy student unions with rock climbing walls which now everybody has and things like that and college would have actually ultimately go back to looking a lot like college looked 50 years ago which would be a somewhat more spartan environment and somewhat lower pay for faculty and a lot fewer administrators on campus because that's actually where the bulk of the excess money is gone is into flocks of administrators who eat up our substance and that's what college would look like college where tuition is you know revenues are 50% in real terms what they are now would look a lot more like a college of several decades ago when revenues were 50% in real terms what they are now How much slack is there in the college budgeting I mean we so we could if we didn't have the loans then the amount that students would be willing to pay we didn't have the subsidies the amount students would be willing to pay would go down dramatically so most colleges would not be able to get away with charging 30, 40, 50 thousand dollars a year in tuition how many of them could make do without that money if tuition dropped to more reasonable levels because I mean there's this dream right of like every child should have the opportunity to go to college but if we suddenly have far fewer colleges there's going to be it's going to be harder to get in right no matter what the price is there's going to be longer lines waiting lists they'll raise the standards necessary for entrance so is there is there really room there I mean we see colleges cutting costs all the time with things like you know hiring more adjunct professors who you know course hour for course hour make a tiny fraction of what tenured professors make you notice they never hire adjunct administrators but the purpose of a college is supposed to be teaching and yet and even research and yet when they come to cut budgets they don't cut out administrators they cut out faculty and they take faculty replace them with low paid adjuncts who don't do research first you know nobody ever said well you know our budgets got to be cut so our deputy assistant director of student life is going to be farmed out for two thousand dollars a year to an adjunct they just don't and there was a pretty interesting study recently by the Goldwater Institute that said about sixty five percent of the increase in college tuition over the last several decades went into administration which just for somebody who walks around a college campus and sees all the buildings full of administrators seems about right to me now how much slack is there how much could they cut it I really you know that's a tough question because university accounting is on a par with Hollywood accounting but Bob who's with the University of California has got a new book out he's I don't agree with his solution he thinks public education higher education should be free and government subsidized but he goes through a long discussion of how much it really costs schools to educate students versus how much they claim it costs them and suggest that in fact schools are spending a lot less money on actually teaching students and a lot more money on other stuff than they let on and that too seems right to me just based on my impressions would this help students when they approach going to college when they're eighteen look at it as a human capital thing because that's what I would see as opposed to a consumption good you have a great line in your book where you say a six figure consumption item is well beyond the resources of college students nobody would advise an eighteen year old to purchase a Ferrari on borrowed money after all but if college education is a consumption item not an investment then that's basically what they're doing and these colleges with rock climbing walls and amazing dorms and all these things that is a consumption good element and if we got students to look more at it as a human capital element maybe would be better off in terms of participating in the increasingly dynamic world marketplace of ideas would you agree with that no I mean I think that's right I think that college should be looked at as a human capital issue first and foremost it should not be looked at as four to six years of recreation because honestly at age 18 you really can't afford to spend four to six years unproductive stuff that's an important part of your life and the other side of it is it's not just whether you go to college or not I mean we often hear numbers like oh college graduates make a million dollars more than people who don't go to college those numbers are kind of deceptive for two reasons one of them is that colleges aren't just making you more valuable they're also sorting and the fact is people who graduate high school and go to college would make more money on average than people who graduate high school and don't go to college even if they never went to college they're just smarter and more disciplined the second thing is that and there was actually just an interesting study on this that came out last week that your choice of major makes a bigger difference in your lifetime earning than whether you go to college or not and that makes sense when you think about it I mean if you major in I keep saying electrical engineering but that's a hard one if you major in that you're definitely going to make a lot more money than if you major in say women's studies which may actually reduce your employability because if I'm an employer and I see somebody's got a degree in women's studies I say well they didn't learn anything and they'll probably sue me so they're not a very attractive employee so if you think of it as a human capital thing you really need to say what am I you know 18 year old applicant going to get out of my time at college that is going to make it worth all this money now 18 year olds aren't prone to thinking that way and colleges and their literature and the whole way the system is set up are designed to try to discourage them from thinking that way too much so what should we do should we tell them all not to go to college and go and get a tech degree or at least dissuade them how do we shift the stuff over too many people go to college and so if we change this we got rid of government subsidies and fewer people with the college I don't think that would be so terrible you know in the pre expansion days you know the assumption in the 50s and 60s was that you had to be about one standard deviation above the mean and IQ to really benefit from college and that was about one six of the population that was how many people should go to college now we say everybody should go to college and it's just not clear that that's true if you go to college and you spend four frequently six years and you don't get anything out of it even if it's free in the sense that somebody else is paid for it and six years of your life you don't have that many years of your life and that's a lot of them to throw away on something that's fundamentally not productive and sure you may have fun in college but you know you're in your early 20s you're probably going to have fun whatever you're doing let me bring this reform discussion back again full circle then to K through 12 because if you know there's a lot of people are going to college who probably shouldn't not just because they're not going to succeed at it but in not succeeding they're doing a disservice to themselves in terms of debt or years of their life that could have been spent building up a career whatever that the reforms that we often talk about for K through 12 this you know using different models teaching kids different sorts of things focusing on stuff that's going to build up human capital we're going to have to sort people into who should go to college and who shouldn't when they graduated 18 and are making decisions about what to do for the next year make those same sorts of decisions for kids and you talk about how 18 year olds are maybe not best equipped to think about this sort of long term planning and they get lured into the glossy college brochures but a lot of parents maybe because presumably they're the ones who are making the choice about what track to put their kids in aren't necessarily well equipped to decide if my child when he or she is 5 and getting ready to enter the schooling system is going to be Yale bound or a technical degree bound or should just have a high school diploma so how do we all the reform starts at the beginning education starts at the beginning and so how do we fix all this how do we let the market fix all this without ending up in a situation where from a very early age we're precluding opportunities well that's a real concern and of course that's you know one of the things that people who say we should just have free higher education in the United States they often point to systems like Germany's and Germany in fact does track people pretty early on a college track or a vocational track and you know both of their tracks are really good but once you're on one of those tracks it's pretty hard to switch to the other one and I'm not in favor of that kind of of rigidity I mean my own approach is first of all people say what should we do about this is first do no harm an awful lot of the problems that we face in these areas are the result of government distortion so the first thing to do is to get rid of the government distortions and the second thing to do is to make sure that people have a lot of choices and then I think the market will tend to take care of it now people will still make bad choices because that's what people do but I think that overall if you've got lots of different educational alternatives they'll compete with one another and people will find ways to figure out which one looks best for their kid when you've got lots of job opportunities that perhaps require a certification exam or evidence of competence rather than just a college degree a lot of people are going to say you know rather than spending six figures going to, it's a six figure class even go to a public university for four years you know I'll instead get my Microsoft certification or whatever it is and take a job that way and I think that would be better and I would like to see things move in that direction rather than requiring people to go to college just because we sort of fetishized this idea of college as a class marker rather than any sort of actual value Thank you for listening if you have any questions you can find us on twitter at Free Thoughts Pod that's Free Thoughts P-O-D Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org


Guys, I am here with this month's design team challenge. If you don't know, I have my own line of rubber stamps designed by me in my Etsy shop. I've also written a book in the last year. I've got a bunch of digital downloads you can buy, artwork for sale. I even have some of my creative jolt weekly prompts from my Facebook group available in a deck of cards that you can download and make the cards yourself. For those of you who want that and aren't in the Facebook group. Anyway, so I'm here this month with my design team to show you some of the things you can do with my stamps. This is my storage binder where I keep all of my stamps that I've made. These are all the different sets. And I think I know which one I wanna use. This is one of the original sets. This is number two. This is number one. It's what started it all. All right, so I think we're gonna go back here to one of the older sets. This is set number six. And I'm gonna pull these two arrows off of here. There are these two arrows right here. And we're gonna set this aside. I've got some archival ink here. For this, you really do wanna use an ink that's waterproof. I usually use archival or stays on. And then you're gonna need some tissue paper. This is just plain white gift tissue. I also have this one that's kind of, looks like pattern paper tissue. Now this gift tissue has a shiny side and a dull side. We're gonna be working on the dull side. I'll be right back. Turn the camera on. Everything starts dinging and people start messaging me. That's always the way, right? So you of course can do a full sheet of tissue paper if you want. I usually do squares about like this. I just usually just do enough to do a page or a project or try out a new line of stamps. You can do this in colors. I usually always use black or sepia. You can use whatever color you want. Like I said, if you're gonna do like I'm gonna do, which is use it for collage, then you want the ink that you use to be waterproof. So I'm gonna ink up our stamps. The nice thing about doing this and stamping an image on tissue paper is when you collage with it, the tissue paper almost completely disappears. You can also do this on deli paper. If you have a supply of like old fashioned typing paper, that would be cool. So I wanna kinda do a pattern here, let's see. So I'm inking it up pretty good and then pushing pretty hard. It's coming out exactly the way I want. This is a fun way to get, you know, interesting unique tissue paper to use in your artwork, you know, rather than just buying it. You can get plain white tissue paper at your dollar tree or local dollar store, wherever that may be. Maybe you have a family dollar or a dollar general or something like that. So doing these little pieces doesn't take too long. This is like a quarter, a quarter of a sheet. And it doesn't really take more than that. And then you have something interesting to collage with, which I'm gonna do next in my small delusions journal. I'm gonna speed forward through the process and I'll be right back. It's still wet, but there you go. It's just one example of many that are out there of using some of your tissue papers, especially the custom printed ones that you've created in your art journal, in your mixed media. So go out and get some plain tissue paper, use some of that hoard of rubber stamps you have laying around. And if you need some new designs to add to your collection, of course, mine are available in the Etsy shop. Maybe you don't have a hoard of stamps, maybe you just have a few and you need to add to your collection. All right, that's it for today. I hope it gave you some great ideas. And I say hoard with all love and affection because hoard of stamps too, along with watercolor and a few other things. Oops.  Don't forget to like, share and subscribe. If you want to order my stamps, join one of my Facebook groups, send me happy mail, email me a question, anything like that, all that info is in the description below. The most important thing of course is to go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.