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Jan. 23, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:22:36
2306 The Politics of Parenting - Stefan Molyneux and Laurette Lynn
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Time Text
Okay, that's better.
Now I got you through my headset.
Can you hear me?
I can.
I think you actually may have been correct about the Lin hand puppet.
I think it's time to call the Chinese operation and have it stop production.
It may be confusing for some people.
It may not be clear what the intent was.
Well, you know, I think it's just maybe TMI about me that my mind went there immediately and I went, oh my goodness.
Keeps your hands warm through friction.
No, wait.
No, that's not the appetizing slogan that we want.
Not exactly, you know, the idea I'm trying to portray here.
Plug in the unplugged mom anyway.
I've heard a lot of that, which really played into my decision to kind of say, okay, maybe it's time for a change.
Yeah, so lay down to me the last couple of bits of time.
It all sounds very interesting.
Yeah.
What's that now?
All the decisions you made, you were going to start the radio show and not do the radio show.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Oh, my gosh, yeah.
You know, and I was actually really looking forward to that, doing the weekly live show because I loved doing the live show when we were doing it, you know.
And when I did it for the two years, when I did Unplugged Mom for two years, it worked out because the time that I did it was 8 o'clock on Friday mornings.
And my family was still asleep, and we didn't have anything else going on on Friday.
So it was kind of a lazy day anyway.
But not only did my husband's work schedule change, he works from home and he runs a home business, but he shifted his hours around a little bit.
So it kind of made it a little bit more difficult for me to do the show at 8 o'clock in the morning.
And I kept thinking, well, how early am I going to get up?
Yeah.
So I was thinking maybe on Sundays, but it turns out that as my kids get older, they don't get less busy, they get more busy because they have more of an active social life.
So it just became a little bit more demanding of my calendar.
And I started to shift things around and I was thinking maybe doing it on Sunday morning.
And then I just finally said, you know what, this is turning out to be like more trouble than I wanted it to be.
Having always to worry about what time am I going to do it and when am I going to have time to – because if you're going to do a quality show, you have to spend some time researching the topics and reading everything.
You can't just like arbitrarily say things, you know.
You have to know what you're talking about.
And then there's always time invested in finding guests and communicating with that.
You may be talking to the wrong guy about that, but I understand.
Oh, the quality show part.
Yes, if you want a quality show, you need to do that.
That's certainly never been part of my mandate, except, of course, when you're on, but I understand that it is a restriction for other people.
Maybe it just comes naturally to you because you do have a quality show.
I like to make sure that I research the topics that I talk about.
I do a lot of reading and communicate with the guests.
There is time involved in it.
People who don't do shows, they don't know.
It's like at least four hours of prep for an hour of radio.
Yeah.
There is time involved.
When I started, it was kind of off the cuff, but as the audience grew and I started to get more into it and read more about doing the show and learn more about it, I wanted to make it better and the more effort I put into it, the more the audience grew, the better it started going.
At some point, it became a little bit too much for me to chew.
We went over that story because there were some personal issues involved in that, but So I just said, you know, I just need to wait.
I just need to take this as a sign and just put the brakes on a little bit and wait.
But I wanted to try to make it clear to everyone that I wasn't completely closing up shop.
I'm still running the website.
You know, I still try to answer as many emails as I can.
I'm not writing as many articles because I'm going to try to focus on learning curves and get that book finished.
So I'm still here.
I'm just not going to do the live show.
And I was talking to my daughter recently, and she keeps asking me, when am I going to do the show again?
And I'm like, well, it's a time issue.
And she's getting older now, and she's willing to invest a little bit of time, but she has a very busy, active life herself.
She's involved in a whole bunch of different things, as are my boys.
But she suggested, actually, that I do the podcasting.
And I said, you know...
That's just as time-consuming, if not more, because then you've got to edit them, and I spend all this time editing.
At least with the live show, I don't edit much.
It's kind of, well, it is what it is.
If I messed up, oh well, you know?
Are you still there?
Oh, yes, of course.
Oh, okay.
My speaker is just locked out.
Anyway, I... I was answering emails one day and I was in the office for longer than I wanted to be, but it was late at night.
Everybody was sleeping, but she woke up and she said, why are you up so late?
And I said, well, I'm answering emails.
So she said, that's what you should do.
Instead of answering emails by writing, you should have just a half an hour podcast where you just address everybody's questions and concerns.
And I said, well, I guess I could do that because I could certainly answer it faster verbally than I can in writing.
So I'm thinking about it.
I'm tossing around the idea of if I keep myself limited to 35 minutes and I'm strict about that and I don't commit to any weekly thing, I just, okay, like a couple of times a month I'll go ahead and I'll address a particular topic, like something that is especially important to parenting and, you know, free thinking or libertarian type of parenting.
I'll address a particular topic, but I... Don't want to commit to a particular time every week because our family schedule is really taking up my focus right now.
I just think that's more important.
Well, I mean, that's a limited thing, right?
I mean, your kids are going to get older.
They're going to shoot the bowstring and off they go.
And then it'd be like, gosh, now I have some time and I kind of miss the time that I spent with that.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know, and you always, you go back to, and people say this too, and they say, well, you know, you got to do it now while you're young and, you know, you're still pretty and you're energetic and you have the charisma and everything.
And I said, well, are you saying that, you know, maybe five or six years from now I'm going to be like gross and ugly and stupid?
Do people actually say to you, you've got to, what, do media now while you're pretty?
Oh, yeah.
Do they really?
Oh, I'm so sorry.
I would like to apologize for the world as a whole for its ridiculous shallowness.
Oh, yeah.
You're still young and attractive.
It's not always pretty, but, you know, you're still young and attractive.
Well, attractive is still the same kind of thing, though, right?
I mean, what a silly criteria to have, you know?
I mean, I get it.
Like, if you're going to go on Fox News, then you've got to look like some aerobics instructor made out of a wax museum.
But, I mean, it's, you know, for a podcasting and stuff like that, I mean, what does it...
I mean, and for quality thought transmission, what on earth would it matter?
Yeah.
It doesn't matter at all.
And I think that I'm still young enough that in, you know, maybe six or seven years from now, I'll still be smart.
I'll still be charismatic.
I'll, you know, maybe I'll even be more intelligent because I'll have more wisdom behind me and I'll have raised my kids, you know, so I'll have more to offer the world from that perspective.
And I mean, I'm pretty sure I'll still be hot, so...
Well, all you have to do, Lorette, is just switch to a low-def camera.
You know, that's going to shave at least a decade off your looks.
You know, Botox, some sort of horrible voodoo, Vaseline on the lens of a low-def camera, and you'll look pretty much like you're 12.
Oh, wait, that's probably not the kind of audience you want to attract as well.
But, yeah, so many options.
I just think, oh my, I don't think anyone, I mean, this is just the different world that men and women live in, or maybe the different world that attractive and unattractive people live in, but I don't think anyone has said to me, You know, Steph, it's really, really important that you continue to do your show while you're attractive.
I guess, you know, pre-Crypt Keeper days, which kick in, I guess, in the early 50s, I guess it's the time to strike while the iron's hot.
I think, no, I think it's a woman thing.
I think it's inadvertent sexism.
So I don't really get insulted.
I don't see it as sexism because I just think it's inadvertent.
It's a, you know, society kind of trains you in a certain way.
Just like they go out of their way to put bright looking blonde people on Fox News so they all look like the sunshine, you know?
And you have like the ugly looking, like glass wearing other kind on the other shows.
It's just, it's all strategy.
It's all marketing.
Megan Fox versus Amy Goodman, I think, is the one on Democracy Now!
who actually looks like a real human being.
Anyway, it is a little tragic that people need to get their facts through this nonsense, but I guess it's a photogenic world, so it's a little tough to fight.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, there's something to be said for me where I think we've done a few shows together where I wouldn't do video.
So I'm not that much of a camera hound.
Well, I don't know about you.
I read all these studies about your sitting is fatal.
You know, it's really, really bad for you.
So I always try and do...
I used to do more videos.
I'm sort of abandoning that now because...
I mean, I don't think anyone sits there and watches an hour of me just staring at the camera and talking.
And I generally do better, think better when I can gesture, when I can walk around and all of that.
And that's what I do for the Sunday show is I just do like a two hour back and forth stroll fest.
So, you know, a little exercise, keep the body moving and don't do that hunched over like a snail staring at your own mortality thing that seems to be what doctors are advising against these days.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I just, I'm very self-conscious in front of a camera, and the times that I've done it with you and the times that I've done it with Brett, I do it because I, you know, there are people out there that are more visual, I guess, but I find that I'm so much more into the camera lens and worrying about, like, Am I looking in the right place?
Am I looking at the camera?
They should be thinking I'm looking at them.
You know, don't scratch your head.
Don't stick your arm in your pit.
Like, you know, I'm worried about all these different things.
Keep your finger out of your nose.
I can't think.
I can't think.
You know, right now I'm kind of more relaxed.
I can rub my eyes and not worry about my mascara.
I can drink my coffee and, you know, so I can concentrate on what I'm saying.
Yeah, I don't think people get that staring at a camera is like, you know, it is like having a staring contest with a cyclops robot.
It's not, you're not looking at a person, you're looking at, you know, a series of concentric lenses or whatever.
And so it's tough.
I mean, there obviously is a skill to talking to the camera like it's a person.
But that, you know, that's for actors, not for podcasters.
So, yeah, it's a bit of a funny thing.
I think that it's probably a little bit more in just talking to people than staring at the camera and pretending it's a person.
Yeah, it's a little different.
Alright.
So, our show topic?
Yes.
I remember rightly.
Parenting versus politics.
Parenting versus politics.
Yes, yes, yes.
And I appreciate this.
It actually just came up in a show I did yesterday with Mike Shanklin about this.
It does seem to be that this ship is slowly turning around because of the efforts of people in the movement to get people to focus on once you...
Look at the smoking debris of political action that's really been the focus over the past.
Certainly it was going into 08 was a huge focus from sort of 06 to 08 and then of course from 10 to 12 so you know six or seven years of just a huge amount of focus on political action.
And, you know, lo and behold, the government is bigger than ever.
The government is more in debt than ever.
The government's reach, through NDAA, indefinite detentions, the expansions in renditions and extraordinary renditions and drone strikes and possible torture and all of that.
And now, of course, with the guns issue, it really hasn't achieved what it is that we want it to achieve.
And I guess the The question I have and the question that I think is worth asking is, let's not keep doing the same thing and think it's going to achieve a different result, you know, that old definition of insanity.
But I think if people, if it's not going to be academics and it's not going to be like education academics, whatever it is, sharing articles from The Economist or the Cato Institute or whatever, If it's not going to be that, what's it going to be?
And the one thing, as I said yesterday, that we really haven't tried is just really focusing on parenting and personal relationships.
And that's kind of good.
It's good that we have an important thing that hasn't been tried yet because if we didn't, we'd really be out of answers, right?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
The whole idea seems to have backfired, and I'm guilty of walking down that road, too, thinking this is very important.
And going into that time, and it was probably around 2005, 2006, and then even more so in going into 2008 from 2007, I became heavily involved in politics, and I was very, very active, and I felt that it was extremely important.
My children were very young at that time.
They were younger than they are now, obviously.
And I tried to balance my time the best I could, but I was convinced that it was extremely important that I'm paving a better road, that I'm making a better future for my children.
And it was difficult because there was that sense of, but shouldn't I be spending more time with them?
Versus the sense of, but you're responsible too to your community, to your world, to the future of your children, to your country, and so on and so forth.
I think I was very nervous about the future that I was bringing my children up into.
I wanted to do my part.
We all felt a certain amount of ambition.
You get riled up about a certain cause, especially when it comes to personal freedom and liberty.
You want to do what you can to try to protect that.
I was a fan of Ron Paul at the time, of course.
I I was very active.
I didn't run for any particular office, but I was very active.
Over the years, I had been asked several times to run for office.
I declined running for House of Representatives or Congress or anything of that nature, but I did agree to get involved in a lot of other ways.
Over the last year, Thank you.
and politically and just through, I guess, personal evolution and wisdom always changes your perspective and experience always changes someone's perspective.
I pulled away from a lot of that.
And for most of the time I was just trying to observe and remain aware without getting too actively involved.
And like I said, there were a myriad of different reasons why I made the decision to pull away from it.
I also pulled away from a lot of what I was doing with Unplugged Mom Radio and I just started to realize that I matter so much more than I think with my family, which was a little bit of a difficult reality for me to grasp because it was what I preach.
That's the message that I talk about.
That's what Unplugged Mom Radio was really about, was you need to focus on your family and And if you need to make the sacrifices in, you know, your life while your kids are small, then that's what you need to be doing in home education and supporting home education and all of that.
And I started to say to myself, I need to be doing more of that.
Meeting you did have an influence on me because it opened up a world of exploring the need to not be involved and not be as politically active as I was, and that by not being involved, I'm actually maybe, perhaps, doing more.
So I started to explore that avenue, like going back to what you were saying before, perhaps the whole idea backfired on us because the more people that were involved, the bigger the whole thing is now.
So it's kind of like foot-in-mouth syndrome there.
Recently, I had lunch with one of the members of the House of Representatives, former member of the House of Representatives that I know here locally, and we had become friends back in 2008, I think.
We kept in touch, and he was in town recently, so we had lunch, and of course he asked me if I would run for my district for the house, and I said no.
Well, it turned out that a few people on his heels also got in touch with me shortly after that and, you know, tried to wrangle me into it.
No, but we need somebody.
We need somebody that, you know, thinks like you and conservative but freedom-minded and things are bad right now.
And, of course, they lay down the whole kind of But you owe it to your children.
You owe it to the future of your children.
It's your responsibility.
And if we don't get someone in office like this, then it's the same old, same old.
One woman said to me, I know that you've been tossing around this idea of anarchy, but I got to tell you, that's not the way to go because there's going to be someone in office.
And if it's going to be anybody, then it might as well be someone that's friendly and friendly, quote unquote, to the cause.
And I said, no, you know who needs me right now?
My children need me right now.
And yes, they do need me to help make a better future for them, but they're the ones that are going to be living in that future, so they need their parent right now.
They need attention.
They need the home education that I'm offering them.
They need me to drive around to their different events and spend the quality time with them so that they are healthy intellectually, spiritually, and physically.
And they don't enter the world feeling that they've been neglected in any way because their mother was spending three months out of the year, you know, across the state in the capital.
So that was why I made the decision.
I mean, sorry to, you know, compare you to the governator, but I mean, it's the decision that if you look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, the guy what spent eight years as the governor of California, and what, I mean, he did not see his children.
For that time, I think Maria lived apart from where he was, so he commuted, came back on the weekends, obviously brought work with him, was exhausted, constant interruptions and emails, was gone Monday through Friday for eight years of his children's life.
I mean, for what?
For what?
What did he get done?
I don't know.
California is a complete basket case now.
It's far worse than when he first got into power.
I'm not saying that's his fault.
It doesn't matter whether it's his fault or not.
He wasn't able to tame the unions.
He wasn't able to cut even the increase in the growth of the deficit.
He wasn't able to stymie or block any of the unfunded liabilities that California was taking on.
He spent eight years not being present in his children's lives.
I mean, that's almost half their entire childhood.
For what?
It is a big deal.
And Stefan, even if he was unbelievably successful, and even if he was everybody's favorite governor and he did wonderful things and the whole country was better because of him, you still have to look at the fact that That his children, the human beings that he brought into this world, suffered.
So, you know, I mean, there's the whole, well, it was for the good of the many, so you sacrifice the few.
And a lot of people will look at it like that, and I get that.
I get why that seems like it's a noble cause.
But your children are such a huge responsibility, and they only demand a fraction of the years of your entire life.
That's it.
That's all they're asking from you.
And I think that we need to pay more attention into dedicating our time to that.
Now, I do realize that we do need to earn a living.
Either the mother or the father, or in some cases, both of them need to make money in order to bring it in.
But there needs to be more focus on balancing that so that you can still focus on your children.
And I don't want to support child worship where, you know, you have to like completely just stop everything and just lay in bed all day and hug and squeeze and tickle your kids.
There has to be a balance there.
But I don't think enough of us in our society today even attempt to balance that.
We just figure, well, this is the way life is.
And, you know.
First of all, we are all going to have a legacy.
Everybody's going to die and everybody's going to leave something behind.
And it's going to be a memory.
It's going to be something you accomplished, something you did.
Sometimes it's big.
Sometimes it's small.
But whatever it is that you've done is not as important as the actual human people That are going to go on after you.
You know what I mean?
Ideas are great, but the world is going to turn.
The world is going to spin no matter what you do.
I'm not saying that you're not going to do something important, but you can do something important and still be an unbelievable parent to your children.
And again, they only need your focused time and attention for a small fraction of your life, and they deserve it.
Do you know who Mitch Snyder was?
Oh, the name is familiar.
I can't place him.
Washington, D.C., circa 91, maybe?
He was an activist for homelessness in America.
I think it was during the Bush administration.
He was very challenging to the president, and he camped out on the lawn.
He did all this stuff.
That is my husband's father.
He died in 92, I believe.
Now, when you look him up, there's a lot of information about him.
And that's why I'm not partial to Wikipedia.
I mean, this guy was my husband's dad.
He knows what's true and what's not.
But he did a lot of great things for homelessness.
We would differ.
You and I would probably differ from him if he were alive today in a political perspective.
But the fact remains that he did accomplish a lot for homelessness in America.
And this was on the heels of the when they closed down the government mental hospitals.
And we had all the homeless people.
I mean, tons and tons of homeless people all over America, all over the streets.
So right on the heels of that, enter Mitch Snyder.
And he did all this work.
There was a movie made about him with Martin Sheen.
Little known fact is that he left my husband's mother with two little boys, my husband and his brother.
He was two at the time.
His older brother was four.
He just left.
He just disappeared and said that he has a calling.
So I always think about that and I say, okay, how is that okay?
That he just walked away from his wife and two kids.
So we're laying down the red carpet for this guy, and we're praising him like we're going to canonize him like he's a saint.
He loved his wife and kids.
So, I mean, there just has to be some perspective there.
Right.
Yeah, I remember watching the movie Chaplin with Robert Downey Jr.
many years ago, and he was off obsessing about his films and the music and Putting them all together and his wife would bring his children by.
They'd beg for a moment of his time and he'd yell at them because he was a perfectionist and he was all...
And he was a monster of a dad, apparently.
Hemingway, a monster of a dad.
Go through the list.
There's a great book by Paul Johnson called Intellectuals about the moral life of the moralizers.
You know, the sort of personal family life of people who decided to instruct mankind on its duty.
And they're almost universally monstrous.
At home.
And, you know, bullies and tyrants and absent.
And I kind of look for the local virtues before I will listen to people about the big virtues.
How's your relationship?
How's, you know, what's your commitment to your family?
If you have kids, how do you treat them?
I mean, that's what I look for.
And before I will take anybody's abstract ethics seriously, I will look at what their personal relationships are like.
Because, I mean, it's the old thing.
You don't take Anti-smoking advice from a chain smoker.
You know, like, here's how to quit smoking.
Puff, puff, puff, right?
I mean, it's silly.
They may be right, but the odds are so much against it that, you know, it's just from an efficiency standpoint, you just don't bother.
And people love to, you know, sort of sky-right these incredible ethical ideals, which they just refuse to enact in their own lives.
And that's tragic.
And it's also tragic, of course, that politics hasn't worked.
I mean, Wouldn't it be great if it did?
You know, I said in a show the other day.
You know, it would be great.
And I think I might be slightly more convinced to give it more of a go.
But I did give it a go.
And all it did was get worse.
I'm not saying that I personally made it worse.
But, I mean, I don't really feel that all the time and energy and effort that I spent really helped all that much.
And people can argue and say, well, if there were more of you and if you just kept at it and you kept at it.
And I'm like, no, you know what?
Because there were nights that I didn't get home until 11 o'clock at night and I didn't tuck my kids in bed.
I need to do that.
I need to be there for them.
And if everything is going to, you know, hit the fan, like they keep saying, then they need their mother.
They need their mother and they need their father and they need the security of a loving family.
Warm, safe household.
That's what my children need.
And that's what they're going to get.
And once they're older and they're on their own, then hopefully I've given them enough security and enough love and enough guidance that they can be strong and they'll be okay.
And then whatever they need to offer the world will be that much more powerful because they came from a strong foundation and a stable background.
That is my job right now.
I think a lot of times, and I probably was guilty of this at some point, There's a little bit of narcissism in all of us.
I think my husband's father, Mitch Snyder, one of his friends growing up said the same thing.
He was a bit of a narcissist.
So that did play into why he was so into getting in front of the camera and in front of the news conferences and saying, I'm going to go on a fast and I'm going to do all these things until you help the homeless people and until you build these shelters.
Not that what he did was not a good thing.
What he did for the homeless cause was definitely a good thing.
But there was a little bit of, look at me, look at what I'm doing in that.
There was a little bit of, hey, look at Mitch Snyder in there.
You know what I'm saying?
It wasn't all pure.
And that's okay.
I get it.
It's a human trait.
But behind that, he left his family.
Now, I've had other arguments with people that will say, you know, that's really illogical.
It's...
Not intelligent to think that way.
It's a logical fallacy because it's ad hominem.
You don't want to judge the action of what he's doing and the goodness of what he's doing by who he was before.
It has nothing to do with it.
It's irrelevant.
I don't think it is irrelevant, though.
Just like you were saying before, you've got to kind of go to the source of it and say, okay...
Is this person handing me some BS or are they giving me non-smoking advice and did they actually quit smoking?
Are they going home and they're smoking themselves?
So it does require some substance behind it.
I don't want to go off track too much.
The point is that we all need to pay more attention to our family.
That's the point.
Yeah, look, I mean, this argument that being skeptical of someone's perspective because of their personal life It's not the same as ad hominem.
Because we all understand that if you're hiring someone, let's say you want to hire some lawyer, and some guy shows up in a thong with a full Incan headdress and a parrot on his shoulder, he may be the very greatest legal mind in the world.
But you're not probably going to bother to find out.
You're just going to call security and get him off.
You'd say, well, but you can't prove that he's not the best legal mind just because he wears a thong and an Incan headdress and two parrots.
It's like, well, but life is short.
We all dress up to go on job interviews, and we all wear pants on the subway, and so on.
Danny DeVito can show up and ask for a modeling contract, and you can't You know, axiomatically prove that he's never going to sell anything because he's Danny DeVito and whatever, right?
But nonetheless, it would be funny, right?
I mean, he showed up on a Friends episode as a male stripper.
You can't say, well, Danny DeVito would never be a male stripper.
You can't prove that.
But it's funny that he...
So there is an importance in...
I think we'd all like to believe that aesthetics don't matter.
I think we'd like to tell ourselves that we're not that superficial, that aesthetics don't matter, but they do.
I think it's more than superficial, though.
The reason we dress up for a job interview is we are telling people, by putting on a suit for a job interview, we're telling people, look, I get that there's such a thing as social conventions.
And I get that there are standards within our society that reasonable people are expected to maintain.
And so I'm not going to display, because it's pointless rebellion to show up to a job interview in shorts.
You're just shooting yourself in the foot, right?
I mean, because you're asking people to surmount a lot of standards for no particular purpose.
I mean, what does it mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
Just throw a suit on.
It's not going to kill you.
So I think showing that you have some conformity to social standards that you understand, it's a basic level of empathy.
If you show up for a job interview in a bathing suit, you're not showing empathy for the person because you're saying, well, I feel more comfortable in a bathing suit and I either have no idea that I'm supposed to wear a suit or I don't care how I appear to other people.
In other words, I don't care about the standards that you expect or anything like that.
Now, of course, once you get the job, if you're really great, you can say, look, Fridays are bathing suit Fridays and here's why.
You can negotiate that.
But the presentation thing is, I think, it's not shallow, I don't think.
I think it is quite important because life is very short.
We don't have time to evaluate everyone all the time in any way, shape or form.
And...
So presentation, I think, is a way of really cutting through the clutter and at least eliminating people who are real outliers in terms of empathy and social understanding.
You know, it's interesting.
You're reminding me of a very interesting and kind of fascinating perspective on humanity that's been manifesting with me lately.
I'd say it's probably over the recent few months or even year that I've been doing a lot more work in home education.
There seems to be, I don't even know what to call it, this trend in parenting that portrays itself as very free thinking and very into the kids and very respectful of the kids.
But if you take a deeper look at it, it's a little disturbing because I actually, I think we're doing more harm than good when we start to go in this direction.
This is another thing that I'm trying to encourage parents to do and another reason why I've made a lot of the decisions that I made because I realize it's just not about me saying, look how cool I am.
I'm such a cool parent.
I'm a home educator, and we do this with the kids, and we do that with the kids, and I'm just so damn cool.
I think that is a sickness that has infected a lot of society, and it's that narcissism problem again.
And what you were saying is reminding me of...
An incident, this is one example I could think of, but it clearly illustrates back to what you were talking about where a mother that is a home-educating mother and considers herself very free-spirited and cool, and I'm so cool, and my kids are so cool, and we just all do what we want, and we don't...
Force anything, blah, blah, blah, was talking about how her kids were outside playing and the neighbors were rolling their eyes around and kind of complaining that the kids were so loud and she laughed and she said, haha, yeah, that's my family.
We're so loud.
Deal with it because we're just free spirited and we're not in school and deal with it.
And I'm thinking...
Okay, so you go on and on about how you trust your children and respect your children like they're adults, and they could just, you know, play and carry on and do whatever they want.
Why don't the neighbors get any respect?
Why isn't that okay?
And, of course, the argument was, well, I'm just going to conform to society's standards.
I'm like, wow, you're just a rebel for the sake of being a rebel.
Well, what's the point of that?
And that's what you were reminding me of when you were talking about showing up to work in shorts, showing up to and into insurance.
It's just...
To purposeful rebellion for no reason.
There's no substance to it for the sake of being rebellious.
And The problem, bringing it back to parenting, is when we're not focused on our family and we get so wrapped up in trend and whatever else is going on, we're so easily swayed.
But what other people are doing and why they're doing it and look how cool everybody is, instead of teaching your kids empathy and respect for all people, it Your neighbors matter.
People matter.
And this is what I think we're really lacking.
So I think, you know, we're just paying our attention in the wrong direction.
And if the choice is between being active in politics or being with your family, you need to be more with your family, especially when the kids are kids, because the more we breed this kind of selfishness and this kind of narcissistic behavior, things are just going to continue to get worse.
So we need to pay attention to that with our children.
Yeah, I mean, I think this, yeah, somebody in the next house might have a migraine.
It might be somebody ill.
I mean, this is something you would discuss with your neighbors and not just say, well, we're allowed.
And I mean, that's just not a good negotiating and certainly not empathetic.
And, you know, like, I mean, would they like if the neighbor's son started practicing drumming on the front lawn at four o'clock in the morning?
Well, we're just musically spontaneous.
We're jamming.
It's not that great.
How does that foster a good community?
It doesn't.
And the other thing, too, is that this is the great challenge, I think, and I try to resist this myself as a parent, which is the children as vanity object.
That, to me, is one of the toughest.
I mean, I'm so incredibly proud and admiring of my daughter.
She is, in some ways, the person I want to be.
She really is.
She is somebody I look up to enormously and she has a massive amount to teach me in terms of confidence, in terms of non-retaliatory feelings and so on.
Like if she's – if I bump her or whatever, she just says that she's upset but there's never any retaliatory aspect to her or whatever.
And so I admire her so much and there is that temptation.
I don't know if you have it or if you resist it successfully.
I'm sure you do.
But to look upon your children as looking good on me kind of thing.
And I think that has something to do.
Like if the mom is like, well, we're just these kinds of people.
It's like, well, how much is the kid just conforming to that because that's kind of necessary for the mother's vanity or the father's?
Yeah, well, I think she needs – she needed to maintain her posture in her community and how her peers looked at her.
So she needs to make sure that her children are always looking like, you know, however she wants them to look so that she feels like she's, you know, preaching a good message or whatever.
I don't know.
The whole thing gets on my nerves anyway.
That whole kind of trend, I keep going back to the word trend, gets under my skin to begin with.
But I do understand what you mean about that.
There is that temptation to stand behind your children and kind of rub your hand on your chest a little bit and say, yeah, I did that.
That's me.
Those are my kids.
He's good on me.
Yeah, exactly.
My child, you look good as a fashion accessory.
Yeah.
When I'm at the baseball game and my kid slams a home run, I do stand up from the bleachers and go, yeah!
My boy!
That's my boy!
But I think it's appropriate at a baseball game.
When you incorporate that into your whole life, it's a little bit different.
Or when my son was in a play, people came up and said, wow, he did really good.
I liked it.
It felt good.
But you can't incorporate that into your whole life.
And that's why I try to not use my children as props in my work.
When I did Unplugged Mom, I think my daughter appeared on one of the shows with me, and that's because she really, really wanted to, and I finally said, okay, you can do one of the shows with me and have a conversation.
But I very rarely mention their names.
If any time I ever mention my kids' names, I very rarely write any articles or blogs that are personal about my own kids.
I do have a home education blog specifically for...
Home education to give like ideas and tips and tricks.
So I will talk about what we do and that's just recently, but I still don't mention like real kind of detailed information.
I try to never use them as props.
I don't put pictures of them on professional websites.
I don't put them in front of the camera.
I just don't do that because I want to try to maintain that separation.
So I do understand the temptation to do that, but I don't want to.
And I also want to respect their privacy.
They did not ask to be part of this.
So I don't want to force them to be part of it just to say, look, like how great of a mom I am.
I'm like so cool.
I mean, there are some things that happen here and there that I feel are shareworthy and I will do that.
But I try to share it if it's really shareworthy, if it's really like something that's really cool or that I think is going to be helpful.
But I try not to incorporate it into everything.
Just like you'll use examples.
You'll tell stories of when you were showing your daughter a certain thing and how she responded or whatever.
But you don't put her in front of the camera and say, hey, look, it's all about her.
It's all about my daughter and everything.
It's tempting, but you have to try to steer clear of that because it's supposed to be about them growing up and becoming healthy, independent, Not about you standing on their shoulders and saying, look how cool I am.
Yeah, so do you think that there's anything that can be gained through political involvement and activism?
Again, I mean, I would love for there to be.
I mean, wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to do this confrontational deal with your personal relationships, family, parenting, non-spanking, peaceful, this, that, and the other?
Because that stuff is huge.
There's a reason why There's a reason why Murray Rothbard didn't really write about parenting, and Ayn Rand didn't really write about parenting, and Milton Friedman didn't really write about parenting.
I don't know that there's been much libertarian parenting books out there.
No, but I think there needs to be.
I think there needs to be.
I've known a lot of libertarian parents...
I'm one myself, and I think there needs to be more talk about raising your kids with a freedom-minded perspective and healthy intelligence, healthy mind, healthy body, healthy spirit, and also a sense of community and a sense of respect for other human beings and a sense of empathy.
I think there needs to be more conversations about that.
And that's why I said, you know, I still am willing to participate.
I'm still willing to do the work that I do.
I just have to take it down a few notches because if I'm going to talk about this stuff, then I need to do this stuff.
I have to walk the walk before I can really talk the talk.
Other words, everything I'm saying is useless.
It doesn't make any sense.
And then I can do even more work when my kids are grown, you know, when I'll have those years to bolster my wisdom.
But, I mean, of course, that question has come up, too, if I will eventually get more involved politically and run for office at that time.
And I don't know.
You know, I don't know.
There was a time that I would have said, yeah, yeah, you know, later on in my life, maybe I'll get involved or whatever.
But I don't know.
Unfortunately, I don't think that humanity is close to a truly peaceful...
Volunteer as society.
I think that we can certainly work toward it, and we can continue to work toward it and talk about it, but I don't think we're going to see that in our lifetime, unfortunately.
I hope that my grandchildren see the beginnings of it in their lifetime.
So there is going to be politics, and there is going to be problems.
I hate to encourage anyone that really does feel like they can make a difference not to do it, but Stefano, I don't know.
It's just all such bullshit.
I don't know how else to put it.
What do you mean, it's all?
You know, when I look back at my time now, the time that I did spend when I was so involved, I feel dirty.
I do.
I feel dirty.
I feel like my skin is tainted with the dirt of bureaucracy and BS because it was a dirty, dirty game.
Anyone that says, oh, but I'm an honest politician is not because you just cannot be in that world and not...
in some kind of sneaky underhanded business.
There was just so much going on that was so dirty.
You realize that in order to be here, in order to accomplish anything, you have to just play.
You have to play this game or else you're just going to get trampled.
And it sucks that it's like that, but it is like that.
I don't want it to be like that.
And I think we have, you know, new zealots entering politics every year that think that they're going to change it and they're going to make it different.
But unfortunately, it's the other way around.
It changes them.
And it's really unfortunate and it's really sad.
And like I said, I think that we can definitely still have conversations about moving society in a better direction, but...
It's going to take a while.
It's going to take a long time.
So whether or not I'm going to get involved when my kids are older, I don't think so.
I think my work is in focusing on family and the productiveness and the health of the family.
That's like the root.
You know what I mean?
You have to really get things at the root.
I think we just spend so much time swiping at branches and pruning leaves and trying to paint the branches and the limbs and we're not paying attention to the root.
The next generation that's coming up, they're the ones that are going to change the world because everybody else is going to die off.
You know?
I don't know.
I think the other thing too is that the tough thing about politics, I think, is...
If I were to go into politics, then I would have to, like most politicians, spend the huge majority of my time fundraising.
I mean, that's all you do because your politics is almost all about the money.
I mean, obviously, plus some intangible charisma thing, but you have to try and raise money and then you have to get on the phone and you have to get people to give you money.
And how are you going to get them to give you money?
Well, I couldn't say, give me money.
So that I will save the republic.
I will restore the constitution.
I will limit government.
I will give you school vouchers.
Because none of those things can be promised.
And in fact, I mean, Ron Paul and even Rand Paul, it's a long line of heroic speaking, utterly ineffective people who went into politics, right?
I mean...
Gary Goldwater was going to save the GOP. He was the most libertarian candidate, really, I think that's ever run outside of Ron Paul.
Of course, I mean, if you look at Ronald Reagan, who was supposed to be the big hero and savior of statism, and the federal government grew by two-thirds under his watch.
And this thing just goes on and on.
And the Republicans have always taught smaller government, but entitlement spending goes up faster under Republican administrations than it does under Democrats.
I don't think it's because people lack conviction.
It's just that the entire system is so set up that it's impossible to get things done.
The system has had, the statism has had thousands of years to defend itself against people who want to shrink it.
I mean, the whole system, the mindset, the setup, the laws, the precedents, the whole way.
So, what would I say to people?
What would I say to people?
Would I say to people, well, I am not going to be able to shrink government.
I can't even prove to you that anything I do is going to even slow down its rate of growth.
So can you give me some money?
But that would be truth in advertising, right?
Is a good analogy trying to shrink the ocean by throwing another bucket of water into it, thinking, well, this bucket of water is going to make the ocean shrink?
You mean taking a bucket of water out?
No, by throwing a bucket of water into it.
You can't really shrink the size and scope of it by joining forces with it, can you?
I think people enter it with a lot of conviction, thinking, well, I'm going to run for office and I'm going to shrink government.
But it's like, well, you just ran for office, though.
You just became one of the government.
Oh, I see.
I see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm going to pee into the swimming pool to make it all dry.
No.
Right.
It's just polluted and a little bigger.
Right.
Well, I think that people do want to go into government to shrink it.
I mean, I really – I have no doubt that that's the case.
I have no reason to doubt the integrity of Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes or Ron Paul.
Yeah, it's like when someone says, you know, well, I love you and the person says, I know you think you do.
You know, I think they're honest about their intentions.
Right.
Yeah, but the whole system is set up.
So the first thing you'd have to do is – You have to mislead people as to the possibilities that you can achieve.
And that's a pretty dangerous thing to do.
Already you're kind of corrupted.
So you have to give people the impression that giving you money or supporting you is going to shrink the state or slow its growth or something like that.
You have to make that something that people will believe because that's why they give you money.
Because if you say, well, I'm not going to be able to shrink the state but I'm going to make people in general more aware of how bad the state is by being in the government.
Like, join the mafia so I can tell everyone how bad the mafia is.
Well, you don't really need politics to educate people, particularly in the age of the internet.
I mean, you know, your show does tons, my show does tons, lots of people's show does a huge amount of stuff in terms of education.
So, and the other thing is even if you do get into power, You have 100 meetings a day of people whose entire life has been focused on this one meeting to get you to give them something.
That's pretty tough.
That's a pretty tough kind of day.
Just saying no to everyone.
Ron Paul doesn't do it.
I mean, Ron Paul sends a huge amount of federal money back to his districts.
I mean, he spends like nobody's business.
He's one of the most successful people in getting federal money to go.
So he doesn't say no.
Well, he'll say no in Congress because it doesn't mean a damn thing.
But he'll say yes to, you know, every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes into his door with a business plan written in Crayola on their foreheads.
And so how do you have meetings where people come in and they've literally worked for years to get this meeting?
And they probably donated a huge amount of money to you.
I mean, that's how it works.
According to Joe Biden, you know, the guy who donates 10,000 bucks to you or 20,000 or whatever, he gets the meeting.
That's just the way it works.
You know, he calls you up and he says, well, I'd like that meeting now.
And you say yes, because of course you want re-election and you don't want to burn your...
So then he comes in and he gave you 10, 20, 30, 50, whatever it is, thousand dollars or arranged for that to be, you know, he was running some super PAC that spent a huge amount of money on you.
And then he says, listen, I need this.
What do you say?
I mean if you say to the people ahead of time not only will I not shrink the size and power of the state but I'm going to block every possibility of giving you one thin dime in any kind of government benefit once I get into office please give me some money.
You just you can't be honest because nobody's going to give you money if you tell them the truth about your capacity to shrink the state and if you are absolutely honest And true to your convictions and say, if you come to me for one thin dime, I'm always going to say no, no matter what.
I'm going to give you no preferential legislation.
I'm going to give you no benefits, no bonuses, no subsidies, nothing.
No tax breaks, no lobbying, no licensing, nothing.
Well, I don't think you could ever get elected that way.
No.
The whole system is self-contradictory.
It's entirely set up so that it can eat itself.
I think that there were people in history that have made differences in the world and I don't know how many of them have been politicians.
I think that would be an interesting project for me to research and maybe go over as a history lesson with my kids because I'm wondering about the people that have really had significant positive change on the world and how many of them played this game, how many of them actually played this game.
And as you're speaking, and I'm thinking the theme that we're talking about here is parenting versus politics.
I mean, I could Or any mother or any father that's thinking about the same thing.
And believe me, I understand how it feels to be really riled up about something and really feel like I have a purpose.
I have a calling.
I have to get involved in this.
I can change this.
I know I can do it.
I know how it feels to have those feelings.
I've had those feelings.
For a long time, I've had those feelings.
And you feel really ambitious and you're just sure that if you can convince enough people That, you know, you can really make an impact.
You can really make a difference.
And then you start to feel like you owe it to the world.
I owe it to my community.
I owe it to my world.
It's my responsibility.
I have to do this.
And that's really some weight to put on your shoulders, you know?
Or like when they get older, my kids will understand why I did what I did.
Right, exactly.
Like, you know, because I'm paving.
I'm making a brighter future for my kids.
But think about that.
And if you're out there and you're listening and you're thinking, well, yeah, I do feel that.
I do feel that conviction.
I do feel that energy.
And, you know...
I've got to make a difference.
I've got to do something.
I can't just, you know, sit at home and watch Fox News and do nothing.
You're not doing nothing.
If you're a parent, then you especially are not doing nothing.
I'm thinking about the scenario that you just painted and how futile the whole thing really is.
And believe me, I know.
I didn't run for office, but I did do a lot of things.
I was very involved.
And I was very involved in my county.
And, you know, I went to all the meetings and all of the...
And it's very, very dirty.
If you think that you're going to clean it up, not by yourself, you're not.
And, you know, that doesn't happen.
But think about that scenario that you just painted and think about a day in the life of a parent where all you really have to do is be honest.
You actually have to be honest.
You should be honest.
You don't have to lie.
You don't have to ask them for money.
You don't have to ask them to vote for you.
You don't have to win them over.
You don't even have to be charismatic if you don't feel like being charismatic that day.
All you need to do is love them.
And that is going to have a greater positive impact.
On the future than anything you do at your capital.
And you know, that might be shocking for some people to hear, but I'm starting to see that it's true.
Because my three children can enter the world and make so much more of a positive impact if they had a healthy foundation from the beginning.
But if not, then I'm sending three people into the world that have been damaged.
Right.
And there is more than theory at work.
There's evidence.
There's actual empirical evidence That if you want to make the world a better place, you focus on parenting.
So for instance, this is a few of the many countless ways that you can prove this.
And I'll keep this brief.
So Lloyd DeMoss, a psycho-historian, he has done work where he said, okay, so in the Eastern Bloc countries, after the fall of communism, it took some time to establish a working democracy.
And it varied between the countries.
And What he did was he said, I'm going to correlate infant mortality with how long it took for that country to achieve a stable functioning, using the words in the mainstream sense, a stable functioning democracy, which we will, I think, admit is better than the communist hell they all crawled out of.
And he found that it was directly correlated.
So the more infant mortality there was, the longer it took for these countries to achieve a democracy and the shorter the infant mortality is very strongly correlated now I know correlation is not causation and so on but this is a way of saying that if you if we accept that infant mortality is a rough way of saying how well are children treated how well are they cared for in the society well the societies where the children were better cared for achieved democracy that much sooner and one other example So,
I mean, it didn't matter who were the politicians or who was making writing blogs.
It only mattered how well the children were parented.
Another example is they did, of course, in Germany in the last century, the parenting was unbelievably brutal.
By far the worst parenting that you could imagine in Europe happened in Germany for a variety of reasons, but mostly to do with the fact that they They had 150 years of religious warfare and missed the whole enlightenment and therefore never went through the Rousseauian revolution of thinking of children as non-evil and so on.
So, I mean, they were just unbelievably brutal to their children, which is why they had a totalitarian history for the first half of the 20th century.
And there's very strong studies to show that up.
But the other thing that's very interesting is...
There were, of course, generally three types of Germans in the 1930s and the 1940s with regards to the Jews or the other people being persecuted as part of the Holocaust.
The first were those who participated to various degrees of enthusiasm.
The second was those who didn't really like it but didn't act.
And the third were those who acted to protect, to shelter, to create the Underground Railroad to get people out or at least try and keep them safe.
You know, the kind of people who were keeping Anne Frank in the attic.
And in-depth interviews with hundreds and hundreds of Germans on this issue found no difference in levels of education between these three groups, found no difference in terms of professional attainment, found no difference in terms of geography, found no difference in anything except one degree.
Aspect, and only one aspect, which was how they were raised as very young children.
That was the only difference that could even remotely be statistically found to be significant.
And this was enormously significant in that it was the sole variable that could be found to explain these differences.
So the ones who actively helped the Jews and other victims of Nazism were parented peacefully and positively.
And those who were opposed but didn't act We're sort of spanked more and yelled at more and hit more and punished more.
And those who participated had brutal childhoods.
And so, you know, by the time the Nazis come along, it's too late to change anyone's mind.
But the people who really helped were those who'd been parented peacefully.
And...
And again, this is just one of countless examples.
You can look up Robin Grille's Parenting for a Peaceful World for more, Psychohistory.com for more.
The Origins of War and Child Abuse is a book that I'm reading by Lloyd DeMoss.
It's available on my website, and the book section is an audiobook.
It seems to be enormously clear that the quality of a society is significantly, I would say overwhelmingly, determined by the quality of parenting.
And this is what it means.
If you want your society to be peaceful...
Getting politically involved with a whole bunch of traumatized people, which is relative to the future, what the existing civilization almost always is, can't do it.
It's nonsense.
It's like trying to, you know, go to a fat farm and start a Cirque du Soleil.
Like, sorry, it's not going to work.
You have to start laying the foundation for the freedom of the future in the here and now, and it's not politics, it's parenting.
You know, I would argue, Stefan, that it's not significantly determined by, but almost completely determined by.
Because it's very basic.
We're talking about very, very basic physics here.
One generation replaces the next.
People die, and children grow up.
And then they grow up, and they die, and their children grow up.
This is a very simple physics.
That we're talking about here.
And with all of that proof that you just talked about, the most recent proof is in our own history right here in this country, in America.
I'm not quite certain how far reaching that was, but I would venture to guess that the whole world changed after World War II. Let's just look at our history.
Let's look at the inception of mandatory compulsory schooling.
Where suddenly all children had to go to school and that, you know, kind of all within the same few decades of more women going to work and the boom of feminism.
Now we have more children in school, more women going to work, so even more children have to go to school.
And now we have government raising kids instead of parents raising kids.
And society is getting more stressed out, more tired.
People could argue that a lot of people were making more money.
Okay, a lot of people making more money.
So what does that mean?
They're spending more money.
We're consuming more money.
So we're better trained to want more.
So we feel like we're not happy.
We're not satisfied unless we get more.
So now we want more.
Now we're going to show examples to our children.
It's not about the quality time that you and I spend.
It's about how many gadgets we can have in our house.
That's where happiness is, is how much we can have.
And we can't have that unless we're working.
So we have to work more.
And dad comes home and he's tired.
Little Johnny wants to play baseball.
And Dad says, I can't, son.
I'm tired.
I've been working.
And they get into an argument.
And he says, you know, how do you think you have all these things?
How do you think you have the PlayStation?
How do you think you have your ATVs and all this stuff that you have?
It's because I work.
And I work my ass off.
And I slave away so you can have all of these things.
So now Johnny thinks, okay, well, that must be important.
It's important to work and slave away and make all this money so we can have things because that's what daddy says is making us happy instead of going out in the yard and tossing a ball with me, which is free.
So this is kind of the cycle that has been going on generation after generation, especially since we've been telling women, oh, you have to go to work.
You have to earn your own paycheck.
You have to get out of the house.
You just don't want to be a housewife, do you?
You won't be fulfilled playing with your children what you really want to do.
You want to get out there and you want to bring home the bacon and you want to work 9 to 5 and you want to do all this.
Well, how has that worked out for us?
Let's examine the last few decades.
How has that worked out for us?
Do we have better family values now?
Do we have smaller government now?
Are we more free now?
Are we economically in better condition now?
Do we have less sick people?
Or do we have more people on psychotropic drugs?
Do we have more depression?
More disorders?
More ADD? More stress?
More suicides?
More people flipping out and inflicting violence on other people?
Do we have more violence or less violence?
So how has that all worked out for society where we're spending more time paying attention to work and politics and less time paying attention to our family?
Isn't it time now that we kind of just stop the flow and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, maybe we do need to spend more time with our family.
Maybe it is fulfilling for a parent to spend time with their children because it's free.
It really doesn't cost you any money.
It costs you money to buy your kid a PlayStation and plop them down and say, I'm going to go have a glass of wine while you play with the PlayStation.
But it doesn't cost you any money to giggle and roll around on the floor or go to the library together and learn something or go to the park together and have a nature walk.
So yeah, there is a financial issue.
You do have to pay the mortgage and you do have to bring in a paycheck.
But it's significant that one of the parents takes a chunk of their lives, a decade, maybe 15 years of their lives and says, I'm not going to work.
I'm going to pay attention to you and I'm going to focus on you.
And no, I really don't think that politics is the answer anymore because it hasn't been.
It hasn't been.
And like you were saying, correlation doesn't equal causation.
Yeah, I get that.
But there's a point where you have to just say, okay, there's a little too much evidence here for me to ignore.
We really have to do something here.
We really have to pay attention here.
So I could spend another eight years of my life Fighting with these other yahoos at the Capitol and living there for three months out of the year because it's too far for me to commute every day.
Or I could spend the next eight years of my life with my children.
And again, it's the fun.
It's very basic.
If I'm absent from their lives and they grow up, Missing a mother or father or missing some very basic attention, I'm sending three broken people into the world.
Or I can dedicate and focus my energy on them and send three healthy people into the world.
Who's going to offer the world a better chance at peace and compassion?
Broken people or healthy people?
This is very simple.
Very simple principles.
And then by default, they will spend more time with their family because that's what they're used to.
That's how they've been raised.
They've accepted that as normal life.
So when they get married and they start having families, they start having children, they will treat their children respectfully and peacefully and spend time with them and focus on them.
Because that's how they've been raised.
Chances are they'll seek out a mate that agrees with them because we often do seek out people that are, you know, on the same wavelength as we are, hopefully.
So especially if they're healthy, mentally healthy and spiritually healthy, they'll probably have healthier relationships.
So the cycle will continue.
But you send people into the world having missing something, and I hate to sound cliche, but maybe Freud had a point.
Maybe it is all the mother's fault.
Right.
Yeah, and look, I mean, it's a pretty dark subject, but I think it's worth talking about since we mentioned Freud.
Of course, one of the great disasters, I think, of modern history was the fact that when Freud began to develop psychoanalytics, psychotherapy, When he began to develop that, he was given, of course, lots of patients, a lot of women and some men who had hysterical symptoms, right?
They're blind, but there was nothing wrong with their eyes.
They couldn't feel their arm, but there was nothing wrong with their arm and that kind of stuff.
And he found, of course, as he delved into it, that the children had been cruelly and repetitively sexually violated as children.
And this was shockingly common in the Vienna of the late 19th century.
And he began to talk about these findings and The prevalence of it, and he was just, of course, viciously attacked by all of the people who prey upon children, and he then backed down, which I think was one of the great catastrophes of modern history,
and it's piling a lot on the guy and all that, but nonetheless, both he and Jung appear to have also been molested as children, which is not great for the birth of this particular discipline, but Because he backed down and then transmuted the actual rape of children into what he called the sexual fantasies of children, the electro and eatable complexes.
I mean, I really do believe that that laid the foundation for World War I. If children are rescued, war becomes much less likely, if not impossible.
But if children are betrayed, war becomes that much more likely.
And this has been a continual problem throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century.
The prevalence of childhood sexual abuse is, I mean, it's just shocking.
And the statistics vary widely and the measurements vary widely.
But, you know, it's two in five boys and three in five girls report some significant misconduct, let's say, before the age of 18.
In some studies, the average age of, sorry, the average length of the sexual abuse has been five years.
So, if, you know, Up to half the population has experienced some form of this and a smaller proportion has experienced significant and repetitive child rape.
I think we should really start with that.
You can't build a free society on victims of childhood rape.
And if they're a significant portion of the population, it's just not going to work because they're too traumatized.
They're too, you know, without a huge amount of investment and help.
I mean, it's...
You can't build a castle on such a shaky foundation.
If we can, and I do believe that having parents at home who are involved in their children's lives and in continual contact with them throughout the days and weeks and months and years, that the prevalence of child abuse, certainly sexual abuse and so on, would hopefully be less.
I'm sure it would be.
So that's another thing that happens, of course, if you stay home, is you protect your children from anybody outside the immediate family who would do them harm.
Which, unfortunately, there is a distressingly large number of people who will do that.
From priests, to daycare workers, to relatives, to friends, to friends' parents, to whatever it is.
And this is another thing, of course, that you do when you're home, is you keep your children safer.
And by keeping your children safer, you significantly contribute to the peace of the world.
I mean, you're out there doing politics 12, 14 hours a day, Who is protecting your kids?
Especially if one parent is working, the other one's doing politics.
Well, you've just lost control of their protection.
I'd like to point out also that when you say protecting your kids, I think a lot of people have in their minds, especially when they hear from someone like me who's a home-educating parent, they equate protection with shelter.
And, oh, they must be sheltering their kids.
And then they hear the word shelter and they put a negative spin on it.
Like we're overprotective somehow, or we don't let our kids out of the house, or we lock them up in the house and we never let them out.
And that's our way of protecting them.
That's not what we're talking about when we say protect them.
It simply means that when you are an active parent and, And by active parent, I mean you're actively part of your child's life, which you're supposed to be.
You're aware of who they are.
They're aware of who you are.
You know who they are as a person.
You know who their friends are.
You know where they are during the day.
Even when they're not in your immediate sight, you know where they are.
You know where they're going.
You develop a trust factor.
So if you're If your teenager says, I'm at the library, you trust that they are actually at the library and not at a strip club because you have a relationship with them and you develop a mutual trust factor and a mutual respect.
That's what we mean by you're able to protect your children is because you're able to have that closeness with them and that intimacy and that relationship where...
You communicate with each other and you know what their activities are.
You know what their social life is.
You know who the boyfriends and girlfriends are.
You know who their friends are.
And you have some influence.
And not by force.
You don't force them to hang out with certain people or forbid them from hanging out with other people.
But because you do have that close relationship, they are naturally able to make better decisions about who they spend their time or with whom they spend their time.
I hate to end with a preposition.
No, but I think you're right.
That's very, very important.
It's an important thing to mention that the best security your child has is this strong bond with the parent.
I mean, if you're some god-awful child molester or whatever, every time you prey upon a child, of course you're taking a huge gamble because if that child runs straight home, tells mama, mama phones the cops, then he's in jail for years and years and years.
Of course, you don't want to be a child molester in jail.
You won't do very well.
So every time he picks on a child or she picks on a child, it's a huge gamble.
And they get very good at knowing who they can prey on.
Like the lions, they like to prey on the sick and the old and the weak.
It's statistically, and we can do it to scale because I realized that I think there are, oh God, I think it's close to 3 million families now.
I think the latest was close to 3 million families now in America that home educate.
So that's still a small fraction of the society in general, but you have to do it to scale.
And statistically, if you measure it to scale, there are significantly less incidents, less than 1%.
Of home-educating families that are found to be abusive or sexually abusive or neglectful.
And that's always what you hear.
Well, you know, we have to regulate home education because the parents might abuse the kids.
But statistically, there's really no concern there.
But if you examine the abuse that goes on in schools, that's where abuse is happening.
Sexual abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse, emotional abuse from other students, from peers, from teachers, from people exerting improper authority.
And then, you know, let's not even get started on the abuse that happens with the religious sector.
That's a whole other conversation.
So the kids that are not in a secure family situation, these are the kids that are getting abused on a daily basis.
And the only, so let's examine that for one second.
Most of our, the majority of our children in society are in school being exposed to almost daily forms of abuse, whether it be emotional, mental, physical, or sexual abuse.
They're being exposed to some kind of abuse daily for 15 years of their lives.
These are the people that are entering society, and these are the people that are going to enter the quote-unquote real world when they're adults.
And shape society.
Whether it be a democracy or a republic or a volunteer society, these are the people that are going to shape it.
What's the likelihood that it's going to get better if we keep pushing out generation after generation of kids that have spent their entire childhood being abused?
I mean, this is, again, very basic, very basic math, very simple concept to understand.
The only thing that I want to point out for listeners is that we in our conversation, it's all very important.
The things that we're mentioning and child abuse is very important, very significant to mention.
But I want to clarify that I don't think either of us are trying to create a false paradigm where, you know, if you're not staying home and focused on your kids, then you must be a sexual abuser.
I don't, you know, I don't, there are parents that are just spending a little bit too much time at work and not focused on their children that I think you're still doing damage, but I don't necessarily think that you're molesting your child.
So there is, there are nuances there.
No, no, certainly my argument.
Yeah, no, my argument is simply, and you can, of course, have open lines of communication if you're a working parent, if both parents are working.
You know, if you take the time to connect, if you have those open lines of communication, the children who are most likely to be attacked or bullied or assaulted or molested or whatever are the children, in my opinion, I'm no expert, but are the children who don't have that clear line of communication, who don't go straight home and tell their parents what happened, either because they feel they'll be blamed, or the parent will just get angry, or the parent will provoke and make things worse, or Or they just would never imagine it because the parent is not there for them.
So if you're working, you can still protect your children.
The important thing is to have this open line of communication so your child is constantly communicating his or her experience.
The predators sense that and they stay away from that.
The lions pick on the old, the sick, and the weak.
It's the same thing with parenting.
I think it's easier and more likely to be a deeper relationship if you're home.
That's just a matter of physics.
Relationships are proximity.
Even if you're around more and you're present more, Then it's going to be deeper for the most part.
But yeah, it certainly can be the case that you can protect your kids if you're both working.
I just think that's the really key thing to focus on, is to make sure that if there's ever a problem, your kids will come directly to you and tell you everything.
That's the thing you need to encourage most, because that will almost certainly ensure, I would imagine, Or I believe that there will not be problems.
Well, the key is to be active and be involved in your children's lives.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with being involved in your children's lives.
There's nothing...
I think, you know, we like to paint this picture of, well, we want to give them freedom.
We want to give them independence.
We don't want to...
We can't...
Draw this, again, this false dichotomy where there's one extreme or the other extreme.
Either we're, you know, rebel parents and our kids come and go as they please and we're totally free or we're authoritarian.
I think it's okay to maintain a balance and to embrace your responsibility as a parent and say, look, I brought you into this world.
It's my responsibility to guide you, give you advice, give you support, and have conversations with you.
And you find that when you are an active, involved parent, you don't need To be tyrannical.
You don't need punishments.
You don't need to forbid.
You simply have open communication and you talk about things.
I don't think I've ever forbade any of my kids from doing anything.
If they wanted to do something I felt was a little bit too dangerous or that they weren't ready for, and only the parent can really judge that because you know your child or you're supposed to know your child.
Then I would talk about it with them and we would reach a decision.
And if they decided that they really wanted to go ahead and do it, I just made sure that I was a safety net for them, that I was there because I knew that it was going to get messed up and it did and I was there when it did.
If it was something extremely dangerous, then I would just say, okay, I don't really think so and here's why.
I never just said no because I said so because I don't think that's respectful.
I don't like that.
But the idea is not to quit your job and just throw yourself at your kid 100%.
If you need to work, you need to work.
I get that.
I understand that.
It's about balancing.
So many parents say, well, I need to work.
Therefore, they go to work for 8 to 10, sometimes 12 hours a day.
They come home and they say, well, I worked all day.
I did my responsibility.
I'm done.
I'm just going to turn on the TV and I need to relax now.
I need to chill because I just worked all day so you can have that PlayStation.
So you just sit down and be grateful.
You're working all day and I applaud you for that because it takes a lot of energy.
But guess what?
You still have to pay attention.
You still have to have a conversation with your kid when you come home.
And, you know, I hate to sound so judgmental, but I think that's what happens.
And that's why I also advise parents re-evaluate your situation when you say, well, both of us have to work.
Do you?
Do you?
You know, I think there's a lot of consumerism going on there that if we release our dependence on that, then we can make a lot of changes.
I don't want to...
I've been...
Yeah, downsize.
You can downsize.
Exactly.
My car is like 15 years old.
It's got no cruise control, no ABS, no air conditioning.
The radio doesn't work half the time.
One of the door locks doesn't work.
I mean, half the...
Just downsize.
I mean, because I would rather have more time with my daughter than a new car.
That's just the reality of things.
A car is not going to drive up to my deathbed and hold my hand when I slip into the great beyond.
It's going to be my daughter, who I hope is going to want to be there.
And it's the relationship that matters.
That's exactly it.
You know, I'm not going to be clutching a coach bag when I kick off and I'm not going to take it with me.
But I mean, hopefully the love and the relationship will live on through my children.
And, you know, that's what I'd like to see.
I've been accused when I say things like this.
I've been accused of being a privileged and a princess and I don't understand how the other side lives.
You know, it's really sad.
That people think that by hearing me because people that know me in real life know that I drive what I like to call a vintage car.
That's better than saying an old piece of shit.
I tell people it's not crappy.
It's vintage.
I'm just really into the vintage look.
It's not that it has all these different colors.
It's really an abstract, expressionistic car.
Yeah.
You know, like that old Adam Sandler.
The thing is that there are people that, yes, they have to.
Just to make ends meet, they have to work.
But unfortunately, you still have to make an effort to have a relationship with your child.
And there are ways to keep them out of school in households where both parents work or even in single-parent households, which there are a lot of single-parent households that home educate.
But...
On top of that, I do believe that many of us can reevaluate our financial situation and really, really ask ourselves, can I give certain things up?
Are there things, can we downsize, can we have less?
And what is the reasoning for doing that?
Because my child is worth it.
Because my child is worth it.
They don't need another PlayStation.
They need more time with you.
And, you know, this is something that in the back of our head we all know.
That's why we all get teary when we hear the song, Cats in the Cradle.
Because we already know this to be true.
We just don't take it to heart as much as we really should.
If only we could live the Hallmark cards we buy to give people when we haven't been living the Hallmark cards that we buy to give people, then everything would be great.
Listen, Lorette, I do have to boogie on.
Sorry, speaking of parenting, it's time for me to resume.
But if there's anything you'd like to tell my listeners about, any upcoming projects or places you're going or things that you're doing, I'm sure certainly my listeners are a huge fan of just about everything that you say.
So if you'd like to share anything about that, that would be fantastic.
Well, I am considering...
I decided I opted out of doing the live weekly show just because of the commitment factor.
But I am considering doing a semi-frequent podcast addressing particular topics that are important to parenting, libertarian parenting, free thinking parenting.
And I'm open to suggestions.
And I will also cover questions during those infrequent or maybe semi-frequent sessions.
I'm always open to questions.
I try to answer them in email.
I may answer them during podcasts.
So I can be reached via lauretelynn.com.
The site is going to be moving, but I think by the time this is published, it'll all be okay again soon.
So you can go ahead and just visit laurettelynn.com.
Everything's right there.
And I'm still pretty focused on fall being able to publish another book, which is called Learning Curves.
And that's a very easy and simple guide to getting started with home education from a...
Thinking perspective.
So that's coming out.
Other than that, I blog and hopefully I'm still offering information and you can always keep up with what I'm up to at my website.
And be sure to get your copy of the truly excellent Don't Do Drugs, Stay Out of School.
And I would really, really recommend that.
Are you going to do an audiobook?
We talked about that last year.
Eventually, I'll do an audiobook.
Yeah, I'll get that done sooner or later, I guess.
I looked into how much studio time is, and it's really very affordable, so I think I might do that.
And so far, so good.
I've gotten really excellent feedback on that, so I'm really happy about that because it offers a sign of hope that there are people out there that are just like, you know what?
You're right.
This sucks, and I need out.
Yeah.
It's going well.
Beautiful.
Well, for your listeners, I'm, of course, at freedomainradio.com.
Of course, as always, I would like to thank you for a truly delightful conversation, and I think we covered a lot of important topics.
Believe it or not, it was largely unscripted.
I know people with the laser-like focus that we both bring to each of these questions.
I'm sure people are shocked at that, but it was a real pleasure, and I hope we can do it again soon.
Absolutely.
Love talking to you, Stefan.
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