If you haven't already, I'd like to encourage you to listen to the first episode. It was an introductory episode in which I sum up my reasons for starting this podcast, my intended audience, and I went over my background as an entrepreneur of an Inc 500 company, as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award finalists, as a US Air Force veteran, and as a private person creating this podcast out of a sense of duty to country and to all of humanity for that matter.

Today's topic is freedom and truth. Freedom is not possible without truth. How can you discern who is telling the truth especially during an information war in which freedom of speech itself is being challenged in the western world?

I'd like to quote Theodore Roosevelt:

“Patriotism is to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. In so far as he efficiently serves the country, it is patriotic to support him. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that, by inefficiency or otherwise, he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth whether about the president or anyone else.

I'd like to add that it's not just unpatriotic to not tell the truth, it's destabilizing to human minds and human institutions. In fact, it's disrespectful to human dignity.

Telling the truth vs telling lies is one of the first lessons every parent teaches their child. People think of it as a moral question and, of course, parents are moral teachers so it makes sense that they would start there. But it's even more fundamental than a moral question: it's a reality question.

The extent to which a person, a marriage, a business relationship, a K through 12 institution; its relationships with its students, its parents, a company, or country; to the extent to which any of these entities tells the truth and lives in the truth is exactly equivalent to the extent to which it lives in reality.

Living in pseudo reality is destructive and psychologically destabilizing. Gaslighting, lying by omission, selective use of facts, being dismissive of people's concerns, throwing out red herrings in response to people's concerns, all of these things are forms of lying; they’re forms of protecting untruths. They’re forms of pseudo reality. All of these things lead to failure. Human beings who live in lies fail. Marriages living in lies fail. Companies living in lies fail. Institutions - including educational ones - living in lies will fail and countries living in lies fail, of course not necessarily right away - which is why lying can seem like a successful strategy for a while. But history tells us that eventually a lie’s growing complexity becomes unwieldy and the truth catches up and that's where, sadly, the world of education in the Western world is right now.

And not just K through 12 and not just public and not just private but the higher institutions as a whole are running and being run by people who are promulgating and protecting a pseudo reality. It shouldn't be surprising that this is happening in the educational institutions because this is where the Western world - as a whole - is right now.

Our country is on the brink of social implosion; the whole world is on the brink of implosion, including possible physical explosion into nuclear war and it's all the result of a vast network of lies and liars.