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Jan. 5, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:25:07

2293 Ron Paul vs Spock: Will Politics or Parenting Set Us Free?

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	Hey everybody, this is Matt, and welcome to School Sucks Live.
	Tonight, I'm going to start out in the studio alone, but on the phone with me is Mr.
	Stefan Amonius.
	Steph, how are you doing tonight?
	I'm great, Brett.
	How are you doing?
	Happy New Year, brother.
	Happy New Year.
	Glad to have you back.
	It's been...
	Well, you were on with us at Porkfest briefly, but before that, it was sometime in 2010...
	That we got together to do a show.
	So, a lot has happened.
	You've had a lot more time to be a dad during those two years.
	Your daughter is growing up.
	She's four?
	Yeah, she just turned four.
	Oh, right.
	So, education has begun.
	Oh, boy.
	Education began at the very beginning.
	I remember when she was fairly close to a couple of months old.
	I used to lie her on her back and grab her feet, sort of put them up to her bum, and then she could push herself forward along the ground.
	And I think that's one of the reasons why she walked so early, is she really enjoyed having that kind of control, being able to push herself.
	I remember going up and down the hallway a whole bunch of times.
	And so, yeah, the education has begun.
	And I think, as most parents will attest, it's a completely mutual education.
	I'm certainly receiving as much, if not more, I've seen some discussions between you and Dana Martin.
	Has she sold you on the idea of unschooling?
	Yeah, she certainly sold me on the idea of unschooling in that it's kind of in the mix of things to consider, which I wouldn't really say that it was before.
	So, I mean, homeschooling was kind of radical enough for me, but unschooling is really pushing the envelope.
	And her idea of sort of Stuff happens and you just kind of let kids learn to make their own mistakes.
	It's so counter to not just my upbringing, but what I understood as upbringing growing up.
	So I'm still trying to square that circle in my head, but she's definitely making great progress at dissolving the toilet-trained-at-gunpoint fascist chains that unfortunately was my heritage.
	So I guess she's appealing more to the Irish side of me than the German side.
	And you spent some time in boarding school, correct?
	I did.
	I did.
	I spent a couple of years from six onwards in boarding school, also known as a breeding ground for the Orwellian-style colonial dictators that they needed to run a fairly brutal empire.
	You know, separation from the young, fear of authority, exposing you to lots of very harsh peer pressure and canings and all that kind of stuff.
	It's good at stripping out any remnants of empathy that you don't want bleeding in to the consciences of the upper class.
	So, yeah, very effective and I'm very glad it wasn't longer than it was.
	I wanted to ask, you know, something that I run into a lot with the people that I interact with here in New Hampshire.
	Something that people say is, well, you know, I always understood this stuff.
	I always understood that the school system was corrupt.
	The school system was, you know, this attempt to get me to be obedient, to conform and to control my behavior.
	And, you know, I always knew the state was bullshit.
	And I'm really surprised to hear these things because I was deeply confused about a lot of these issues for a long time.
	And I remember internalizing a lot of that school experience and childhood experience probably...
	I think for some people, this can continue right into adolescence as, boy, I hope I can figure out what's wrong with me, because I'm not fitting into this mold.
	Yeah, I mean, I was certainly a fine, good little status Christian when I was younger.
	I mean, I was brought up in the church.
	I was in the The school choir, and we went to church several times a week, and whenever I'd go and stay with relatives, we'd go to church and so on, and I didn't have any sense at all that the world should be different than the way it was.
	I mean, there was lots about it I didn't like, but you know what?
	I didn't like going bald or being subject to gravity, but I just don't think these things are kind of optional.
	So there's There was a lot I didn't like about the world, but I really didn't have any sense whatsoever, Brad, that it could be fundamentally different than the way it was.
	I mean, that took Ayn Rand and a bunch of other thinkers, but mostly Ayn Rand to sort of explore that possibility within me.
	So I reject it, but I kind of rejected it like I sort of sent my soul on a Samastad mission, sort of sent it underground and said, well, there's lots about this I don't really like, but I better keep it to myself because it's kind of not liking that it rains.
	You know, this is just the inevitabilities of living on the planet Earth.
	And so the fact that I didn't like it didn't really give me any sense that it could or should be different.
	So I certainly can't claim to have had any innate understanding.
	I mean, I remember as a kid just going like we moved to Canada in 1977 and you could buy a candy bar for a dime.
	And I remember the price going up like crazy.
	And it sort of stabilized around sort of 80, 90 cents a dollar within a decade or so, decade and a bit.
	I do remember thinking, well, that's kind of freaky.
	Like, why are the prices going up?
	And so I sort of imagined, OK, well, I guess maybe the wages are going up.
	I couldn't and it's because I knew no exposure to monetary policy, fiat currency, the central banking or anything like that.
	So I do remember.
	Being kind of confused by some stuff.
	And I also remember as a little kid, I was asking my mom, and I said, I can't remember how old I was.
	Maybe, I think this was while I was in boarding school.
	I was home for some Christmas, and I was six or seven years old.
	And I remember saying, Mom, how long did the First World War last?
	And she said, four years.
	And I said, who started it?
	And she said, Germany.
	And I said, well, how long did the Second World War last?
	And she said, four or five years.
	And I said, well, who started it?
	And she said, Germany.
	I remember thinking, okay, that can't just be a coincidence.
	There has to be some rational explanation for these repetitive patterns.
	I remember thinking about that stuff, but I had no clue whatsoever about any of the sort of alternate stuff.
	I mean, this is pre-internet.
	This is back in the golden days of two and a half television channels in England, a grainy black and white TV seemingly devoted to endless reruns of Bond movies and sweaty-faced contestants in a puzzle game.
	So, I just, I think a lot of people did maybe feel that there was some alternate that could be achieved.
	I just, I knew it wasn't that much fun to be in the world the way that it was, but I no more imagine changing it than I would changing the laws of physics.
	Yeah, the clearest thought that I remember from growing up was, gosh, it's too bad that this is the way that it has to be.
	And I'm not talking about the larger world around me, which I was pretty much oblivious to that at that point.
	But growing up and learning a little bit about history, before I was introduced to any of these ideas that we discuss so regularly today, but kind of saying, is the world run by the dumbest, most myopic people?
	Or is there just some other agenda that they're not sharing with us?
	So I think that's similar to your World War I versus World War II and really being the same war with a 20-year break in there idea.
	But just feeling like, gosh, it must be something that I just can't get my head around.
	And if I can't understand why this makes sense, when everybody else is walking around at least acting like everything that's going on from the school to the political to the cultural makes sense.
	So, you're aware of it.
	I just remember saying, gosh, it's too bad it has to be this way.
	Yeah, when I was growing up, there were two groups of people who were responsible for all the ills in the world.
	And those two groups of people are why authority had to be so harsh.
	Now, the first group of people were foreigners, and obviously the Germans were pretty high up on that list, and the most enthusiastic of the Nazi supporters, the French, and the Italians, who apparently couldn't fight their way out of a calzone bag.
	So there was the foreigners who caused lots of problems.
	We were just sitting here innocently enjoying our tasty white man's burden, raise up the brown-skinned people to the elevated ranks of Christianity empire, and then out of nowhere, the Kaiser ate a bad turkey sandwich and decided to invade and And then people pulled the wrong levers in the voting booth.
	Hitler got in and he was such a powerful demagogue that he was able to rouse people up to, you know, the suicidal civil war slaughter of the European continent.
	And so the foreigners were one source of the problem.
	And this is why, you know, we had to be harsh and we had to be tough and we had to have an army and a navy and an air force and we had to be disciplined and we had to do push-ups and we had to...
	We had to excel in sports and we had to learn engineering and all of that because there were these dastardly foreigners who just wanted to end our way of life.
	You may remember this from the recent greatest hits of the war on terror.
	That was hugely problematic when I was growing up and really was the fundamental reason for the harshness of authority were children.
	Oh, my.
	Children, you see, did not fit in very well to the hierarchy that was there.
	So, of course, there was original sin, echoes of that.
	I mean, I wasn't raised Catholic, but there were certainly echoes of that.
	Children were selfish.
	They liked candy more than Jesus.
	And this, of course, had to be corrected.
	However, harshly children didn't listen.
	They weren't obedient.
	They didn't form lines when ordered to.
	They didn't want to spend all their time on homework.
	Sometimes they didn't run hard enough up the hill for the 30th time during physical education classes.
	And children were just basically bad.
	You know, they were like...
	I don't know how to put it exactly, but they were like a sack of wheat that kept breaking at the seams and had to be stitched up regularly.
	And the selfishness and the laziness and the untrustworthiness and the deceptive nature of children who will try and fool you at any time into thinking that they've done something they haven't and all that kind of stuff, the sort of lying, perfidious, underhanded, lazy nature of children was largely responsible for the harshness of the discipline that was around and above me when I was a kid, right?
	So I mean, I got caned for I thought I could just take it all on myself and not listen to anyone.
	It was entirely the fault of foreigners and children that discipline had to be so harsh.
	And the world was the way it was.
	And if only foreigners would shape up and children would stop being selfish, I'm sure everyone could, you know, imagine living in a kind of nirvana.
	But I think that was the general impression that I got as a kid, that I was a badly defective adult that needed to be constantly patched up with violence in order to achieve the lofty summit of responsible adulthood.
	Yeah, we recently did a show about the film that actually came out in the UK in 1971 called The Clockwork Orange, and we called the show A War on a Clockwork Orange.
	And the film itself...
	By the way, I've kind of followed your lead, and I'm getting real into film analysis these days.
	I think I might make a thing out of that on this show.
	But yeah, we were looking at the film, and not just so much the meaning of the film and the message of the film, but how the film became a lightning rod in British society for...
	All of these problems that were already going on.
	You know, you have that post-war shell-shocked or post-traumatic stress disorder generation becoming adults there.
	And I think that was a line that I used in the show was, when there's no foreigners around, you blame the kids.
	And it's really unfortunate that Clockwork Orange became just a symbol of youth and all that was wrong when, in reality, what first the author Burgess and later the filmmaker Kubrick were trying to do We're, you know, reflect problems that already existed.
	But, you know, this is kind of, this is moving us right into the topic nicely.
	I talked to you maybe six months ago about this idea for a show that I had to reach out to maybe some new people who are coming to these ideas and, you know, maybe, as so many do, they first experienced Libertarianism, for lack of a better description, through politics.
	And here we are six months later after another season of political hopefulness and reality has set in on the whole Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Gary Johnson thing, failed ballot initiatives.
	And there's also those people too who feel like maybe they've been spinning their wheels for a while and there hasn't been any meaningful progress.
	So whether we're talking about When people first understand these ideas and they first embrace these ideas, I think anger is a natural emotion.
	Whether they're reflecting on their own childhood or they're taking these ideas and looking at society through the lens of the philosophy of liberty, through voluntarism.
	I'm sure you have a very active board at your site, freedomainradio.com.
	Have you fielded a lot of questions or a lot of dismay from new people on these types of issues?
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, I think there's no doubt that, you know, Freedomain Radio and other shows like it, well, I don't think there are that many other shows like it, but let's just say Freedomain Radio, just to speak from my own footprint on the web, definitely it looks like there's You know, that the airplane carrying all of the political libertarians crash landed somewhere off the coast of the island of philosophy.
	And, you know, a fair number of detritus debris and people are washing up on the shore saying, you know, well, I put everything I had into this political stuff and now I need to figure out another approach to bring liberty about.
	And there is, of course, a lot of frustration.
	The numbers have barely shifted.
	In fact, they've shifted in some ways downwards over the past 40 years.
	And the first libertarian candidate polled at about 1 percent.
	And Harry Brown polled at about 1 percent.
	Won't be born in a bit.
	And I think Gary Johnson got about, what was it?
	Oh yes, 1%.
	Because, you know, people, they understand, like, it's not really changing.
	And the reason it's not changing is pretty clear.
	People say, well, look, I converted three people to libertarianism over the last couple of months.
	And that's great.
	I mean, that's, you know, three or four more than there were before.
	But it's kind of like the job situation, right?
	They say, ooh, the economy created 50,000 jobs last year.
	Yes, but you need 150,000 jobs a month just to keep...
	We are converting people, but every single year, tens of millions of children come out of government schools full-on status.
	I mean, we simply cannot keep up with the propaganda machine of the public school, let alone what's going on in the churches.
	What does that mean to convert people?
	More specifically, they say, yes, I'm into this.
	But I think the place where most of them go, and maybe the reason I've wondered this myself, is that when people first understand these ideas, and then they look at how society actually functions, and they look back at their own experiences as a child, as a student, the anger, the betrayal, maybe for some, as we've seen, there's people who are making a lot of money on the internet off other people's paranoia.
	There is this gravitation to politics, and I've wondered if people go there because, you know, anger, betrayal, paranoia, fear.
	Politics seems like such an appropriate outlet for those kinds of emotions.
	It seems like that's the purpose of it, almost.
	Yeah, I think you're talking about the doom porn that seems to pervade a lot of the libertarian websites.
	I mean, I certainly understand that.
	I'm probably a little less charitable.
	I did a debate a little while back with a liberal named Sam Seder.
	Yes.
	And I got a lot of complaints from people about that debate where people were saying, oh, you should have pinned him to the mat and really exposed him for what he was or whatever it is.
	And for me, I'm like, look, I just want to get through to the peaceful parenting stuff.
	I want to lay out a foundation for why we can have a peaceful future.
	And then I want people to take the bait called, how do we get there?
	And then I'm going to bring out the peaceful parenting.
	And I have a question for you.
	This is a question, it is directly related to the political thing.
	So who is more committed to the non-aggression principle?
	A libertarian who spanks his children or a liberal who does not spank his children?
	I would say the person who does not spank their children.
	Right.
	Because that's something you can actually affect, right?
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, the rest of it is just like proxy.
	It's easy.
	When you're putting distance between yourself or your ideology and the actual acts of aggression down the line, like I've talked to liberals, I've talked to conservatives, I say let's play this game.
	I don't do this anymore because it turned out to be just amazingly unproductive.
	But I would say let's play this game called Skip to the Gun.
	Where we just skip all the steps, all the platitudes, and you get me right to the part where somebody's pointing a gun at me if I don't do exactly what you want.
	But they're not actually...
	These are people who might even be happy, like out in Keene, New Hampshire, there's a lot of...
	Fanfare when, say, Ian Freeman, someone like the host of Free Talk Live, gets thrown in jail for some victimless offense.
	But those people who are cheering for his incarceration in the comments on some newspaper's website, they're not people who would actually enact physical force against him.
	So I think that the latter in your either-or choice is the much more peaceful of the two options.
	Yeah, I mean, I have for years been trying to stimulate a debate in the libertarian community about spanking children, aggression towards children, and it gets virtually no traction.
	I mean, there have definitely been some people who've changed their minds, and certainly, I mean, I've estimated tens of thousands of families as a result of my show have, and the audience participation in my show, have abandoned aggression against their children, which is an incredible footprint to leave in the world.
	I mean, it's like, you know, dropping roses all over the desert and having them grow.
	So to me, that's a wonderful thing.
	But I actually have more in common with a liberal who is peaceful with his children than I do with a libertarian who is spanking or yelling at his kids.
	Because that is actually going to change, right?
	That the liberal who's not spanking his children is doing much more to bring about a peaceful, voluntary society than someone who rails against the Fed and spanks his kids or justifies it or defends it or refuses to talk about it as a topic worthy of our attention.
	You and I are not likely to go out and strangle hobos and hold up nuns or whatever it is, but the choice we're going to make about aggression and violence in our lives is almost entirely to do with child raising.
	I'm never going to get jumped by nine ninjas and going to have to throw them off with my cat-like laser brain martial arts moves.
	That's never going to happen.
	If the police come to arrest me, I'm going to go quietly with them because I kind of want to keep body and soul together.
	The only fundamental choice that I'm going to have to make in my life when it comes to the non-aggression principle is with regards to my children.
	And those people who make choices with regards to their children that conform to the non-aggression principle are the true anarchists.
	They are the true libertarians.
	I don't care what they say about the Fed.
	I don't care what they say about Social Security because that's just words.
	And who gives a crap about words?
	What really matters is actions.
	You know, by their deeds shall you know them.
	And so leftists and liberals and communists and anarchists and Jacques Fresco folks and all of these people, hey, if you are peaceful with your children, then we are brothers and sisters and I don't care what your ideology is because that's actually the foundation for a free society.
	If you are aggressive towards your children, I don't care what your opinions are about the free market because you simply do not get the non-aggression principle.
	You do not understand it.
	You do not grok it in any kind of fundamental Heinleinian sense.
	So the goal of politics and the reason people are drawn to politics It's not socially volatile, fundamentally.
	The idea for politics is the idea that someone is going to come in and do all the crap that I don't want to do.
	Someone's going to come in and save me and reduce aggression and fix the Constitution and repeal the minimum wage, privatize money.
	I don't know what it is that people want.
	It's someone's going to come in on a white horse and I'm not going to have to do the difficult work Of confronting my own history, of making a vital and fundamental, a visceral commitment to the non-aggression principle in my own life and deal with all the fallout that happens when you decide not to act aggressively towards your children.
	So it's a way of managing your own anxiety about the changes that you need to make in your life.
	I don't mean you, but one needs to make in one's life.
	It doesn't have anything to do with actually trying to free the world.
	It's entirely a defense mechanism.
	Because empirically, we've been trying for hundreds if not thousands of years to use The one thing that has demonstrably worked is improving the peace and reason and negotiation skills of children.
	That empirically, scientifically, validly, historically, just look at psychohistory.com, that works in reducing violence.
	That is the only thing that empirically and repeatedly works in reducing violence and increasing peace and reason among mankind.
	If we look at it empirically and objectively, it's all about peace with children.
	Everything else is just distraction from that essential fact.
	Yeah, I know you had Nathaniel Brandon on your show a couple years ago now, probably, and he has this book that I've been reading through recently.
	In fact, Wes Bertrand was doing a series about it on complete liberty.
	We talked about it a little bit on my show, and the name of the book is Breaking Free.
	And, you know, when you describe these libertarians who wind up, you know, people who profess the philosophy of liberty and wind up, you know, striking their own children, he has this concept in the book, Brandon does, he calls it the inheritance.
	And, you know, I could just look at my own life and my own parenting, and, you know, I see where my parents came from, and my father especially, I think, wanted to...
	Do a better job with his children than his mother did with him.
	I think that's normal.
	I think that's certainly something that a lot of parents, maybe not people who aren't the best parents, or even putting 100% effort into parenting, they say, gosh, I want to do better than my parents, and his upbringing was awful.
	But if you don't deal with the impact that that had on you, The inheritance is going to continue, basically.
	You're going to pass that on to your next generation.
	Despite your desire to want to be a better parent, if you don't look at how that affected you...
	Then I think that's maybe one of the reasons that we see that kind of parenting, you know, the libertarian who spanks their child, because they've never done the personal freedom stuff.
	Kind of goes back to the politics thing, too.
	You know, my first instinct when I learned about these ideas was to run to the thing that was furthest away from me.
	The Federal Reserve.
	Electron.
	The furthest thing away from things that I could actually control and that was the idea with this red pill blues is that yeah you take the red pill and you go and do all those things and you feel very small and you feel very defeated and you don't feel efficacious and I think unfortunately a lot of people give up and they don't start in the realm Or the sphere,
	however you want to picture it, of things they actually could change and control in their lives.
	I certainly know that I didn't even look there for a long time.
	Yeah.
	No, I think that is very tempting because it is a lot safer than having to look at where can I promote the non-aggression principle in my own life.
	You know, I know what you mean about parents, right?
	So there is...
	All the way from, you know, all parents do the very best they can with the knowledge that they have, you know, all the way to some radical feminist thing that, you know, all parents are patriarchal bastards who want to eviscerate their children with some sort of boar-tooth fangs of masculinity or something.
	But when I think about violence against children, I think about it often in terms of domestic abuse, right?
	I don't know.
	I mean, this may be a little bit before your time, but sort of when I was growing up in the 70s, there was a really strong...
	Push towards awareness of domestic abuse.
	And domestic abuse basically meant husbands hitting wives, husbands beating wives, husbands mistreating wives.
	And it was really powerful propaganda.
	And I don't mean that necessarily in a bad way.
	I mean, it was a 30-second clip.
	You'd see them on TV. You know, spousal abuse is unacceptable.
	You know, one hit and you walk.
	Any form of violence is unacceptable.
	In human relationships.
	Don't stand for it.
	And as a result, divorce rates went through the roof.
	I was talking to a friend of mine recently.
	She came back from Chile.
	And Chile has recently allowed no-fault divorce.
	The divorce rate is 80%.
	80%.
	Because you don't actually have to prove that you're being mistreated.
	You can just say, I walk from this marriage.
	And the whole family is falling apart there.
	And I don't remember.
	When I was a kid growing up, And this happened all the way through my teens and into my 20s.
	I don't remember a single instance of anyone saying, well, husbands who beat their wives are doing the best they can with the knowledge that they have.
	You know, they have really great intentions.
	Maybe they're just lacking particular skills.
	Like, I don't remember any of that.
	What I do remember was, you know, they were really portrayed as bad guys, beating up their wives, yelling at their wives, abusing their wives, cutting off money from their wives, abandoning their wives, having affairs on their wives, ignoring their wives, whatever it is.
	The sort of male chauvinist pig thing.
	I don't remember any sympathy for the abuser.
	Now, I'm not saying that's right or wrong.
	I'm just saying that that's what I recall as a kid.
	And that is how I look at, to some degree, how I look at sort of the parent adult child.
	When you're a child child, you sort of struggle through as best you can.
	But the parent-adult child.
	I'm not sure why the standards suddenly shift.
	You know, we're not allowed to have any sympathy at all for a man who hits his wife even once, but parents who repeatedly hit their children, whether it's spanking or something even more serious, we have to start making up all these excuses for them.
	And I can't fathom that.
	I mean, other than maybe it's just a hangover of honor their mother and their father, you know, the one commandment that we seem to be having a great deal of trouble examining rationally.
	But that's sort of where I come from.
	Like I read on psychology websites that say, you know, if he hits once, he's going to hit again.
	If he hits you for the first time, leave and never look back.
	But then when it comes to an abusive parent, the story completely changes and it's like, well, you know, they're struggling.
	They're doing the best they can.
	They themselves had bad childhoods.
	Like, I don't ever remember when I was a kid if a husband beat his wife.
	I don't ever remember people saying, well, you see, but he had a difficult – the husband had a difficult childhood, so she's really got to stay with him because she needs to understand that he's struggling with that and maybe he didn't prepare as much as he could for marriage, but he's doing the best he can.
	There was none of that.
	There was just a clear line drawn in the sand, and I think which had significant effects.
	I mean, abuse against women declined by a third after no-fault divorce went in.
	It seems that promoting volunteerism within marriage has done a great deal to reduce spousal abuse.
	I also believe that promoting volunteerism in the parent-adult-child relationship It's also going to do its part to reduce violence against children.
	So anyway, that's sort of where I'm coming from.
	So I have a little bit less tolerance for, maybe a lot less tolerance for their doing the best they can argument because I certainly never saw that when I was growing up for a far less egregious abuser than a parental abuser.
	No, my perspective is a little bit different.
	I'm sure that's a question that you fielded countless number of times.
	My parents were really great.
	They did the best they can.
	You know, I know when I was growing up, this is something that I've discussed on the show before, you know, my mother was, I would describe her today as sort of very weak will.
	She was very emotionally distant.
	or reactionary like she would flip out about something and there was very little in between.
	And this was a very difficult thing to experience as a young child.
	As I grew up and I obviously got out of that situation when I was eighteen and went on to do other things.
	During that time my mother got divorced, she went into therapy.
	I would say today, as I know her today, one of the most significant transformations that I've seen That's great.
	That really is wonderful.
	...in my life.
	So that's a little bit of a different perspective, but also the other thing, too, about, you know, I know that using a phrase like empathizing with an abuser is very, very explosive, and I would attach maybe a bit of a selfish motive to it.
	When we look at, let's just take the parent-child relationship and look at things that might have happened to us when we were kids, I think that probably the most serious and in-depth evaluation of anyone's parenting is going to be done by that person's child probably later in life.
	Maybe the neighbors have something to say.
	Maybe grandma has something to say.
	But the most in-depth, meaningful evaluation of what somebody did as a parent is probably going to be done by a pretty self-aware child later in life, trying to understand how that affected them.
	Now, of course, anger is certainly, I think, a very healthy emotion.
	I've been plenty angry about a lot of things that happened related to family and otherwise.
	But, you know, I realized at one point when I felt like I was holding a lot of different resentment towards a lot of different people in a lot of different areas of my life, that I was never going to have that, you know, Emperor Palpatine return the Jedi power to transfer any of that electrically into somebody else's body.
	That I was just renting out space to, you know, all of those people through those resentments in my own head.
	And that was one of the things that I wanted to ask you about was, yes, anger is healthy, yes, resentment is, you know, a normal product of anger, but how do we do the process that acknowledge that and let it go?
	Right, right, okay.
	Yeah, so there's people who've, and I'm just going to talk about abuse victims here.
	I'm not, of course, putting you in that category, Brett, but I'm just talking about my amateur opinions about abuse victims.
	So people who have been victimized, the scientific studies seem to be quite clear that the best chance you have for not re-inflicting that abuse is to get angry about it.
	Because when you get angry about it, you engage your sort of moral immune system, to recognize it as a great wrong that was done to you, and to get angry about the way that you were treated, and not to try and over-empathize with your abuser.
	I mean, that's really, I think, quite a dangerous thing to do, and we're not Asked to do that in any other sphere, like to take an extreme example, a woman who gets raped is not asked to empathize with the rapist, a man who gets assaulted is not asked to empathize with his assaulter, and so on.
	But so I think that, and this comes out of an article by Robin Grill, which I read recently, the psychologist from Australia, that the science is very clear.
	The best way to stop the cycle of abuse is to get angry at having been abused.
	And this is why I'm very...
	Critical of people who make up excuses for abusers, because it's not because I hate the abusers, it's because I really don't want this to be re-inflicted, and the best way to have it not being re-inflicted on your own kids is to get angry at how you were treated.
	Now, people who've been victimized...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, Robin Grell, who you've interviewed, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, you do.
	You've done...
	You've gotten around.
	You've...
	My good guess.
	I'm very envious.
	I like Robin Grille, and I've been reading through some of his work.
	It was in your interview or another where I heard him use the phrase denormalizing, that parenthesis.
	Because it's all we have.
	It's all we know.
	We have nothing to...
	You can't say, you know, my parents compared to what?
	You might get glances of other people's relationship with their mom or their dad, but that's normal parental treatment.
	And, you know, a lot of opportunity exists in anger.
	So I think that's what he was driving at, right?
	That getting in touch with...
	Yeah, it is.
	But the problem is, of course, if you've been the victim of child abuse, I mean, child abusers don't harm you When they're calm, they don't harm you when they're happy, they harm you when they're enraged.
	And so the great danger, of course, is that we then create this connection, which is that because I was abused when my parents got angry, anger is abusive.
	And that is a very dangerous supposition to have.
	It's perfectly understandable that we would have that.
	But that which you most need to protect yourself and your future children from abuse is anger.
	So if you say, well, my parents always abused me when they were angry, therefore anger is abusive, therefore I can't get angry, therefore the opposite of abuse is to make up excuses and pretend to forgive my parents.
	That's how it reproduces.
	This is the great danger.
	If you don't get angry at it, it's most likely to reproduce psychologically and scientifically.
	And so this is the great danger, right?
	So my parents abused me when they were angry.
	Therefore, anger is abusive.
	Therefore, I'm going to get all Buddhist on them and say, well, they did the best they could and I'm not going to get angry.
	But this is the problem.
	This is how it's most likely to reproduce.
	So this is the great danger.
	So finding a way to get angry without that anger being abusive and destructive It's a challenge and I think that something needs to be worked out with a very good therapist and with journaling and with all of that.
	But learning how to become angry without being abusive saves you from being abusive, at least the most likely thing to save you from being abusive.
	It gives you a great deal of security and safety in the world because anger is the body's defense system against exploitation, emotional exploitation, financial exploitation.
	hierarchy exploitation, business exploitation, sex exploitation, whatever.
	Anger is our natural defense.
	We wouldn't want to not have an immune system.
	That's called having AIDS or living in a bubble in a Seinfeld episode or something.
	We don't want to have that.
	We want to have the natural reaction to dangerous and invasive viruses.
	And human exploitation is a dangerous and Invasive virus can strip away years of your life and half your savings or all of them if you get conned and exploited.
	So the essential thing is to decouple abuse from anger and to learn how to get angry in a way that is actually protective of yourself without necessarily being abusive towards others and certainly not abusive towards the innocent.
	And that's not easy.
	It takes a lot of self-knowledge.
	It takes a lot of work.
	It takes, I think, working with a therapist to learn that.
	But it is not the case that if you get angry at having been abused, that you then suddenly fall into anger forever, you become destructive and abusive and so on.
	Quite the opposite is true.
	If you can, you know, as Aristotle said, it's the mean, right?
	So a deficiency of courage, right, he called cowardice, and an excess of courage he called foolhardiness, right, where you just go charging over the World War I trench with, you know, a pea shooter and a thong, and, you know, you're not going to do much except get riddled with Swiss cheese.
	And so, learning how to get the right level of anger, and Aristotle said, he said, look, getting angry is easy.
	Anyone can get angry, and poke a baboon with a stick, he's going to get angry.
	And anyone can not get angry, can pretend to take the high road, can swallow their upset, and not get angry.
	Neither of those are...
	Morally good or the right thing to do.
	It is difficult to get angry in the right way, at the right time, you know, for the right effect, under the right circumstances, in a just way.
	But it is a skill that we really essentially do need to learn because without the capacity to get justly angry, we are open to significant amounts of exploitation and therefore we will end up exploiting others because it tends to be a kind of pass-through equation.
	Yeah, we talked about recently too, you know, in parenting, I think this is, we'll take a break here a couple minutes before we go on to our next topic, but it's okay to let your children know that you have, that what they do affects you in an emotional light, right?
	So I think that would be someplace that would be incredibly dangerous if you hadn't mastered, and maybe not even mastered, but become aware, of how anger can turn into abuse.
	We're not just talking about physical abuse, you know, verbal abuse, disconnecting, you know, that threat of the withdrawal of affection, parental affection from children are all consequences of, you know, yes, I get angry, shouldn't get angry, I'm going to try to handle or mishandle it like this.
	So...
	Yeah, I think...
	Do you want to move on to another topic?
	I just wanted to mention one other thing, which is that in my experience, anger can be extremely intimate.
	That sounds very counterintuitive to a lot of people.
	But the rage, which is, you know, a sort of an immature and explosive way of avoiding whatever prior traumas and hurts have discombobulated you, or in a sense defending the actions of abusers by reenacting them and normalizing them, by being inhabited by the sort of biting ghosts that fed on your childhood, that of course is destructive.
	When people in my life, if they get angry at me or I get angry at them, we have an honest conversation, it really does draw us closer.
	Because anger basically is saying, I really care about something that you did.
	You know, it is not the opposite of love.
	It is a component of love.
	Because we don't all act perfectly, and in our imperfections lies knowledge, self-knowledge, and the growth of intimacy.
	So anger in intimate relationships, being angry about something that someone else did, having them be angry at you, having an honest discussion about that, you know, without attack, without insults, without escalations and extrapolations.
	You always, you never, but simply being honest about the feeling of anger can be An intensely intimate and growing experience.
	And of course, if you are in a love relationship or even a friendship, which is another kind of love relationship, if you can both get angry and talk it through, what an amount of trust there is in that relationship.
	I mean, so many relationships fail and falter because anger is either acted out in an immature, raging way, which is really the avoidance of the true issues and a significant lack of preparation for an intimate relationship.
	Or people suppress their anger and therefore they're not close to each other because now they're essentially lying to each other.
	You know that old cliche of you go home and your girlfriend is storming around and your wife is storming around.
	You say, what's the matter, honey?
	Nothing.
	Bang.
	Right.
	But this is lying.
	This is falsehood.
	This drives people apart.
	If you can get angry with people or they can get angry with you in a way that is honest, that is true, that is not abusive, it is an incredibly binding experience.
	And not codependently but a very intimate experience.
	And this is something that people who haven't worked with their anger, I think, don't really get that anger is part of being in an intimate relationship.
	We're all going to do things that annoy each other, but being able to talk through that anger is an incredible cementing and trust growth in the relationship.
	So let me ask you this, and I know this is a lot of the stuff that you cover in real-time relationships, your book that I've also talked about on the show in the past, but when you are expressing anger to another person, I'm interested in how it's framed because one thing that I've noticed is that so often, and I know I've done this plenty in the past, I've framed descriptions of how I actually feel in terms of What somebody else is doing to me.
	So instead of saying, you know, I have a need for autonomy, or I might say, I'm feeling coerced, right?
	This is something that's being done to me.
	That's not a feeling.
	I'm feeling coerced, I'm feeling judged, I'm feeling manipulated, I'm feeling threatened.
	I mean, what the common denominator is, is those are all verbs of that What people do to you and it's not about what you are truly feeling.
	It's not exactly the same thing, but it's not too dissimilar to what we were talking about before as going to the furthest thing away from you politically and trying to control that and just feeling powerless.
	If anger is directed towards what somebody, or if that emotional energy or awareness is directed towards what somebody else is doing, I think it kind of can get you into that same non-efficacious feeling trap.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, I mean for me the feeling, it's got to pass the elbow test.
	And the elbow test, like say you get a pain in your elbow.
	Right?
	And you go to the doctor and the doctor says, where does it hurt?
	He says, elbow.
	And he says, well, what does it feel like?
	You don't say, well, I feel that my elbow is being exploited and I feel that my elbow is seeking more autonomy and I feel that my elbow is being coerced.
	The doctor would say, I have no idea what any of that means.
	Well, it's kind of a throb or it's a dull ache or it's a sharp pain or it's an intermittent discomfort or, you know, it's just a kind of tension or whatever it is, right?
	Those are things that can actually...
	So think of it like a physical pain.
	So if I'm angry at someone, if I'm angry at a friend, Then there's two possibilities.
	Either I know exactly what happened, and therefore I can go and explain everything and so on.
	Or, since that never happens, I never know exactly what happened.
	I can go and say to my friend, listen, Bob, when this happened, when you said this, when I did that, I felt this physical surge of tension and anger.
	And I don't know why.
	I don't know why.
	Because generally, that's the truth.
	In relationships, it's complex.
	It's really complex.
	To rush in with a conclusion doesn't open a dialogue, right?
	The moment you have a conclusion in an interaction, you are no longer having a dialogue.
	And to have a dialogue about anger, we have to be vulnerable enough to say, I'm angry and I don't know why.
	Because I guarantee you, that's always going to be an honest statement.
	I do not know why I'm angry.
	I mean, it's a little different if someone drives over your foot.
	That's not what I'm talking about in sort of intimate relationship.
	You want to open up a dialogue about anger, and we tend to try and control the interaction by coming in with a conclusion, right?
	So as you know, in real-time relationships, I'm very much against coming into a complex intimate interaction with conclusions.
	Well, you know, I'm angry because you said this and that was insulting to me and therefore you did the wrong thing and it's all because of your relationship with your aunt's spider and that's exactly what it is.
	Well, you can't go anywhere with that because you've just come in with all these conclusions.
	Central planning is a conclusion, right?
	This is why communism doesn't work.
	The free market is a dialogue.
	It's a negotiation about prices and needs and wants and preferences and services and goods and all this kind of stuff.
	Central planning is, you know, we need 500 tons of timber delivered to minks tomorrow morning.
	There's no negotiation, right?
	You understand that to come into a relationship discussion with conclusions is to be a Soviet central planner and it's really the opposite of a free market dialogue that's needed.
	So you go in and you say, I'm angry.
	I don't know why.
	It happened when you said this but I don't know exactly why.
	What were you feeling?
	And then you can actually have a dialogue about it where you're really mutually exploring what happened for you in the interaction.
	Without coming to the inevitable self-righteous judgment conclusions called, you did X, you're a bad person, you made me angry.
	These things are generally not true.
	They're dishonest, and as a result, because they're both conclusions and therefore necessarily dishonest, they close off opportunities for exploration, and intimacy is curiosity and exploration.
	Okay, yeah, so I think both examples are similar in that it's jumping the gun, right?
	So whether you're jumping the gun in a way where you are passing a judgment on what the other person is doing, you're doing blank to me.
	Or jumping the gun on the analysis of what we're actually feeling when in the moment you might not know.
	Alright, that makes sense.
	Do you want to take a two-minute break and then I'll bring in my co-host and we can do a little parenting talk before we let you go, Steph?
	Yeah, that sounds great.
	Alright, so everybody, we will be back in, let's say, yeah, let's say about two minutes.
	This is School Sucks Live.
	We'll be back real quick.
	Steph, feel free to freestyle if you want.
	Freestyle rap.
	music Talking about anger, nothing like fang-a This is what we want when we're having intimacy.
	I'll stop now.
	Alright, so we're starting again, and in the studio with me, you know my regular co-host on the show, Jason.
	Jason, how you doing?
	Doing good, Brad.
	Glad to be back.
	Yeah, it's been a while.
	So...
	Traveling the country with the kids, visiting grandparents and whatnot.
	To Ohio.
	Yep.
	So, we talked earlier in the day and you were saying that you might have some questions for this man about parenting.
	Yeah, you'd think I would after all these years.
	So, where should we stay?
	Here's a question for you, Steph.
	How do you deal with Christmas at your house?
	In terms of presence and the daughter and all that surrounds that ritual.
	I'm not sure I follow the question.
	I want to make sure I'm answering something specific.
	I mean, we have a regular old Christmas.
	I mean, my daughter's birthday is close to Christmas, so I've explained to her that most of the cheap people in her life will only ever give her one present, and it's a thief that father time will maybe pay her back with overtime.
	But that's just something she's going to have to deal with over time.
	But, you know, we get a tree.
	We put up the tree.
	We put on...
	Michael Buble's Christmas album sometimes and enjoy the lights and all that.
	So, yeah, we've got presents under the tree and, I mean, we've explained to her, you know, she sees Santa everywhere and, of course, she knows that it's a fun story, right?
	Because we go through the logic of how it couldn't possibly happen, but it's a fun story.
	And she enjoys her presents and, you know, we have parties and all that, friends over.
	It's...
	A very relaxed and enjoyable time.
	So that's sort of how it works in our household.
	Again, if there's any hiccups in yours, I'd certainly be happy to lend you my amateur vocals.
	Yeah, so two years...
	My daughter is turning six next month.
	And two years ago Christmas...
	We set what I find to be a dangerous precedent of having presents on Christmas.
	And two years ago, it turned into just two months worth of crazy trauma over the anticipation of waiting for these presents.
	And it became completely unbearable.
	Such that last year, we just said, forget it.
	We ended up doing the presents two weeks early.
	And then this year, we ended up doing the presents four weeks early, just to get it over.
	We couldn't handle it anymore.
	Is there anything like that that you've experienced with your daughter?
	Oh, yeah.
	Look, I mean, children, particularly around the age of three and four, I mean, they're fiendish materialists, and their sense of gratification deferral is measured in the subatomic nanosecond range.
	And so I generally work with a 10 to 20 to 1 ratio.
	So two weeks for a kid is like 40 weeks for you.
	And 40 weeks is like, well, if you have them here, why would I wait for 40 weeks for something that's great?
	And certainly if the government – like if a store said, you know, well, thank you for the refund.
	We will ship you a check in 40 weeks.
	You'd be like, well, no.
	We've got the money.
	We're just going to wait for 40 weeks to send you the check.
	That would probably be kind of annoying for you if the government said your refund check is in the mail.
	It will be there in just under a year.
	You'd be like, well, you've got the money.
	You can type it into the computers if you want.
	So I think just recognizing that from a child's standpoint, You know, shiny baubles, toys and that are hugely fun to play with.
	And their sense of time is very different from that of an adult's.
	And I think that's sort of just a basic thing to understand.
	You know, that the horizon for when things are going to happen is pretty short.
	Like, you know, my daughter can get sort of the day after tomorrow, kind of.
	She gets that that's not too far away.
	But, you know, you ask her to estimate things, you know, like, you know, how long do you think it will take for You know, the eggs to boil, you know, like 30 days.
	It's all pretty abstract.
	And of course, remember that Christmas is, for kids who have no sense of a calendar, Christmas is a completely arbitrary deferral.
	That makes no sense to them whatsoever.
	So it's like, I have these toys, but I'm not going to give them to you for a month.
	It's cruel for children, and they're going to protest that, right?
	I mean, it's just cruel.
	So, I mean, there's a couple of things you can do.
	Of course, you can get them little presents, like little dinky presents to open every day leading up to it.
	You can sit down and spend half a day explaining, you know, why that has to wait.
	You can give them their presents early and then give them another present or two little ones to open up on Christmas and so on.
	But...
	Yeah, kids are, you know, they're fiendish materialists and they're kind of bottomless holes of consumption, right?
	So I was just sort of making a joke.
	I had to go get a key made today.
	And, you know, when we were last in the hardware store, my daughter saw one of these little rainbow keys and she desperately wanted it.
	And I wasn't going to buy her a rainbow key.
	But anyway, she was so charming that the guy at the key counter just gave her that, which I thought was nice.
	And I sort of pointed it out.
	I said, you know, do you remember that rainbow key we got here?
	You were desperate for it, like you would have gone to the ends of the earth.
	You know, here, here, take my hand.
	You know, cut it off at the wrist.
	Just give me that rainbow key.
	It's oxygen for me.
	It's blood to a vampire.
	If I don't have that, I will surely die!
	And, you know, two days later, she didn't even know where it was.
	So, reminding kids of the transient nature of their fiendish desires is, I think, really important.
	I mean, it's a way of building empirical evidence, right?
	To me, all conflicts to do with With childhood are almost completely solved by repetitive preparation for it, right?
	So if you get stuff for your kid and they, as they inevitably do, they're dying for it and then, you know, a day or two later they don't even know where it is, you point this out to them repeatedly.
	You point this out to them repeatedly, not in a way to sort of shame or humiliate them or say, I told you you weren't going to play with that thing forever, but just to point out.
	So then the next time they want something, you can say, hey, remember we talked about this thing you wanted and then didn't play with?
	Remember this thing we talked about?
	I think this might be the same kind of thing.
	What do you think?
	And they can sort of talk about it and you can sort of whittle them off that.
	You know, that almost epileptic seizure of materialism that grabs them so strongly that they just desperately have to have that thing.
	And if they don't have that thing, they're just never going to be happy.
	To just remind them that they've had this a whole bunch of times before and they haven't really...
	Kept that same desire for stuff.
	So I think it's a lot about preparation, but yeah, just remember, it's like, you know, I have your toy, but I'm not going to give it to you until infinity days have passed.
	I mean, that for a child, I think it's just, it is kind of like a torture for a time marker that is completely arbitrary and incomprehensible to a four-year-old.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Aside from the time aspect too, there's also the expectation and the sense of entitlement that I think the whole charade instills.
	I remember when I was a little kid, the whole Christmas thing really turned me into kind of an asshole.
	Because I wanted certain things, and if I didn't get them, then...
	Oh, come on.
	Give yourself some credit.
	You might have been an asshole before that came along.
	Don't necessarily blame Christmas.
	It was the Christmas that turned me into an asshole, though.
	I feel like I might not otherwise have been one.
	And I see that with my kids, too.
	I want this.
	I want this.
	And Sugar does it, too, right?
	Maybe?
	I don't know.
	Well, I don't know.
	My daughter's a bit of a sugar fiend, so that can happen to her as well.
	Yeah, we keep that away as much as possible.
	Right.
	Okay, so not so much a case with you.
	So, what do you mean when you say entitlement?
	I just want to make sure I understand that, the way you're using that phrase, or that word.
	I deserve presents, and people will give them to me.
	And they will give me what I want, because that is the way it's supposed to be.
	Right.
	I mean, is that not true?
	Aren't people supposed to give them presents that they want when those days arrive?
	Well, that's the culture that has been bred, but I don't know that that's...
	Well, no, no, no, no.
	They wouldn't get that message unless you as the parent gave it to them, right?
	I mean, presents are clearly supposed to be given to kids on their birthday, right?
	And Christmas or whatever, right?
	And you as a parent would have communicated that to your kids.
	Oh, it's your birthday.
	We're going to have presents or we're going to have cake or whatever, right?
	So it's not entitlement if you tell them that's how it's supposed to be, if that makes any sense.
	Like if you say, well, you need to sleep in your bed, it's not entitlement if they say, well, I have to sleep in my bed.
	I mean, that's just following the rules that have been set down by the parents or the expectations that have been set down by the parents.
	And clearly the gifts are supposed to be to make the child happy.
	And to make the child happy, you have to give Sure.
	I don't know if we're speaking the same language, I guess, but my intention was not to blame the kid, but to blame the parents for causing this to happen.
	But sorry, so what's the blame?
	The entitlement, because you said asshole, right?
	So the entitlement is a rational expectation that is set by the parent.
	So you can't really, obviously, that's not a negative thing.
	But is it that there's no gratitude?
	Is that what you sort of feel?
	Right.
	So the kid just like, hey, I'm going to get my presents.
	They better be great presents.
	And if they're not bringing great presents, I'm going to be like really upset.
	So there.
	Right.
	Right.
	And it seems like that might, regarding the one specific event, might spill over into one's attitude toward other aspects of life.
	Right.
	Like there's just this conveyor belt of good things that come my way and I don't have to lift a finger and that kind of stuff, right?
	Right.
	Can I ask a question?
	What kind of exposure do they have to media?
	Right.
	Your two kids.
	Dora the Explorer.
	Okay.
	Nickelodeon.
	A little bit of that.
	Mostly they watch How It's Made and Mighty Machines.
	Mighty Machines.
	So it's programmed geared towards their age group.
	But commercials too, I would assume, right?
	Yeah.
	Because this is something that I think we often overlook, certainly as far as our coverage of it.
	I mean, I just talked about it for the first time on the last show.
	The science and the resources and the money, the psychological research that has gone into turning children into consumers.
	John Taylor Gatto pointed out 20 years ago that children and addicts are two groups that don't necessarily understand when to stop consuming something.
	And the goal of school was to turn everybody into children or to stop them from growing up.
	But, as far as the marketing is concerned, in youth marketing, there used to be a real clear differentiation when I was watching TV when I was a kid.
	It's like, this is the show, and this is something else.
	This is the Smurfs.
	This is a guy selling cars.
	One is an animated, blue, living under a mushroom, can't read so good kind of thing.
	The other is Bob...
	From Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and he's got a car dealership.
	But today, there is virtually no differentiation between the actual program that is there for entertainment and the commercials.
	In fact, a lot of the time, it's the same characters that these children love so much through these shows that then come on in those two-minute breaks to participate in selling stuff to them.
	So I think that that's another...
	I mean, it sounded like one of the things that you were talking about, Steph, is the importance of being proactive.
	And this is one of the things that I've harped on a lot in the past, and it's something that I've learned from my own experience working with young people, that I think it's important to have conversations with children as young as possible about what the nature of television is and what the purpose of advertising is.
	Yeah, I certainly agree with that.
	I mean, we've had all those conversations with her starting when she was two and three years old.
	But the other thing, too, is that to me, it's always well worth, you know, buying a DVD which doesn't have commercials rather than television or buying a subscription to a television station that doesn't have commercials.
	You know, that's going to be a lot cheaper in the long run than having them exposed to a lot of commercials.
	Because, yeah, as you point out, it's kind of embedded in the shows and...
	So I think that's important.
	As far as, you know, sort of the image came to my mind thinking about this issue of generosity, right?
	So the fear is that if you're really generous with children, then they'll just kind of sit back and expect things to come to them and not reciprocate.
	But to me, you know, when my daughter was very little and even still now, you know, I'm constantly teaching her new words and teaching her, you know, concepts and sentence structure and all that kind of stuff.
	So it's kind of like saying, well, you know, if you just keep teaching children language, they'll never speak back.
	Well, they do.
	I mean, they are very enthusiastic to speak back.
	My daughter's now at the point where she's sort of asking me, you know, if I'm gone for half a day, you know, what did you do with your time?
	Where did you go?
	How did you have fun?
	She's really asking me lots of questions.
	So I think if you're generous towards children, what you're doing is you're modeling generosity.
	And almost in a sort of universally preferable behavior machine that I think children really are, they will simply reflect that back and become generous that way, right?
	So I've always shared my food with Isabella, and she is very happy to share her food with me.
	And, you know, I always ask her how she slept and how, you know, if she had any dreams.
	And now she asks me how I slept.
	Did I have any dreams?
	And we'll sometimes act out my dreams in the living room.
	It's really quite surreal, but a lot of fun.
	And so if you are generous towards your children, open-hearted and give them reasonable things that are useful, instructive, enjoyable, and entertaining for them, They internalize something called generosity and as long as it's not hooked in with any kind of resentment or conditional and so on, I have found that it really does come back.
	It is just like a boomerang.
	It's sort of involuntary the way that happens.
	There is a phase where It does sort of feel like, oh my god, I give and I give and I give.
	And that's usually right before it starts coming back.
	You know, I don't know why that is.
	It does always seem, the moment I get frustrated with my daughter in some particular area, it's right before she changes in some great way.
	It's really, and I don't think it's as a result of me getting frustrated.
	But I think if you just are generous, you're actually teaching them what generosity looks like.
	And therefore they will internalize that.
	In the same way that when you use the correct words for things, they internalize that and then speak those words back to you.
	So I think just trust in generosity will be reciprocated because you're really teaching them what it looks like and they can't, in a sense, they can't help.
	You know, my daughter can't help but use the word apple for an apple because that's what she's been taught.
	And she can't help but share her food and share her toys and be generous and to resolve things peacefully and to want to negotiate with everyone all the time because that's Can I ask you,
	how much do you think your relationship with your daughter has benefited from the amount of time that you can actually spend with her?
	And maybe speak to, you know, a little bit about I know, Osborne, your wife is around all the time.
	You work a pretty regular schedule and you have to travel a little bit.
	But for a lot of families, the kids don't see their parents pretty much all week.
	And that's really unfortunate.
	It's extremely unnatural.
	It's one of the greatest tragedies, I think.
	So historically, and anthropologists have done a fair amount of work on this, and people can find the reference for this, I think, in chapter one of Dr.
	Philip Zombardo's book, The Demise of Guys.
	But historically, there was about a four-to-one ratio of adults To children, when children were growing up.
	Because you'd be on a farm, your parents would be around, you'd have extended family over all the time, there might be many generations living under one roof.
	I'm not saying that was all ideal, but I'm saying that the way that we developed, the way that we evolved as a species was with a much higher ratio of parents to children.
	You know, four to one.
	No matter how many kids you had, there would be about four to one parents to children.
	Now that has completely changed.
	I mean, it's more than reversed.
	Because it's not like we have, you know, one to four kids to adults.
	I mean, when your kids go into, you know, school, you know, 20 to 1, 30 to 1, when I worked in a daycare, there were two teachers for about 25 kids aged 5 to 10.
	And so what's happened is things have more than completely reversed.
	And now we have 10 to 15 to 20 to 30 or more We're good to go.
	What happens is, of course, children imprint upon those around them.
	I mean, that's natural.
	They take their cues.
	They take their self-esteem.
	They take their pecking order.
	They take their instruction, moral, cultural, artistic, you name it, from whoever they're around.
	We are highly impressionable as a species.
	I mean, we're like, you know, that wax that they put that siglet ring into.
	We're just wax.
	And then culture and philosophy and thoughts and habits and politeness, they all impress upon us very deeply.
	So children are going to absorb whatever they're around and unfortunately we have a society where children are almost exclusively influenced by other children.
	And children cannot raise children.
	They can't do it.
	They're a million miles away.
	We don't let six-year-olds babysit our children, but we will put our child into a classroom with 20 or 25 other six-year-olds, one harassed and distracted adult, and then wonder why peer pressure ends up so important and ends up so destructive in a child's life.
	And I was just talking about this the other day with my wife.
	I mean, my job as a dad...
	It's about 90% done.
	It's about 90% done.
	I mean, I got a little course correction that goes on.
	There'll be new information and new situations and so on.
	But my job as a father is mostly done because this is my daughter's last year of significant brain development and personality development.
	You know, by the time she's four, four and a half, five, I mean, it's almost completely done.
	I mean, it can be changed later in life with great effort and so on.
	But my job as a parent is mostly done.
	And the rest of it is just management a little bit, some tweaking, course correction, and so on.
	I've strongly suggested to people just find whatever you can do to take that time off and be with your kids when they're growing up.
	I read a book a long, long time ago.
	It's had a huge influence on me.
	It's by Daniel Crittenden.
	It's called What Your Mother Knew But Couldn't Tell You or something like that.
	Anyway, people can find it.
	She's a good writer.
	And in it, she talked about sort of the distant mom.
	And there was some executive who said, yes, I travel a lot.
	And I'm at work a lot.
	But my children know that I'm always with them in their hearts or in my heart or something like that.
	And she said, you know, that sounds exactly like you describe someone who was dead.
	You know, well, she's always with me in my heart and so on.
	And I remember being really struck by that.
	And, you know, I didn't really want to get kids or get married back in the day.
	That all changed when I met my wife, of course.
	But, um, It really is, you know, we take time off from productive earnings to get a college degree or whatever, to travel the world sometimes.
	You know, take a couple of years off if you can.
	I mean, if it's even remotely possible, take a couple of years off.
	The bond is so incredibly powerful and there's so much that occurs in parenting that is...
	Not concentrated.
	That is just diluted into the moments and moments.
	And you never know when the breakthrough is going to happen.
	You never know when the crisis is going to happen.
	You never know when the fall is going to happen.
	So being there as much as humanly possible, I think, is really essential.
	And I think it's something that really does pay off later, hugely, right?
	I mean, you know, my daughter can, you know, we were at the mall with some friends today, and they have She just went off with their daughters.
	I didn't have any concerns about her getting along or her running off.
	She's a very easy child to get along with.
	She was pretty high maintenance at the beginning, I'll tell you that.
	I don't know if that's my kid or just in general, but hugely high maintenance to begin with.
	But now things are very, very easy, and she's a real pleasure.
	I mean, she's always been a pleasure, but she's A real pleasure to be around.
	It's a very easy relationship because there's just so much water under the bridge.
	So I suggest if you want to have kids, save up your money.
	Go live with your parents if you have a good relationship.
	Find some way.
	Downgrade.
	Sell your house.
	Live in an apartment for the first couple of years to have at least one, if ideally, both parents present.
	It really does make an incredible world of difference.
	It makes parenting so much more fun.
	I mean, it is of course a huge commitment, but I really think that the peace of the world deserves nothing less.
	I have one more question.
	There's something semi-related to this, and I'm just interested in your thoughts.
	What do you think it is that motivates people to have children?
	Or is that too general a question?
	No, it's a great question.
	It's a fantastic question.
	Personally, and maybe this is kind of a cop-out.
	I don't think so.
	I look at the world going forward over the next 10 and 15 years, and I don't have any doom or gloom scenario in mind, but I'm just very uneasy about bringing a young person into what possibly could develop.
	So I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, but then maybe more generally, why do you think people are Are they consciously choosing to do this, or is it some biological cue for a lot of people that's just like, oh, time to get married, have children?
	Well, let's hear from your fabulous co-host while I compose a thought or two.
	Why did you have children?
	That's an interesting question, since we have Stefan on.
	I was in his boat back in the day.
	I never wanted to have children, and even when my wife and I got married, we didn't want to have children.
	And it was really only after when Stefan started doing his podcast and listening to him for a year or two that I decided that would be a good idea to go about embarking on that journey.
	How about that, Steph?
	Well, I appreciate that and I can only assume that they're named Steph1 and Steph2.
	I also accept UPP or FDR. Sure.
	Well, I know what was stopping me is I didn't feel like I knew how to do that.
	My childhood was not good.
	I didn't want to impact that on anyone else.
	So I felt like I never wanted to have the children until I knew exactly how I was going to do it.
	Look, I just wanted to mention, I don't know the details, but I'm obviously sorry about the childhood that you have.
	And this, of course, is one of the frustrations of the planet as a whole, which is that the people who have enough forethought to know that they don't want to reproduce their own childhoods, they're hesitant to breed.
	But in a sense, they're the people who should be breeding because they have the greatest capacity to break the cycle.
	But anyway, I just want to mention.
	So, okay, so let's say I said, you know, well, you know, parenting is fun or, you know, there's a lot to be got out of it or whatever.
	Was there anything in particular that was the primary motivation to deciding to take what is, you know, the biggest commitment you can take outside of marriage?
	You know, I don't even know how to verbalize that.
	Alright.
	While you think about it, let me start avoiding the personal question with a very, very brief discourse on the motivations that most people have.
	Most people, of course, they don't know why they want to have Like, if you ask them, they say, I don't know, we got married, that's just the thing you do next, or I was getting pressure from my parents, or the priest said, have some babies, or whatever it is.
	And I think it's really important to understand that childhood and the having of children has fundamentally, historically been breed for the benefit of the rulers.
	Right?
	I mean, if you look at religions, they tend to be against birth control.
	Why are they against birth control?
	Because it is easier to indoctrinate than it is to convert, right?
	So why do Catholics want to have so many children?
	Why do Muslims want to have so many children?
	Because that's how you spread, right?
	So there's a lot of pressure and propaganda from the ruling class to have lots of kids in the same way that If you have a very fast horse, you want to stud it or breed it.
	If it's a male horse, you want to breed it off even if it's a female horse because it's going to make you a lot of money, right?
	So the breeding of taxpayers, the breeding of religious adherents, the breeding of tithe payers, whatever it is, has been a huge motivational factor for people that have children.
	And this is why there is this general prejudice.
	It's like, well, you don't have kids.
	What's the matter with you?
	There's something wrong.
	You should be having children.
	Children are the best thing ever.
	You've got to have kids and so on.
	But no particular reference to empirical studies.
	Empirical studies show that children, by and large, reduce the quality of people's life experience and marriage experience considerably.
	Considerably.
	I mean, if people just did a little bit of basic research, you know, like, as I was to say to someone, oh, I went to go and buy a...
	An Android tablet.
	It's like, well, how long did you spend doing the research for that Android tablet?
	Oh, you know, I was off and on reading websites, a couple of hours, you know, a couple of days kind of thing.
	It's like, okay, so when you decided to have kids, how much research did you do into whether that was a good idea or not?
	And if it was a bad idea, under what circumstances was it a bad idea?
	How could it be better?
	And how should you discipline your kids?
	And if you even need discipline, and what are you going to do for education?
	I mean, the average bride, I think I was reading this today, If I remember the numbers right, the average bride spends like 170 hours preparing for her wedding.
	It's like, dear God, take 20% of that and read parental effectiveness training or figure out, you know, what mistakes people made that end up with them having such a negative experience of having children.
	I mean, one out of five women doesn't even want the child that's coming out of her hoo-hoo in the actual moment.
	I mean, it's a complete mess.
	I really encourage people to do the research, to recognize that for the majority of people, having children negatively impacts the marriage, negatively impacts intimacy, happiness, sleep, health.
	I mean, it can generally, according to the studies that are done, it's pretty disastrous for people to have children.
	And of course, because they resent all of that, the children end up not being very happy and not being treated well and so on.
	So I think that's an important thing to understand.
	There's a lot of propaganda around having children, even though Having children for the ruling classes generally makes your life a whole lot less fun.
	And was it Phyllis Schlafly, the writer, has a comment about this that's somewhat related, but she says, you know, it's hard for women who have never, quote, paid into Social Security to get much back out of it.
	Although she says, well, I've been, you know, I've raised six children and therefore have contributed six taxpaying citizens to the general public roles.
	Therefore, I should be getting Social Security because I've produced so much that is of benefit to other people as new taxpayers and so on.
	And children are a revenue stream.
	And one of the reasons that Europe is doing so badly is the birth rate is really low.
	And one of the reasons the birth rate is really low is that there's been such a huge growth in the size and power of the state.
	So there's a lot of propaganda.
	I don't think people really think about it at all.
	It's just the next thing you do.
	There is of course a phase in a woman's 30s where I've sort of heard it described as either feeling like you constantly need to pee or you constantly need to eat where they just get this baby hunger and there's that sort of biological drive.
	But I think that people don't really think about it.
	The research shows that not really thinking about it is a bad idea because you end up less happy than before and it's not like you can just back out of it kind of easily.
	So I think it's really important to do that.
	I mean, I had a kid just because I think life is a incredibly beautiful thing.
	I am completely overjoyed to be alive.
	And if there's this wonderful and beautiful gift, this thing called life that you can just kind of snap your fingers and, and create and, and then spend time nurturing and so on.
	It is a truly a delightful experience to see a mind rise like a skull and bones Atlantis and become sort of full flesh talking, animated cutesy head with teeth.
	It is an absolutely amazing, I hate to say it, almost a religious experience to see out of a sperm and an egg and an ultrasound to have a human being come.
	So Michelle Pfeiffer says this in some movie with Nick Cage.
	It's like, there were no people.
	And now there are people.
	I mean, fundamentally, that's an incredible thing.
	A mind-blowing thing.
	There are no people, and then there are people.
	And that's just incredible.
	I mean, it is like being a little deity, you know, to make people.
	I mean, it's incredible.
	I can't even put my wife's treadmill together.
	But, you know, with...
	You know, three minutes of bad sex.
	I can make a baby!
	I mean, it's incredible.
	So, I think that unbelievably magical, mystical, quasi-astounding, jaw-dropping, there's a person there that there wasn't before, is just such an astoundingly amazing thing to be part of and to have a hand in guiding.
	That, I mean, jeez, I mean, if you do the research and you do it right, I think there's nothing better in the world.
	But unfortunately, most people never do the research, do it pretty wrong.
	You know, 80 to 90% of parents are still hitting their children, and then they wonder why their lives take a bad turn after they have kids.
	Well, it's because you're doing wrong.
	That's why, you know, if you go out and become a shoplifter, you're not that surprised if you lose some self-esteem points, are you?
	But if you go around hitting your children, yelling at children, abandoning your children for other people to raise, guess what?
	You do bad things, you tend to end up unhappy.
	That's the reason equals virtue equals happiness, a trifecta of philosophy, and the opposite is true as well.
	So if people do the research, do the preparation, And know what they're doing, why they're doing, commit to the non-aggression principle, raise their children peacefully, give extra special rights and privileges and superhumanity with the cherry on top to their kids.
	It's an incredible experience, but that's really quite the opposite of what most people do.
	And that is, I think, the central tragedy of our species at the moment.
	Really well put.
	Except for the part where you said skull and bones rising out of Atlantis.
	Our conspiracy theory listeners are going to have a field day with that.
	But other than that, perfect stuff.
	But don't worry, that particular skull and bones did not get any vaccinations and was never exposed to fluoride.
	So there you go, people.
	Now they're definitely going to have a field day with that.
	All right, well, hey, I want to thank you so much for your time.
	You want to take a quick minute to plug your stuff?
	Plug my stuff, man!
	Okay, so follow me down into the back alley, people.
	Listen, I'm going to open up my trench coat.
	I got some philosophy here, man.
	You can snort this stuff.
	It's good stuff, man.
	It's a whole hangover, man.
	you'll be flying high as a kite on fire through the face of the moon, backwards around the sun, looping around.
	It's going to be like being a condor's ass feather in a high breeze.
	That's where you want to be.
	It's going to be like being a seagull in a tornado going round and round, but never hitting the ground.
	This is the good stuff, man.
	Mainline it.
	Take it.
	freedomainradio.com.
	We've had almost 50 million downloads, just one, dare I say, ahead of the inimitable Ron Paul Tom Woods and Antonio Beeler, the 2012 Liberty Inspiration Award.
	You can check that out.
	I've got a link to it on the main page of my website.
	Read some of the testimonials.
	I mean, if you doubt the power of philosophy, read some of the testimonials.
	I think that you'll at least be intrigued and hopefully will dip your toe into the Elysium streams of reason and evidence.
	Yeah, biggest philosophy show the world has ever seen.
	Massive, massive thanks to the listeners.
	It's entirely donation-based.
	The books are all free.
	The podcasts are all free.
	Website is all free.
	If you like it, you know, kick a few shekels upstream to the starving salmon ahead.
	That would be great.
	And hopefully in the next month or two or three, the documentary will be out.
	It's called Truth!
	You can go to truthofdocumentary.com soon, I think it is, to check out some of the previews and promos.
	I've got a conference call tonight with the musical production team, which is fantastic.
	So yeah, that's what's going on.
	And of course, for my listeners, definitely you, Brett, want to plug what you're doing.
	I've always been a huge fan of your show, Brett, so make sure that my listeners can hear your tasty goodies too.
	Sure.
	And I'm at schoolsucksproject.com.
	We just launched a brand new website.
	So I encourage people to go over and make a user account and get participating in the...
	They can start a group, they can join a group, participate in our forums.
	Anything you do on that website puts you right on the front page of it.
	So if you have something that you want to share, you want to get some eyes on, please go to schoolsucks.com, make account, and get involved.
	And we also have this thing called the AV Club, which is a bonus content.
	We have over probably approaching 150 hours of unreleased material.
	That is quite a wide range of content.
	So I recommend that, you know, we're also donating.
	So if people send us $6 a month and $9 a month, they get access to all of that.
	And just on Ustream on Saturdays.
	And a quick tip as well.
	If you're searching for Brent's show, do not put a space between school and sucks and definitely do not click on the images.
	It will age you significantly.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	School sucks.
	Just one word.
	Look for that.
	Don't put the space in it.
	Do not click on the images.
	Do not click on the images.
	Funny story.
	When I was Googling myself looking for videos put on a website when I was still building it, like maybe there's videos out there of me that I don't know about that should be on the site, I came across a playlist that had a picture of you as one of the screen caps, a picture of me as one of the screen caps, and the title of the playlist on YouTube was something like, Learn about how you are a sheep in the Jesuits-controlled education system.
	And I said, wow, that's for, you know.
	Sorry, Jesuits.
	So, I'm half a step.
	Sorry, Jesuits.
	Fair enough.
	It's interesting to wind up involved in on the internet.
	So, anyway, thanks again.
	We'll have to do some time in the future, and hopefully I can plan to see you in New York in April at, what is that event?
	April the 20th, yeah.
	And I will also be at the Escape Hatch Conference in Belize in early to mid-March on my website under speeches.
	People can see my public speeches before.
	I can't remember how many I did last year, but it was a huge number.
	And I will be in Belize.
	And then, I don't know, are you going to Porkfest, Libertopia, that kind of good stuff next year?
	Or this year, I guess now.
	Definitely Porkfest, yep.
	I will be there.
	Fantastic.
	Well, thanks a lot.
	And thanks to everyone on your side.
	It was a real pleasure.
	And have a great night.
	All right.
	Thanks, Steph.
	Take care.

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