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Nov. 27, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:35:21

3911 Baby Boomers: The Selfish Generation - Call In Show - November 22nd, 2017

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	So we had a bunch of great callers tonight.
	Okay, the third one in particular you should listen to.
	The first one wanted to know how important I viewed my role as an entrepreneur and my business experience in terms of...
	Helping me out with the show, helping me out with life experience as a whole.
	And it was a great question, great conversation back and forth.
	If you're interested in entrepreneurship, I'd highly recommend it.
	And the second caller, I think it's a fairly good example of how not to have an argument, which I think is instructive as well.
	Don't forget theartoftheargument.com for my new book.
	This caller, this man, wanted to know how I could possibly defend the free market, given that corruption works very well in the free market.
	And, well, we had a good conversation.
	The third call of glories was a boomer woman who was absolutely appalled that I might have anything negative to say about the boomer generation as a whole.
	We had a great discussion about what I had said, and then she pretty much proceeded to, you know what, listen to it.
	It's really, really important.
	It was a wild call for me, and I think it will be for you as well.
	Now, the fourth Caller was an American Indian or indigenous couple who were having some big issues regarding parenting and we had a very powerful conversation regarding spanking in particular with the mom and I hope that you will not just listen to it but also forward it to other parents or parents-to-be that you might know.
	As always, thank you so much for listening.
	Don't forget to use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon.
	Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	Sign up for the newsletter at freedomainradio.com.
	And also, enjoy the show.
	Alright, up first today we have Rosser.
	He wrote in and said, Knowing you have a background in software entrepreneurship, I'd like to know how important your business experience was to shaping your philosophy regarding the importance of having purpose.
	That's from Rosser. Hey, Ross, how are you doing tonight?
	I'm doing fantastic, and I have to say it is a pleasure to speak with you, Stefan.
	Oh, I appreciate that. Let's hope we can keep that up.
	Why is this question important to you at the moment?
	Well, it's something that I love hearing your take on things, because you tend to provide a very unique outlook that you just don't hear from other people.
	And to me, I'm in the process of...
	I'm starting my own business.
	I've been working with some friends on.
	And I've also just noticed in men that I know who've been very successful, like one particular gentleman who I'm just not going to name on your show, but he had very high goals, very lofty goals. And he's from a small town in South Georgia.
	He got into the Naval Academy.
	His scores were so good there that he got into the Navy's nuclear program and they paid for him to go to MIT. He went on to become the captain of a nuclear sub.
	This was in the Cold War period.
	And then from there went on to be eventually the CEO of a company that regulates the nuclear industry because of his background.
	Whenever I talk to him, he always would talk about how important it was that he was relentless and how being relentless in pursuing these goals gave him a certain purpose and kept him motivated and emotionally healthy, if that makes sense.
	Right, right, right.
	So I'm going to bounce this back to you for a minute.
	Yeah. If you have any more questions.
	No, that's fine. I mean, I can tell you a little bit about what the business world did and didn't do for me.
	It made me a better philosopher in that it taught me a lot of rigorous.
	It's hard to be a relativist and a subjectivist when you're dealing with an objective field.
	There are not a lot of leftists, or at least not the kind of pathological post-modernists have babies with trees kind of leftists in physics or in engineering, because you simply have to deal with objective reality.
	You can't create this platonic cloud castle of bullshit to keep reality at bay.
	So, you know, things worked or they didn't.
	Yeah, things worked or they didn't.
	And that basic reality was...
	Essential for me. Learning how to deal with customers, learning how to sell, learning how to ask for things.
	These were all very important.
	So that really helped me in the business world.
	It made me a better philosopher being more rigorous.
	You know, when I was first getting educated, like after high school, I was doing like an English degree and then I did a history degree.
	And those are history lesser.
	One of the reasons I bailed on English was...
	I kind of realized you can't be wrong.
	If you're eloquent, you can't be...
	How do you... Yeah, prove to me that my interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest is objectively incorrect.
	You know, like, I mean, it just became too goopy for me, too subjective for me.
	And so I wanted to... You're saying it was better.
	I'm sorry? So I was saying, you're basically saying with English, it was because it was everyone's subjective opinion against everyone else's, and you can't win.
	Well, you can't lose and you can't win.
	And I like games where you can win or lose.
	Fair enough. Yeah, I like games where you can win or lose.
	And that's what business very much is.
	Yeah, yeah. You get the contract or you don't.
	Your software works or it doesn't. You get paid or you don't.
	And there's this sort of heartbeat regularity.
	Like in business, cash flow is king.
	It doesn't matter if you're getting a million dollar contract in a month.
	You need to hit your payroll now.
	And you need to hit your rent now.
	And so there's a real solid objectivity to it.
	So I liked that. But...
	Well, I shouldn't say but, and.
	So it made me a better philosopher in terms of objectivity and dealing with the world and being better at sales and marketing and all that kind of stuff, which is important, which is important.
	But also, it gave me a massive despair regarding the ethical state of the boomers.
	I'm not alone in that in the software field, although I think it's less prevalent in other areas in software, but You know, you're a young hot coder.
	You're coming up with great stuff.
	And then all the boomers begin to circle, right?
	Ooh, this guy can make us some money.
	This guy, he can sell.
	He can code. He's attractive.
	Mmm, tasty youth flesh.
	And yeah, I mean, it was just a whole series of corruption and lies and greed and And dissolution and decadence and nihilism that floated around some of the management.
	And this was in a wide variety, not all, but in a wide variety of companies that I was involved in one time or another.
	Just liars.
	Just liars.
	Lying, stinky, liars lying down.
	And so it gave me a very solid connection to empirical reality and objectivism and all of that.
	And at the same time, so that gave me The strength of empiricism, and it gave me a mission, which was the young are preyed on by the old.
	We see this all the time in society at the moment.
	The young are preyed on by the old.
	And I was invited to be part of that group of people preying on the young.
	I was invited to be part of that group.
	Because people were saying, oh, you know, you can offer stock options to the coders.
	That'll get them to work hard.
	You go tell them all of this.
	And so I would do this.
	And then, don't you know, the stock options, they just took a little while to get the paperwork done.
	Took a little while to get the stock options, you know, past all of the barriers and the hurdles.
	And then, don't you know, by the time the stock options came about, The stock price had already peaked.
	Isn't that interesting?
	So, yeah, I had a, you know, and I put my reputation on the line with people who were my friends, who I cared about.
	You know, when you're in a tech department, you have the common enemy, you know, like unreasonable customers, over-promising salespeople, exaggerating marketers and so on.
	And you kind of like, you're a team under fire in the tech industry.
	And you're the guy who's working nights and weekends.
	I don't see a lot of salespeople up there at 3 in the morning working on a proposal.
	And so when I was involved with that, they were mostly young coders, hungry people, smart people, hard-working people.
	You know, one guy spent the weekend working on a script that we needed to interface or database to Oracle.
	And yeah, I believed the people who made promises, and I in turn made promises, and then I was on the hook when those promises failed to materialize.
	Now, a one-off You could say, well, maybe that was just bad luck, bad timing, or a couple of bad actors.
	But I'm telling you, man, it kept happening.
	It kept happening.
	The greed. Now, I don't think this is part of capitalism as a whole.
	I really don't. I mean, this is one of the reasons why I developed this whole theory called the supercharged stock market about how everybody starts going nuts over stock prices and forgets how to run the damn company.
	Like, you know, these days, it's social justice warriors rather than stock price.
	Everyone goes nuts to try and please politically correct stuff.
	Like, you know, like Twitter. Twitter with this verification thing.
	How can you verify people who are terrible people?
	It's like, so what? If you're a communist and you go get a passport, it's not up to the passport office to say, no, you can't have it because we disagree with your politics.
	It's just like a driver's license.
	Not approval. But they fell into this game of Well, we're going to take the check marks away from people.
	Oh, good. Oh, great.
	Now, good job. Now you've got to police everyone.
	It'll never end. It's appeasement, appeasement, appeasement.
	So, at least with the stock price, it's just naked greed, but with the other stuff, it's cowardice and capitulation to fundamentally very weak bullies, you know.
	Just say no! That's what I was raised.
	Just say no to drugs.
	Just say no to leftism.
	Just say no to social justice warriors.
	Yeah. It's amazing, because, you know, there's all this punishment that's supposed to rain down on you if you say no to these people, and they just shrug and move on to another victim.
	It's all right. Poland's saying no.
	They're still standing. So I think it rooted me or grounded me in objective facts, reality, gave me a lot of skills that are helpful even outside the business world.
	And also...
	Gave me a mission, which was recognizing that moral leadership, it ain't going to come from above.
	It ain't going to come from people older than me.
	And it has to come.
	It has to come from us. Yeah.
	Well, let me give you two quick points.
	First one, I do find it very amusing when you talk about Twitter's stock price.
	That's a whole big mess.
	Where are the shareholders from?
	Sorry to interrupt you, and I'll shut up in a sec.
	Where are the shareholders, for God's sakes?
	These companies are going to get chewed up.
	Where are the shareholders?
	Why don't you confront these people?
	It can't come from the customers.
	I was going to say, you can find an article from about a year ago, it was in Breitbart, because I sent him some information about Twitter's stock following them kicking him off and some other people.
	And one of the things I went and just looking through their shareholder reports, I think their largest shareholder is a Saudi Arabian billionaire.
	Yeah. Gotta worry about that foreign influence on American elections from Russia, huh?
	Oh, yeah, yeah. Anyway, but it was a very amusing article, and it does shed a lot of light on where Twitter's politics come from if they're getting huge investments from Saudi billionaires and so on.
	Well, you know, I'm a big free market guy, but you could easily make the case that this is essential infrastructure.
	You don't let the Saudis own your nukes, and you sure as hell don't let them own your social media.
	Yeah, yeah.
	No, you make an interesting point there.
	When I look at young people my age, and at one point I went to a very, very left-wing private school, and I ended up leaving because it was just so crazy.
	And I was so tired of teachers basically bullying.
	I mean, I had one teacher who literally, I don't know what you exactly said on a report card, that I failed because I'm not enlightened enough.
	I don't know how you quantifiably grade enlightenment, but anyway.
	Because it's tough to spell the word agreement.
	That's a good one. What I noticed at this school is that so many of the students were totally on board with the kind of social justice warrior bandwagon.
	And this school, they had transgender bathrooms I think two and a half years before it was a national issue.
	I mean they were like cutting-edge hardcore liberal to a really incredible degree.
	But I noticed that while they were very much dedicated – To a very extreme degree to leftist ideas, they didn't seem – there was always this thing about kind of feeling like they were just missing something.
	And like their life really had no purpose other than contributing as a cog to the machine of, I guess, leftism, you could say.
	Yeah. And then for myself personally, after I left that school and went on to doing a homeschool co-op program, which I'd honestly recommend to anyone who's tired of leftism in schools, I had a teacher who was absolutely fabulous that taught economics and entrepreneurship and lots of free market stuff, but also how to execute things in the real world, not just when supply goes up, then this happens and blah, blah, blah, using real examples and how people have really done things.
	And I was the first company then selling things I was buying from China through Amazon's warehouse, where Amazon would store my inventory and then ship it off to my customers for me, and started doing pretty well with that.
	And what I found through running my own company was that the longer I did it, It gives you this sort of sense of freedom, like, where there's no boss over your head telling you, you know, what you can and can't do.
	And your revenue is, you know, as high as...
	Which is fine if the boss... I'm sorry. It's fine if the boss is right.
	Yeah, sure. You know, if you're like, you know, I think we should open up an IceCube sales place in Isolate.
	It's like, you know, and here's why.
	If the boss is right, fantastic.
	Fantastic. I mean, that's called mentoring, right?
	Yeah. Well, I would add...
	My friend who I mentioned at the beginning who was running a company that regulates nuclear power, it's a private company that regulates nuclear.
	When he became the CEO of that company, he actually started intentionally hiring people who were his superiors in the Navy because he knew that they would have no hesitation about telling him when he was wrong.
	Many of them were 10 years older than he was.
	But he hired them as fast as he could because he knew that they would be honest with him about when he's wrong about things.
	And that takes a certain degree of humility not many people have.
	Well, or just rational greed.
	It's like, if you don't want to turn on your GPS because you're afraid you're going in the wrong direction, you don't really want to go the right direction.
	Yeah, absolutely. You're right about that.
	But for me personally, I would say I've always found that When you're doing something and you create value for other people and then it leads to you making significant income much more than you could have made working hourly,
	for example, and you know that you did it by creating value and selling it in the right way to the customer, there's something that is so fulfilling about that that I would never be able to explain if it weren't for the fact that I've done it before.
	And in a few other young men around my age, I mean, one way I look at it is almost like in hundreds of years ago, or I should say thousands, I guess it would be, when men would go out and hunt or gather and they'd spear fishes and bears and whatnot and drag them back to the camp.
	You know what I'm saying? That, in many ways...
	Because today's equivalent of that is business.
	You're out doing things, getting sales, making money, being a provider for yourself instead of leeching off of other people's resources.
	And that is so unbelievably fulfilling and something that I feel people my age need more of.
	So I'll pass it back to you.
	Right, right. Well, I would say that the other good thing that business did is it gives me a vast and legitimate impatience with people who talk about the business world or economics while having never actually run a business.
	Oh my god, yes.
	There is something so eye-rollingly juvenile about people who talk about the economy while having never participated in it.
	You know, you can only learn so much about tennis by watching a goddamn tennis game.
	At some point, you need to pick up the ball and swing.
	You can only watch...
	So much golf. It doesn't make you an expert in golf.
	You need to do, not just study.
	And so it has given me a great deal of legitimately earned impatience when it comes to listening to people blather on about who owns the means of production and how the rich are exploiting.
	And like, I know, I know what it's like to work literally two nights and three days to get something done.
	And don't tell me I don't earn What I get paid.
	I know what it's like to take, to motivate a team.
	I know what it's like to calm down an enraged customer.
	I know what it's like.
	Don't tell me. You know, every now and then, if my employees would crap about me making more money, I'd be like, well, I'll tell you what.
	Next time a customer calls up to complain, I'll just forward them to you.
	Do you feel like taking that call?
	No. Right?
	So, yeah, it just gives you this, yeah, yeah.
	You're just talking about stuff.
	It's nice. And it doesn't, it's not even, doesn't really make me that angry.
	It's just, it's just talk.
	It's just people who've read a bunch and they're upset about a bunch and they don't, you know, like, they're like Wall Street, the Occupy Wall Street protesters and so on.
	It's like, but you guys haven't, you know, I try not to talk a lot about the Filipino experience in Michigan because I'm not Filipino and don't live in Michigan.
	I try not to talk a lot about stuff that I have no experience of.
	And so when people, young, middle-aged, older, when they just blather on about a bunch of stuff, and it's usually a bunch of left-wing talking points, it's like, yeah, but...
	It's sort of like that, I don't know if you've ever seen this movie with Steve Carell called The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
	I have not. It keeps popping up in my Netflix.
	It's a pretty funny film. He's pretty good.
	But in it, and this is not a spoiler.
	This is very early on and it's not any kind of crucial plot point.
	But in it, he's talking like he's a 40-year-old virgin.
	And he's trying to talk about what it's like to hold a woman's breasts.
	And he says, it's like a bag of sand.
	It's like, well, no, it's really not, unless you've got really someone with a really bad boob job that came from some Saudi prince or something.
	So for me, it's like listening to people talk about the economy when they've never been an entrepreneur.
	It's just like listening to a 40-year-old virgin trying to pretend that he knows something about women's boobs by saying they're like bags of sand.
	It's like, you're not mad at the person, you just know that they're lying, and you lose all respect.
	Well, yeah. Personally, I completely agree with you on that.
	And then another great example would be of the hypocrisy.
	My girlfriend of about two years – so I've got to say, Stefan, you would absolutely love this girl.
	Just incredibly witty and sassy and conservative, very similar to yourself.
	But… Her father's a hugely successful guy, just incredibly successful.
	And a lot of times when we were in school, people would do stuff.
	You don't understand that.
	You have money.
	One guy said, your opinion doesn't matter because your dad has a Ferrari to her.
	Just really dumb stuff like that.
	And what they don't realize is that...
	He dropped out of medical school.
	He's in medical devices.
	That's his business.
	He's been in for 33 years.
	And at one point, he was so poor that he slept in his car in the parking lot of a hotel because he couldn't afford a $25 a night hotel room.
	And he slept in his car for like a month going around repping his own products.
	But he had just absolute focus and resilience.
	And in the long term, it paid off and he sold part of his company to another Gigantic medical company, but like you said, people don't understand how hard people work when they're starting companies.
	They have no idea how hard it is to do that kind of thing or how much resilience you'd have to have to sleep in your car for almost a month with the determination not to give up and keep going on your business.
	It's a hypocrisy.
	Or when someone points to a company's revenue and says they're exploiting their workers, then you have to take them all the way down to the bottom and say, no, you see this number right here that's 1% of what the revenue is?
	That's the actual profit.
	Stuff like that.
	Well, it's also kind of sad to me when people say, oh, the corporations, they're ripping off the workers.
	They're not paying people enough. So what we need to do is raise corporate taxes, raise taxes on corporations.
	It's like, oh, it's so ridiculous.
	There's no such thing as a corporation that has a magic bag of money.
	I mean, it's just a flow-through.
	They pay their people less.
	They raise their prices.
	That's all there is. And so, yeah, I mean, the fact that in the new tax plan, there's a reduction in the corporate rate.
	Fantastic. But corporations have been created as some sort of evil deity that people...
	Just think, have magic money.
	Corporations have been created like fiat currency has been created, just so everyone thinks that there's magic money out there that can pay for stuff without consequences.
	All right. Well, listen, I hope that's been helpful.
	I appreciate your call.
	We've got a bunch of cues tonight.
	I would ask. Yes, go ahead.
	Would it be possible for you to, at some point, do a video called the Truth About series on big tobacco?
	I think it would be a really fun talk.
	Interesting thought. I will mull it over and put it on the show list note, which is now longer than, I think, the Old Testament.
	I appreciate the idea.
	Well, Stefan, seriously, I appreciate you talking to me.
	Oh, my pleasure. Thanks very much for calling in.
	Thank you. Alright, up next we have Kenneth.
	Kenneth wrote in and said, That's from Kenneth.
	Hey Kenneth, how are you doing tonight? Oh, not too bad.
	How about yourself? I'm doing well, thank you.
	And can you give me a little bit more details about what you mean?
	Okay, well, basically, for the 15 years of my adult life, I was what I would term a corporate mercenary.
	I worked with more than 30 corporations, both public and private, in a variety of different business relationships, from You know, 10th to permanent contract, consultant.
	I opened my own consulting firm.
	I basically worked in seven different ministries and agencies of the government and probably 15 or so international investment banks and various financial institutions.
	No, no, look, I'm sorry to interrupt.
	I don't want a resume. What I do want is...
	Okay, let me start, think a little bit more precise.
	Okay. So, if the question is, how does the free market deal with corruption?
	That, I think, is the essence of what you're...
	And I can lay out a couple of scenarios, and then maybe we can take it from there.
	So, corruption is that which is immoral and economically inefficient.
	So, if... Hang on.
	Let me make the case before you start pushing back against the very opening sentence, right?
	That's not an argument for me yet.
	So if you bribe a company to take your solution over the solution they otherwise would have chosen, then you are paying them to choose something that is less valuable to them.
	So let's say you pay $5,000 for them to buy your computer system.
	Then, clearly, they don't want your computer system, in the same way that a woman doesn't want to sleep with you if you have to pay her $100 to do so, or 75 cents in Venezuela, tragically, these days.
	So, corruption, just in terms of basic bribery, is economically inefficient.
	If you are a movie maker and someone bribes you, To cast their cousin in the lead role, then you don't want that cousin in the lead role because if the cousin was really great to be in the lead role, you wouldn't need to be bribed to take him.
	So bribery is economically inefficient.
	Now, if you have one company that is making its decisions based upon what is most economically efficient and another company that is basing its decisions on who bribes them, it's not hard to figure out who is going to succeed in a better way.
	In the long run. Is that fair to say?
	That there is an inefficiency in bribery that enriches the individuals, but has the company provide less value to its customers or have less satisfaction in its employees?
	And of course, if you're a decent person who works at a company and the company is corrupt, you don't want to be there.
	And so moral, decent, good people will not want to work at your company.
	And overall, your economic value is going to decline.
	Well, my whole argument about my definition of corruption is that people, when acting in economically pure ways, it's not inefficiency per se.
	It's actually the correct economic decision based on the way that our system is designed.
	Well, no, the question is not what correct or incorrect means.
	The question is, can you be honest?
	Right? The corruption involves lying.
	Right? Because you have to hide the fact that you're taking a bribe.
	You have to hide the fact that it is the bribe that is determining your decision.
	You have to pretend that a particular transaction is fair when it's not.
	And it's the lying part that is wrong.
	Would you agree? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	Like, I need to preface this all by I'm not a statist or a lefty or a social justice warrior or any other pejorative term that, you know, you might want to apply in this particular time.
	No, no, I'm not saying that.
	Let's just, no, hang on. I don't need the commercial.
	Let's continue with the argument.
	The nature of my question is...
	Sounds like it might be from a statist or a communist.
	No, no, I don't.
	Forget all of that. Let's just keep on with the debate.
	I'm a left libertarian, okay?
	Now, I know that's a kind of rare animal in today's...
	No, no, I don't care what label you're giving yourself.
	You could be a Martian.
	You could have tentacles for a nose.
	I don't care. Let's just have the argument.
	Okay, my argument is about the base corrupt nature of man.
	Okay, so you're not going to respond to anything I said, is that right?
	We're just having this parallel discussion where we both make speeches that are unrelated because I made a case here about economic efficiency and lying.
	And what's best for the company?
	And I made a case about who ends up staying with your company if you have to lie or people find out you're lying.
	So you're not going to respond to that?
	Is that my understanding? No, but I did try to respond to that.
	The case that I'm trying to make is that...
	No, you haven't. You gave me a big speech about how you're not a social justice warrior, and then you started talking about the fundamental corruption of man.
	You are not responding to the points that I make, which is fine.
	I just want to know that you know you're aware of that.
	Yeah. I told you already that my argument is not that corruption is inefficient in our economic system.
	That people acting in purely the economic interest of their corporation and in their own self-interest is actually contrary to what is good and ethical and decent.
	Yeah, but you're not responding to the argument that I have made.
	You're saying that, yes, okay, if people have an ethical problem at work, they should just quit and go to a place that doesn't give them...
	That's not what I said. Nothing to do. If you're not going to bother listening to me, like if you've just come here to speechify, I'm moving on to the next caller, because this is boring.
	I've been doing this long enough to recognize when a pattern is occurring.
	You're not listening. You're just waiting for me to stop talking so you can make a speech, and you're not going to engage in a debate with me.
	I'm actually trying to understand... Maybe I didn't understand the point that you were getting at.
	Well, okay, but why didn't you?
	I mean, I made a couple of arguments.
	Do you know what they were?
	Yeah, you said that, you know, if you take a bribe, you know, that's actually economically inefficient.
	You're not doing things for the right business reasons and that corruption is inherently not a good thing in a free market system.
	But my whole argument...
	Okay, so now, so hang on.
	That's not a bad way of characterizing what I said, and I appreciate that.
	So now, you can respond to that argument.
	So you can tell me how bribery is economically efficient for the company as a whole.
	You can tell me, if you want, how honest people will be happy working for a corrupt company.
	You can rebut my points if you want.
	I just don't want you to go off on some speech like I didn't say anything.
	Well, no. I think we have a fundamental disconnect in our definition of what corruption is.
	And maybe that's my fault for phrasing it in such a way.
	Okay, then tell me that you just do the argument.
	You keep describing the argument.
	Then tell me what your definition of corruption is or how mine is incorrect.
	Okay. To me, corruption is not necessarily just taking a bribe.
	It's not doing something unethical because it's going to personally benefit you.
	Like, that is corruption, certainly, but that doesn't encompass all definitions of corruption.
	Which, by the way, I never asserted it did, but I'm happy to expand what you're talking about.
	Well, that's the point that you started with, right?
	That is the point that I started with.
	When I say it's cold outside, I don't mean it's cold everywhere.
	I mean, you know, so yes, we can expand.
	But is it my understanding that you don't disagree with my definition, my first definition of an example of corruption?
	You'd just like to take it further? Oh, no, certainly that is a form of corruption.
	I don't think it's rampant in the kind of society that we both inhabit.
	I am Canadian, by the way.
	I spent most of my life in Toronto.
	You don't think corruption is endemic in Canada?
	I mean, maybe on the federal level with, you know, liberal politics.
	They're certainly well known for their...
	You don't think politicians buy votes by promising free spending on particular groups?
	You don't think that politicians buy votes from Muslims or other groups by promising more immigration?
	You don't think that people buy peace by paying off welfare?
	That people buy female votes by giving women what they want in the court system and what they want in terms of health care and what they want in terms of support for single motherhood?
	I'm trying to figure out.
	It seems to me the vast majority of society is based on corruption.
	Well, it is, but that goes back to my initial assessment of The inherent corruptibility of man.
	Wait, sorry. You said you don't think that there's a lot of corruption and then you say that man is inherently corrupt.
	I'm trying to understand how that works.
	Bribery of public officials.
	When you get pulled over by the police in Canada, you are not expected to give a bribe to the police officer to look the other way in the same way that it's endemic in many other cultures and countries.
	Yeah, no, the bribery goes from politicians to voters, not usually from voters to police or voters to politicians.
	I agree. Yeah, but in other places, that certainly is completely true.
	Sure, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, if you want to get a business license in India, you have to grease a lot of palms.
	Yeah, if you want to get a million dollar contract with the government, then yes, you do have to bribe people in certain ways that are not traceable necessarily.
	Okay, so let's not continue to come up with examples of corruption because I think we're all in agreement there.
	But you're saying that governments are less corrupt than the free market, is that right?
	Or less inefficient? Well, my problem is that I don't think that voluntary exchange In the libertarian sense is possible without the participation of fair actors.
	Okay, fair dealers.
	People that actually have principles and morals and act in a compassionate way.
	That realize that by fair dealing and ethical dealing that it actually has some sort of value in a business sense.
	Like far beyond what your immediate gain of...
	Sorry, I'm not following what it is that you're saying.
	Are you saying that there's less bribery if people are more honest?
	Or people should be more honest?
	I'm not sure what you mean. I'm saying that many people don't have the kind of dedication to philosophy and ethics that maybe you or I do.
	And that people are inherently corrupt.
	What do you mean by inherently?
	Do you mean like... Well, I'm a steadfast atheist, but I subscribe to the rational actor theory.
	Well, certainly in a corrupt environment, people will be corrupt.
	If the only way to survive or to flourish, you know, if the system is so weird, That people acting in their own rational – like if politicians can print money out of nowhere and can raise taxes and can buy votes, that's the way the system is.
	That's the way the game is. So expecting politicians to not do that as a whole – again, Donald Trump accepted so far – expecting politicians to not do that makes no sense, right?
	If bribery is legal, then people will bribe.
	If bribery is approved, then people will bribe.
	If there's no possible way you can get a contract without bribing people, then people will bribe.
	But the problem there is the system.
	I don't know that the individuals are at fault in the same way.
	My argument is that your solution is to abolish the state.
	My solution is to work on those systemic problems to try to eliminate the The incentives for people to engage in things that might be personally...
	Okay, no, I understand, but...
	Okay, first of all, my solution of a stateless society does eliminate those incentives.
	All the ones we talked about of politicians selling off country, culture, future, and demographics in order to gain votes here and now is eliminated without the state, right?
	We can accept that.
	If there's no state, there are no politicians.
	If there are no politicians and no voters, then there's no bribery.
	As far as that goes, right?
	In terms of buying votes with government money.
	There's no fiat currency. There's no national debt.
	There's no deficit. There's no taxation policy.
	There's none of that special interest group manipulation and predation upon the general body politic.
	It doesn't exist.
	And so for sure, what I talk about in terms of a state, the society eliminates the vast majority of what is really going on in the West in terms of corruption.
	Yeah, I certainly recognize your point, but my understanding of the nature of human beings, when you have a state and you have enforcement mechanisms in place, when you have a state and you have enforcement mechanisms but they're not efficient, then people will always make rational choices.
	I'm sorry, what do you mean by enforcement mechanisms?
	Laws. The rule of law.
	I believe in the rule of law.
	Like, I'm anarchist and I hate hereditary monarchy and whatnot.
	But I... Okay, I don't know.
	You're all over the place, man. Okay, come on.
	Let's just try and focus a little bit, okay?
	Make one argument at a time and let's talk about that.
	I mean, just this, like, wandering about stuff.
	I don't know what the point of that is.
	So, human beings, we're wired to survive and to flourish.
	Not to be virtuous.
	And what you want is a system wherein the virtuous have the most chance to survive and flourish.
	And the evildoers and liars and corrupt people have the least chance.
	Now, when you have a state, then corrupt people, I mean, good heavens.
	I mean, look at Bill Clinton.
	Look at Barack Obama.
	Look at George W. Bush.
	These people made fortunes out of being in the government.
	I mean, the Clintons, like, what, hundreds of millions of dollars?
	And so there is a system wherein corrupt people make an enormous amount of money.
	So if you want to flourish, corruption is a pretty good way to do it.
	But that's all related to the state.
	Now, if there's no state, that kind of political corruption can't occur.
	That doesn't mean that all corruption is eliminated.
	But that's who cares, right?
	I mean, if you are against lung cancer and emphysema and so on, then you want to convince people to stop smoking.
	And that's because that's the vast majority.
	The vast majority of lung cancer comes out of people smoking.
	The vast majority, you know, Andy Kaufman accepted, but the vast majority comes out of people smoking.
	Now, if you say, well, I really want to reduce lung cancer, so we're going to stop people from smoking and convince people to stop smoking, there's no point saying, well, but there will still be lung cancer, so there's no point.
	It's like, no, no, there is a point because the vast majority of it will be eliminated.
	And again, I'm fine with trying to convince people not to smoke, but I'm not fine with imposing certain laws that prevent people from smoking.
	What does that have to do with anything I just said?
	It's a proviso, right?
	No, no, listen. I'm a stateless society guy, so what are you talking about passing laws?
	And I also said many times in my conversation to convince people.
	Where are you pulling this, I want a law?
	There's a law being proposed? Well, I am not a proponent of the stateless society.
	I think that it is pie in the sky.
	I think that even post-apocalyptic...
	Wait, sorry, pie in the sky?
	Hang on, hang on.
	Do you consider the phrase pie in the sky to be an intellectual argument?
	Would you classify it, say, as inductive or deductive?
	Okay. I'm using a colloquial term to try to...
	How about you use an argument?
	Why don't you try using an argument rather than a colloquial term that's kind of insulting and not actually adding anything to the intellectual content of what we're talking about.
	Okay. From my personal experience...
	No, no. Your personal experience is not an argument.
	I need an argument.
	If you want to have a conversation in a show about philosophy...
	You have to make an argument.
	Your personal experience is not an argument.
	Pie in the sky is not an argument.
	Personal anecdotes are not arguments.
	Human beings are corrupt or human beings are fundamentally corrupt is not an argument.
	So, please, make an argument or I gotta move on.
	Okay. That people are fundamentally corrupt, this goes back thousands of years.
	You can call it original sin or, you know, I can paraphrase the life of Apollonius of Diana and say that A fool and his money are soon separated because man has a nearly unlimited capacity to prey on his fellow man.
	Do you think that having a government, a monopoly on the use of force and pretty much being above the rule of law, do you think that that would make people more likely or less likely to prey upon their fellow man if there's a centralized coercive agency like the state?
	I think that enforcement mechanisms are necessary No, that's not what I asked.
	What I asked is, if you think that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and want to prey on other human beings, does the existence of a state facilitate that preference or not?
	To certain types of criminals, yes, it facilitates that, absolutely.
	Okay, so if human beings are fundamentally corrupt, then the most corrupt are going to inhabit the halls of state power and use the power of the state to impose their predation.
	On others. So, this is the problem you face.
	If you think that human beings are bad, we can't have a state.
	If you think that human beings are good, we don't need a state.
	Either way, it's the same outcome.
	Well, human beings are mostly bad, but there are some good, ethical, honest, rational people.
	And you can't throw out the baby with the bathwater and say, well, the state has some bad aspects.
	Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not an argument.
	Have you done this before?
	I'm just kind of curious. Have you actually had a debate before where you use arguments rather than tired cliches?
	I'm just genuinely curious.
	I'm really just trying to take some rhetorical shortcuts here.
	I could expand, but every time I do, you seem to cut me off.
	All right. Well, with that, I'm going to cut you off because, I mean, if it's all my fault and you're not doing anything wrong, then clearly that's just a bad decision to engage in the conversation overall.
	Although I think it's very instructive when people relentlessly won't make an argument.
	It's like It's like I've got a voice to text on my YouTube comments.
	Alright, well thanks for the call-in anyway.
	I did enjoy it. So, let's move on to the next call-in.
	Alright, up next we have Theresa.
	Theresa wrote in and said, I was born in 1951 and that entitles me to the Boomer label, I am told.
	I am mystified as to why you speak so scathingly about this demographic.
	Could you expand on this for me, just so I understand the bias for my own future reference when it comes at me personally?
	I bring this up because, like many free thinkers, I do not own what others assume about me, and it might be fun to talk with you as a voice from outside the categories and statistics which you may or may not be referring to.
	I am also aware that your childhood traumas come from a mother who is probably a boomer, so that explains the emotions I hear in your voice when you blame the boomers for most of the ills of the world.
	For this, I have compassion.
	You are free to ask me anything about my childhood, my birthing and raising of my children, my marriage, my post-menopausal reality, my livelihoods, my political, spiritual, philosophical views.
	Perhaps you would agree that I am not really worthy of the boomer label, except for my age, which I can do nothing about, nor do I feel ashamed of.
	A conversation about being old might be helpful for you too.
	That's from Teresa.
	Hey Teresa, how you doing?
	I'm doing pretty good. How are you?
	I'm doing well. I'm doing well.
	Thank you. I appreciate the question.
	I'm going to take you to task because you asked me to.
	Well, I do want to hear it.
	I don't really want an argument.
	I'd just like to have a conversation with you about it.
	I don't think you do. I don't think, based upon what you wrote to me.
	Because, first of all, you don't bring up any of my arguments.
	Secondly, you call my perspective scathing and a bias.
	Right. Yeah.
	But you haven't actually told me where I'm wrong.
	You've just used negative language to characterize my arguments, right?
	Okay. And this cheap psychologizing of my mom, and that's why I get angry at boomers, that's not an argument.
	Do you understand? Oh, no.
	I'm just describing what I'm hearing when you speak about your past.
	I hear a lot of pain and Yeah, I mean, I've listened to enough of your conversations that I'm very aware that you had a really shitty childhood.
	I did, but my mother's not a boomer.
	Oh, okay. No, she's born, I mean, it depends where you start.
	I generally think of it as the post-war period, like sort of 1946 onwards, although some people put it a little bit earlier.
	But my mom was a decade almost before that, so she's definitely not a boomer.
	And I never think of her in that category.
	I mean, to me, the boomers generally come from countries not smashed up by the Second World War.
	I don't think of East Germans particularly as boomers.
	I think of it to a large degree as a North American phenomenon, although I know that demographically that's not entirely correct.
	And did she grow up in Ireland?
	No. No, she grew up in Germany.
	Germany, okay. Okay, and what happened to your dad?
	When? I mean, that's a big, you know, he's an old guy now, right?
	So I'm just trying to narrow it down to what you mean.
	Okay, well, he wasn't present for raising you?
	No, he left, I think I was about six months old.
	So he left before I knew he was there.
	Yeah, okay. Good.
	I was just wondering about that.
	I was actually like looking on Wikipedia to see if I could find out some facts about you, but nobody's talking about that.
	So thanks for sharing.
	No, of course not. Of course not.
	Of course not. So now, why would you be bothered if I speak scathingly of boomer characteristics that you do not possess?
	Why would you be bothered? Because obviously I've never said all boomers are X or this allows, you know, this is a generalization.
	You know, it's like if I say, well, you know, Chinese people tend to be short, and you're a Chinese person, I don't think you'd be offended, would you?
	No, I'm not offended.
	Like I said, I'm a free thinker, and I don't just own what other people say about some age set.
	You know, it's an age set, really.
	It's just a demographic age set, right?
	Yeah, like, I mean, I get this all the time when I say that atheists tend to be leftists and say, I'm not a leftist and I'm an atheist.
	It's like, well, then clearly I'm not talking about you, so why are you bringing this up?
	I mean, it's, you know, it's emotional.
	I do have some thoughts, though, about the demographic, if we can talk about generalizations.
	We can in a sec, but I'm just curious.
	I mean, how long have you been listening to this show?
	Um... I think I first heard you speak on Alex Jones way back in maybe 2008 or something.
	That kind of piqued my interest.
	When I was a little heavier and he wasn't, but all right.
	Yeah, go on. Oh yeah, but it was just listening.
	I didn't see what you looked like, so got no judgments about that.
	In fact, I just listened to the podcast.
	I really aren't That interest in watching the YouTube.
	It takes up too much bandwidth.
	I live in a rural area, so bandwidth is an issue, by the way.
	So, okay. So, I mean, off and on, let's say a decade or so since we first came into contact.
	And this is not specifically directed at you, although you are manifesting it a little bit here, Teresa, but I find this kind of baffling.
	Because, you know, people will post on my videos or will get messages or whatever.
	And they say, Steph, I'm a big fan, but you're an idiot.
	Or Steph, I'm a big fan, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And no argument.
	And so I find it, you know, I try not to get dispirited by this kind of stuff, Teresa, but sometimes it's a little tricky because if people are fans, they should be making arguments.
	So if you have an issue with stuff I say about the boomers, Then you should make an argument, right?
	So you should find something that I've said and you should find where my reasoning is incorrect or my data is incorrect or whatever.
	You shouldn't just say, well, Steph, you're scathing and it's a bias and it's mommy issues.
	Those aren't arguments. And that's why it's kind of dispiriting when I hear, oh, you've been listening for like 11 years.
	It's like, Steph, I'm a big fan.
	It's like, well, if you're a big fan, can't you make an argument?
	Because that's kind of what I'm all about.
	I don't want fans. I want people who can make arguments.
	And I'm just kind of curious as to why.
	Did you know that you weren't making any arguments here or what?
	Actually, my original communication to Mike about being on the show, I was responding to a question that you made when you found out about Weinstein.
	The sexual allegations and the casting couch issues.
	And you said, how can we enjoy watching movies?
	What do we do? How can we watch knowing what we know?
	And you know, I tend to talk back when I'm listening to you.
	And I thought it would be really fun to just be able to talk to you about the There are really fabulous movies out there that, you know, I don't watch the new ones as much.
	So it would be fun to talk about, you know, the really great movies that That I find useful to actually watch a few times, you know, to have as sort of the classic library.
	Okay, but Teresa, Teresa, hang on, hang on.
	What you emailed to my producer doesn't have any relevance to this conversation.
	Yeah, I know. So my question is, I'm going to ask it again, because I have great respect for women.
	I'm going to ask it again. Did you know you weren't making any arguments?
	But being a little bit insulting, right?
	Saying that I have bias and I'm scathing and it's mommy issues, right?
	Those are kind of a way of diminishing my...
	Um, my arguments without actually rebutting them.
	Okay. I'm up for it.
	I am. I'm up for it.
	Okay. So did you know you weren't making any arguments when you sent in a somewhat insulting message?
	Well, I was, I didn't feel like I was insulting you.
	I don't mean to insult you, but if I did insult you, I'm sorry for that.
	But here's the thing is I've got a little thing that I got off of a really great, um, uh, uh, It was like all the commenters, sometimes I get some really good comments.
	And this one came up yesterday when I was expecting to be on your show.
	And this guy said, the generation, quote unquote, is the most useless idea in journalism.
	There is no common origin or common experience.
	No one can choose to join it or leave it.
	No one supposedly in it has any responsibility for it or authority over it.
	It's a catch-all excuse for the prejudices of those who prescribe to it.
	I thought that was very succinct, actually.
	I don't find it useful to throw around, you know, terms like boomers because it's so general and it's really ignoring It's ignoring a lot, especially if you're into a blaming mode about a whole demographic.
	Not only a whole demographic, but the biggest demographic, right?
	So it's a big generalization.
	And if I'm allowed to, you know, express the other side of it, I would say that the boomer generation has done a whole lot of good things for society in general.
	And we can go through that.
	Yeah, let's hear the good things.
	All right, okay. Let's just start with one.
	There's a huge move towards holistic health, which came when I was a young adult.
	I was kind of swimming around in that because everybody else was, and just exploring You know, the poisons that are added to food and going for organic and using herbal treatments and more natural treatments rather than going big pharma.
	Sorry to interrupt. Would you say that the move towards holistic health, not sure what that means, but would you say that that's a general boomer phenomenon?
	Because what I see is boomers accepting and defending the FDA, which allows for unbelievable poisons and terrible things, and also for good medicines to be withheld from the public.
	I see the boomers fairly willing to have their children drugged.
	I see the boomers sitting over the DSM-4 or DSM-3, I guess, and then 4 and then 5, not raising much of a stink about things like the quackery of psychiatry and so on.
	I'm just trying to think what kind of general phenomenon this is.
	And of course, I also see the boomers presiding over the creation of socialized healthcare, in which doctors are paid for writing prescriptions rather than preventing disease.
	So if you have a healthcare system based upon insurance, then the insurance company wants to keep you healthy.
	So they'll take steps to keep you healthy and prevent you from getting ill.
	But if you have socialized healthcare, and by that I include more than half the money spent in healthcare in the States is the government's.
	So then you have a system wherein the doctors profit from you being ill, and they profit from treating you with pills rather than getting involved in your lifestyle.
	And so I'm not sure how I would look at the boomers who presided over this terrifying reversal of cause and effect in the healthcare system where doctors make money throwing pharmaceuticals at you rather than either preventing you from getting ill or dealing with things in a more detailed manner combined with the massive drugging of children.
	I'm not sure where I see as a whole this big holistic health approach.
	Well, okay, so the boomers You know, I hate using that term.
	Let's just talk about the demographic, okay?
	And we've got, we sort of agree on the dates, right?
	No, we're going to use the term boomers whether you like it or not, because that is the correct term for the post.
	Like, this is one of the few times in history where there was very little, hang on, this is one of the few times in history where there's very little blending when it comes to generations, because guys were away for war, they came back, and they all had like five kids apiece.
	Like in a couple of years.
	So there is a massive demographic boom.
	And so it is one of the few times in history where you can really characterize people by a generation because it is one of the few most clearly and most sharply defined generations in human history.
	Yes. Okay.
	So I'll use the word.
	I just don't like the word because I think that it's misunderstood and, you know, it gets a bad rap.
	I think the whole demographic got duped.
	I think we got predated upon by the social engineers and the marketeers.
	And it started right with, you know, diapers and bottles and all the stuff that they figured they could sell to the mothers of the baby boom.
	And it just went everything that this demographic was going through, from childhood to teenagehood to You know, adulthood, being a parent and et cetera, all the way through, all the way along, they were predated upon by the people that could make a ton of money selling things to them.
	And also...
	Are you saying that this was unique to the boomers?
	I think it really stepped up because the thing is that you could really access a lot of people all at once by targeting your advertising to just that one demographic.
	Hang on, hang on. Are you saying that the people who wanted to prey on others just magically appeared during the boomer phase and weren't around before or since in human history?
	I mean, every generation has to deal with the elders who want to prey on them, don't they?
	No, I'm not saying that at all.
	Those businessmen and political ideologies, I'm sorry, political idealists And, you know, the communists and everybody else that's been trying to engineer the society.
	You know, going back to eugenics and, you know, the whole...
	You know, you can go right back to a lot of the programs.
	Okay, sorry, we're on a bit of a ramble fest here.
	Do you think that from a younger generation standpoint, Teresa, do you think that when the boomers complain about being preyed upon, when they have dumped an unbelievable amount of national debt on the next generation, do you think that the boomers playing victim comes across as particularly credible?
	Well, we are victims when we have no power to change things.
	So I think as children, yes, we were victims.
	The boomers had no power to change things?
	Not when they're children, no.
	No, no, no. Of course not when they're children.
	But I mean, I'm not complaining about boomers when they were five.
	I never have, right?
	I'm talking about adults. Okay, I know that my personal experience isn't an argument, but I have lived I've worked in rural areas for most of my life.
	And my picture of my demographic is quite different than what's gone on in the cities.
	And I never was involved with the state.
	I tried very hard to just live under the radar.
	I was maybe what you might understand as being a member of a counterculture.
	I mean, I basically went...
	You went off the grid.
	Raised my kids in the bush.
	I was very... Hang on, hang on.
	So you went off the grid? I did.
	I went off the grid for many years.
	I homeschooled my kids.
	I gave birth at home.
	I raised my kids with...
	No, that's great. I appreciate that.
	I think your kids probably did very well out of that, certainly compared to what would have gone on in government schools.
	That's fantastic. I mean, good for you.
	But you didn't fight. And they got raised with two parents.
	No, you didn't fight. You weren't out there fighting.
	You say, oh, well, we were helpless to fight, but you weren't off the grid.
	You didn't fight. I mean, I could have gone off the grid, but I'm here fighting.
	Well, I fought in my own way.
	Then how did you fight? Oh, I got it from every angle, especially when I was raising kids.
	You know how homeschoolers get picked on?
	No, I don't. Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, and natural childbirth, choosing to have babies at home.
	I fought for my individuality.
	This is the boomer thing.
	Not for what you wanted.
	What did you fight for in society?
	Oh, well, I fought for what I wanted.
	Well, that's the whole problem.
	You're kind of manifesting the entire criticism.
	Not what did you fight for what you wanted.
	You wanted to homeschool your kids.
	You fought for that. Good for you.
	I'm not complaining. You wanted to have your kids at home.
	You fought for that. Good for you.
	So you fought for what you wanted.
	My question is, what did you fight for for the next generation outside of your own family?
	I raised three really great kids.
	Outside of your own family.
	They are the next generation.
	So it's their job to fight now.
	I did what I could where I was.
	I was in a rural area.
	I was never, ever up for getting up and taking to the streets or starting a podcast.
	I did it in my own way.
	What did you do?
	You're saying you fought, but what did you fight for?
	I fought for What did I fight for?
	Well, individuation.
	Which you wanted. I'm talking about society as a whole.
	Self-realization.
	That's what you wanted. That's good for you and good for you that you did it.
	But what did you do for society as a whole?
	You know, I'm not a collectivist.
	I feel that... No, no, no.
	Fighting against collectivism doesn't make you a collectivist.
	Come on. What's that?
	Fighting against collectivism doesn't make you a collectivist.
	What did you do outside of your own family?
	Okay. Well, if you want to hear what I think I did outside my own family, I could go into it in detail.
	Just give me the big picture.
	I could explain what I'm doing in 30 seconds.
	So just tell me what you did and what you're doing.
	Right. Okay.
	Well, I went for my own integrity.
	I went to learn...
	How to act from a true place.
	No, it's all about you.
	Well, of course it's all about me.
	Now that's the boomer thing.
	It's all about you. Oh, is it?
	Yeah. Now I understand why you're sensitive to my criticism of the boomers because you're manifesting all the worst qualities I've criticized.
	It's all about you. Okay.
	You want to be individuated.
	You want to be authentic. You want to do this.
	You want to do that. And the next generation can pick up the bill.
	Was Carl Jung a boomer then?
	Because he was talking about individuation and self-realization all through his life.
	Wait, are you comparing yourself to Carl Jung?
	Is that the plan here? I'm just saying, you know, it's not just a boomer thing to want to become...
	No, no, no, no. Come on.
	You want to start talking about Carl Jung?
	Well, pluses and minuses, but Carl Jung was...
	A psychologist, a therapist.
	He worked with Freud.
	He wrote huge numbers of books.
	He tried to educate people.
	He was a teacher. I mean, he did things for his society more than just, I want to have my kids at home and homeschool them and be like, are you going to put yourself in the category of Carl Jung?
	Fine. Then you have to have written a whole bunch of books, educated a whole bunch of people, suffered a whole bunch of slings and arrows getting out there fighting for truth in the world.
	Okay, I'm 66 years old.
	I've done a hell of a lot.
	I'm still waiting for you to tell me one damn thing.
	All right. I've painted a lot of pictures.
	I've written books.
	I have made a living and managed to raise children without going bankrupt or going on welfare.
	That's a big accomplishment right there, actually.
	So your contribution to the world is not going on welfare and painting pictures?
	You know, I offered actually to Mike, I offered for you to see a movie that was made about me so that you could maybe get a better picture.
	I'm glad that you painted pictures, Teresa.
	I really am. I think it's wonderful.
	Well, you're asking me what I did.
	But how did that fight the growth of the state?
	What's that? How did that fight the growth of the state?
	I didn't give them any of my power.
	See, that's all about you.
	Well, that's...
	What did you do to fight the science and power and growth of the state?
	Well, and so what you're doing is...
	Give me a hint here.
	No, no, see, look, Teresa, you know and I know and everybody listening to this knows that you didn't.
	And listen, I don't even mind that.
	I don't even, like, if you lived a life for yourself and you didn't want to get involved in fighting the science and power of the state, if you wanted to live a life where you painted and you wrote and you raised your kids and you homeschooled and so on, that's fine.
	Listen, I'm not saying, oh, that makes you a terrible person or anything like that.
	But it does mean that you did nothing to fight the mess which my generation now has to claw and bite and fight at great personal risk to try and reverse.
	You did not push back against the growing cancer of state power and many of your generation, not yourself particularly because you were more off the grid and so on, but many of your generation greedily sucked at the T to state power, grabbed everything they conceivably could and were more than willing to indebt the next generation For their pensions and their retirement and their healthcare and their benefits and the welfare so they didn't have to give money to charity as much and left a massive bill.
	State power, environmental degradation, massive entrenched bureaucracy, huge national debts, staggeringly enormous, over $200 trillion in America of unfunded liabilities.
	That came out of the boomer generation primarily.
	I didn't do that though.
	I didn't say you did. My question is, what did you do to stop it?
	What did you do to stop it?
	I created an alternative.
	You understand that's a very weak source there, right?
	No, I don't think it's weak at all.
	Okay, what did you do?
	Tell me what you did. Pardon me?
	Tell me what you did. I don't know what creative and alternative means.
	What does that mean? I do not live like a statistically typical boomer.
	I created an alternative.
	Yes. What does that mean?
	I use money as little as possible.
	As little as possible.
	I trade as much as I can.
	I barter. I buy things from neighbors and trade things.
	Okay, so you feel that, hang on, you feel that the military-industrial complex is somehow going to be brought down by the fact that you trade lawn mowing for eggs?
	It's going to bring itself down, Stefan.
	I'm not going to take that cross and bear it.
	Okay, so you don't have to lift a finger.
	It's going to crash, and the next generation or two is going to have to deal with it because you didn't want to do much about it.
	Well, you know what? There's another quote I have here that...
	This really famous guy says, hard times create strong men.
	Strong men create good times.
	Good times create weak men.
	Weak men create hard times.
	And so the cycle of history continues.
	And what does that mean?
	I have no idea what that has to do with what we're talking about.
	There's only one way you can attack this kind of beast.
	Yeah.
	And that is just disengage and create an alternative way of being.
	And that's what I did.
	And that's what I've been doing.
	Oh, I see. So the only way to win the battle is to run away.
	No, I'm not running away.
	I'm disengaging. Okay, potato, potato.
	So somehow, if you run away and you don't spend a lot of time convinced, if running away is a good thing, how many other people did you convince to run away and how hard did you work at trying to do that?
	I didn't run away. Okay.
	How many other people, Teresa?
	And listen, I appreciate you being in this conversation.
	I'm glad to have a chance to test my thesis.
	But if disengaging is the way to Fight the power, then how hard did you work to try and get other people to disengage?
	How many relationships did you put on the line?
	How many letters did the editor to the right?
	How much did you publish? How many people did you fund?
	How hard did you work to try and get other people to disengage?
	Or is disengaging something that you preferred to do and now you're calling it some sort of moral crusade?
	Do you want numbers?
	Because I can't keep track of how many letters to the editors of various newspapers I wrote over the years.
	Many. And how many were published?
	What's that? And how many were published?
	How many were published?
	Oh, probably over a dozen.
	All right. And I actually did, you know, come to think of it, the little town out on the west coast that I lived in was being threatened by a mega development, and it was a little heritage town, and nobody wanted it.
	And I had a big part to play in the defeat of that.
	Well, you used the power of the state to prevent people from building stuff?
	This is your big contribution to preventing the size of the power of the state from growing?
	No, I wrote letters to the editor.
	I talked to people just like you do.
	And people rose up en masse.
	And how did they prevent this from actually happening?
	Let me just think about it.
	When it came to voting for certain infrastructure, promises that these people had made, when it came to voting whether or not to let these people go ahead and do something that they said they were going to do, the vote was, no, we don't want it.
	So you used the power of the state to prevent people from building things in your town?
	The power of the state.
	Yeah. Didn't the state then forbid to give them a license or didn't give them the permission to do what they wanted to do?
	They wanted to completely change the nature of this little town against the wishes of the people that lived there.
	No, no, no. If it was against the wishes of the people who lived there, then no one would sell them the land to do it, no one would patronize the businesses that they built, and nothing would change.
	That's exactly what happened.
	They didn't sell- Oh, so you organized a boycott, but you said voting.
	Voting indicates a mechanism of state power.
	Now, if you're using the power of the state to buy any property rights, you're part of the problem, not the solution, right?
	Well, state power, it was a consensus among individuals who lived in this little town.
	And the consensus, if there was a consensus, then nobody would build there because nobody would patronize them and nobody would sell them any land to do so.
	And that's how it worked.
	And that's how it worked.
	They simply could not do business there.
	Well, then what did voting have to do with anything?
	It was... Voting amongst individuals within the community to decide on certain strategies of selling or not selling to these people.
	Voting had nothing to do with the state?
	It wasn't a state-run vote.
	It was a consensus agreement between the people of the town.
	I don't know about any of this.
	It sounds to me like you all voted to violate property rights, but that's neither here nor there.
	So you did something that you cared about your town.
	They didn't own anything.
	Hang on. You cared about your town.
	You didn't want your town to change, right?
	Right. Now, did America change from when the boomers first gained power as adults until more recently?
	The whole town called the West has irreversibly changed.
	Everything is changing all the time.
	Well, no, not according to the way you wanted your town to stay the same.
	Do you ever think that the next generation kind of wanted to inherit the same freedoms that you guys benefited from when you were younger?
	Well, that's what we were insisting on.
	We were insisting on our freedom to choose the way we wanted to live.
	You know, sometimes it's just on a smaller scale, Stefan, but, you know, it is about...
	It is about stepping up to the plate.
	Sometimes it's just different than being a podcaster.
	It still seems to me like you just barred people from wanting to build stuff because you didn't want the town to change.
	Well, the changes were not desirable.
	Right, and the changes in the West were not desirable.
	Welfare state, massive government programs, affirmative action, demographic change, national debts, unfunded liabilities, crappy schools, come on.
	You guys didn't grow up with any of that stuff.
	And you handed it to the next generation, collectively.
	You did not defend the freedoms that gave you all of the opportunities in the known universe.
	You were handed the glorious gift of a post-Second World War, largely liberal, relatively low tax, relatively free economy, relatively small government, relatively low debt, very few unfunded liabilities, and what you handed to the next generation was the exact opposite.
	And you're saying, but it's okay.
	I traded eggs for lawn mowing, so I did my part.
	No, what I'm saying is when you're referring to you, You're referring to a demographic, an age set that I happened to be born into.
	Didn't have any choice in the matter.
	I was lucky.
	I had parents that really cared for me.
	And they endeavored to give me everything that I needed to thrive.
	I can't be blamed for that.
	And I wanted to provide the same thing for my children.
	And I would say that it's a natural thing for people to want to provide a good life for their kids.
	So why didn't the boomers as a whole fight tooth and nail against the national debt?
	Why were they so greedy for more and more government programs?
	And why were they so comfortable with underfunded Social Security and old age pensions, which is now praying?
	It's like an anvil around the neck of the young.
	Why aren't they giving up their pensions saying, well, we didn't pay in enough.
	Why are they so happy to have all these unfunded liabilities?
	Why aren't they saying, no, no, no, we can't really go for healthcare.
	We certainly don't want Obamacare and all that kind of stuff because we didn't pay enough into it.
	We weren't responsible.
	We created a massive national debt and therefore we need to make sacrifices because it sure as hell wasn't the young who were responsible for all of that.
	I totally agree with you.
	I've been ranting like this for years.
	So you agree with me about the boomers who don't listen to that and make those sacrifices?
	Well, I don't care what demographic they come from.
	I just don't like those kinds of forces in the world.
	Wait, what do you mean you don't care what demographic they come from?
	It doesn't matter to me what demographic it comes from.
	I think this crap has been happening way, way, way further back than the 1950s.
	This crap has been happening all over the world.
	Okay, who presided over the massive growth of the national debt and the welfare war for state, the unfunded liabilities, the unfunded pensions, the crappy expansion of state power to the healthcare system, and the complete crapification of government schools?
	Who presided over that?
	Which generation? I think the generation term is not helpful.
	Why is it helpful to you?
	Well, no, we already went through this, right?
	Do you remember what I said? That the boomers who were born in the baby boom after the Second World War were one of the most sharply defined generations that ever existed in human history.
	So when you have a sharply defined category, it's not unreasonable to talk about that category.
	And you find it helpful to blame.
	The word blame is used when people don't like the word responsibility.
	Right. Blame is one of these emotional, and frankly, Teresa, it's a girl term.
	Okay. It's like bashing.
	Oh, you're just bashing the boomers and you blame the boomers.
	It's like, no, no, no, no. You guys voted.
	You had power.
	Let's try a different word.
	How about victim? Do I hold people responsible for their adult choices?
	Hell yeah! Because the boomers sure as hell held me responsible.
	For decisions I made as a child.
	Oh, you didn't study for your test.
	Well, you get an F. Oh, you didn't show up for school on the day of the test.
	Oh, you get an F. Oh, you disobeyed the principal.
	You get detention. Oh, you disobeyed the boomer.
	You get caned. I was held accountable as a child by the boomer generation.
	And now as an adult, I'm turning around and saying to the boomer generation, you're accountable.
	And now I'm full of bias and prejudice and I'm blaming people.
	You know, I got all that too when I was in school.
	Right. So you have exactly the right, if you got all of that in school, Teresa, you have exactly the right to hold those who did it to you accountable for their adult choices.
	If you are attacked physically for mistakes you make as a child, then surely people who made terrible mistakes as adults can be held accountable.
	And surely once we become adults, we need to take responsibility for our own decisions in our life.
	Right? That's what I'm talking about with boomers.
	We agree on that one.
	So the boomers did not fund all the goodies they wanted should the boomers get the goodies that they want.
	Should the young be forced to pay for the political programs the boomers wanted?
	Hell no. Okay, well then we're in agreement.
	Do you think many boomers would agree?
	See, the boomers, well, the elder generation is often comfortable sending the young off to war.
	What about when the young turn to the old and say, well, you failed to fight the necessary battles to keep the state small, so we are not going to be held responsible for the promises that you wrung out of governments by voting for people who wanted bigger and bigger government and more and more spending.
	You try cutting back on a social program that affects the boomers.
	What happens? You try cutting, like, imagine, imagine this.
	Imagine being a politician and saying something like this.
	The young should not be held accountable for the political decisions grown adults made with easy access to libraries.
	The young should not be sold into serfdom, into virtual enslavement in terms of national debts and unfunded liabilities.
	The young are not responsible since they weren't even born when these political decisions were made.
	The young should not be held accountable for the decisions that Grown-ass adult voters made.
	And therefore, since the boomers chose not to fund the programs that they wanted, since the boomers chose to kick the can down the road, since the boomers acted with full economic knowledge of this underfunding, if the boomers refused to pay for that which was promised to them, the young should not be held accountable for the boomers' self-delusions.
	I'm not sure- Therefore, the boomers need to make sacrifices and they need to recognize that it is unjust and wrong to prey upon the young who weren't even born when these decisions were made.
	So I'm going to cut back and claw back benefits to the boomers.
	How long do you think that politician's career would last?
	Well, it wouldn't last very long.
	You know, we're both on the same page as far as the state goes.
	I don't think I, I mean, I don't want anybody telling me How I should live my life.
	I'm not, you know, I don't think that the state, whether they were boomers, you know, I mean, Clinton was the first boomer president, right?
	He's the guy that broke into- He was not the first president that the boomers voted for, for God's sakes.
	No, but he was the first boomer president.
	No, he wasn't. The first boomer president occurred when the boomers started to vote, at least that's when they first began to have an influence.
	On politics. Oh, yeah.
	And that was in the mids, early to mid-60s.
	Yeah, well, I'm not American, so I never voted for Clinton anyway.
	But my point was that Clinton, the first boomer president, he was the one that broke into the pension funds and spent it all, the pensions that people had been paying into.
	That's why that money isn't there.
	It was spent to balance the books, to make him look better.
	And did the boomers then vote him out and vote in somebody who was libertarian?
	Yeah, I mean, if you- No, no, they didn't.
	That the state can make decisions for you, and the state can make decisions for society, then, you know, you're gonna keep trying, keep voting harder, Because maybe you'll hit it.
	Eventually, you'll find somebody that can tell you what to do properly.
	I don't have any faith in voting in politicians.
	I really don't have any faith in them.
	So far, they've shown me no reason to believe in what they do or decide for me.
	I only follow the laws that I have to follow.
	And that's the way it is.
	Do you know how many times, Theresa, You use the word I, me, my town, I do this, I self-actualize, me, me, me.
	Right. It's all about you.
	You bet. Not about society as a whole.
	You bet. This is my life, and you're having your life, and this show is all about you.
	I mean, we all... This show is all about me?
	Yeah, you bet. This is your show.
	Oh, I think that's what they call projection, Teresa.
	Okay. Cool!
	But do you mean I'm the only self-realized person in this room?
	No, you misspoke.
	You don't mean self-realized, you mean selfish.
	Because it's all about you.
	I don't mind being selfish.
	I know you don't mind being selfish.
	That's my whole point.
	Remember Ayn Rand? Are you saying the boomers are big fans of tiny government?
	Of libertarianism, of objectivism?
	Trust me, I've talked to boomers my whole life.
	You bring up Pine Ranch, you do not get.
	It's like they read the title of the book, The Virtue of Selfishness, and then just said, oh, well, then it can all be about me.
	Well, the thing is, there were so many boomers that there's so many different kinds of boomers.
	I live in this little town.
	It's a really little town.
	There's 150 households here.
	And a large majority of them are in their 60s.
	So we're kind of like a boomer town here.
	And, you know, the people that are living here, they're all hardworking individuals.
	You ask them how they got to where they are, they all had, you know, hard jobs, every one of them.
	They weren't welfare bums.
	And they really didn't like what was happening with the state, most of them individualists, country people.
	So there's a whole other section of boomers that you're missing here.
	Yeah, but you ain't one of them.
	Because you said you're very happy and proud to be selfish and that it's all about you.
	Well, ish, selfish, self-realized.
	No, no, I said selfish and you said you were fine with that term.
	So don't start weaseling out with me with this self-actualized crap now, right?
	Yeah, well, it's okay.
	You can use whatever term you want to.
	No, I'm using the term you agreed to.
	Okay. Whatever.
	And now we have the whatever, which is you don't like what I'm saying, so you're disengaging.
	And this is the frustrating thing.
	Boomers can't be corrected because they can just disengage whenever they don't like where a conversation is going.
	Boomers don't like subjecting themselves to any larger rules or responsibilities there for themselves and for their family.
	And, you know, you did a good job with your kids, I'm sure, and that's fantastic.
	But as far as larger society goes, they've just got their noses in the trough.
	And they will growl and snarl and claw at anyone who tries to get between them and their unjust gains.
	And that is my problem. And you've done nothing to change my view of boomers.
	In fact, I'm afraid it's more reinforced now than before our conversation.
	That having been said, I really do appreciate the conversation.
	I think it was very illuminating, but I will move on to the next caller.
	Thank you. Okay. Okay, up next we have Bill and Alice.
	They wrote in and said, I guess the crux of the issue is determinism.
	My fiancé and I both come from a long line of broken families from an Indian reservation.
	Has the multi-generational failure of our ancestors to maintain stable family units imprinted into deep upon us the self-destructive urge to break our family apart?
	I believe that we all have free will, but has joining our hundreds of years of combined nature and nurture towards brokenness created conditions that make it improbable for our family to succeed.
	That's from Bill and Alice.
	Alright, how you guys doing today?
	Good. Yeah, we're good still.
	Alright, alright, alright.
	So, how do you think this is bubbling up for you guys?
	Well, there'll be times when we do things that we're not necessarily proud of.
	Say we yell at each other and, you know, even in front of our children we get angry and yell at each other and we regret it later.
	So I know it's not something we're approving of if we're regretting it later.
	Sorry, go ahead. We're both Native American.
	And my partner has lived on the reservation his whole life, and I'm a Native American who has not.
	I grew up in Virginia.
	And so I see a lot of differences in our lifestyles, and we butt heads a lot about our backgrounds and things like that.
	Can I ask an entirely cliched question for which I apologize in advance?
	Yes. Okay, thanks.
	No alcohol, right?
	You guys don't drink? No.
	No, not at all. Okay, good.
	I just wanted to get that out of the way.
	We're probably the first in our line, though.
	No, it's horrible.
	It's one of these great tragedies of human biodiversity that European whites, you know, biologically can handle alcohol relatively okay.
	But there's something freaky going on.
	Well, not freaky. It's just lack of exposure to the enzymes.
	With Native Americans, so Indigenous, that alcohol is not a friend, not a friend at all.
	But okay, good.
	Now, what was your experience on the reservation?
	How was that like growing up? I mean, I have my own brief, well, not that brief, I guess, knowledge or experience of the reservation system and what it's like, at least up here in Canada.
	But how was it for you?
	I guess I could compare it to something like almost like a Inner cities for blacks almost.
	It's like a really strict male dominance hierarchy.
	So growing up as a male there, it's definitely hard because all the boys there are basically competing against each other as far as not just grades or the ability to succeed.
	It's more along the lines of basically who's the most violent or the best predator, I'd say.
	So you grow up in that kind of environment, and it kind of, I guess, hardens you a little bit.
	Then you do try to move to another place or go to school later on.
	It's like the skills that you've picked up throughout your childhood aren't the ones that are a benefit to you.
	Now, it's interesting because you say it's sort of male-dominated hierarchy, but it's a lot of single moms, isn't it?
	Yes. I'd say the fatherless rate's probably...
	Along the same lines as, like, the inner city, I'd say, with the blacks.
	Now, are the dads around at all?
	Or are they, like, really gone?
	It can be as the dad lives down the street and never sees his kid.
	Like, things like that. Because the reservation's so small that, like, the dads are there.
	It's just, they're just... Maybe you might see them in passing in the street, but...
	I mean, they don't live with you.
	They're not present for your birthdays and things like that.
	So, so close.
	Like, I mean... My dad was gone, but he was gone to Africa.
	And so not seeing him was somewhat understandable, just geographically, but was that the case with your dad, like he was around but not around?
	No, my father passed away when I was about five years old.
	Oh, how? What did he die of?
	He got cancer.
	Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, thank you.
	Was it lifestyle-related, or mostly just out of nowhere?
	Yeah, it was kind of out of nowhere.
	He was really into fitness.
	He was a jogger.
	He worked out all the time. He owned his own business.
	He took care of himself pretty well.
	It just kind of snuck up on him and they told him, you know, you got like six months to live.
	Wow, that's rough. Was he a pot if you shouted at all?
	Yeah, he was there.
	Him and my mom were married.
	They got married when I was like three or four.
	So they were married.
	He was there as far as I can remember until he died.
	Right, right. So, unusual, I guess, relative to your friends as a kid?
	Yeah, definitely.
	Most of my friends, their dads have taken off on them.
	I guess all I can say is mine didn't have the chance.
	I'd like to think that he would have stuck around and I would have had the two-parent home, but I guess he didn't get the chance to show that.
	It sounds likely.
	I mean, it sounds like a high IQ kind of guy.
	And, uh, that's a, that's a good legacy to have, right?
	I mean, that's a, that's different from a lot of where your friends would be coming from, which is, I guess, the same with the inner city as well.
	And, um, now for, for you, Alice, not growing up on the reservation, how much was the sort of cultural or indigenous background part of your upbringing?
	Um, my mom is about 40% Native American.
	And she brings a lot of the lifestyle from the reservation.
	I mean, she's different, as in she's a hard worker.
	I mean, she had morals before my parents were divorced, but it seems like she just was stuck in the cycle that she brought from the reservation.
	Like, she comes from broken homes, and the divorce rate is high.
	And her mom didn't raise her, her mom's sister raised her.
	And so her mom was a drug addict and an alcoholic, so she was born like a drug baby.
	And so she did try her best, but I just feel like she could never break the cycle of where she came from.
	Right, right, right. And in terms of stability for your parents, respectively, growing up, how did that strike you?
	What was your sort of sense of what their adverse childhood experiences might have been in terms of the score or how stable you think their upbringing might have been?
	Both their upbringings were pretty unstable.
	Um, my dad is of European descent and, um, his dad left his mom when he was eight.
	And so he's from a divorced family and my mom, her dad was abusive and he was an alcoholic and he had diabetes.
	And so he, she would regularly see him beat her mother or her, you know, who she thought was her mother for a long time, who was actually her mother's sister.
	You want now that last bit, can you just rewind me that?
	Oh, yes. I'm not sure where I cut off her mother's sister.
	Just the family tree thing there.
	Okay, okay. Her mom was an alcoholic and a drug user, and so her mom gave her up at three days old to her real mom's sister, so her aunt raised her.
	And the weird thing was, The dad that raised her was her real dad, but he had gotten the sister pregnant, and so her real mom's sister raised her, and her dad was an alcoholic.
	So wait, the dad cast an edit between the two sisters?
	Yes. Yes, that's a reservation.
	That's prevalent.
	Was either of those sisters named Elizabeth Warren?
	I'm sorry, I just couldn't get through the conversation without bringing her up at least once.
	I appreciate your intelligence.
	I just had to get that off my chest.
	And what's your relationship like with your respective parents these days?
	I recently stopped speaking to both of them because I feel like they're like children.
	Like, they're stuck in the traumas of their childhood, and it's really hard for them to parent, and they haven't really been parents since I was a teenager when they divorced.
	It became more of, like, me, me, me, like how you talk about the baby boomers.
	Well, my dad's an actual baby boomer, but my mom's not.
	She was born in 1967, but I feel like they are all about themselves, and they left their kids, you know, in the wake.
	Right. I'm sorry to hear that.
	I really am. And how many kids do you have?
	My mom has two, and my dad has another one from a previous marriage, or his first marriage, sorry.
	Okay, okay, got it.
	And with regards to the kids, where are you in terms of peaceful parenting, reasoned parenting, non-yelly at the kids, non-hitting the kids?
	Um... I would say that I'm worse.
	Bill, he talks to the kids.
	He doesn't spank. I'm more of the one that spanks and disciplines and yells and I think it's because my dad was like that.
	His mom basically beat him as a child.
	She was a single mom and she took out all her stuff on him and I feel like I should be a better parent to my kids than I am.
	Yeah, because by the logic if you stop talking to your father Because of his aggression towards you, then you're basically, aren't you setting up your kids to do the same thing to you?
	Yes. So, you know, this is the challenge when you have high standards with your parents and you say, well, you know, I don't have any contact with my parents or I have a limited relationship with my parents because of what they did to me as a kid.
	If you're doing anything similar to your kids, how are you going to answer them when they say, well, wait, you cut off dad because he was mean, but you were mean.
	I mean, wouldn't that be pretty heartbreaking to go through all of this and then not even have a strong relationship with your kids when they grow up?
	Yes. In my opinion, though, like, I have...
	I step away, you know, where my dad didn't...
	He just hit me, you know, spanked me with a belt until he wasn't angry anymore.
	Like, I find myself to where I stop myself, you know, most of the time.
	Like, 50% of the time, I'm like, don't need to spank your child over that or, you know, that you don't need to do that, that I... I think about it before I do it, and my dad never did.
	And I understand that I shouldn't, I mean, I probably shouldn't spank because it doesn't seem to work anyway.
	Well, actually, did your father have as a value not spanking?
	No, he spanked.
	So in a way, Alice, you understand.
	In a way, you're more morally responsible for spanking than your father, who did not have it as a value to not spank him.
	Yes. Because you know this saying that people have about their parents, oh, they did the best they could with the knowledge they had.
	Well, if your father didn't even have the value in his head of not spanking, I think he's less responsible in a way than you who have a value in your head called not spanking because you're not doing the best you could with the knowledge you have, right? Yes.
	So, it doesn't work.
	It's very unpleasant. So why do you do it?
	I think for me, it's like anger in the moment as well.
	And, you know, my child may have hit his sister or, you know, yelled at me.
	Oh, you've got to hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Oh my goodness. You've got to see this though, right?
	You're complaining that your child is hitting the other child?
	Yes, I understand that I spanked him and maybe that's where he learned it from, but What do you mean, maybe that's where he learned it from?
	Does he see a lot of other hitting?
	No, he doesn't, actually.
	But it's mostly... I think with boys, too, it's part of their testosterone, and I know that he's a...
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Do not blame the victim.
	Come on. Oh, I'm not...
	No, this is like, well, of course I had to beat my wife.
	The food was cold. You know, I mean, if she simply bought me the beer at the correct temperature, I wouldn't have to beat her.
	If he wasn't a boy, if he didn't have testosterone, I wouldn't have to hit him.
	Come on, you can't blame masculinity for your failure to control your temper.
	You can't blame the hormonal system of your little boy.
	I mean, you can, but I won't stand for it, right?
	I think boys hit each other, whether they see it or not, also in the home life as well.
	No, no. I have some good friends.
	They have three boys, all under the age of eight.
	They are peaceful parents.
	They know this show, of course.
	I have never seen their boys be aggressive with each other.
	Their boys are very helpful to each other.
	Their boys are kind to each other and considerate and thoughtful.
	Now, there will be accidents.
	They play rough. But I've never seen it be intentional.
	Don't normalize the effects of you hitting your children on masculinity as a whole.
	That's not fair. If you have this view of boys, Alice, then you will be more likely to hit your boy, right?
	Is it fair to say you hit your boy more?
	He's older, so yes.
	I don't spank my younger one.
	I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
	Are they both boys or boy and girl?
	It's a boy and a girl.
	Boy and a girl. Okay. And so if you have this view that boys are rougher and need to be hit more, then you understand that's causal in your boy becoming what you think he is.
	Like you treat him in a way that he's more aggressive, so you hit him, and then he becomes more aggressive.
	Ah, you see? But you're causing it.
	Right? It's like the neurotic boyfriend who kind of trails you around the house.
	I know you're going to leave me.
	I know you're going to get sick and tired of me.
	I know you're not going to stick with me.
	I know you're not going to stay with me.
	And then eventually you're like, you know what, I'm leaving.
	I knew it! And let's say that you're right, though.
	Let's say that you're right in your evaluation that boys are.
	They do have a tendency to be more aggressive.
	Then you would be better off spanking your daughter than your son.
	Because if boys have a tendency to be more aggressive, then being more aggressive with them will make it even worse.
	Does that make sense? Yes, it does.
	It activates those genes.
	I'm sorry, Bill? Oh, I was just saying it activates the genes and, you know, like the...
	Oh, yeah. The whole warrior gene thing.
	You don't know what kind of kid you've got, right?
	I mean, if you've got a kid with the latent warrior gene and you're hitting them, oof, welcome to teenage hell, right?
	Now, Bill, I mean, you know Alice is a spanker, right?
	Yeah. So, what are you doing about it?
	I've tried to have the conversation where, I guess, in negotiations at the moment, we talk about it, but it's...
	It's kind of like a moment of anger thing, and then afterwards I try and have the conversation.
	It doesn't happen super frequently, but I'm not around for most of the day, though.
	But we have the conversation when it does happen.
	I don't really approve of the spanking.
	I don't think it works, and I just don't really find it to be the moral thing to do either.
	Right. Now, Alice, if you were having a conversation trying to negotiate something with Bill and he hit you, what would you think?
	I would think that he's a grown adult male and I wouldn't stand for it.
	Right, so he would be utterly wrong in hitting you for disagreeing with him.
	Yes. Now, he's responsible for not hitting you because he's an adult, right?
	Yes. So why are you not responsible for hitting your kids?
	You're the adult. Yes, I am responsible.
	I should hold myself to a higher standard and control my temper better.
	I should step away for a while.
	Well, what are you teaching? What are you teaching your son by hitting him?
	What are the lessons he's absorbing about how to deal with problems and conflicts and difficulties?
	What are you teaching him?
	What are you modeling for him? About how to deal with the world and people when he gets angry.
	I'm teaching him to have outbursts and I'm starting to see that in him and his temper that he never used to have.
	Right. And what's going to happen when he gets bigger than you?
	I don't know. Sure you do.
	Hopefully I can stop.
	No, the bigger person gets to hit.
	Isn't that what you're teaching him?
	Or the authoritative figure, that's what I'm teaching him.
	Oh, no, no, no. Listen, no, no, no.
	When you hit your child, you are not an authoritative figure.
	You are clearly somebody who's lost control.
	You lose your authority when you hit.
	Are you trying to say that if your husband hit you, you think he has authority?
	No, not as to adults, but I mean, as the mother or father figure, having authority.
	No, but you don't have authority.
	Hang on, hang on. You don't have authority as a mother, right?
	Yes, you do. No, you have authority as a mother.
	No! All the time.
	Are you still talking to your father right now?
	No, I could talk to him about a week ago.
	So, are you saying that your father has authority as a father or does he have to actually have particular behaviors in order to have that authority?
	I meant as him being a father and me being a child.
	Well, hang on. Does he want you to call him?
	I don't think my dad really, um, he kind of cares, but he doesn't act like he cares.
	My dad, he smokes pot a lot and he just, he just cares about himself.
	So he does not have authority because he's a father.
	He does not have authority to command you because he's a father.
	Not anymore. Right.
	So the only authority that he had when he was younger was he was bigger, possibly meaner, and controlled the resources, right?
	Yes. But that's like saying a prison guard has authority.
	He doesn't. He just controls consequences.
	I think he controls legalities, too.
	He's the legal guardian. Sure, absolutely.
	But that is another way of controlling consequences.
	That's not authority, that's power.
	And you don't want to, like if you have authority over your child, your child will respect what you say.
	If you have power, your child will comply with what you say.
	But they won't respect you.
	Which means that they'll continually be looking for an out, a way to avoid your control, to avoid your power.
	Like, I'll give you a tiny example.
	So when I was a kid, when I was very little, I don't know, maybe four or five or whatever, my mom always said, brush your teeth.
	And of course, because I was a kid, I didn't like brushing my teeth.
	Plus, you know, back then toothpaste was pretty crappy.
	It was like brushing your teeth with chalk that left a bitter taste all night.
	And so I would go and I would like rub Toothpaste over my teeth and gums, because she'd say, let me smell your breath, right?
	So I was continually avoiding brushing my teeth.
	And then, of course, it struck me, as I think it does to any sensible kid, well, wait a second.
	If I get a toothache, who's suffering?
	Me. If I have to have a cavity drilled, who's suffering?
	Me. Now, my mother had not made that connection for me, and so she had to run around trying to get me to brush my teeth and trying to make sure that I'd brush my teeth.
	Now, once I internalized that, my mother never once had to tell me to brush my teeth again.
	Do you see the difference? Yes.
	You don't want to be, brush your teeth.
	You want to be, here are the consequences if you don't brush your teeth, and here's why you should.
	Because that way the values or the behavior is internalized and transferred to your son, right?
	Yes. But if you hit him, what have you proven?
	You've proven that you're bigger and meaner.
	That diminishes your authority.
	I mean, would you want to take advice from somebody who hit you, Alice?
	No. Of course not.
	I did as a child, so.
	I mean, I don't condone hitting.
	I know what I'm doing is wrong, and I know that I need to stop.
	Well, hang on. Let's go back to what you just said.
	You said you did as a child?
	You happily took advice from someone who hit you?
	I took advice from my father, yes.
	And what good advice did your father give you that you took and accepted?
	You mean from spanking?
	You mean advice like from spanking?
	No, no, I just mean...
	Why he spanked me?
	If your husband hit you, you would be very unlikely to think he was a wise person and take good advice on how to live from him, right?
	Yes. I mean, as an adult, I can differentiate from that than as a child listening and, you know, listening to my father.
	As an adult, I know...
	Yeah, but if someone's going to hit you, the listening is never unconditional.
	If you get hit for disobedience, then obedience is always conditional upon the fact that you're going to get hit.
	You can't listen freely to someone who has in their arsenal of interaction and their behavior the capacity to hit you.
	Because you're jumpy, because you're focusing on the fist rather than the voice, right?
	And so if you want to have authority with your children, Hitting them is the exact wrong thing to do, which is why hitting doesn't work.
	Hitting will get you maybe immediate compliance, but 10 minutes later, 15 minutes later, 20 minutes later, the same behavior erupts again, right?
	Because nothing has been learned other than fear and avoidance.
	And it means that when you hit a child, you lose the capacity to motivate them through respect, through genuine authority.
	I mean, you wouldn't be calling me up if I screamed at people, right?
	If I abused people.
	You call me up, I think, because I'm reasonable.
	I have useful things to say.
	I'm not abusive, even when I strongly disagree with people, even when they annoy the crap out of me, which has happened once or twice, even tonight.
	But you call me up because I have important things to say that may help you.
	And because you know for sure, I'm not going to be abusive, right?
	Right. But if you heard me being abusive, like it's Skype, you can kind of hit people.
	But if you heard me being abusive, wouldn't I lose all my authority?
	You might have less callers.
	No, but to you. Wouldn't you be shocked?
	Because it's not me who has authority.
	It's the arguments that have authority.
	If I attempt to substitute personal abuse for recent arguments, I lose all authority because you can't abuse people into giving you respect.
	You can abuse them into being frightened of you.
	You can hit them into being scared of you, but you cannot abuse people into respecting you.
	I mean, there's this conflation, you know, fear and respect and so on, but that's just people pretending that they're doing something halfway decent other than terrifying their kids, right?
	Like politicians? Yeah.
	So, the reason I'm saying all of this is, and I know that you know this, but of course there are other people listening to this conversation as well.
	I know you know all of this. But the reason that I'm saying all of this is because they really want you to enjoy being a parent.
	And... If you have authority with the people around you, and authority is not a hierarchical thing fundamentally.
	It's involved in that sometimes.
	But my wife has great authority with me.
	I have great authority with her.
	My daughter has authority with me about certain things, how to draw a dragon, right?
	And I have authority.
	So it's a mutual thing.
	It's not just like a power thing.
	Although, of course, when you're an adult and they're a kid, there's more knowledge, more experience, and so on.
	But wouldn't it be great?
	The thing I hear the most from moms is this incredible frustration at not being listened to.
	Does that happen for you too?
	I'm sure that happens for all moms.
	Well, not all.
	Not the ones who don't hit.
	But that's the most frustrating thing is being stuck in this revolving loop, nightmarish scenario.
	Where you just, don't you feel like you spend half your day just trying to get distracted kids to listen to you and just do what you need them to do?
	Yeah, I'm a stay-at-home mom, so it's pretty much all day.
	Right, right, right.
	And that's not fun, is it?
	No. I'm not saying being a mom as a whole, but I'm saying that part of it.
	Of just running yourself ragged, getting hoarse, just trying to get kids to do what you want them to do, and they don't listen.
	And then you feel, okay, what do I do?
	I need them to do something.
	They're not listening. What do you have other than escalation, right?
	Raise your voice. Threaten.
	Threaten to withdraw privileges.
	Threaten to hit. Hit. You need them to do something, they're not listening.
	I mean, it's mad frustrating for a lot of moms.
	And it happens to dads too, but I hear it a little bit more from moms.
	I don't want that to be your day.
	I don't want that to be your day, because that's not fun.
	And there's enough about parenting that's just kind of grindy.
	It's like life. You know, there's enough about life that's just kind of grindy.
	You know, like, what was it the other day?
	I had to talk to my accountant.
	I had to take my car in for servicing and to get the winter tires put on.
	And then I went to the dentist.
	And it's like, oh. Oh, joy.
	What a lovely day that was.
	Actually, it was okay. Driving around with my daughter, so we had good chats in the car.
	But... I don't mean to over-explain, but let me give you a tiny example from my own life.
	So... I think it was yesterday.
	Oh God, the day's blur. I feel like I'm trying to run after an airplane of current events and try to catch up all the time.
	It was just yesterday.
	I've been doing a lot of work lately.
	I did a great chat with Tom Woods today and then I recorded two hours of The Truth About Charles Manson.
	Now I'm doing the show tonight. It's a lot of work.
	The other night I'm up at 1 o'clock in the morning recording something on the new congressional scandal.
	And it's work. And for my kids, he's grinding through book after book talking about child rape with Manson and all that.
	And it's really important stuff.
	So I've been home a lot.
	And I like to get out of the house.
	I really do. So I said to my daughter, let's go trampolining.
	And she's like, eh, I'm kind of low energy.
	Now, I normally am like, I'm pretty easygoing as far as that stuff goes.
	But I was just like, you know what? I've basically been home for four days.
	You know, for me, being home is like not changing your underwear.
	Like, after a while, like, I gotta get out the spatula and the hammer and peel it off.
	I just gotta get out. And so, I sort of tried to say, you know, could we or would it be?
	And she was like really kind of, eh, right?
	And that's a conflict, right?
	I want to do so. I can't go trampolining without her.
	Not that I would. You know, I would go somewhere else.
	But I needed her to come.
	My wife was walking. And I ended up having to talk to her about, and I was saying, you know, like, I'm frustrated because I don't normally say, let's go somewhere.
	I really need to go somewhere. But I, you know, I do think, I said, I think if I, like, if you were really dying to go somewhere and I was kind of 50-50, I'd probably say, okay, you know, if it was really important to you.
	And I don't make a lot of demands.
	I don't say, you know, well, we've got to go and do this.
	I mean, if there's stuff like going to the dentist or whatever, then you have to do it.
	But I don't make a lot of demands.
	And I said, you know, my concern sometimes is that if I don't make a lot of demands, people ignore the demands that I do make.
	Like if I'm not insistent about a lot, then when I am insistent, people can just brush it off.
	And I said, that's, and we talked about, like, has that ever happened with friends of yours?
	Or has that ever happened with me or mom or whatever we talk about?
	What it is to have demands, what it is to want something which the other person doesn't want to do.
	And I said, you know, like, you're an only kid, and you have two accommodating parents, and so I don't know that you often have to kind of step out of what you feel like doing and experiment because someone else wants to do something.
	And, you know, we talked, and it was a great conversation.
	You know, it was a conflict.
	Now, I could have said, you know, just, I mean, I wouldn't have, but I could have said something like, listen, Just get at the car, we're going.
	You know, and the funny thing is, is that we would have had a great time, even if we'd done that, but it would have been spoiled a bit.
	Because then you're in this impossible situation if you want to go someplace and have fun, but if you're going to kind of, you're going to muscle your kids into doing it, then they don't want to do it and it's not fun anymore.
	It's like you have to try and preserve the fun at all costs, because otherwise it's just proximity and blech.
	So we chatted about it for a while.
	Now, I wasn't chatting about it with her, with the goal of saying, we're going trampolining.
	But I was talking about being frustrated.
	And I did cite a whole bunch of other times where I'd wanted to do something and she hadn't wanted to do it.
	And I've been like, okay. Or, and I also cited a bunch of times where she had wanted to do something.
	And I didn't really want to, but I did.
	And it was a great conversation.
	And of course, as it turns out, like everyone, she'd had situations with friends or others.
	Where she'd wanted to do something and they hadn't or whatever, vice versa.
	And it's complicated. You don't want to be always doing what other people want.
	You don't always want other people to be doing what you want, but there are times where there's genuine incompatibility.
	So, so we had a great conversation about it.
	The irony being that without prompting for me, she did say, you know what, let's go.
	And then it turned out that the trampoline place was closed because it was just that one day of the week.
	Where they try and shot fathers who are dying to get out of the house.
	So it's okay. We went somewhere else and it was a great time.
	And that's sort of laying the foundation.
	It's laying the foundation because then the next time, like you have that in your head together, the next time that you have a conflict about what it is that you might end up doing, you're starting to layer things in.
	How are we going to resolve things?
	And I just have one kid, you with two kids.
	It's going to get even more complicated because everybody's going to...
	Sometimes a family feels like everyone is just racing off in different directions.
	But you can't all do different things.
	So how do you resolve it?
	Well, you have to start layering that conversation in.
	Now, every time you muscle your kids, you bypass that conversation.
	And it means that you're that much less prepared for the next conflict.
	And this is why this... They don't listen, I get angry.
	They don't listen, I get angry.
	I screech and scream all day long.
	It comes from you're not layering in.
	And you can do this from a very early age.
	You're not layering in.
	How do you deal with disagreements?
	My daughter never wants to wear a coat.
	It's like she's made of lava or something, you know?
	Driving my wife crazy. How do you negotiate these things?
	How do you resolve things?
	And you need to start layering that stuff in early.
	So that you get really good at it as time goes along.
	Because, listen, when we're just talking about going trampolining or not, that's one thing.
	And you want to practice on the things that are slightly less important than can I date this guy, you know, when she gets older, right?
	Or I want to date this guy, you know.
	You want to have all of those negotiations laid in the head.
	And every time you hit, every time you escalate, every time you yell, every time you Use your size and your strength to override your child's thoughts and wishes.
	You're just undermining your mutual skill at resolving differences.
	And that opportunity you could have, Alice, of being at home, having a great time with your kids, And believe it or not, welcoming disagreements.
	Isn't that something that would be really great?
	Not living in fear of disagreements, but like, we have a real disagreement.
	Let's sit down and talk about it.
	You've got time, because you're home during the day, right?
	And kids, when you engage them in a conversation, are really good at it, and really, in my experience, and it's not just my kid, right, who's very verbal, obviously, but You know, when I was in daycare, you know, I mean, just engaging kids in conversation, they starve for conversation.
	And obviously hitting and yelling is not a conversation.
	They love to disagree.
	They love to argue.
	They love to negotiate.
	And they really should be given that opportunity because you just get better and better and better at it.
	And, you know, I'm, you know, my wife sometimes work like a lot and I'm, I've got my daughter from like, you know, sort of maybe one in the afternoon until she goes to bed at night.
	And it's just the two of us.
	And we have maybe, maybe one mild conflict a month.
	And that's partly the result of work that I've done for a while.
	But, you know, if it takes a while, you should start as soon as possible, if that makes sense.
	But you can have.
	The kind of relationship with your kids where disagreements are not a problem.
	Because they're always going to happen. Always going to happen.
	Disagreements are not a problem.
	Because if you have confidence and your children have confidence that you can work it out and be thankful it happened, then there will be no anxiety about having conflicts, about having differences of opinion.
	And that's I think what the escalation and the temper and the hitting is preventing from coming into being.
	You guys are learning the language mutually of coercion and aggression rather than reason and negotiation.
	But you can turn it around anytime you want and what's on the other side of that turnaround is a really fun, peaceful, easy existence where conflicts Are perfectly fine.
	And bring you closer.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yes. I think also, too, it's a part of our family cycles that we wanted to break.
	Like, I wanted to break a part of my family cycle of, you know, abusiveness and spanking.
	Right. But you still have a permission within yourself.
	To do it, right? Which means that you're still not resolved about whether it's good or bad.
	No, I know it's bad.
	I need to control it.
	No, no, no. No, you don't.
	I'm sorry to be annoying.
	I really... Listen, did you ever see that video of Michael Jackson dangling his kid over the balcony?
	Yes. Okay.
	Would you do that? I'm sorry, what?
	Would you ever do that?
	No, I wouldn't name my child Blanket either with his child Blanket.
	It's a Blanket, really.
	That's pretty funny. Okay, so you wouldn't dang your kid over a balcony, right?
	Right. I got a comment the other day when we were talking about spanking in the black community about a guy was saying that his parents, he's black, and his parents used to put him in a warm bath before giving him a whoopin'.
	In that way his skin would be more sensitive and tender.
	Would you ever do that?
	Oh my gosh, no.
	Right. So you see, the things that you absolutely won't do, you don't have to struggle to not do them.
	Because you're not ambivalent about them.
	You think that spanking is valid in some situations.
	Otherwise you could do it.
	I think it's become so ingrained in me from, you know, long lines of it happening that it's something that I have to work on.
	Oh, no, no, no, no. This is like, that's all good.
	How am I? Okay. Tell me the value of spanking because you believe it.
	Otherwise you wouldn't have done it, right?
	Because you don't think of the value of putting your kid in a warm bath to make spanking more painful.
	To the kid, right? Because that's, I mean, that's just sadistic.
	Plus the kid's got to sit there knowing what's coming next, right?
	So that is off the table for you.
	You don't have to fight having to do that.
	You just don't want to do it like dangling a kid over a balcony.
	But with spanking, you have a different relationship to it.
	If you genuinely and totally and top to bottom thought that spanking was wrong, you wouldn't do it.
	So you have an ambivalence in you.
	There are situations where you feel that spanking is the right thing to do.
	And I know that because you blamed your son.
	You blamed his testosterone.
	You blamed his masculinity. So you feel, you believe, that it is an appropriate thing to do to your son, otherwise you wouldn't do it.
	Like, that's just night following day.
	If you genuinely believe something is totally wrong, you're not ambivalent about it, like, I mean, I'm going to assume, at least this week, you haven't stolen a car.
	Why? Because stealing a car is wrong, and you shouldn't steal a car, so you're not even tempted.
	You don't walk past every car saying, ooh, I don't know, that is a pretty nice car.
	I think it's got a really nice spoiler.
	Oh, that's a nice stereo in there.
	You don't sit there having to fight the urge to steal a car when you walk up and down the street or to mug someone or whatever, right?
	Because those things are unambivalently wrong.
	But you have an ambivalence about spanking, otherwise it wouldn't even show up as a possible behavior.
	Does that make sense? Yes.
	So tell me the pluses.
	Of spanking. Or, tell me what happens if you don't spank.
	What is the disaster scenario that occurs if you don't spank?
	There's not really a disaster scenario if I don't spank.
	I hope that there is, because otherwise you're spanking for very little benefit.
	What happens if you don't spank?
	If your son has a bad habit or something you don't want him to do, like, I guess, hitting his sister or whatever, what happens if you don't spank?
	Or what happens in the moment, at least, if you don't spank?
	You're getting angry, you're getting frustrated, and you don't spank.
	What else happens? If I stop and wait, I might just yell then.
	Instead of spanking, I just yell.
	He might stop it, he might not.
	But I mean, big things like running into the road with cars, I might spank for that.
	Or hitting, but the hitting is just teaching him to hit.
	Okay, let's rewind a little bit.
	If you don't spank, I guarantee you, you feel something worse than spanking is going to happen.
	Everyone brings up the same, they bring up the same two examples, right?
	He runs into traffic.
	Spanking is better than him being hit by a car, which is undoubtedly true.
	Absolutely, right? Or the other one is Pot of boiling water on the stove, right?
	Or I guess the third one is the electrical outlet with the fork or something like that, right?
	So spanking is considered to be preferable than these disasters.
	I guarantee you somewhere in your head you have a disaster that occurs if you don't spank and therefore spanking is by far the lesser of these two evils and that's why you allow yourself to do it.
	I think I spank, it's more impulsive than just, you know, thinking.
	It's It's like he's in trouble and I'm angry.
	And I mean, there's no disaster scenario.
	It probably will stop if I didn't spank anyway.
	No, but to do something, to hit your child, you must think that there's something else that's worse if you don't.
	That he might continue to do it?
	That's not... Okay, that he might continue to do it.
	Okay. Okay, so he might continue to hit his sister, right?
	Right. What else might happen if you don't spank?
	I can't think of anything else.
	Would you like me to tell you?
	And please, if I'm wrong, just tell me I'm wrong, but I'll tell you what I think.
	Alice, if you don't spank your son, you will cry.
	You will cry big, fat, sad tears of loss.
	Because the reason why you hit is because you're ambivalent about your father.
	And I know that because you talked about his authority earlier.
	If you accept that your father hitting you was never acceptable, if you take that behavior completely off the table for you, if it becomes as unacceptable as stealing a car, then you have to deal with the pain of having been hit yourself all the way.
	You hit to justify your father.
	You hit to avoid the pain of your childhood.
	The disaster scenario is you will emotionally break down if you take spanking off the table completely.
	Because it's your last connection to what happened.
	It's your last justification for how you were treated.
	Yeah, if I don't speak, sometimes I do resort to crying.
	Okay, so you don't spank.
	You're trying to control your feelings.
	What happens if you cry in front of your son?
	What happens if you do have a breakdown in front of your children?
	They come and console me.
	Isn't that amazing? It's more human.
	More humane. So if you don't hit them, if you get sad, if you cry, if you mourn, they open their hearts to you, they come, they kiss you, they love you, they're not terrified, right?
	You're closer. Yes.
	And they get to see, my daughter's seen me cry.
	There's nothing wrong with that. You know, it's funny, we have this thing about tears, like it's somehow terrible compared to laughter.
	Like, you'd never say, well, I can't possibly have my children see me laugh.
	But tears are just to flip this other side of the coin.
	Tears are like laughter.
	We have, like, I wouldn't be ashamed to laugh.
	I'm not ashamed to cry.
	I don't consider laughter If my daughter sees me laughing, does that mean I lose authority?
	No. If my daughter sees me crying, does that mean she's going to lose respect for me?
	Of course not. So if you say, no more spanking, and that brings out pain in you, Your children will respect you for your honesty because your children know that you're lying when you hit them, that you're avoiding your own history, your own experience, your past, your pain.
	They know that. Do you have any problem with your kids not telling the truth?
	My son, when he likes to sneak snacks in the cabinet, Right.
	Now, that is a little bit of a phase, and that's not the end of the world.
	But if you're not emotionally honest with your children, they will internalize the value of falsehood.
	Like, I'm trying to think.
	So, I remember, so there was this woman who, I don't know, I mentioned this once before, there was this woman who Offered to get my book published.
	I don't know what this is like more than 20 years ago now.
	She offered to get my book published if I slept with her.
	And yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, it wasn't quite as aggressive as that.
	And she gave me a choice.
	And of course I said, like, I didn't yuck.
	That would just be gross. So, and she was quite pretty, but not, not on the inside, not where it counts.
	And I This is before she made me this offer, but I brought her over to a friend of mine's place.
	My friend was really friendly to her.
	Really nice to her. Oh, it's great to meet you.
	We should get together again soon.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Closes the door on her.
	She's taking a cab home, and I was staying for a little longer.
	So, closes the door on her.
	Turns to me and says, I can't stand that woman.
	Now, that was kind of chilling for me, and that began the unraveling of that friendship.
	Because when he was so genuinely, seemingly nice to her face, turns around, boom!
	I can't stand that woman.
	Now, that's not good.
	And of course, I recognize that he could be entirely fake, which undermines my trust in his emotions and integrity.
	And I didn't mind that he didn't like her.
	It turned out I didn't either. But...
	The fact that he would be so, oh, it was great to meet you and so genuine.
	Like, why are you fluffing her that much if you don't like her?
	If you don't like her, just say, well, bye.
	It was, you know, goodnight.
	You know, you don't have to say anything.
	But why? Oh, so great, so great.
	And if your kid, I'm not saying your kids, but if your kid ever saw you do that, it would be kind of chilling for them.
	Like how fake mom could be.
	But if you are secretly or internally in pain, but you're acting it out in an aggressive manner, if you're hitting to avoid crying, your kids know that.
	And they know that they're being punished for your unwillingness to experience your emotions.
	And that's another reason why You have to keep repeating it.
	Because it's inauthentic.
	It's a lie.
	You're lying to your kids.
	If you're really feeling sad deep down, but you hit them to avoid it, that's false.
	Right.
	And if you are false to your kids, you don't have any authority to request honesty from them.
	And I think that's another price.
	that's more than I'd ever want to pay.
	Nothing but good things happen when you take that hitting off the table.
	I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh no, I was just thinking we might have cut out.
	Yes, I agree.
	Em, how do you feel now? Well, kind of sad and remorseful.
	And then you give me the little laugh to tell me not to take it seriously.
	Well, I will take it seriously, though, Alice.
	Tell me more about it. I'm trying to talk through tears, so I just...
	No, but tell me. Hey, listen, you can be open with me.
	I'm not going to criticize you for having feelings.
	God, right? So, tell me what you're feeling.
	I feel remorseful, and I want to treat my children better than how I was treated.
	And you are, to be fair, right?
	Yes. It's an upgrade.
	You're going from the back of the plane to the middle.
	I'm saying just go to first class and be done with it.
	Right? Go to the very top of the pyramid and be done with it, right?
	Is the sort of goodies that I'm dangling in front of you in terms of not being afraid of conflict, not having that many conflicts, reasoning through things and so on, is that tempting enough to take spanking off the table?
	Yes. It is.
	Are you going to tell your son?
	Yeah. Okay, so tell me what you might say to your son if your son's sitting in front of you and you've decided to change.
	What would you say? I think I would tell my son, I would say, Mommy's not going to spank you anymore.
	Mommy's going to find a more appropriate way of handling conflict and maybe taking away the iPad or Video games or something in place of doing that.
	In place of spanking.
	Because it was wrong of me.
	Go on. And I would tell him that I love him very much.
	And of course my daughter probably won't understand all that but I'll give her a hug too.
	It's good. I'll make a couple of tweaks.
	They're just suggestions. Obviously, it's your motherhood.
	Alice, it's not that it was inappropriate.
	It was wrong. Right.
	It was wrong to hit your son.
	It was wrong. So, inappropriate is one of these words that it's another self-avoidance word.
	And it's not like, yeah, okay, things can be inappropriate for sure, but If your husband was apologizing for hitting you and he said it was inappropriate, what would that mean to you?
	I would take it as, you know, as I'm saying it wrong.
	I think it's just more of the word that I use instead of wrong.
	No, but if your husband said it was inappropriate for me to hit you, would you think he'd understood that?
	It's never, like, and it's not just a matter of inappropriate, because then what do you use for something that is just inappropriate?
	Like, to take an extreme example, if you strangle someone to death, that's not an inappropriate action, right?
	That's just wrong. And hitting someone does not fall into the category of inappropriate.
	Inappropriate is, well, that joke was too off-color, you know, or that commercial was inappropriate for children.
	It means just not proper to the circumstance, right?
	But hitting is not a matter of inappropriate.
	That's a moral category.
	It's never appropriate unless it's in self-defense, I guess.
	Yes. Right. And I'm going to assume that your son has not been charging at you with a chainsaw.
	Yet. Yet.
	A little toy one.
	That's right. Okay.
	So that's the first thing that I would say.
	Is... I don't know that he's going to get the word inappropriate in his heart as strongly as wrong.
	And I think it's a way of you avoiding again what you've done or minimizing it.
	When you're going to apologize to someone, don't minimize what you've done.
	That's the sorry, not sorry.
	Like, I don't know if you heard the last call, uh, Teresa, right?
	Oh, I didn't mean to insult you.
	I'm sorry if you felt that way.
	And you know, like that's no ownership, right?
	If you're going to apologize to someone, it has to be unreserved.
	Don't hedge, don't minimize, don't, like, you know, you have an affair with your wife, you don't say, I apologize for my inappropriate physical contact.
	Sounds like a memo. Yeah, it really does.
	I'm sure that's just tattooed on Harvey Weinstein's nutsack or something, but I wouldn't know personally, but I'm sure that's the case.
	So that's the first thing.
	The second thing is I wouldn't go straight to, here are the other punishments I'm going to substitute instead.
	Like, I'm sorry I hit you.
	From now on, I'm just going to take away your iPad.
	Because that's bringing a situation of conflict into something where you're supposed to apologize.
	And I'm telling you, you guys don't even know.
	You stop hitting and you start reasoning.
	You have no idea what discipline means.
	After that. Because, like, I mean, people don't believe me.
	They don't believe me, but it's true.
	Never punished my daughter.
	Never. It probably makes them more intelligent as well.
	I'm sure there's higher IQ, you know, higher IQs in kids who don't get spanked.
	Well, you definitely want to do what you can to give your kid the leg up intellectually, and certainly spanking does seem to lower IQ points by Um, a couple and, you know, in these days, this tough economic environment, every, every point helps, right?
	And so, yeah, so, I mean, she has access to a tablet and there are a few times she's discovered the crack addiction of Minecraft, which we regularly mocked in the past.
	But now, uh, you know, I, I don't, I still don't quite fundamentally understand it, but I'm a Lego guy myself.
	So if she's been on the tablet for a little while, I'll say, hey, that's, you know, do you think that's enough tableting?
	And we've talked about it before, you know, like posture and eyesight and lack of exercise and all that's involved with tableting.
	So, you know, we'll go for a walk and we'll chat.
	Or she'll say, yeah, you're probably right.
	Or, you know, another 10 minutes I'm doing something really important and all that.
	Like this taking stuff away, you know, naughty seats and naughty chairs and so on.
	I'm not sure... That it's necessary.
	So when you say, I'm not going to hit you.
	Instead, I'm going to take away your iPad or put you in a timeout corner or something.
	You don't know that.
	Because once you start using your words instead of your hands, once you negotiate instead of hit, you don't know whether what is traditionally called discipline is even necessary in the future.
	So I wouldn't go necessarily from I'm not going to hit you to, here are the other ways I'm going to punish you, because that brings something negative into it.
	Right? Right.
	And to seal the deal, when you apologize, you ask your son, what's it like for you when I hit you?
	How do you feel? What do you think?
	What has it been like for you that I've hit you?
	If you really want to take hitting off the table, you fully empathize with the effects of hitting.
	You get him to pour his heart out, however long it takes.
	It might not all happen in one conversation.
	You get him to pour his heart out about the effects of being hit and what it's done to him.
	And once you see those effects, once you really see them and feel them, it won't be tempting at all.
	That's my suggestion.
	And also, you can talk to your daughter in whatever, I guess we can use the word appropriate here, whatever age appropriate mechanism you want.
	To find out what it's like for her when she sees her brother being hit.
	Thank you.
	She can't talk yet.
	Oh, okay. Okay.
	My kids are relatively little.
	Right, right. Good.
	Well, that's good news, because it means then, you know, if they were eight...
	You know, he's going to be five soon, so...
	So you better get busy, because his personality is rapidly becoming less water and more ice, right?
	Yes. So, yeah, those would be my suggestions.
	Bill, what do you think? Yeah, I think...
	That was what was necessary.
	She was... Alice is trending that way, you know, towards, you know, peaceful parenting.
	It's just... I think the conversation we've had tonight and your guidance, basically, will give her that final push.
	It's like, I don't have the arguing power that you do to be able to convince her of this, but...
	Ah, you know, your kids listen to strangers and so does your wife.
	Yeah. It's true, right?
	I mean, people... Isn't it frustrating when you see your kids...
	With other people. Yeah.
	So helpful, so compliant.
	And that is, I used to drive my mom nuts.
	I used to drive my mom nuts how my brother would respond to male authority figures.
	Why can't I have that? It's like, well, because...
	Not hitting, right?
	I guess it's just like how parents treat other kids differently than they do their own kids a lot of times.
	Yeah, well, that's true as well.
	That's true as well. But you can have that internally as well.
	My daughter's the same with others as she is with me.
	Yeah. Alright.
	So, if you do end up hitting again, will you call back?
	See what I missed? If I do hit again, do you call back?
	Will you call back? Yeah, just in case I missed something.
	Because I didn't make a good enough case if you do it again.
	Yes, I'll call back.
	That sounded like a kind of, yeah, yeah, here's my number, and then you write the wrong digits down in the bar.
	Wait, this is the number for a pizza place just down the road.
	Really? Will you call back?
	More of a timid, timid yes, I guess.
	Yeah, yeah, but you will? Yes, I'll call back if I do.
	And hopefully, don't, I'll try, you know, I'll I'll be a better mom.
	I mean, this is your punishment.
	I'm not taking away your iPad, but you've got to call back.
	That's your negative consequences.
	And if you want to avoid that, then just don't hit.
	And that would be my suggestion.
	All right? Well, thanks a lot for your call, guys.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	And, you know, for those who don't, again, you know, you may be listening, they're judging or whatever, but it's really tough to have these conversations.
	But this is how the world works.
	It moves forward step by step.
	This is how the world gets to a better place.
	And massive admiration, props, and kudos to Bill and Alice for calling in about this difficult topic.
	I appreciate everyone who called in tonight.
	It was a good show.
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