KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – October 25, 2025

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Good morning on the Jacobson Group here on KXEL, 1540, 100.5 FM.

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We're gonna have a wonderful show today.

We're gonna talk about free market enterprise economy.

And at the midpoint, some great entrepreneurs here in eastern Iowa.

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your t-shirt to run and walk for a life like the loving gracious Deborah Jacobson does.

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go to that website.

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So we're going to have the great free marketers from out of you and the Gortney Institute on then Barbara Hames Bryant from the Hames Homes people and then part two of Gortney.

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Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.

Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.

This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.

Welcome to our show today.

My name is Peter Jacobson.

I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.

Joining us today, we have Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and the founder of the Gortney Institute.

as well as Dr. Justin Clark, I'm an art family professor of philosophy and ethics.

All right, so I'm kind of excited today to learn about some things that I know a little about.

Love to have Dr. Clark guide us through humanism, naturalism, and supernaturalism.

Dr. Clark, take it away.

Okay, so I've kind of been thinking a lot recently about the way worldviews have developed.

And in particular, like this, the development from

what's usually called the humanist worldview, which we usually date at, you know, the renaissance on and the development of naturalism, which is usually seen as the kind of development of the humanist worldview.

Now, prior to the humanist worldview, usually people will say the worldview that most people had was a religious worldview or a supernatural worldview.

And I guess the

The line that I want to push is something like humanism was thought to be this kind of freeing worldview in that the doctrine of humanism is that man is the measure of all things, right?

So this is, I think that's from Vico, I could be wrong.

But, and this was the view that we get starting in the Renaissance where

Instead of thinking of the world as something governed by powers we don't understand or various different kinds of religious views on the way this is usually told to us, the Renaissance put humans at the center of the universe and said, well, humans are the measure of all things.

What's important is what humans can figure out about the world.

This led to the development of science.

Well, it started at Renaissance, approximate timeframe,

what year?

century 1400s on, like 1400s on, and so the development of things like the Industrial Revolution are said to have their roots in this philosophical turn that we get in the Renaissance that enables the development of science.

Once this humanist worldview developed the scientific method, so this view, so this goes, we realized that actually

Once we put humans at the center of things and we realized that the way that humans understand things is through the scientific process, this actually led and then

18th and 19th centuries to the naturalist worldview and natural here means a worldview that is dominated by the natural sciences and this view says instead of saying that like humans are the measure of all things it says that the natural sciences are the measure of all things the way we know about things is through the natural sciences and the stronger versions of this like people who call themselves philosophical naturalists say the things that we should countenance as existing in our

our theories of everything are the things that are demarcated by the natural sciences.

Does that make sense?

And naturalism was really, really powerful in the late 1800s and at least the first half of the 19th century.

And I think it's still the dominant view in like academia generally.

It was the dominant view in philosophy departments for a very long time.

And you saw this in

the attempt to kind of reduce mental phenomena to physical phenomena and philosophy of mind.

This was the view that's usually called physicalism or functionalism.

In the late 20th century, in the late 1900s, a bunch of challenges to the naturalist conception of the distinction between or the mind-body relationship led a lot of philosophers of mind to kind of

abandon these really, really naturalistic philosophies like physicalism, which is that the mind just is the brain and mental states are brain states.

Would you say it's mostly secular than the humanism movement and that you've kind of got now supernaturalism with God being at the center, riding along with this growing population of people who believe humans are at the center?

Naturalism is a purely secular world.

So it's a secular world.

Okay.

And

So it will say things like, since we don't find evidence of God, or evidence of God, or in our physics equations, God doesn't exist, right?

And in fact, if we define God as something that's supernatural, that is above or outside natural sciences, then not only are we not going to find God in our scientific equations, we couldn't by definition, right?

Does that make sense?

Nope.

Okay.

So one of the things that happened is people realized, okay,

If we take the natural scientific worldview really seriously, which is what we naturalists are demanding that we do, it seems like there are some things that are going to drop out of the theory, in particular mental states, and things like qualia, which is the experience, subjective experience, and it also

It also is very hard to make sense of like abstract objects like numbers or even like the integers.

So in philosophy of mathematics, there's Hartree Field who says we can do physics without numbers and therefore numbers aren't real, right?

Because the only things we need to admit into our actual ontology or whatever physics demands that we admit are real.

Now the problem is what does physics actually range over?

And the problem is in physics, what we're actually, what we talk about in physics are particles in fields of force.

That's really it.

And if we want to be like, we can move this forward and we want to talk about particles in fields of force, we'll talk about collapses of the wave functions at certain times.

And it turns out that if we really try to be really strict naturalists, we have to say that

a lot of the stuff that we actually want to care about, things like personal human experiences, you know, your mother, your GPA, those don't show up in a finished physics.

They can't.

They're gonna fall out of it.

And so my claim is something like, it's very interesting that we started with, okay, let's go humanism and put humans at the center of everything.

And this move to humanism,

pushed us into naturalism.

And if we take naturalism seriously, it makes everything that the humanists actually cared about not even exist or worth caring about.

And so my claim is that actually if we want to be really strict about it, humanism is a form of supernaturalism.

That is, a strict naturalism is going to by itself and by definition

exclude almost all of those features of the human experience that the humanists were initially set on centering.

And so on this view, instead of driving, I think the wedge was initially driven between humanists and those with the religious worldview.

And on my view, that's not where the wedge actually goes.

The wedge goes between naturalists and everybody else because all of those things

that naturalists, or sorry, all those things that humanists wanted to care about, those are going to look on the naturalist picture exactly like religious claim.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think it.

makes a lot of sense.

And I want to argue that this idea has been brought forward by other thinkers as well, in particular, Max Stirner.

Now, I don't know if Max Stirner was a naturalist.

I would assume no, based on what I know about him.

But he does recognize that this movement towards humanism is itself a religiosity.

So I'm just going to read an excerpt from his book, The Ego and Its Own.

And so again, this is someone I, Stirner, by the way, said,

in atheists, he's not a supernaturalist.

And most of his argument relies on arguing that these categories that people invent, the moral categories, the idea of having responsibility to anything in particular, he calls these things spooks.

In other words, they're things that people believe are real, but they're not actually real.

So it is a naturalist critique of these systems, regardless of if Sterner himself is a naturalist.

He is bringing in a natural critique.

And so he spends the beginning of the book criticizing my belief systems.

That's religion, you know, traditional morality, things like that.

But then he moves into the humanists.

And so he starts by criticizing a thinker who is not super popular nowadays, but very influential in the early Hegelians.

So for Hagel and Karl Marx and people like this named Ludwig Feuerbach.

And I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but I tried.

And so Feuerbach basically writes that Christianity is not real and really the truth that Christianity is communicating is something about how humanity should love each other.

That's Feuerbach's like main conclusion that he draws.

And here's what Sterner says about Feuerbach.

This is the supreme and practical maxim.

This is the turning point of world history.

But properly speaking, only the God has changed, the deos.

Love has remained, therefore, to love the superhuman God here, to the superhuman God here, love to the human God, therefore,

Man is to me sacred.

Who is God?

Man with a great M. What is divine the human?

Then the predicate has indeed only been changed to the subject.

And instead of the sentence God is love, they say love is divine.

Instead of God has become man, man has become God, etc.

It is nothing more or less than a new religion.

Does it love the man, this man for the man's sake, or for morality's sake?

And so, for homo-harmony deus, for God's sake.

And so in other words, what Fierbach is saying is that when we... or excuse me, when...

What Stirner is saying about Furibach is Furibach is saying, well, we don't have to have Christianity literally.

What we can have is Christianity metaphorically.

So we don't have to believe in a real God and a real incarnation.

Instead, what we take from Christianity is, oh, man becomes God.

That's the main point.

And well, what does that entail?

Well, that means that we should love other people, that we should value man with a capital M. That's all things human.

And by the way, I skipped some of the lines in there, but he says that would also entail loving everything.

categorically that is beneficial to humanity.

So things like friendship, things like marriage, right?

And this is some of the things that Feuerbach points out are valuable because they forward the cause of man.

And so what Sterner's pointing out is all you've done is changed the subject of the sentence.

So everything is remains the same except for the word God.

Now you're saying the word man, even though, and this is Sterner's main contention, there's not such a thing as man properly.

And this is maybe, again, it fits with the naturalist argument that

Well, what is man in general?

And Stirner's thought as well.

There's no such thing as a man.

There's only me and then there's everything else against me.

So again, I don't think he's a strict naturalist, but his point is this.

It's like the category of man that you have decided is the new safe harbor that we should love man.

That category doesn't have any of its own legs.

And so what Fjordbjok is doing is simply renaming God to something else and giving us all these like things that are morally entailed by that.

And so again, even though I don't think Stirner is a naturalist, I think that

he highlights the same thing, criticism of humanism that Justin highlights, which is that humanism is religious by its nature.

In other words, it's supernaturalism rather than anything like strict naturalism or materialism or anything like that.

So this is probably getting close to a good time for a break.

That made me think of a couple different things.

One is

Ayn Rand, which I'll leave as a little bit of a cliffhanger to get into where her philosophy and stuff would fit into this.

But then also Luther, Martin Luther was one of the first people to talk about the law versus gospel and the Bible and how the law is there to convict and show you of your humanly faults to actually turn back to God.

And so here this whole thing is really turning away from God.

towards man, making man the center, right?

And so it is kind of a complete opposite of that view that we're really turning to yourself, whether from a moral standpoint or from other ways to run society.

So yeah, that looks like a good spot for break.

Why don't we come back and we'll get some thoughts back from Dr. Clark.

We'll be back in a

moment.

Each of these fields is interesting in their own right, but they intersect in ways that are important to understand both individually and for your community.

If you find philosophy fascinating but want to make sure that your study of the subject is practical, if you enjoy economic analysis but want to see how economic laws interact with more principles, if you are interested in politics but want to explore how economic and ethical realities constrain our political choices, you should consider the PPE program at Ottawa University.

This spring, Ottawa University is organizing a PPE League competition or Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Students in this competition will compete leveraging the ideas of philosophy, politics, and economics in various events.

If you're a professor or an advisor of college students and you're interested in your school competing in PPE League this spring, contact Peter, Justin, or Russ today.

By 2030, the Gorton Institute will be known for its alumni, supporters, and participants who incorporate economic understanding with their faith in their careers, vocations, communities, and personal lives.

We have some great programming going on for high school students.

We have an online microeconomics class.

Yes, you can earn college credit for $200 by taking an online class.

It's affordable, flexible, layered with support.

Our new online micro is optimized for you.

If you'd like to consider some events for your high school students or that class, please contact Justin, Peter, or Russ today.

Okay, so we're back and Peter laid out some things there.

I think we need Dr. Clark to shed some light on.

What do you think,

Justin?

So I think what Peter said about Barback kind of touching on this is is dead on and a lot of, I think he found this point being brought out by a lot of the early existentialists as well.

People like Dostoevsky and

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche grappling at, like, okay, in this new worldview that we get from Newton where the universe is just one giant clock or mechanism, how do we salvage all of those parts of that world which we used to think were sacred or divine?

Right.

And you have thinkers like Kierkegaard saying the world you must be wrong because we have our conception of the sacred is important and true and more true than the theories of the universe is the clock or whatever.

You also have people like Nietzsche, and I think even more than Nietzsche, a lot of followers of Nietzsche who said things like, no, the universe just is a clock or it is just deterministic and all we have are atoms in the void and therefore there is no room.

for meaning in it.

And in particular, I said a lot of followers of Nietzsche rather than Nietzsche himself, because at the end of his life, you find Nietzsche saying things like, oh, you lovers of truth, you scientists who claim to be lovers of truth.

And that's why you hate religion and superstition.

You haven't yet faced up

to your original superstition, that's the superstition of Plato and Aristotle, which is the superstition that the truth is somehow good for us.

And Nietzsche's point is something like, you guys, you think that you can save the concept of the sacred and say like, oh, by somehow tying it to the concept of truth, but there's...

There's no scientific guarantee that what's true is going to be good for us if we take the naturalist worldview.

That is actually just as much of an example of religious or dogmatic faith as you would find in any kind of religion.

And Nietzsche's point is something like, if you want to really, really be naturalists, you're going to have to abandon even that.

And so I think this is getting at the point, one of the points which I take, I take it that

Peter might have been making is that humanism, I think it was sold as this idea that we can maintain.

a lot of the categories of the sacred with regard to what we regard as sacred and human and somehow just like not worry about that religious stuff.

Right.

But the truth is like if you give up that foundation you're going to be surprised about with how quickly all that other stuff slips right through your fingers and there is no foundation for any property of sacredness that you find in any natural science.

There just won't be unless you import it via some

superstition that you're going to get called out on and have to abandon.

Would you call

that you fell into relativism essentially?

I would say nihilism.

Yeah, that the choice then is between, on my view, naturalism is just a form of nihilism.

And it has to be by definition because it's going to have no

um, way to admit anything that counts as a value, um, let alone as something sacred.

So, yeah.

Nihilism being the view that nothing has any inherent value whatsoever.

Um, and so on, on my view, then the choices between like nihilism and non nihilisms and all non nihilisms are going to be at least in some respect religious.

Um, right.

Another way to

I mean, they're just kind of like synonymous in the way that I've just put them forward.

And so, yeah, so that's what I'd get at is that I think you find existentialist philosophers making a lot out of this.

But existentialists as philosophers are more often of the nihilist and atheist bent.

So they're

A lot of existentialist philosophers are trying to sell you something else that you can use in the stead of the concept of the sacred, or how to create sacred in your own life, even though there's nothing sacred objectively or whatever.

There are a bunch of Christian existentialists as well, they're just outnumbered.

And existentialism, give me that.

I

always get a lot of these philosophical stuff.

Existentialism is just the name for a branch of philosophy.

It might be like if you ask like what is a Chicago economist.

There might be like one certain thing that all Chicago economists have in common.

With some of them it's

They went to Chicago with some of them.

It's the, you know, I'm a disciple of Gary Becker, even though I never took his course or whatever.

But it's like this intellectual heritage that leads back to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky.

About the truth, or what the truth is, or truth-seeking, or... More about, like, how difficult it is to... The really pressing problem, philosophical problems, are problems about meaning in the universe.

How we get meaning to our individual lives, given whatever.

world view that we have.

And so you often find a lot of existentialist thinkers talking about these issues, but existentialist thinkers are difficult to read.

And they usually get kind of subsumed into the French, German continental philosophy, which is, I think, just intentionally obscure.

and difficult, whereas Anglo-American philosophy is clear, but usually deals with problems that nobody cares about.

So

let me throw my Ayn Rand thing in.

So it's on my mind because I'm going through Alice's shrug right now with my students for class.

And so she was what people call an objectivist.

Objectivism maybe I'll let you expand more on that but the the idea is she was an atheist so the whole kind of meaning to her was Centered around the human and that you morally don't owe anything to anybody other than yourself and so the only Person to worry about so sometimes the criticism came that you know is built on selfishness and that's kind of a loaded thing But am I reading right that with her philosophy that would fall more into the humanist camp?

I think she would describe

herself as 100% just a humanist, right?

So that's what I thought.

And one of the reader comments was one time that we should tell stories about how we arrived at our current position.

And so I was an objectivist for a while.

I'm not anymore.

So I'll save that story before you ever do it.

Yeah, my claim is that like people like, if you look at what I ran, she's a strict atheist and she claims the reason ought to be our only guide

and

how we make decisions and how we view the world.

So she's a humanist, but she's also seems like she's very wedded to the naturalist perspective.

And I think this, this is hugely problematic in Objectivism as a general theory because

She also claimed, and when she talks about selfishness, what she really means is what the rest of us call prudence, which is rational self-interest, not things like stealing from people or whatever, although...

there are problems with this too.

But I think the big problem for Rand's position is like, if you look at the way she explains her general worldview, she says, I also have a benevolent universe premise, which is that the universe is basically good.

And that as long as we act in accordance with reason, we're going to be rewarded because, you know, the universe is in general benevolent.

Sure.

Yeah.

And

I'm sorry, but like I will take that and I actually agree with that because I'm religious though, right?

I find it very suspicious about how you could arrive at that belief if you weren't religious and what would count as rational grounds for that belief.

In fact, I think it's totally groundless.

And it is something that it's Rand's way of trying to not slide into nihilism while still retaining the things she wants to retain as a humanist.

And my claim is that all of those footholds come loose.

And insofar as you want to be a non-religious humanist, those

foot holds a road and you end up as a naturalist.

If you want to keep those foot holds, I'm sorry, you have to be religious.

Yeah, so your claim is kind of similar to Nietzsche's criticism of the scientists assuming that truth is good.

Rand is fundamentally doing the same thing that truth is necessarily good for us.

Yes.

Which, especially if you are a naturalist, we don't have any particular reason to believe that

either the truth is good for us or that the truth is something that we indeed do pursue.

And so one of the big critiques of naturalism is that, well, naturalism

really on a, you know, wedded to modern science says that we come to our beliefs through an evolutionary process.

That is, we as humans are the result of this survival of the fittest evolutionary process.

And the question is, is it always the case that survival and multiplication are founded on objectively true beliefs?

And I think the answer is not necessarily.

That is, I think sometimes people operating under false beliefs sometimes succeed either in spite of or even sometimes because of those false beliefs.

So for example, if you think that if you're a male and you think that you can get any woman that you want, it may not be true that you can get any woman that you want.

But if you act that way, you might be more likely to get a woman, right?

Because the male who thinks he's and that you can't get anybody that he wants is going is, yeah, it's not going to try it, right?

And so the point is this is that

Evolution doesn't necessarily select for truth in all instances.

It's selects for survival.

Unless those two are the exact same thing, or at least in all relevant ways the exact same thing.

Well, this has been a production of the Gortney Institute here at Ottawa University.

I'd like to thank you all for listening.

Five Star Rating helps other people find us, so otherwise just pass this along to people that might like to take a listen.

Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.

Thanks.

Thank you.

John Jacobson back with you here on KXEL on a glorious October Saturday morning this signal of caroming to 14 states and two Canadian provinces just within the sound of our AM signal here on 1540 not to mention the FM band out of Cedar Rapids and the listen live feature for KXEL as well as being on podcast and this is our Hames Homes segment where we

Take a look at this great American business.

Wonderful custodians of bringing safe, affordable, beautiful homes to families here in eastern Iowa.

And we are back with the man who bears that wonderful name, Curtis Hames.

Kurt, great to have you back on the show, Curtis.

I love visiting with you guys.

Thank you for calling me.

Hey, big game for the Hawks.

Penn State coming in wounded.

I think we can do it.

Some Kinnick magic.

What say you, Curtis?

I love it.

We're

trending upward.

They're trending downward.

Very, very good timing to meet a blue blood.

Excited to get a Hawks win.

This would be great, guys, and how wonderful that Kirk Farrance is extending out what looks to be another very good season.

An impressive win up at Camp Randall.

Who to thunk?

37 to zip.

It's been almost a century since winning by that margin a shutout up at Camp Randall.

Well, some folks will never be shut out or the great people at Haymes Homes.

You guys have got, you've had a great track record here.

You've had a great month.

You guys just finished Haymes Homes and Garden View Homes at the Cedar Rapids Parade of Homes.

How'd that go for you guys?

It went great.

Our sister company,

Garden View Home, and we were part of the Greater Cedar Rapids Area Parade of Homes.

We're proud to be members.

We're proud to participate.

We love to have new eyes come and see our high quality homes on our newest development on Luke Street.

We love seeing and showing off all of our inventory, all of our high end amenities.

We're very, very proud to show everyone around.

It's an open house all the time, but we're glad to reach out and

see

come back and visit my mom there in Marion.

It's always a joy to drive through Summit View and Grand View.

Look at these beautiful homes, landscape, nice yards, beautiful new streets, ample street lights, a lot of green space, a pastoral rural setting in the back view, but dog parks and food pantries and Frisbee golf and Curtis, you want to talk about high quality family living.

You guys are emblematic of it.

We love, love, love those compliments and we work every day to earn them.

We're a planned community and we want to have safe, clean, warm, welcoming living space for high-end families.

We know that times are getting tough and people need high-end living done affordably and we try to provide all of that.

Yeah Curtis Haymes guys you can ask for Curtis when you stop by their location there in Southwest Cedar Rapids not far from all that great retail and the airport there and you know Curtis we we got to start thinking here usually

We're freezing in Kinnock this time of year.

We're coming up here pretty soon the end of October.

We fall back with the clocks.

We leave daylight savings time.

It starts getting dark about 5.30 at night.

We'll be past Halloween and Thanksgiving.

It's time to think about winter and how to prepare for winter.

And I know you guys are on the vanguard of doing that well with your communities at Hames

Homes.

As warm as it's been here in October, winter can be just right around the corner.

And we're here to help.

We want to make sure that everybody who acquires a home from us is prepared.

Again, we're a planned community.

We have our office.

And if people have questions on how to maintain their homes or get them ready, it's not as difficult as one might imagine.

Or as the rumors have said, our product is very much built to withstand

high winds, low temperatures, heavy load of snow on the roof.

But if there's any questions, we're always available to help.

You know, Curtis, you nailed it because the facts are that during that horrific derecho five years ago, this past August,

a derecho that cut down every tree from my childhood in Marion, Iowa.

Every tree at Indian Creek golf course, every tree around Country Club Drive and 25th Avenue where I grew up on.

And yet your homes withstood magnificently that onslaught of derecho wins.

You guys came through unscathed, Curtis.

I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

but it really showed how well engineered our system is.

The homes are built to last and our Iowa codes to tie down homes and set them up really really stood the test and it's the worst test that I've ever seen in my life.

So we're very proud that we hung in there and as a community we rebuilt.

We're very proud of that.

Again a safe well engineered housing product and we're very very proud to help

and those emergency times.

Well the late great Kirk Haymes the first would be very delighted to see how

Well, your team acquitted itself in keeping your people so safe during that time period.

Current norm would be very proud of you and Troy and Barbara.

And he'd also be proud of the fact that you guys have got some nice financing options, guys.

Jerome Powell is finally dropping rates a bit.

The market is anticipating this.

Rates have started to fall a little bit and you've got very competitive financing.

Don't you, Curtis?

What we do at our office is we can help a potential buyer with financing.

And we can take an application and look at a potential borrower's income, down payment, and credit score.

And we can make a suggestion on a bank.

And the banks are fighting for people's business right now.

They're

motivated, they're cutting rates, and they're ready to work.

What we do at our office, myself and Clint, is we'll be the liaison to those banks.

and we'll make sure that they're fighting for you to get the best rate and the best terms.

Well said, Curtis.

And one other touchstone for us.

Surveys have recently showed that Americans are rightly concerned about crime, of course,

Usually in the larger urban areas, you're in someone of a pastoral rural setting, but Curtis, you and your team go the extra way to ensure that these are the safest communities possible.

Talk about a few of the special steps you guys take in this planned community format.

John, that's a great question.

What we have is the terminology we like to use is planned community.

So everybody who lives in a Hames community has passed a background check.

no recent felons, no one on a sex offender registry, no one with violent dogs.

Everyone is going to come through and all of our homes are going to be owner occupied.

But we won't have sub-leasing or people trying to sneak in, people who've had some blemishes on their record.

We're not here to make a value judgment, but we are trying to make a clean, safe, planned community for all of our residents.

Yeah, it is just an extremely well run operation.

And guys, I can't think of a higher calling for anybody in life.

It's really a calling to provide safe, affordable, beautiful homes for families.

It's right on Maslow's hierarchy.

It's the prime need of all people to be able to have families in safety and security, able to transmit those

generational values of faith and freedom across time and space and the Hames family have been worthy custodians of this now.

Multiple generations going back to those early 1970s that I remember so well and so fondly and even harking back.

That's why we play the Cracklin' Rosie instrumental from Neil Diamond Curtis because that was the music that first we heard with the

Then WMT Channel 2 television, television commercials for Haymes Homes.

I love hearing all about that.

I love love stories about grandma and grandpa.

We really, really are honored to be able to serve our friends and our residents and our homeowners in the same way and continue that legacy and lineage that grandma and grandpa started so many years ago.

Great American veterans who honor our veterans to this day when you see the flags on the mast at the Hameshomes headquarters, you'll see old glory.

Our Iowa rights, we...

Prize in our freedoms.

We will maintain that great blue white and red flag with the soaring eagle and then third on the pole but of great significance that POW MIA flag recognizing our prisoners of war and those missing in action Curtis, how can they find you physically on digital media and by telephone?

However is easiest we want to hear from you.

Please stop by

We're on the southwest side of Theta Rapids.

We can be called on the phone, 319-377-4863.

We still have that Marion exchange from years ago.

You can find us on social media.

We're on the HamesHomes Facebook page.

The best, most efficient way to get the most information is on our website, www.hameshomes.com.

Guys, the great Curtis Hames and hey, those of you that might have kids going to school in Iowa City or might even have kids that go into professional school in Iowa City, you're only 10 minutes away from Hames Homes.

Curtis, let's hope the Hawks get this would be a huge win and put them in that upper tier in the Big Ten.

I think they can do it.

Go Hawks.

We love visiting.

Thank you for calling and absolutely go Hawks.

And we'll be back in a moment.

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Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.

Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.

This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.

Hi, and welcome to our show.

I'm Justin Clark.

I'm an ARD family professor of philosophy and ethics.

And I'm joined by Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Distinguished Chair of Economics and founder of the Guartney Institute, and Peter Jacobson, the Guartney Professor of Economic Education and Research.

All right.

Well, the internet seems to be going to higher and higher levels of complexity with AI and other things.

So I want to try to get a fix on some of the issues we face, and I don't know exactly what Peter has in mind, but he's going to lead us through something fabulous.

Peter, what do you have to say?

Yeah, so I'm going to talk about how you guys are getting dumber and dumber.

No, that is somewhat of the podcast.

We mostly want to talk about, Justin's gonna hate me for saying it this way, but the philosophy of the internet.

I know Justin hates tech, I just hate what people just use philosophy to mean, like, I want to talk about something.

It's just how I'm using it in this case.

That's not the reason I hate you.

And so in the past listeners, we've done a podcast on Urban.

It's just kind of like an internet alternative would be maybe a way that you put it or a different way of being on the internet.

And today's not about Urban.

Today's just about the internet in general.

And what I wanted to talk about was why the internet is so terrible now.

And like, this is my most, you know, you know, aggrieved old person take, you know, but the back in my day take that I have, which I think I'm actually objectively correct on.

which is that when I was growing up the internet was like cool and interesting and now the internet is like boring and soul-sucking and it's exceptional to find something really worth your time on the internet today whereas back

Back in my day, I previously, you know, early 2000s, the internet was sort of characterized by finding things that were really interesting and worthwhile.

So here's what I mean.

Let me get specifics down by talking about like my own time on the internet compared to now.

So now the way that I see people use internet is like there's four or five, six mega sites, you know, Google, you've got Reddit, you've got a few news aggregators, you've got social media, so Twitter, Instagram, et cetera.

And I say, at least in the US, from what I can say, young people's time is 90% spent on these platforms just scrolling in a straight line.

And so you scroll and you scroll.

It's called doom scrolling, right?

It's when you just scroll endlessly and kind of stare at a few things.

You know, some of these websites try to aggregate interesting stuff to you.

Like, that's the idea behind Reddit.

It's like, let's get all the interesting things from all over the internet and put it one spot.

I don't think that's what Reddit does, but that's what Reddit tries to do, or at least previously tries to do.

And so that's how the internet was, or is now.

It's like, you've got six big streams, and you kind of make your way down the stream.

My perception of the internet when I was younger is the internet was much more interested in offshoots and going down the beat path or going down back ways.

And what I mean by that is when I was on the internet I was really interested in video games and TV shows.

And I liked the Japanese animated variety of TV shows.

And so I wanted to find a video game that was based off of the show that I really liked as a kid.

And I had the one GameCube game of that, but I wanted more video games like that.

And so I was like, oh, the internet sometimes has this sort of thing.

And so I search and I find this project that is making this game.

And it's making this game using

So software was released by Valve.

It was Valve's half-life editor, if you want to know the specifics.

In other words, this is like a small engine that Valve used to their games creation company.

They used it to create their game, and they're like, well, let's let everybody create games with our game engine and use our assets and that sort of thing.

Just release it to the public.

Well then I stumbled onto like 10 different communities making games like this.

And I got really interested in like making maps of games.

Like I downloaded like the map maker and started making my own maps.

And I got interested in like learning.

I was in like the internet forums talking about these games.

And in the internet forums you could make your text different if you learned how to code certain things.

So I'd spend some time like learning HTML and stuff like that.

I built my own forum on one of these like forum creator websites.

And I'm not saying everybody went to this extent back then.

But things like internet forums or blogs or, in other words, there were destinations on the internet that were not part of these big six large streams that the internet are today.

In other words, the internet was a lot more back roads than it was on the beaten path, is what I was trying to say earlier.

And I think that there was even like, for example, a website called Stumblr.

And what you would do is you would, you know, hit the button on Stumblr.

It would take you just literally a random website on the internet, like anywhere.

It could be anywhere that you were going.

And people would discover these cool things and they would go and they'd share them and they'd talk about them.

You know, flash games were very popular.

So if you were a kid growing up when I was a kid, there's addictinggames.com.

People would just like make these little video games that you could play for free.

There's no advertisements, anything like that.

No microtransactions.

So my point is just this.

I feel like the internet used to involve a lot of discovery and a lot of kind of forging your own path.

It was almost in a very kind of silly way adventurous to be on the internet when I was growing up.

It was also more dangerous, right?

It could click the wrong thing.

When you're trying to download a video game, it would download a... There were plenty of

people who were predators that were on your

form.

And that could be too, yeah.

But that still happens, I think, on the current... I don't think the current internet's any better on that front.

But the point being is...

that there was danger involved with that, but that's also part of adventure in the first place.

This is danger, right?

And so, like, you don't know if the thing you're following is... And by the way, that game that I was interested in never released.

The person who was responsible for developing it just stopped talking to everybody else who created the game and, like, that ended it.

So it's like, it wasn't, like, a happy ending, but, like, I made friends on the way.

I still have Facebook friends with this guy from, like, Norway who made this game.

And so, I guess I want to talk about that.

I want to talk about...

the internet as being on the beaten path or off the beaten path and how the internet say it's app culture is what I call it like we've got six apps and we just kind of scroll through them and it kind of seems like that's boring and miserable and it kind of seems like and maybe this is just like my bias but it seemed like when I was a kid the internet was like exciting and interesting so I don't know have you guys noticed the same thing that the internet has become increasingly streamlined and boring am I misdescribing the phenomena but am I describing something real what do you think?

I'll jump in first with the old man perspective because I'm graduating in 1989 from high school.

I've been with the internet since its infancy and I just, is there something more than email and online shopping to the internet?

I don't know where this sense of adventure comes from so that must have came.

My point is that that might have came

Out a little after I was already let's say in the business world more worried about emails and you know online shopping or something and maybe website development certainly was one but for more for me anyway commercial purposes so

I don't quite connect in the same way you're stating that, and it might just be our 20-year age difference.

Yeah, well, it's kind of funny because I think you're right that the internet, at least in large part, was sort of forged partly by this commercial side of, like, let's get this shopping thing set up and all that.

But kind of along the way, like, again, let me give some more examples of this.

A really popular website when I was in junior high high school was a website called My Life is Average.

my life was average would just be a website where you could submit a story about how your life is pretty average and like there were like hundreds of people on this website like saying like oh it's kind of interesting it's like what would now be like a subreddit on reddit like used to be kind of its own thing and so you know then there are offshoots of that there's like my life is bro which is like a bunch of lacrosse bros talking about how cool their life is right and so like it just seemed at one point

that these little projects that people would make on the internet would kind of like to take on their own life you know whether that's games and so is there more than you know email and.

And business yeah there there were games on the internet for a long time and they still are but they're all in an app store now so there's not a game communities really so there were games there were programs that were developed by people in the internet communities around them there were.

how to decentralize communities and so again like people would if you were interested in like PC gaming you would go to like the PC gamer magazine forums and talk about PC gaming or like if you wanted to look up like you know how to like get through a certain level on a video game that was difficult there would be like a website that had game you know FAQs frequently asked questions right but now it's like that's just all shoved in like YouTube and reddits and like that's what people do so

yeah and let me ask one more follow-up does

what you're saying some of it sounds like you already said is available just it's kind of crammed or hard to find and so my question is is it you don't stumble into it the way you did or is it people don't use that or it's not as popular as Venturist because

it's always right in our face with the mindless scrolling.

And so our time's been substituted for that.

I think a lot of it has been subsumed by the big platforms.

And I think the problem is the big platforms tend to take the edge off of all of it.

And so like you still kind of have the same things, but there's things that like are now advertiser friendly versions of them.

So

yeah, I think this definitely happened.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Are you saying something like the internet used to

be a source of kind of food for like food for niche interests.

And now it is kind of just giving everybody the same slob.

Yeah.

The internet used to be the alternative to the mainstream media on TV.

Yes.

It used to be the alternative.

And now what has happened is just those same interests, then the same groups that used to, you know, in

2003 or whatever, we're giving us the same like a three-channel monoculture have now just taken over what used to be a kind of weirdo depot for lack of a better word, right?

Yeah, I think that's true.

Yeah.

And I think that that's happened for a couple of reasons.

One of them is the one you brought up, which is like, I remember when I was in college, a big site was like called a tumor.

I don't know if you remember.

college humor.

A bunch of sites like that got subsumed by Facebook because Facebook said just let us host your site and then we'll do all the hosting and it'll cost you less on servers and then you'll still make this money via some advertisements or whatever but there was like a bunch of class action lawsuits against Facebook because they misrepresented what they were doing and what happened was a bunch of giant corporations took over

All these old platforms, it used to be their own sites.

Like you talk about these to have, you know, these things are now more likely to be subreddits than sites in and of themselves.

There was like Color Tumor.

There was Overheard in New York and Overheard wherever.

E-bombs world.

Yeah.

And these, these places were all weird and they did have an edge.

And now when you have the same six companies owning all of these sites independent on ad revenue from, you know,

milk toast advertisers, the edges I think are hard to find or at least they aren't where those of us who think we had an edge 10 years ago, the edges aren't where we put them anymore.

The other thing that I think led to that happening wasn't just the consolidation by like large corporations.

It's that, have you ever heard the phrase like the eternal September?

No, I haven't.

So it used to be every September,

In the early days of the internet, use net forums were big, so this is before me.

People got into college, they would get an ID and they would be able for the first time to use the internet on their college's computers.

And every September, admit.

at admins, administrators would have to get ready for this influx of people who had no idea how to behave or where to go on the internet.

And so it was like, okay, September's coming.

We're gonna have to be nice.

We're gonna

top things down.

We've got newcomers.

We've got to train them how to act, where to go.

You can't snap at people or whatever.

And then with the advent of AOL shipping out the CDs to everybody, it was, oh my God, it's eternal simple number.

It is

newbies all the time everywhere.

So it wasn't, I mean, we can argue about like which one caused the other, but these two things together, the normification of the user base also is going to lead to this idea that like, oh, well, it's not just full of food for niche appetites anymore.

I agree.

And I want to expand too on that theme of like things being niche because it's not just, and I agree with you that like Facebook grabbed a lot of things.

But interestingly, Facebook itself changed too.

And it changed in a way that, in a way, was less niche, but I would say, first off, you're right.

The internet used to be more niche, or at least there used to be more decentralized niche communities.

I would say the internet also used to be a lot more personal.

And what I mean by that is, I still remember when your Facebook page that you had, like your profile,

was something that you manipulated the appearance of significantly.

And so you could have like buttons on your Facebook.

It was just like a board with like a button on it.

And you could move that to where, you know, to the top left part of your Facebook.

And when someone went to your Facebook, they would see your buttons that you have set

up.

or you know people used to have even though like you can still I actually I think they finally removed the feature you could poke people on Facebook right which is just a way to notify someone that they have been poked so it's kind of a stupid feature but the point is like you could move things around when I had AOL you could do like customize your home screen you could change like oh I you are gonna have news on your home screen or like horoscope so I remember that I was like 11 years old reading my daily horoscope on it wasn't able to frontier net as well what we added is an

internet seconds.

And MySpace is the perfect example of this.

Like comparing early day MySpace to current social media, like the two things couldn't be more different even though they're in a way the same thing.

Like MySpace was a way to connect with people and talk to people.

That's what it existed for.

And the way that like you could, you got a blanket MySpace page, but you could actually like change the code of your MySpace page.

You could

make it play music every time somebody went to it.

You could put like little flame animations, you know, you could change the whole thing black in the background with white text.

In other words, it got my space out of all the social medias with the most customizable.

Facebook was a little bit less, but still allowed for some customization.

And so the internet was very personal in that sense, like the drive by even the major website says, let's let people make things look how they want them to look.

And it was personal in the sense that my guess, and this is again, just a guess, is the proportion of websites that were hosted by people's personal individual servers back then was much higher than today.

In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if...

you know college humor or you know my life is average.

If these websites started off as like being hosted in like somebody's garage they felt like a server set up or something like that.

And nowadays I imagine that's almost impossible.

Like I know you can find it like at some extent academics host their own websites now so like that still exists sometimes.

But for the most part it doesn't happen and so it's less personal in that sense too.

In other words we've outsourced the

the way that websites are sort of created and put on the internet as well out of a personal sense.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I think the eternal September thing and the corporatization element are one, but it is interesting even the corporations have changed over time too.

By the way, the philosophy is now exactly the opposite.

It's not just we're not going to let you move things around, but

We are going to stop you from moving around to the things that you've always been able to move around, right?

This is like Windows, like trying to tell you like, oh, no, you have to do this update now.

Like when would you like the next update?

Not would you like the next update?

When would you like the next update?

And forcing you to take this update.

Yeah, except 12 minutes.

Exactly.

Or like, you know, almost every website having the same like five tones of blue icon, right?

Like that's another example of this.

And so the depersonalization and homogenization of the internet extends, I think, on several margins.

So.

All right.

Well, this looks like a good spot for a break.

And this is just reminding me of our big, big business being boring and other things with a recent episode.

So I think we got some places to build from there when we get back from break.

We'll be back in just a bit.

Ottawa University has an exciting new major, PPE, which stands for philosophy, politics, and economics.

Each of these three fields is interesting in their own right, but they intersect in ways that are important to understand, both individually and for your community.

If you find philosophy fascinating but want to make sure that your study of the subject is practical, if you enjoy economic analysis but want to see how economic laws interact with moral principles,

If you are interested in politics but want to explore how economic and ethical realities constrain our political choices, you should consider the PPE program at Ottawa University.

The Gordon Institute at Ottawa University is the best place in the Midwest for free enterprise education and its contribution to human flourishing, faith, and economics in action.

We have some great high school student programs like PPE Fest.

This is an event where students get to listen to some world-renowned speakers

and then participate in competition geared around philosophy, politics, and economics.

Our everyday economics program is just a half day on a Saturday, and we will have an integrated discussion about common sense economics.

We have a college credit microeconomics course that runs every eight weeks.

Your high school student can earn college credit for the special price of $200.

If you know some students interested in programs like these, contact Peter, Justin, or Russ today.

All right, this has been a production of the Gordon Institute here at Ottawa University.

I'd like to thank you all for listening.

5 star rating helps other people find us, otherwise just pass this along to people that might like to take a listen.

Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.

Thanks.

Thanks again, guys.

Tell your friends about the podcast, kxel.com slash Jacobson, J-A-C-O-B-S-E-N.

In the meantime, listen to all the wisdom of Jeff Stein during his weekday news and commentary.

And folks, always remember and never forget to be safe, be smart, be good, be strong, love Jesus Christ, and God bless us.

everyone till we meet again have a great weekend and bye bye