All Episodes
Previous Next
March 16, 2018 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes
56:42
Get Off My Lawn Podcast #33 | The Best Childhood

In this issue I try to sell you on the idea of having children because I use to be like you and my only regret is that I waited so long to have a family. Within this pitch, I also get into marriage tips like, “It’s OK to have a bad year” and parenting tips such as, “You can be friends with them when they’re young or friends with them when you’re old. You can’t have both.”

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The best childhood in the history of childhoods must have been Brooklyn in the 1950s.
It was a great time for America, great time for the West, because you don't know what you got till it's gone.
And they just came out of World War II, which was really hell, right?
Hell on Earth?
And there was this sort of rebirth.
That's why there was a baby boom.
Because people were so happy to be alive.
They were jubilant in Britain during the Jubilee.
Of course, that was juxtaposed by finding out what happened in World War II and seeing the pictures of the dead Jews and learning about the concentration camps.
I don't think we really knew the extent of Hitler's carnage.
Until after the war.
I talked to G. Vaucher about that.
She's the woman who did all the graphics for Crash.
You probably know her beautiful realist sketch of the Statue of Liberty putting her face in her hands.
That's almost everyone's avatar these days.
Okay, that's a slight exaggeration.
Almost everyone.
Maybe a hundred people use that as an avatar.
She said that as a little kid, there was this strange combination in Britain of the joy of being out of the war, and the horror of seeing all these dead bodies, this carnage, learning what had just gone on.
And you see that in her art, right?
She'll have a happy family, sitting around the dinner table like Norman Rockwell style, and then they'll be serving like a human head.
Which that Dead Kennedys dude ripped off, by the way.
Uh, and you know what?
In retrospect, that kind of bothers me.
That kind of art.
The, the, fuck the nuclear family art.
You know?
I grew up with that, with punk rock, and... What's the matter with the nuclear family?
Sometimes, and I love crafts, and I visit them every year, but, but that... I listen to the lyrics, like... Teaching little Johnny to shoot a gun.
Terrific way for father to get to know his son.
And I'm listening to it as an adult going, yeah, it is.
It's a great way for a father to get to know his son.
Or they have another song where they go, system, system, system, teach it, no, force her to crawl.
And it's about, you know, how we train our children to be part of the system.
Uh, no, we don't.
And, um, uh, babies crawl on their own.
You don't force a baby to crawl.
And they talk about having a backyard and a swimming pools!
How do you get it?
Follow the rules!
Well, I've had some swimming pools over the years.
The way you get it is you bust your ass.
And, you know, a really nice one's about 50 grand.
And the kids love it.
It's a lot of fun.
I got one with lights in it.
I sold the property with it recently, but it was really fun when we had it.
It wasn't part of the system.
And that's why I want to make today's episode about kids and the family.
There's a real war on the family going.
I was talking to Alex Jones about this during the week and he said, you know, when people come up to him on the street and attack him, they'll yell things like, there's too many people in the world because he'll be with his kids.
And you go, what a strange insult.
What a strange priority.
You think I have too many kids?
Okay, so you must hate Mexicans, because they breed more than Americans.
And Mexican immigrants are 100% of our immigration growth.
The locals, the long-term Americans, the ones that have been here for generations, they don't really breed.
They do maybe two, or less than two.
So they're just basically steady.
But if you look at a graph, But no, they don't mind that.
They like that.
The refugees.
a straight line for the rest of us and then a 45 degree angle for the Mexican immigrants and they call that the wedge because it looks like a wedge on top of a rectangle but no they don't mind that, they like that, the refugees I try not to make the podcast political, I want to talk about how cute kids are but sometimes it leaks into that
And I worry about this hatred for the family, because I think, and I talked about this on my 100th episode on Get Off My Lawn, I think, guys, you might want to try it before you knock it.
It's really fun.
Having a little kid in your house, especially when they're at peak cuteness, which is like two to five, it's like Vince Neal's in your house.
Like, you can't believe you have a rock star in your house.
I know it's hard to convey.
I don't know what analogy to use.
I mean, uh, because you've never experienced this.
Like, I'm not particularly impressed by celebrity.
But if you are, okay, imagine, uh, uh, Louis C.K.
is in your house.
Actually, now you're worried he's gonna beat off in front of your family.
So, I don't, like, whoever your superstar is, that little person is in your home.
And just watching them eat a sandwich is a joy.
And it's hard to convey this because it sounds so boring to non-kids.
People, the childless, I should say.
But there's a study that these two homosexuals were touting about how you're less happy after you have kids and Lauren Southern debunked it in a video.
She did a reaction video and she says, and this is a woman without kids, she goes, I think what's happening here is you have a different scale of joy after kids.
So when you're childless, you go, this weekend was awesome!
I was so hungover.
I woke up at 2 p.m.
because we were doing coke till the sun came up, and then we just binged Netflix, had sex like four times, and ate Häagen-Dazs in bed.
And you go, all right, great.
That's awesome.
You should definitely have that under your belt.
But I would consider that the worst weekend ever now.
And so you you have a different level of joy because first you have this rock star in your house, but there's also this huge Sword of Damocles this huge sense of responsibility So you're not really happy If you don't do anything that weekend, because you feel like you failed your kids.
Like last weekend, I took my son to baseball on Saturday, and then the whole family went skiing on Sunday.
You go to bed feeling really good that night, because they weren't on screens, and you go, I'm doing my job.
I feel fulfilled.
And that's joy.
Like when I'm away on business and I call my wife, when I say, how are you?
It really means, how are the kids?
And that will sound weird to you if you don't have kids.
But it really means, like if the kids are doing great, my wife's happy.
They say happy wife, happy life.
Well, happy kids, happy wife.
Well then just spoil them.
Yeah, that's not, that doesn't work.
That's uh, candy for dinner.
It usually turns out shitty.
We actually do this thing once a year, I call it Kids Day.
Anything you want!
Anything!
Do whatever you want!
And inevitably they stare at screens all day, eat nothing but junk food, stay up till maybe 1, 2 a.m.
watching movies and stuff, playing video games.
They stare at a screen the whole time and then the next day they're destroyed.
And you realize, this is Lord of the Flies.
This is what would happen.
So this episode, I want to tell the childless to please make some babies.
Not for me, not really for society, although it helps society.
If you're listening to this podcast, you're the kind of person who should have kids.
At least you speak English.
And if you have kids, I would like to share some wisdom.
One thing I just came up with last week, by the way.
I have this problem as a parent, outside of Screams, which are the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE!
I'm having a carpenter come in on Saturday to build a safe for our screens.
I could do it myself, but I'm a very mediocre carpenter.
I love doing projects like that.
But if I ever want to sell this house, we can't have some shoddy door in our closet.
We have this nice walk-in closet.
I can't just have, like, a Gavin door there.
It has to match the rest of the cabinetry.
So I'm having a professional carpenter.
300 bucks he's charging me, by the way.
That's the problem with having a nice house.
Every time you get a quote, it's twice what you think it should be.
So, 300 bucks, and it's gonna be a little door, and I have a plug in that part of the closet, so I could have a power bar there, and I can plug in, you know, infinite iPads and iPhones, and I'm gonna be the only one with the keys.
And I will put all of the phones in there, because, I swear to God, it's like having Coke around Japs.
And by Japs, I mean Jewish American princesses.
And if you didn't grow up in Montreal or New York, you probably don't know what I'm talking about, but they are voracious when it comes to Coke.
If you're doing coke in the bathroom and there's a Jap around, you're gonna hear pounding on that door that it's gonna shake the deadbolt.
Holy Lord.
Yeah, even like this morning, I see, I come downstairs and I see my son sort of run away from the counter.
And I look over and there's, of course, my wife's left her cell phone there and he's checking baseball stats.
Which sounds innocent enough, but believe me, it just goes into memes and watching other people play Fortnite on YouTube.
That's the thing with the kids today.
They watch someone else play a video game.
You thought you couldn't get stupider than video games.
Nope!
There's worse.
There's watching someone play a video game for hours.
And they go, wow, this guy's really good at this video game.
Fortnite is the big one now.
Don't worry, I'm not going to forget the cupboard.
But Fortnite is this game where you go around shooting people, murdering them.
And, you know, with all these school shootings, you don't like the idea of trivializing mass murder.
But, on the other hand, say you totally outlaw it, right?
You're separating your kid from everyone else.
It's sort of like homeschooling.
Yes, it's better for the kid.
It's higher quality education, obviously.
But, you're also making your kid a freak.
And I, you know, I hang out with all these weirdo anarchists, especially in Britain, and I'm with their homeschooled kids, and they're weird.
I'm sorry, but they're weird.
They talk to me like an adult.
So, Gavin, what do you do?
Are you in media?
Fuck off!
With your little homemade Harry Potter wand.
It's not even a Harry Potter wand, it's a homemade wizard wand, because you just use your imagination, because you don't have real toys.
You have a stick with a feather on it that you made.
Blech!
So if I outlaw Fortnite, I make him a freak, and he can't talk, you know, to his friends at school, and they also socialize playing this stupid game with their headphones on.
So I wanna...
I wanna make sure I monitor these kids, but I also don't want them to be Harry Potter freaks.
Homemade Harry Potter freaks.
Like my daughter!
I restrict screens from 730 to 8.
And that's when she socializes right on their little chats, and then I think so I cut that out And she's the only available for half an hour a day well now she can't socialize and the whole reason we moved to the burbs Was to try to get back to Brooklyn in the 50s or at least my bucolic childhood Which was suburban Canada in the 70s and in both cases you?
Disappear after breakfast and you come home when the streetlights go off pretty perfect Pretty poor, too.
I mean, I grew up middle class, but my parents were poor.
So it's sort of like being poor, because they don't buy you shit.
No Star Wars toys.
No six million dollar man.
Just his boss, Oscar.
But it was still way better than my kids' super rich childhood.
Because we're here in the Burbs, and it's kind of a ghost town in the summer.
These rich people send their kids away, Literally the day after the last day of school.
So they get out early, say noon, 9 a.m.
the next day they're on a school bus out of town for eight to nine weeks!
Isn't that weird?
And then when they come back, they have sailing lessons in the day and lacrosse and field hockey and all these other activities.
So there's no kids on the street in this kid neighborhood.
So anyway, step one to getting these kids out of the house And getting them creative again is getting them bored.
Bored is like the gasoline that powers creativity.
And with screens, you're never bored.
So, I have to constantly monitor who's on a screen, I try to hide them, they find them.
And every time I hear silence in the house, I know something's up.
And I'll go upstairs, downstairs, I'll find someone, sometimes in a closet, on a goddamn screen!
You know a good tip, uh, to traumatize them?
You sneak up on them when they're in a hiding spot on a screen, and you take your shoes off, right, just socks on the floor, and you get up nice and close, and you go, OH FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!
Wow, do they jump.
The screen goes flying, and then you go hide it.
So anyway, on Saturday this guy's gonna come by, build me a beautiful little door with a lock, And I'm going to put all the iPads in there, all the phones, they're all charging on the power bar, and you can have them from 7.30 to 8.
Oh, by the way, there was a mutiny on the bounty I forgot to tell you about.
The kids had a meeting, and they, via my wench, they went to the captain of the ship, and they said, we want to change screen time.
And by the way, this is not a democracy, it's a benevolent dictatorship.
That's what my dad used to always say, and I stole it.
You end up stealing all your dad's lines when you become a dad.
I remember yelling, when I'd leave the door open or something, we're not heating Stinson Avenue!
That's the street I grew up on, 38 Stinson Avenue, in Bell's Corners or Nepean or something.
And I say the same thing, we're not heating Pitland Avenue!
I'm not telling you my real street.
So I say it's a it's a democracy.
It's not a democracy.
It's been only dictatorship and they go we want we don't think half an hour a day is enough.
All right, that's amusing.
What else do you got plebes?
And they go we want to take Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Monday, Monday to Thursday off.
But we want to accrue that screen time and have a big session Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Like an hour and I think it's 15 minutes or whatever the math does.
And I go, fine.
Let's do it.
So they do that.
But that's still...
A challenge to get these screens away.
So I'm going to have to confiscate my daughter's phone the second she comes home, put it in that lock thing, lock it up.
Then phase two of the plan is boredom.
Then they get bored, they stare at the wall.
My son was so bored last weekend that he started banging his face on the couch, the Chesterfield as we call it in Canada, and he got a nosebleed.
This is after I said, should we set up a play date?
And he goes, nah, nah, I'm good.
And no, you're not good.
What nah, nah, I'm good means is, I have my heart set on video games.
And I'm hoping I can somehow get you to let me play video games for the rest of the day.
And the answer's no.
Even by your mutiny on the bounty plan, which worked, and you get an hour and 15 minutes, that's still an hour out of 24.
So, you're still sitting around doing nothing.
So you get them bored.
And now, phase two, afterboard, is make the house unappealing.
When we had a, we used to have an apartment in Brooklyn and a country house upstate that was two hours away.
That plan sucked.
Because they, you raise city kids, and then you take them to the country, and they don't know how to country play.
So, I would try locking them outside, and I would come back 20 minutes later, they're all bundled up, you know, in their snowsuits, and they're sitting on the goddamn porch.
They haven't moved.
So now I gotta get my snowsuit on and take them for a six-hour walk in the woods, hoping, like, identifying... I'm not very good at that, but identifying the few things I can identify, the plants and birds and stuff, and explaining, you know, there could be a bear in there.
And we start to map out the country.
We were behind a big sort of uncharted territory.
That still doesn't work.
They're city kids.
So eventually we gave that plan up and we said, all right, let's do The suburbs, maybe you can be like my childhood where you hop on your bike and you go to Darren Alberti's house.
No.
Can't do that.
You still gotta set up playdates.
Now this world still exists, but it's blue collar, lower middle class.
Am I supposed to buy a cheap house just so my kids can play?
What do I do, put all my money in the bank?
I'd rather live in some of my money.
I wanna live in a big house if I can afford it.
You know?
I kinda wanna live in a shitty little house.
I worked my whole life to have a big house.
But I gotta live in a shitty house so they can play?
No.
So, you gotta make the house unappealing.
And here's what you do.
There's obviously an insane amount of laundry in a house with five people.
And my wife's always complaining about how hard it is.
She's like, I'm always doing laundry.
By the way, I did it last weekend.
There's really just two categories in the laundry.
Johnny's peed pants.
And your workout clothes.
There's like 900 Lululemon pants in the laundry.
And towels.
Why are we washing towels?
Towels dry off a clean person.
And then they're immediately hung up to dry.
There's no poo on them.
There's no B.O.
They don't stink unless you leave them on a pile on the floor.
I think you should wash a towel once a year.
I'm very anti-washing, by the way.
I've always said this.
As a man, you only really have to wash your foreskin.
I assume if you're circumcised, you don't really have to wash that.
How do you get pee on it?
Foreskins are a mess.
Don't get me wrong.
I understand that.
But a wet wipe can handle most of that.
Wash the sides of your balls.
Your anus, obviously.
Poop comes out of there.
That's nothing... That's nothing to write home about.
And then armpits, they stink because you got B.O.
What?
Don't wash your hair, guys.
It makes you bald.
And your arms?
Unless you work in construction, what dirt is on your arms?
Plus, the water's just gonna wash that away.
Don't soap your arms.
Don't soap your knees.
And ladies, do not wash your tits.
I don't understand bras and the laundry hamper.
What, you got boob juice on them?
You got milk on them?
You're lactating?
Okay, I understand that.
But outside of lactation, why are bras in the dirty laundry?
The only thing that should be in the dirty laundry is things with like jam stains and B.O.
Kids don't have B.O.
So it's just underwear with poo and pee and then jam stains.
Kids should have almost zero laundry.
Anyway, you do it all.
It takes like a night.
Sometimes all, you know, the kids go to bed early, like 8, 9.
My wife will crash early because Indians, they need a lot of sleep.
And then I'll just have like a night to myself from 8 to midnight.
That's a lot of laundry.
You can just have that going on in the background while you watch Portlandia.
So then you have a massive pile of laundry like it fits in a bed sheet.
You take that upstairs like some sort of nomad.
You look like that Led Zeppelin album where the guy has a faggot on his back.
I mean a bundle of sticks.
And then you lay that all out and you say, alright guys, you want to stay in on Saturday?
Great!
Let's do chore day!
Yeah!
Alright, let's sort all the laundry.
It goes person by person and there's the underwear drawer and the pants drawer.
Isn't this fun?
Don't you love staying in?
After this it's gonna be dishes party!
Yay!
And then we're gonna clean our rooms, and then we're gonna organize the basement.
Yeah, the playroom is a mess.
Let's organize our toys, guys!
And you just make the house hell until they're driven outside.
And then maybe they will discover playing.
But all of this is rooted in taking away screens.
Screens are crack cocaine.
Especially with little kids.
You know, you take away an 11 year old's screen and they just secretly resent you.
And just stare at you the same way like when a cop makes you pour at your peer and you just think, I'm gonna get you one day.
I don't care if it's an old folks home in 50 years from now, but I hate you.
You fucking pig.
That's how an 11-year-old feels when you take her phone away.
But with a 5-year-old, it's taking a crackhead's crack away.
Like, they melt down.
They start throwing stuff.
You can give them timeouts.
You can smack their wrist.
Doesn't matter.
You've taken away a crackhead's crack.
And that is evidence that screens are evil.
Goddammit, even when they're having freakouts, they're cute.
Like my youngest son.
And he's Satan, by the way.
That's what I didn't understand about the omen.
Why do you want to kill Damien?
How many people have died?
Alright, he tried to kill your wife.
That sucked.
I get that.
But outside of that, he's got a Rottweiler.
That's scary.
Okay.
The nanny hanged herself on purpose.
I did it for you, Damien.
Right?
The rest of it though, I would just take a circuitous route around the church so he doesn't freak out.
I have holy water.
My wife got it for me at some trip to the Dells.
I don't want to splash my son with it, my youngest, because I don't want to burn him.
I said that to a guest on my old show, who was a born-again Christian, and she took me totally seriously and suggested some exorcisms I could do.
But it is weird.
Like when we drive by the church, he freaks out.
When we go to church, they give you these things to color, like Jesus coloring Jesus's dress.
And I look over and he's drawn knives in everyone's hand.
Jesus, Moses, Mary, even like the goat has a knife in his hand.
And I go, what's going on with those?
He goes, those are knives.
Another time, he just wrote these weird letters.
He can't write, obviously.
He's four.
He was four at the time, now he's five.
He just wrote these letters that look like letters, but they're not, because he doesn't know what letters are.
And I go, what does that say?
And in church he goes, God is dead.
Okay.
My son's possessed by Satan.
No problem.
We'll work around it.
People have gay sons.
I can have a satanic son.
But dammit he's so cute and the way he talks like I'm I know like it's it's impossible to make people see your kids as cute But maybe through me talking about it.
You can see that you'll be saying that about your kid.
You know?
Like, Johnny says this day, on this day.
He doesn't know the word today, so he says, on this day, are we going to go skiing?
He also calls people humans, which might be another piece of evidence that he's possessed by Satan.
He goes, how many humans are going to be there?
Yeah, there was three humans at soccer today.
Humans.
It's fun, too, listening to speeches on Veterans Day, because you hear Mike Pence talk about, on this day!
People recognize, and you're like, oh, Johnny's writing your speeches.
On this day.
But, I really, one thing about being a parent, too, is you appreciate your parents, and if your parents were one of the 50% that stuck it out, stuck together, I'll do a whole other one on this, on the secrets to marriage, too, because just briefly, the secret to marriage is to accept that there's gonna be a bad, some bad times.
It's gonna be a bad year.
It's like moving to China.
If you move to China, and you're gonna marry a Chinese woman, and like learn Chinese, and end up reading the Chinese newspaper.
By the way, I met a dude like that when I lived in Taiwan.
He fucking married a China woman, spoke Mandarin, read the Chinese newspaper, had Chinese kids, and lived in rural like...��城,��人��,老子��!
Oh, hey!
Eddie!
Like he would yell at his kids in Chinese.
I mean, I guess that's what most, you know, all the Italian immigrants after World War II did that when they came here.
But that's so bizarre to me.
Just sitting down with the Chao-Ning-Chi times and reading those stupid little... Hey guys, maybe update your language?
You use a drawing for every word?
What is this, hieroglyphics?
We're not in a cave anymore.
Okay?
Korea updated their thing to a bunch of circles and boxes.
Can you not have a drawing of a man in a hat to mean man in a hat?
How big is your keyboard?
Your entire desk?
What an idiotic language!
Hey, China and all of the Middle East, if you need a paintbrush to write your alphabet, your language is retarded.
They have four different ways to say every word, and it means a different one each time.
There's tse, there's tse, there's tse, and there's tse.
It's impossible to learn.
Even Chinese people don't know Chinese.
If you watch Uh, a Chinese program in China?
There's subtitles.
In the same language.
Because even 70-year-olds are going, oh yeah!
If you're saying, like, man without a hat, you draw a man, then you don't draw the hat part.
Okay.
I never thought of that.
Still learning the stupid language.
It's impossible to learn.
Oh, by the way, last podcast I was sinking a bunch of places into the sea.
I'm getting a lot of angry messages about some mistakes I made.
Armenia should not be sunk into the sea.
It's Christian.
Last bastion of Christianity in the Middle East.
I'm bringing Armenia back?
I'm also having second thoughts about Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
You're a gay.
I've been looking them up.
They don't look like very nice places to live.
I may have to chop out the middle of South America.
You're on thin ice, Bolivia.
And Armenia, you're back.
Also, all Christian nations in the Middle East are back.
Northern Iraq, you're in.
Just little funny islands.
That's the new Caribbean.
The Christian Middle East.
Anyway.
A Chinese guy lives in China.
That's marriage.
So, surely if you moved to China, if you moved to Beijing, and God help you if you moved to Beijing, you'd have a rough time, you'd have a rough year, learning the language, That stupid language would take you forever.
Learning the customs, taking off your shoes, learning all this stuff about saving face.
It takes some time.
You just gotta stick it out.
I remember when we were kids, punk kids, staying in this big house.
That was a thing back then.
Portlandia does a great job of explaining the concept of the punk house.
There was this dude, Ralph, who sold all his belongings and worked his ass off for a year.
He raised like five grand, which when you're 20 is 500 grand.
And he said, I'm moving to Europe forever, guys.
Bye.
I made a big party for him going away.
He came back a month later.
He had just gone to Amsterdam, stayed in a pretty good hotel and just got prostitutes every day and spent all the money.
And he came back and was living with his parents because he had nothing.
That's what divorce is.
It's giving up.
You know, you change over time.
And when you have kids, It's like you're both Mets fans and you live with the Mets.
So, like, my wife's a vegan, she's a liberal, she voted for Hillary.
That doesn't really come up.
It comes up when we're watching movies and we're watching Charlize Theron beat the shit out of seven Green Berets, as Nick DiPaolo says, and I'm watching it going, oh, for crying out loud, why do they always have to ruin movies with this affirmative action crap?
And she goes, why can't you just enjoy the movie?
And I go, because they're trying to brainwash us.
That's a time when it comes up.
We can only really watch movies from the 80s now.
Although I hear Death Wish rules.
But otherwise it doesn't come up.
And that's why I want you to have babies.
Because my life is awesome.
And I was against having kids when I met my wife.
I said it's stupid.
I honestly said I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I said the world's overpopulated.
And now, you know, when my wife makes dinner and we have it in the dining room, on the big dining room table, I said this on my show the other day, do the Selkirk Grace, and just looking at them chew, it really is heaven.
And then there's that horrible day when they stop being little kids and they become children.
And now it's a different vibe.
Like I remember one day I looked up, we had a sort of open to above living room in the old country house so you could see down.
I got it from a Steven Spielberg horror movie that I think Johnny Depp is in.
I just love the idea of a balcony upstairs and you can see down into the living room.
And I look up and Duncan comes out, my middle son, and he's just tall.
It's like overnight he went from a little baby who liked Yo Gabba Gabba to a boy.
And I almost cried.
When my daughter gets her time of the month, I am going to be blubbering.
I'm going to go to 7-Eleven and get a super gulp so I don't get dehydrated from sobbing.
I dread that day.
And with my youngest son changing his diapers, I might tear up right now.
Every poo was heaven on earth.
It was like a chocolate paradise.
Because I knew that these are the last diapers I'm ever going to change and this is the last baby I'm ever going to have.
And changing his diapers, like each one, I knew that there was a finite amount.
I'm down to the last hundred diapers.
47.
28 diapers left.
10 diapers left.
Oh my God, he poos by himself now.
All I have to do is wipe his ass.
That's the funny thing about kids.
They yell, wipe me!
You're just walking down, you're walking down the hallway in the kitchen, you just hear, wipe me!
I know it sounds gross if you don't have kids, but it's funny when you do.
And then another thing they do, they have no shame, right?
So when they first start pooing, though, they don't ask you for privacy.
That's like towards the end of the independent pooing.
And now, with 9-11 year olds, I mean, it's like walking in on an adult.
You just don't do it.
But when they first start pooing by themselves, they'll sit down on the bowl and they won't want you to leave.
They'll go like, hey, did you know that I- Iron Man got in a fight with Spider-Man and Spider-Man can't put webs on Iron Man because Iron Man can just blast through the webs.
So even though Iron Man is You can't laugh.
That's the other hilarious thing about kids.
You can't laugh because they don't like being cute.
It's sort of like supermodels.
Like, they want you to care about their photography.
And they pretend that, you know, I had a scholarship.
I was actually going to get into engineering before I got into modeling.
Yeah, sure you were.
Gorgeous idiot.
Or races.
Like, if you want to pick up an Asian chick, find out where she's from, like Detroit, and just focus on her as the Detroit person.
Like, oh, you probably eat rats.
You're psychotic.
I know you people, you Detroit people.
And it's so rare that someone sees her not as an Asian, but as a Detroit person, then you'll probably get in there.
And kids are the same way.
They don't like being cute.
Like my son, my five-year-old, is shockingly cute.
He could easily be a model.
He could easily be on TV shows, which I would never do.
But they don't like that.
So when he looks tough and he's wearing like a Batman cape, you have to go, holy shit, you're a fucking badass, dude.
And when they punch you, you have to go, oh my god.
Oh, that was like getting kicked in the balls, but it was a punch in the arm.
Meanwhile, his little sausage arm, it feels like someone tapped you.
And so, all of this cuteness, all of this fun, is great and everything, but as a parent, you have to temper that with this need for them to get outside and just have fun.
You know, I talked about this a long time ago, but my dad grew up dirt poor in the projects in Glasgow, where he was surrounded by four giant buildings, right?
And they made a square, and in the middle of the square, there was just grass.
and it wasn't big and you would play soccer there 24 hours a day basically and if there was one-on-one when it was like 10 p.m.
because those people had shitty parents fine at noon it would be like 30 on 30 and you just go on the losing team or the team with the fewest people and so the game would just grow just like the Sun at noon it would be biggest and we get smaller and smaller until it was you know 11 p.m.
and there'd be no one playing soccer the ball would just sit there that was one ball for a hundred kids no toys no one had toys And if you're hungry, you'd yell up for a jelly piece, and your ma would wrap it in newspapers and throw it out the windy, and that would land down, you'd have your jelly piece and get back to your game.
Heaven on earth!
Cost, what, a dollar?
Then my childhood, unbelievably awesome, hopping on my bike.
We had these bikes, I was talking to another old guy about this, another dad.
Right before BMX bikes came out, whenever that was, 1979, there were these, there was normal bikes, like banana seat bikes was the mid-70s.
And then, I'm gonna guess around 77, 78, they Invented motorcycles for children.
And it was a bike that had grips just like a dirt bike.
It had a plastic gas tank, which you obviously didn't put gas in, but it looked just like a gas tank.
I think it even had like a fake screw top for you to open to put in gas.
Had a number on the side, a number on the front, and it had shocks!
Big, big spring shocks on the front and the back.
Next, now, now, you've been making jumps for a long time.
Now you do a jump, you land, it's like landing in a bag of pillows.
What the fuck?
Now you can make your jump three times as high.
Now you can jump so high that you have trouble breathing because there's thin air up there.
You have to watch out for planes and helicopters.
Then you land.
Bajum, bajum.
Now you gotta bring a magazine when you do a jump, because you're bored up there.
That was the greatest.
And it was not quite as good as my, well, maybe it was better, actually.
Who are we kidding?
Because we also live near a nature preserve in Nepean, Ontario, and we would go explore in the forest on our awesome dirt bikes, which you have so much energy at that age that it is like having an engine.
The engine is your legs and you're just whipping, whipping through the forest with your big treads.
It had the same treads as a dirt bike.
I tried to find some of these online, and as American Pickers will tell you, boys destroy their bikes.
So, when you find one of these, it's just dead.
It's not like there's any kind of okay condition.
Not that your son would want one.
You know, your son wants like a nice new Trek.
So, uh...
We had that childhood, right?
And then my kids now have this childhood where it's playdates, and I have to trick them into going outside, and I have to literally lock screens away in a $300 cabinet, just trying to get back to the 70s.
And I honestly believe the 70s weren't as good as that bucolic, sorry to overuse that word, bucolic 1950s childhood, even though in Brooklyn, In an area like Red Hook, there was dead bodies everywhere.
The mob was thriving in the 50s and 60s in Brooklyn.
All those Italian immigrants, they just survived World War II, they were ruthless animals, and their system that they used to survive Mussolini back in the 30s and 40s was setting up their own government and having their own police force, and those police were murderers.
If you didn't pay your wages or you said the wrong thing, you were murdered.
And so as a kid, you'd be playing, you know, that stupid game with the ring and the stick, with your knickers on, knocking that down the street.
And you'd see a dead body covered in a blanket with blood everywhere.
Even including that, that childhood was the best, because it was dense kids.
And there wasn't that many cars.
You'd all be playing on the street, playing stickball.
I've talked to old-timers, by the way.
I obviously wasn't there.
And they would, you know, if someone hit a little kid, say a retard, smacked a retard in the head, a mom would run out and go, hey, what are you doing?
Don't you be touching!
And then she'd smack the kid who smacked the kid.
There was instant justice around.
And all those kids, they had their own trial and error.
Now here's a crazy example.
This is a very extreme example of why trial and error is good.
Here's the worst case scenario, lord of the flies, of kids being on their own.
I remember my friend Kim, I lost my virginity to her in Kanata, Ontario.
She told me a story about when she was a little kid.
They went out into the woods, as Canadians are wont to do, and they were lying on a piece of plywood that they had set up on some stumps.
And it was an operating table.
They were playing doctor.
And so she got naked.
She was maybe six or seven.
She got naked.
And then all the other animal kids, instead of being doctors about it, they started biting her body.
I think there was three kids there and they bit her arms.
I don't think that, you know, it got too sexual.
Bit her arms and legs and stuff and she was crying and she put on her clothes and ran home.
Obviously terrible scenario, right?
Should end the idea of, you know, non-monitored play.
Because that's the worst case scenario right there.
Besides being murdered.
And I go, even that horrible scenario was kind of good.
Because it showed you never to leave yourself vulnerable.
It showed you never to take off all your clothes around people you don't trust.
Or even more metaphorically, to leave yourself open to other people and leave yourself vulnerable to other people.
That was a good lesson.
That horrible experience was actually good for you.
And that's obviously a fraction, 0.00001% of kids playing.
Most of it is fun.
But this monitored play, every time there's someone crying, a parent runs in.
I mean, that's why we moved from the city.
I would talk to people, Manhattanites, and they'd say, you grew up in the suburbs?
And I'd go, yeah.
And they'd go, man, we were so jealous of you.
You could just play, non-monitored play.
It must have been so fun.
We always had parents helicoptering around.
And I just think, that's not Brooklyn in the 50s, man.
That was perfection.
And those people, I mean, they're some of the best entrepreneurs around.
All those old boomers from Brooklyn, you know, they're all Trump types.
They're all in building and construction and real estate.
They're all loaded.
I was at the Metropolitan Men's Club.
Recently which is like this old money White privilege, it's everything the social justice warriors fear It's every guy there looks like those grumpy dudes from the balcony on the Muppet Show You know those two guys the bald guys.
It's just a giant Bar and restaurant of all those guys wearing three-piece suits pinstripe suits with ties all awesome funny guys Who are all incredibly wealthy?
And they're the ministers of industry in New York, but they all got New York accents.
And this isn't like Britain, where they literally will have like lord someone pants running Virgin Records in the 70s.
You don't, we don't have lords here in America and all those guys grew up poor in South Brooklyn and Red Hook and Coney Island and they played basketball and then the black kids would show up and they would get in a fight and That hardscrabble childhood led them to be great entrepreneurs.
Great people, too.
I think there's a problem now with, um...
With these millennials and being overeducated and Charles Murray talks about this in the curmudgeon's guide to getting ahead, which I highly recommend for you young people.
He talks about how the these these CEOs see these resumes of PhDs in, you know, quantum physics and biochemistry and they go, man, you never mowed a lawn like I did.
I don't really I don't think I'll be able to relate to you.
My kids are going to work at a gas station when they're 14.
I don't care if I have to pay the gas station for them to work there.
I don't care if they make a dollar an hour.
They are going to work there.
They are going to understand what it's like to serve tables.
Charles Murray also talks about that.
About how his daughter, he had her wait tables and she lived in the South for a while.
So, when she was at her Ivy League school and she heard her other, you know, rich, privileged friends laugh at rednecks, And use it in a disparaging way.
She would interrupt them and go, hey, hey, hey!
My friends are rednecks.
Watch how you talk about people.
You know, we're raising a generation of people who get their steak from the waitress and say to her at the age of 14, did you go to kill it first?
What took you so long?
That's an ear burning sin as far as I'm concerned.
Your kids talking down to wait staff.
Can you imagine?
It's never happened to me.
But if my kids ever did that or scoffed at someone... I'm noticing that, by the way, in this neighborhood.
These kids talk to their nannies and their au pairs in a snarky way.
And the woman just wants to keep a job.
She's from Colombia, and she's sending home $50 a week, which in Colombia is infinite money.
They're living like kings down there.
Their mother... Of course, these kids don't have a mother.
The mother's here loving other children, which is powerfully immoral.
We have a really skewed sense of immorality here.
We bred chihuahuas from wolves.
That should be a sin.
My dog is a disgusting perversion of a wolf.
That should be a sin.
We have people who date women when they're 28.
Take away their greatest years, 28, 29, 30, 31, then dump them, take some two years to recover.
They're now basically infertile, and there's no stigma there.
It used to be bad, you're taking a woman's greatest years.
Now it's just ignored.
That's powerfully immoral.
Ruining a woman's ovaries.
No one talks about that.
And having a nanny who has kids back in the turd world, that's immoral!
That's a third doozy that no one seems to have a problem with.
I mean, we're living in an era where we have abortionists saying, no, babies can't scream.
I cut their larynx when they're in the womb.
Did you see that?
She's tried to delete the tweet, but it's some feminist abortion doctor who's flippantly talking about how she murders babies.
But anyway, yeah, these kids, I had one of them, I talked about this on the old show, where we were at baseball and he drops his glove about a foot, it sort of rolls a foot and a half away from him, so it's maybe six inches closer to me than to him.
And as he's rifling through his baseball bag, he just sort of casually looks over at me and goes, could you get that please?
And I said, pardon me?
And he goes, ah, my glove, you get that?
He's telling me to pick up his glove.
I'm a man, a dad, who doesn't know him, and he's telling me to pick up his fucking glove.
I should have just picked it up and whipped it 50 feet away.
But I just stared at him and I went, uh, no.
You pick up your own glove.
And then he sort of looked at me like, geez, someone got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning.
But, and I noticed my son, when he hangs out with these kids, and of course it's playing Fortnite for hours.
That's the other problem too, with the screen monitoring.
They go to some other kid's house and will play video games for five hours.
And not talk and not play.
So you can only enforce so much here in your own home when you're living in a screened society.
And then you can only discipline them so much and teach them respect and authority when they're around these au pairs and they see their friends bossing around adults.
Having the kids pick up gloves.
So my son, my middle son, will do this thing where he looks at me like I'm an idiot.
Like I said today, he plays drums in the school band and I go, do you have your drumsticks and everything?
And he goes, no.
And I go, did you leave them in your locker?
And then he gives me this look with one eyebrow up, sort of like my avatar for my Twitter handle.
This sort of like, pardon me?
Because he doesn't have a locker.
I didn't know that.
And I go, wipe that look off your face, boy.
Don't you dare raise your eyebrow at me.
Who do you think you are?
And I think he's getting influenced by these kids with the servants.
You know...
I'll end it with the lesson I learned from my dad at a young age, which is you can be friends with them when you're young, or friends with them when you're old.
And I've chosen friends with them when you're old.
My dad and I are such pals.
He almost like doesn't like my kids.
It's almost like, what are you bringing your kids around for?
I need to talk to you.
I haven't seen you in six months.
We have a lot of catching up to do.
We have a lot of bitching about Muslims to do.
Sit down, boy.
Get these kids out.
What are you doing with my grandchildren everywhere?
Shoo!
Shoo!
He maybe overdoes it a little bit.
But I'm happy to be the bad guy.
I'm happy to be the authoritarian, but you also want to be the their guy.
You know, uh, Marshall Bell?
No, that's not his name.
That's the guy from, uh, that's the guy from, um, uh, Total Lies, Total Recall.
That's Quan- I know him.
An old dude.
He's, uh, the guy with the person coming out of his quadro?
Quadro?
Sorry, I should edit this whole part out.
But I know an old dude, you know Astor Brooks?
She was, her son was accused of embezzling money from her.
And his, her daughter-in-law was on the front page of the Post.
They called her Miss Piggy.
Anyway, I know that woman's son.
Marshall something?
And that guy is a stepfather to my friend, Rob, the guy I used to do Rooster with.
And when he met the stepfather, the stepfather said, look, I know I'm not your dad, I'm not going to replace your dad, but if you ever need anything, you ever want to talk about anything, I'm here for you.
I'm not talking about just financial support, but if you need advice about anything, I've done a lot of stuff.
I went to military college when I was 12 by lying about my age.
I've been around the block and I'm here for you.
And that's a big part of fatherhood.
Moms have to be there hugging, hugging, hugging.
A dad, you want to put in your time.
And I, by the way, I had a big debate with this woman who wrote a book called The Pie Life, P-I-E, kind of a play on the life of pie.
And her whole thing was women need to be in the workforce.
They don't need to be at home.
Just have quality time, like one hour quality time during the week is as good as being there the whole week.
Bullshit.
As a parent, and as a dad, you just have to be there.
Standing there.
For that one time they cry and they come running over and go, someone stole my lunch.
And you have to be there for that.
And a big part of it too, oh I'm glad I got to this.
A big part of it too is putting time aside.
Like, I got three kids.
A lot of the kids get lost in the mix.
That's what's so great about the daddy-daughter dance, by the way.
Those fucking pigs trying to shut that down.
You finally... The daddy-daughter dance is wonderful because A, you finally get some time with your daughter.
Tell me what's on your mind.
Do you have a boy?
Do you like a boy that I need to murder?
Also, you dance with her.
May I have this dance?
And you dance nice, and you get her some punch or whatever, and you show her how she should be treated.
This is how I want your future boyfriend to treat you.
Like a nice person.
You deserve him to go get you punch and stuff, and open the door for you and all that.
So, there's a lot of reasons why Daddy Daughter Dance is awesome, and there's ways to simulate that in your life.
Like, for my family, I make sure I walk my sons to school.
They go to separate schools, so I'll walk the youngest to school, after I walk the middle boy to school.
And sometimes we don't talk that much.
Sometimes I'll just tell them that important lessons, like recycling is bullshit, and guns are not bad, and your teachers are all liars, and school's a waste of time.
You know, important lessons like that.
Your teachers are all liars, they're all Marxists.
And then sometimes it'll just be silence for a long time, but I'm putting in the time.
I'm there for him.
And then with my daughter, obviously she goes to school farther away, and so I don't have a chance to take her to school, so I walk the dog with her.
I'm allotting time.
And it doesn't matter what happens during that time.
It just matters that I'm there.
That's what people don't seem to get about both marriage and fatherhood.
A lot of it is just standing there.
That's the easy part about parenting.
It'd be cool if you built your daughter a dollhouse where all the parts work and there's a little bathtub there with a little tiny sink.
That'd be great.
It'd be really cool if you built your son a go-kart.
I'm too lazy to do that stuff.
That's not that important.
What's important is just, hello, I exist.
When you're crying, I'm there to talk to you.
And before the kids were so old, I had to allot time, like I'm gonna walk with you to school, even though you would rather take your bike or whatever.
Uh, we did a thing where we had, like, Monday night was movie night, Tuesday night was pizza, Thursday night was art night, where I'd sit and show them how to draw a dog or whatever.
Now they're too old for that, so we have to force other traditions.
But we still have game night.
We always eat together as a family.
Back when I ran an ad agency, I would just get to work super early so I could leave early, so I could get dinner at 5.36.
And there's been a lot of studies.
That show teens who are forced to eat dinner with their parents, who are together by the way, tend to get in a lot less trouble.
Because it's sort of like a recalibration.
It's a reboot.
Every dinner.
It reminds them that they have a family who cares about them.
Gives them a chance to talk.
It reminds them that they have a supportive unit behind them.
So if they do something stupid like drunk drive or shoplift or whatever, we're all here for you.
You have a family.
You have a support unit.
You have a background.
You have a community.
A little mini community.
You're not on your own.
You have discipline.
Anyway, I have a post-it note on my microphone that says, be funny.
And I know this hasn't been a very funny episode, but I'm biting off a lot to chew here.
Maybe it's more than I can chew.
And what I wanted to convey today was parenting tips.
And my parenting tip is be around.
That's it.
All the other stuff is gravy.
All the awesome dad stuff, that's your goal and you want to maximize that.
But it's not mandatory.
To get a passing grade, you really just need a C+.
And to be a C-plus dad, just exist.
Don't be wasted, don't be hungover.
Keith Richards, one of the reasons none of his kids drink is because when they think of booze, they think of dad asleep on the couch.
Don't drink too much.
And just be around.
I also wanted to give the childless encouragement and say it's honestly like Motley Crue live at your house when you're 15.
Tommy Lee is upstairs.
Like my kids, I know this sounds gay, but my kids are rock stars and I'm impressed by them.
Like I like their fingers.
You know what I mean?
Like if I see my youngest funny little sock sitting by the laundry, his feet are so small it's almost a square, his sock.
I could look at that sock for a day.
So that's awesome.
And then I also briefly wanted to touch on marriage, which I'll do a whole other podcast on, which is it can suck.
You know, Naomi Schafer Riley, her and her husband, Jason Riley, are both great writers.
And she says one of the reasons divorce is so high is you think that you're with your soulmate and your partner has to be your best friend and they have to like the same music as you.
And you get, you know, it's just like hanging out with your bro, but your bro has a vagina.
No.
It's just a wife.
It's awesome to be with her.
You have a lot in common.
You love her.
You worship the ground she walks on.
You would die for her, take a bullet, etc.
But it doesn't have to be your best friend.
And you can have a bad month.
You can have a bad year.
If you moved to China, the first year would suck.
I can't be friends with people who are divorced and have a baby.
I just don't get it.
Even a one-year-old and a two-year-old, they talk about racism.
If a black guy likes the same things you do, it's a challenge not to like him.
I don't believe in racism.
However, there are biases I have that go way, way before race or anything silly like that.
And it is.
Even flip-flops are ahead of race.
If someone let their family down and couldn't keep it together and has little kids, I don't understand.
Like, what's the matter?
You weren't getting enough felicio in the first year?
Sorry.
Sorry you didn't get laid enough when your wife just had a cesarean.
Anyway, not a funny episode, but an important episode.
And I got plenty of money.
I don't need a job.
I don't have anything to gain from you having kids.
I promise you.
You'll have to take my word for it.
I promise you.
I want you to get past the sowing the wild oats phase and embrace the next chapter, which is family.
Because I used to be you.
I used to want to live in the wild oats phase and never have kids.
My wife convinced me otherwise.
And the only thing I regret now is waiting so long.
I should have impregnated that bitch the night I met her at Max Fish in 2001 and she was 29.
I should have started making babies that night!
I'd have a bunch of 15-year-old friends hanging out right now.
Yes, to remind you, there's two other shows now.
There's CRTV Tonight, which you get via the paywall at crtv.com slash Gavin.
There's also My daily show, Monday to Thursday, Get Off My Lawn.
And of course, there is the free podcast that's going into your ears right now, creating vibrations on your tympanic membrane, which then send electronic signals to your brain, and those various shocks and blips and bleeps are translated into the English language, which is your mother tongue.
And you are hearing that, gaining those thoughts, and those are literally memes.
That's what separates us from monkeys.
We don't go by genes, we go by memes.
And I'm not talking about Pepe on Twitter, I'm talking about conveying stories.
And now, your life is more enriched.
You see, a monkey sees a saber-toothed tiger, he just goes, Wee!
Wee!
Wee!
He can't tell his fellow monkeys, stay away from long-toothed cats.
We are storytellers.
So we can tell each other, Our experiences and now they're your experiences.
So now your life is enriched because I just conveyed a meme.
That's why we're creaming all the other species on the old evolution race.
Because you've now lived my life.
And that's me just doing my job as a human on this day.
▲
Export Selection