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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:11:32
Parenting for a Peaceful World - A Conversation with Robin Grille
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Hello everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
I have, dare I say, a babby on the grill.
I have the great psychotherapist Robin Grill from Australia.
So I am actually in pitch black darkness with, you can't see of course in my home studio, but outside the snow is gently and dare I say beautifully falling down while Robin has kindly informed me that he's just returned from the beach where things are beautiful.
So the first The first part of the show will be me gently sobbing while Robin attempts to console me using all of his therapeutic techniques known to man.
So thank you so much for taking the time.
Your turn will come, don't you worry.
Yeah, and it's very good to be with you, Stefan.
So, I mean, there's a lot to talk about, but I really want to focus.
You have two books.
I mean, one that came out more recently and one that came out in 05.
Parenting for a Peaceful World was 05 and Heart to Heart Parenting It just came out this spring or this summer.
The Australian edition came out in 2008, but I've just released an American edition that's been translated into American English, and that just came out literally a couple of months ago in Amazon and Book Depository.
Now, the one thing that, you know, I criticize libertarians and philosophers about is to not focus enough on early childhood experiences and to focus on the myth of human nature.
And I think that you do a fantastic job, as other people I've interviewed on the show have done, of exploding the myth of human nature.
And, you know, to paraphrase, and, you know, please correct me if I go astray, but to paraphrase It's something like human nature is an adaptation to early environment that is earlier than we can remember because it happens in the womb, it happens in our first few years of life before memories really set within us.
And because we can't remember what it was like to be formed by those experiences, it seems like human nature to us because we don't have an alternative, we don't have a magic other self, we can compare ourselves to race in a different family.
Yeah.
And penetrating this myth of human nature seems to be really, really difficult.
It's hard for me, it's hard for you, it's hard for Lloyd DeMoss.
It seems to be really quite a wall that we beat our heads against sometimes.
Look, there's all kinds of reasons why there's a wall.
People resist this new kind of discovery because it's so confronting, it's so threatening.
You know, the more that we start to consider how important early childhood is, and even adolescence, how formative that stage of life is, it is frightening, particularly for mums and dads, because responsibility is frightening.
You know, it presses a lot of buttons to do with guilt, etc.
So people actively, when I say people, not everyone, but there's a lot of resistance in the media, especially against this kind of science.
And the science, About the science, you can say that in many ways the jury is back.
There's not really an academic debate anymore.
Early childhood is incredibly formative.
If we're going to talk about human nature, it is intrinsic to human nature that human nature is changeable, very, very changeable, and most changeable in early childhood because of the way that our environment writes
Really a story or a program into our very neurology, into our brains, into our brain chemistry, and now with the new science of epigenetics what's being understood that even our genes are subject to change.
Did you know that?
That genes can be switched on and off in early childhood, completely changing our genetic profile according to how life is treating us when we're very, very young.
Yeah, and this is something that I I've read and actually Gabor Matei has been on my show and his book in the realm of hungry ghosts.
I hugely recommend.
He talks a lot about this idea.
When I was a kid, of course, your genes were like a rock in the ocean and the environment was like waves crashing on it.
It may adjust it a little bit, but you had this fundamental piece of physics called your genetics.
And now it seems that, I mean, okay, so your early childhood experiences don't determine whether you have a nose.
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off depending on our experience.
There's potentiality, but there's not actuality until the genes are combined with experience.
And all throughout life, this can change.
You can start reprogramming your genes into the middle of your life.
Yes, and I don't know how deliberately you can reprogram your genes.
There's so much still to be learned, but definitely the environment has a very, very, very significant impact.
And what they're saying now is that the old idea of genetic determinism is really a form of genetic illiteracy.
So, yeah, we are really throwing out that old idea.
The very nature of evolution is quite different than what we thought.
Now this is something that it seems hard to believe is hard to believe.
The reason I say that is that anybody who's turned on the TV, read a book, used a computer knows that there are very different cultures out there and everyone in those cultures kind of believes a lot of the same stuff, wears a lot of the same disco bondage headgear or whatever they put on, worships a lot of the same deities and has a lot of the same attitudes.
And we all know that if I was born over in some backwater village in Afghanistan that I would not grow up speaking English, I would not grow up with ideas that I have, I would grow up with very different ideas and have a very different relationship to reality, to society, to ethics, to community and so on.
So we can see all of this stuff happening all over the world and the adaptability of human beings to their environment and yet somehow we feel that we did not adapt in the same way to our environment.
It's hard to miss once you look at it even just Yeah, and here's where information, and even something that is very, very obvious, doesn't necessarily by itself change the way that we do things in the world.
Because when you start to think that, for instance, To some degree, your mental health, the thing that we call your mental health, is to some degree a reflection of the way that you were parented.
More importantly, the way that your parents were taken care of, or not taken care of, by their community.
Because it's not just up to mum and dad, by the way, it's the entire community.
You know, when you think in those terms, when you think that even the human propensity to violence, whether we have violent attitudes or if we're violent in our behavior, that that has quite a bit to do with the way that we were schooled and the way that we were raised as children.
Now you're talking about something that nobody wants to really look at in the eye because That is a frightening concept.
And we play all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid that, no matter how much science we have in front of us.
So I think it'll take quite some time for that information to really sink in and start to create some of the changes that we need to see in the world.
You do see a lot of this, I think, a reversal of course, in effect.
So you'll hear people say, well, I had to spank him because he was a difficult child.
In other words, that the nature of the child came first and then the parent is like this helpless asteroid orbiting the giant planet of the child's personality.
Whereas, of course, I think the argument would much more strongly be made that the behaviors of the environment, and again, we want to avoid just talking about parents because, I mean, for instance, Sociopathy, which is I think 4% and rising rapidly in most of the Western countries, is down to like 0.04% in Thailand and that's not specific to parenting, that's specific to the culture as a whole.
So it's really important to remember that there's culture.
But the culture, the attitudes of the environment come first and that's always the place to look when you're looking at the behavior of children.
But people take the behavior of children as fixed and they're just helpless in trying to manage or control it.
Yeah, I mean, in a way what you're saying, I think, is that so many people feel like they're... I mean, in terms of the rationalization, the stories that we tell ourselves about why we must hit our children, for instance.
You know, we think of ourselves as victims to our little child.
You know, because my child behaved in this way or that way, I had no choice but to hit my child.
And, look, this really opens up so much about What I think is an enormous need to not only educate parents but to support and support and support parents.
And we are not doing that anywhere near enough.
And I think in many ways the European countries, in particular the northern European countries, are way ahead in that area.
You know, in most European nations now, for one, it's against the law for any parent to hit a child.
33 countries in the world and 25 more coming online where it will be against the law.
But they don't just prohibit, they support.
I'll give you one example.
In Sweden, a mother will be paid very generously 80% of whatever she was earning professionally before the birth of her child.
She is paid to stay with her child for 18 months and then has the option to go on for 3 years.
at a slightly reduced rate of pay.
Fathers as well, one month on full pay to stay with their child after birth.
And this just gives you one example of the kind of support that is available that we should make available for our families so that we can hold, you know, if community holds parents, any parent can be better at holding their child, including setting of strong, you know, I'll say asserting including setting of strong, you know, I'll say asserting strong boundaries of behaviour with our children in a way that has nothing to do with punishment.
Right.
Now, there's a lot about nurturing in your work, which of course is really hard to argue against, but one of the things that I found very interesting in your article on bullies that showed up in Everything Voluntary I don't know if you have the research at the tip of your tongue, but if you could talk a little bit more.
I found it quite fascinating that the need to denormalize the way that you were parented seems to be very important and part of that denormalizing process seems to be getting angry about it and the people who actually get angry about injustices that were committed against them as children.
seem to be the ones most capable as adults of parenting in a different way than they were parented.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit because anger is one of these things that people who've suffered trauma, especially from, you know, really, quote, angry people, they have a difficult relationship.
They view anger as abusive.
But the idea that anger can be liberating, break the cycle, be healing is really counterintuitive to a lot of people.
Yeah.
Look, I want to say first to preface that anger and violence are not the same thing.
And I really want to make that clear.
The reason why we tend to associate the two is that for a lot of us, when we were growing up, if somebody in our family became angry, that was very quickly followed by some kind of physical violence or verbal abuse.
And yet the two are not really related.
In fact, I think that we tend to become more violent towards one another when we don't find a safe way to express our frustration and our anger.
And when you think of it that way, anger can actually be a builder of a relationship and a builder of love, really.
It's a force for creating understanding when understanding is lost.
Now having said that, there is some very interesting research, plus I find this over and over again in my practice as a psychologist.
I've been working in my private practice for about 20-25 years.
The people that were at the receiving end of physical punishment when they were children, if they grow up never challenging the belief or the rationale that I was hit because I deserved it, because I was a brat, Those are the people that are most likely to then pass that on to their children, without the empathy.
Those are the people that will strike their children and say, look, it did me good.
You can end this cycle of intergenerational abuse that gets passed down from one generation to another when you help any individual to reject that kind of treatment.
Whether you become angry about it or not, it's really up to the individual's process.
I strongly feel this has nothing to do with condemning our parents and saying what bad people they were.
Every parent in the world does the best that they have available given the time and the culture in which they live.
However, if there's going to be any social evolution, we must at some point reject some aspects of what was handed down to us.
So I meet all of the people who say, "Look, I love my mum and dad dearly.
They gave me so much, but I reject their style of discipline." Do you think that it's reasonable or true to say that all parents are doing the best they can?
I mean, I agree that a lot of parents are.
other things that my parents did, you know, to say no to that treatment.
Now you become the kind of person that is far less likely to pass it on.
Do you think, I mean, I appreciate that argument.
Do you think that it's reasonable or true to say that all parents are doing the best they can?
I mean, I agree that a lot of parents are.
I think a lot of parents obviously struggle to improve or even struggle to maintain.
I think there are probably a minority, a significant minority, but I think there are sort of cruel and sadistic and abusive parents out there who are not struggling to do better or who aren't trying to improve but just acting out in very, very negative ways.
I mean, because there is this idea that, you know, we would never say about all husbands in the world are doing the best.
No, there are some sort of sadistic and cruel husbands who just grind their wives down and, you know, sociopaths and monsters and so on.
And however a minority they may be, it seems like whenever psychologists talk about parents, we go to... This is very, very nuanced and very difficult for me.
I want to treat this delicately.
There is potentially, and look, on the one hand, no doubt, there's no question, there is definitely all kinds of psychopathic parents, abusive parents, sadistic parents, parents who take like a perverse pleasure in tormenting their children.
Generally speaking though, and this is something that I find very important to say to people when I'm running my workshops, my public seminars, is that very often you can take what people generally call a bad parent, okay?
If you can see the quotation marks, bad parent.
and really improve their capacity to be parents and to be good listeners by placing that parent in a different environment where they feel much more supported.
You know, partly it's to do with better information about child development and communication style, et cetera, but to a large degree it's to do with what kind of support is going on around the parent.
And sometimes it's more than support.
Sometimes it requires a healing process for parents who have had very traumatic childhoods that often, you know, find it so much more of a struggle to be able to stay present for the sometimes chaotic behaviour of a child.
So similarly, on the other hand, you can take somebody that would ordinarily be what we call a good parent.
And put them in an environment where they are robbed of support and really highly overstressed and too many demands on them, etc, etc.
And good people start to lash out.
We lose our temper with our children.
We push them.
We ignore them.
We emotionally abandon them.
So I think it's important to get this because I think this is one of the big Antidotes to this huge problem of parent guilt that stops parents from being willing to learn and to take the help of their environment.
You can't just judge one parent without looking at the context that that parent finds themselves in.
Yeah, I mean, psychologically, I mean, certainly in terms of legality, I mean, you can.
I mean, if the parent is a pedophile or rampantly abusive, they generally get tossed in jail without a lot of context.
But certainly from sort of working things through, I would certainly agree that I can't imagine somebody who went through a good childhood.
And it's a very powerful statement that you make in your book that somebody who goes through a peaceful, loving, nurturing, supportive environment can in no way become, a violent person.
I mean, that's a bold, bold claim.
And certainly we would look at bad parents and we would certainly look in their history.
And, you know, if you understand enough about someone's history, nothing is alien anymore.
Everything sort of there's a series of dominoes that makes sense.
But do you feel it's that?
I feel it's that possible.
I mean, I feel unless somebody gets a brain tumor or some horrible railway spike through the forehead that the personality that is raised peacefully must be peaceful and that there's no other way to create a sustainably peaceful world.
I think so.
And if that statement sounds very, very bold, I am willing to stick to it, you know, for as long as we understand what we understand today about the developmental impact on the human brain.
You know, they have such a clear map now for how the human brain can be turned into a more violent prone brain.
So let's talk about some of the science behind this.
I love science, particularly the new brain stuff.
It's just completely fascinating.
So a lot of people, of course, it takes a while for stuff to filter down from the lab to the general population, particularly when it's such a thorny issue as parents and children.
Where is the science these days in epigenetics and in the formation of antisocial personalities and so on?
Where is the science?
Yeah, because, sorry, maybe slightly more specific.
So obviously a huge number of steps have been taken, a huge number of steps forward have been taken in helping people and researchers to understand how particular impulses, we all have impulses and you have what, like a quarter of a second between the impulse arising from the amygdala to the neofrontal cortex, like a quarter of a second between the impulse arising from the amygdala to the neofrontal cortex, which is supposed to damp it down and say, whoa, it's not I won't do this.
I'm going to take a breather.
I'm going to count to 10 or whatever to intercept the impulses, which does seem to be something that is strengthened by therapy, by self-knowledge, by self-work of various kinds, introspection.
So there does seem to be a fair amount of brain mapping about what goes on with impulse, impulse control, acting out and ex post facto justifications for behavior.
They seem to appear quite far under the hood these days.
I don't know if you've scoured the periodicals or the publications for that stuff, but I was wondering if you have any particular science that struck you as supportive of the thesis.
There's quite an abundance of that science, actually, and it's being studied very carefully in American universities, British universities.
I'll tell you something very interesting.
Who's the guy that did Ali G and Borat?
Sasha Baron-Cohen.
He has a very interesting cousin.
I forget his first name, but his surname is the same.
Somebody Baron-Cohen.
He's a professor of neuropsychology in Cambridge University.
He's recently published a book called The Science of Evil.
And he is one of many, many new scientists of the brain that explain this quite clearly.
They do have quite a clear map for human violence because of the new imagery technology that we have where we can see exactly what's going on in there.
Let me explain it in one way.
The central part of the brain called the limbic brain is like the generator of raw emotion.
An analogy that I like, it generates 240 volts of raw emotion.
Now there are parts of the forebrain, the bits that sit above your eyebrow, the frontal lobes, That works like a transformer, okay?
Its role is to take the 240 volts of raw emotion and to transform it down into 12 volts, so that we can have relationship, you know?
We have these transformers in garden lights, in toy, hobby trains, you know what I mean?
Yeah, that's the stuff, the little box that makes your notebook not explode when you plug it into the wall, so yeah.
Exactly, we've got the same kind of thing in our own brain.
So, if it wasn't for this, we would be more like chimpanzees.
And, in fact, a lot of us are.
I think we behave like chimpanzees.
We act out all of our rage indiscriminately.
However, a healthy person that has had sufficient nurturance, respect, a democratic enough upbringing, etc., etc., when that part of the brain is healthy... By the way, I should tell you this.
The reason why toddlers have big tantrums, they have the full 240 volts of emotion, one and a half hours of rage on the floor, you know, where they go speechless, and you've seen that, you know, most children get that, is because that part of the brain, the frontal lobes, don't reach any kind of maturity until we're about five or six, and then it kind of plateaus.
That's when we start to learn to put our emotion into language.
So that even if I feel like kicking somebody, I can contain that impulse and go up to that person and say, hey, I'm upset and this is what I want different.
Yeah, I've made the case that parents need to teach their children feeling words in the same way that they need to and for the same reason they need to teach them not to Go near a hot stove or cross a busy street, because this is what keeps you safe and connected in the world, is to translate impulses to words, so that you can negotiate rather than bully.
But sorry, that's just a minor aside, but I think that's... Parents don't work on the feeling words with children.
It's the most essential thing you can do as a parent, outside of food and shelter.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I cannot think of a more important thing to teach our children than how to navigate conflict in a loving and helpful and democratic way.
And the best way to teach that is by example, so that instead of just telling them, to show them.
If we can have our conflict, say with our partner, our spouse, with our child president, but to do so By using our language and to hear each other, taking turns, listening to one another, making sure that we both feel very, very heard.
That is a very, very, very powerful way for our children to learn and that really, this stuff is recorded for them.
By the way, those frontal lobes that reduce emotion to harmless language that really makes connection with each other, that does not reach its full maturity until we're about 23-24 years of age, which explains why teenagers as well can be risk-takers and a lot of their emotionality can be quite, I guess, fiery, you could say?
Yeah, it's kind of a paradox.
Yeah, but it's kind of a paradox because when you're a teenager you actually have more life to lose and you treat it like... I used to do these crazy triple flip dives off diving boards when I was on the swim team and so on.
I mean, there's not enough money in the world to get me to do that now and I have less to lose because I'm much older.
But yeah, I know the consequences can seem a little bit over the horizon when you're a teenager.
Oh, sometimes I lay awake at night thinking about the things I used to do as a teenager and... Oh, you get cold sweats!
Yeah, it's terrible!
My daughter is a teenager now, so that makes me bite my nails, I tell you.
I bet.
I bet.
But the clincher here, Stefan, is that the way that that transformer in the brain, the way that that grows, that's not just a given program.
That's not just going to happen.
It can be grown in early childhood Based on the way that we are treated as children, it can also be eaten away.
When you leave a child in a high state of fear, in a violent environment, the stress hormones like cortisol that sit in the brain without being comforted, without going away, they're sort of like battery acid after a while.
They literally kill.
They eat the brain cells and make that part of the brain smaller so that we lose impulse control.
And if you take a violent psychopath, a criminal who's in jail for out of control violence.
You need to take an image, a magnetic resonance image of their brain.
You will see great dark holes in precisely that part of the brain.
And you'll understand that the psychopath is built.
Not born, but built.
Well, and one of the things that if you sort of compare to ape-like behavior, one of the things that is profoundly human, I would argue, is to look for win-win negotiations.
But in a hierarchy, in a pecking order, it's always win-lose, you know, and you become addicted to the dopamines of climbing the social hierarchy.
And it's been, I think, quite well proven in monkeys that as they get up the hierarchy, they get more happy joy juice in the brain and so on.
But the need to reduce emotionality and transfer it to language is so that you can work on win-win negotiations.
But it's always struck me that, you know, criminals, particularly in gangs, are hypersensitive to status, you know, to being disrespected, to being looked down upon.
And the maintenance of juice or street credibility is so important.
But that's because it's all win-lose.
Without the language of emotionality, everything becomes, you know, kill or be killed, rule or be ruled, win or lose.
And I think that's truly tragic.
Were you talking about criminal gangs then or about Wall Street?
I think that may be a distinction without a difference.
The bad criminal gangs are at the bottom of the towers.
The really good criminal gangs are right up at the top.
Yeah.
Look, I think human psychopathy is on both sides of the law, really.
I think that's been well established.
And, you know, oh my God, I mean, the global financial collapse that we've just had and we're still suffering from, that's all part of the symptom, you know, of this top-down power kind of mentality that really permeates a lot of the way that we do business, not just how we do war and crime, but this is a lot of how we do business.
I'll also propose that this is, to some degree, regrettably, how we do education as well.
Let's talk about that because I think that's, again, we don't want to focus overly on the parents because that kind of a given, but Most kids spend more time with educators than they do with parents.
They spend more time with teachers and priests and daycare workers and so on than they do even with their own parents.
But that's not something that's often explored when it comes to personality formation.
Yeah, not only that, they spend more time in front of a TV set than with their parents, but that's a whole other story.
But yeah, look, in the classroom... You know, I'm so glad that I'm not a teacher and my heart goes out to school teachers.
Here's what a teacher has to do, and I don't know how it is in Canada, but in Australia, a teacher has to arrive in front of a classroom of 30 children and teach this subject.
You can imagine that half of the kids sitting in front of you are interested in what you have to talk about.
Half of them naturally won't be.
is to force them to do it anyhow.
And to force them to do well.
And then to be subjected to what is potentially a very shaming ranking and comparison.
So the kids will find out who's coming top, who's coming fifth, who's doing better than you, who's doing worse than you.
It's about beating.
Who beats who?
And a teacher's supposed to run that.
So we, you know, as teachers, I think they're enforcers.
If children don't get any right Until they're at least 15 to have a say, to have a voice in.
This is what my passion is.
This is what I want to learn.
And if I'm passionate about mathematics and the bell goes, I don't want to stand up and leave and go to geography.
I was doing some algebra.
I was in love with this.
I want to stay with this.
There's nothing that really respects the natural passion of the child in the way that we ordinarily do schools.
Now, if you think that I'm being romantic and idealistic, I've been looking at schools that don't do this, schools that are increasingly using what's called the emergent curriculum.
And this is a growing phenomenon around the world where More and more, the subject that is being given to a child to study relates to what that child's individual passion is, so that the curriculum is adapted to the child.
Not all the kids are studying the same thing.
They're not learning in the same way.
They learn in subgroups based on a shared interest.
What is really interesting to me is that these schools around the world, and there are many in America, many in Israel, in Japan, in Australia, New Zealand, and through Europe, under all kinds of different names.
The reason why these kinds of schools began, and if you like I'll tell you what they're called, a whole bunch of different names, they did this for academic reasons, because children tend to do better without being coerced and pushed and punished for not doing what the teacher tells them.
And yet they all report to me a very similar, unexpected effect.
You know what happens in the schools?
School violence starts to drop.
And it plummets.
And not only in the classroom, but also in the playground.
My proposition here is that The democratization of education, the democratization of the classroom is actually a very, very viable treatment for social violence and this has been done.
They've brought in democratic educators into violent schools and turned the school around from a very, very violent bullying environment where the students are even beating up on the teachers.
And completely turning that around.
As one Israeli educator explained to me, and he put it so well, you know, this is not rocket science.
When children feel really, really valued for who they are as persons, for their passions and their interests, they don't want to beat each other up.
They don't want to waste time beating each other up.
They just love to work.
Yeah, no, of course, I mean, I'm sure you're aware that the history of what we call modern education, at least in the public sphere, it comes directly out of the Prussian desire to breed soldiers and low-rent factory workers who sit, who listen, who obey.
It is part of the dehumanizing process that the modern military goes through and it is unbelievably tragic.
I've made the argument, I think you would probably agree, I mean, tell me if you don't, What people experience as childhood is the future of the society.
How we treat children is how our society is going to go.
And if we treat children as prisoners, if we put them in these boxes designed by prison experts, and we pass them through metal detectors, and we order them around exactly what they should do with no input from them, and we ask them to raise their arm to do something as simple as go to the bathroom, We are creating a mini little fascistic environment and then we look at the world and we wonder why totalitarianism is on the rise, why individual liberty is on the decline.
It's because we are training our children to be in a fascist environment.
They come out into the adult world completely unprepared for anything to do with the free market and the tendency is for them to recreate that environment because it's not identified as abnormal or dysfunctional in any general way.
Sorry, that's a big rant but that's the end of it.
Yeah, I hear you.
And, you know, there's a distinct kind of military model behind the organization of education as we know it.
There's also an industrial kind of reasoning behind it as well.
You know, modern schools have also been strongly influenced by the Industrial Revolution.
I mean, the early Industrial Revolution, you know, the steam-driven You know, coal-driven kind of stuff.
And, you know, we don't really trust children's intrinsic passion.
We don't want them to connect to that.
We want them to think about money.
We want them to think about success in terms of money.
And we want them to be followers.
Either that or money-motivated leaders.
You know, we are churning them out in a kind of an assembly line process In order that not industry doesn't serve community, but children serve industry.
We're trying to breed the next kind of generation of, you know, if we want more engineers, we better train the kids to be engineers and don't bother asking them.
Don't bother asking them who they really are as people.
And that's violent.
That in itself is where I call that educational abuse.
It is an act of violence.
Without anyone lifting a finger, it's an act of violence.
And of course, as you said, then we complain and blame the kids.
Oh, look how bad they are.
In my day, they used to call me sir.
Come on!
What are we calling them?
Yeah.
Well, and if we hollow out the children enough, and there's a wide variety of ways that schools and churches, I think, do that.
If we hollow out the children enough, then they'll become empty, shallow, status-seeking consumerists who will drive the ridiculous overconsumption of a very shallow economy, which it's currently geared towards.
We don't teach them about the satisfactions of quality, of virtue, of kindness.
We teach them that these shoes are really cool and this is a great backpack to have and this starts really early on if you've got the logo on your lunchbox when you're five, for God's sake.
Of course, this is all about consumption and the harm it does to the economy, the harm it does to the environment.
All of this ridiculous stuff is incalculable.
If you read some of the advertising textbooks that talk about children in this most reptilian way, that children are a market.
I mean, these people know exactly what you can expect a three-year-old child to spend based on the kind of money that they can nag out of the parents' pocket.
So, yeah, I mean, there are big sectors of the economy that are driven by what we can make children want that they wouldn't otherwise ordinarily want.
So they're our market, they're our future workforce.
We tend to mould them, but on the other hand, it absolutely doesn't have to be this way.
And there are so many really, really good examples of schools like the Reggio Emilia system, the democratic schools in Israel, what they call the free schools in Japan that are almost run by the children.
and they, I mean, Those kids behave really, really well.
They ask for homework, they study, they want to learn, they're self-driven, self-motivated.
I thought we wanted self-motivated children.
If we want self-motivated children, You know, the kindest thing to do to a child is to say, what do you love?
What do you love?
Because if that's what you love, then let's help you to do more of it and to learn more about that particular subject matter.
Yeah, how can I facilitate your interests?
How can I be the grease in the wheels of your engine of discovery?
But there is, of course, and this comes out as a grand Western tradition.
It's not just a Western tradition, but I'm more familiar with it.
The idea that, of course, there's something wrong with children, you see.
Robin, you have to understand there's something wrong with children because they don't fit into the existing hierarchy.
They're not born believing in a particular deity or a particular country or a particular culture or a particular political system or a particular economic system.
They're born natural, rational empiricists.
At least, I've worked in a daycare for many years.
I have a kid.
and they're born natural, curious, rational empiricists.
But so many of the beliefs of adults cannot sustain the simple Socratic scrutiny of the toddler set.
I mean, the questions that come to your thighs are the hardest ones of all to answer.
I mean, trying to explain the world to my daughter is really, really difficult because it's a pretty nutty place to be sometimes.
So the idea, of course, is that because children are not fitting into the irrationalities of society, How do I get my child to learn?
And I think, you know, in fact what we should be asking is how do we get them to stop when it's time for them to go to sleep?
So many people say to me, "How do I get my child to learn?
How do I get my child to learn?" I think, in fact, what we should be asking is, "How do we get them to stop when it's time for them to go to sleep?" These guys are just incredibly ravenous little scientists.
I'm sure you'll know exactly what I'm talking about when I say, "I remember the first science question that my daughter asked me when she was four years old," which of course I did not know the answer to.
She wanted to know, you know, why the sky is blue.
And I muttered some kind of nonsense about, you know, refraction of light or whatever that I could remember from high school physics.
And the next question is, well, why?
Everything I've seen is, why?
You know, this incessant hunger for more knowledge and more knowledge.
And at one point, let me just turn off this phone.
At one point, my daughter asked me, and again, she was four years old, she said, Dad, when will I learn everything?
You know, this kid just wanted to know the whole universe.
And this is not peculiar to my daughter at all.
This is everywhere.
If only we look at that.
But you know, I want to go back to something you said earlier, where you mentioned that the world is becoming more and more dictatorial.
I have a different view of that.
I mean, this is really, really surprising, and you wouldn't think so.
I actually think that the world is becoming less violent overall, as an average.
Although you look at any newsreel or infotainment, Fox News or whatever, and you think the opposite.
But in terms of, when you look at the work done by political scientists and they look at, in a very assiduous way, the changing statistics of crime around the world, The impact of warfare, the percentage of people dying as a result of battle, even with all this terrorism and the war on terror and blah blah blah.
Overall, as a proportion of populations, it seems to be getting less, less and less, and crime rates are beginning to fall.
And I think that even though, look, personally I feel I have so much to That I feel critical of, and I complain so much about the way that we treat children, we treat them like a marketplace to sell something to, and we push them around, and we hit them, blah, blah.
Every time that I look at the history of parenting, and I find, like Lloyd DeMouse was saying, and he's so right, the further we go back in history, the worse it seems to get.
You know, this generation, for all of our mistakes, we seem to have taken one quantum step forward from the last generation, In terms of at least making some honest effort to look into the emotional needs of our children.
We want to be more than just providers of a roof and food and education.
We're trying to learn how to address their emotional needs and their emotional intelligence.
This is very, very new in human history.
Now, I think that we have started to see some dividends for that already around the world because You know, really statistically I think violence is falling.
Democracy is growing, even though the growth of democracy is very up and down.
But overall, the number of countries around the world that are at least submitting their political parties to a vote every four years, primitive as that sounds, that seems to be growing.
What do you think of that?
I agree with that.
Now, of course, you know from Damas's work that the growth anxiety that comes from improved parenting from the elder generation is pretty considerable.
I used the word sort of dictatorial, but by that I simply mean lots and lots of rules.
I mean, the amount of laws in the world is growing exponentially every year.
I don't mean that it's like Soviet Russia or Paul Potts regime.
It's obviously not murderous and genocidal in that way.
My sort of major concern is, I think that parenting is in some ways getting better.
I mean, I agree with you and Emma with the moss that historically it was wretched.
I mean, still in America, 90% of parents are hitting their children.
I mean, that's just still a long way to go.
But for me, the major issue is that, I was sort of explaining to my daughters interested in my family history, and my family history is intertwined in particular in the two World Wars in, of course, I'm not going into much detail about any of that, but there were big fights, you see?
Yeah.
And I actually am the first generation in a long time who hasn't suffered through, of my family, hasn't suffered through some cataclysmic war.
And like that is great.
I think that's fantastic.
And that is a step forward.
I mean, whether it's due to nuclear weapons or the fact that the money classes can print money through the Federal Reserve rather than having to go steal it from other people.
But the amount of debt, the amount of intergenerational predation that's going on, the I think coming increases in social frictions in Europe and in North America in particular with the collapsing economies and so on, I think there has been a reduction in direct violence.
I think a lot of it has transferred to this sort of stealthy pickpocket inflation and debt nonsense and where that goes I don't know.
I mean I really do think that we're in a race With some pretty heavy undertoes and it really hopefully comes down to efforts of people like us and and people who think in the same way whether we can illuminate people enough to avoid what could be a kind of a strong undertow you know I mean Roman Empire looked pretty good till it fell too for a lot of people and that's sort of my concern that that there is improvements but there's this big strong undertow that seems to be gathering momentum.
I got it yeah look here's what I Well, how I understand this undertow that you're talking about, I think that on the one hand, although the way that we think about overt violence, it's being less and less valued around the world.
So if we're just talking about overt acts of violence, that is definitely on the decline.
But what's coming up instead, that is a real worry, is the tendency to achieve power not through violence but through manipulation.
So, okay, Let's look at it this way.
Today, you know, 90% of parents in the US still smack their children.
And if you go back one generation, they would have smacked their children with a wooden spoon.
And you go back three or four generations, they would have hit them literally with a whip.
So yeah, you know, it's still awful on the term of overt violence, but it's definitely getting less.
And with that, political overt violence is getting less too, where it's not You know, people aren't respecting the iron fist quite as much as what they used to.
But there's something else coming to take its place.
So that if I want to be a dictator, for instance, it doesn't work so much anymore in the 21st century for me to use direct fear.
If I wanted to become a dictator of a country, instead of getting you to fear me, I would try to find ways to get you to love me.
And this is really going on and I look for instance at the power, the enormous and hugely disproportionate power that is being accumulated now in the corporate structure in this extreme free market fundamentalist world that we seem to live in, the Milton Friedman style of this crazy
It's an ultra-free market where big corporations get their power through the back door by donating millions and millions and millions of dollars.
So do the unions, by the way, into manipulating.
You buy your politics now.
By owning the media channels, you can convince people of so much stuff.
You can get people to buy stuff they don't want.
You can get people to want stuff that they don't want.
Yeah, I mean just a mildly technical point.
I mean corporations are a product of the status system.
They weren't invented by the free market and also if you are using political donations to gain preferential, the preferential use of force is what the state is all about.
The state is an agency of it's a monopoly on force.
And if you donate a bunch of stuff to politicians in order to get them to exclude some competitor's product from coming up against you in the market or to give you some exclusive monopoly or some contract, that's not a free market situation.
That's really more on fascism in terms of corporations plus the state.
I mean it sort of calls free market but they're just being sort of technical about that.
Look, you know, when I say free market, I think what is overtly called free market.
I mean, but the free market, as we are told, casts a huge, huge shadow where it's not open to competition at all.
It's anything but free for all of the reasons that you said.
It's really about manipulation.
And I think there's a tendency as part of our social evolution here that, you know, we're letting go of violence in one way, but geez, we're becoming better at manipulating We don't get them to conform.
We give them these unbelievably terrible untested drugs to get them to sit in rows.
I mean, which is worse?
I don't know.
It's really hard to say.
I mean, would you rather be hit with a... would you rather be slapped?
A couple of times a month, or would you rather be put on Ritalin for eight years?
I don't know.
I think I choose the smack, you know, so I think I see what you're saying, if that goes in the same category.
Absolutely.
Just hit me and get it over and done with, you know, if it comes to choosing between two evils, but they're still both evils.
That's so true, and that's industry-driven, of course, that completely absurd diagnosis That just becomes a rationale for drug companies to sell more Ritalin.
Why is it that North America consumes 90% of the world's Ritalin?
Well, clearly North America has the most difficult children, Robin.
That's the cause and effect that you need to get your head around.
Clearly, they're just difficult.
They don't listen and they don't sit still.
Of course, America has the worst educational system and the highest drugging of children.
And of course, naturally, you have to punish the children for the failures of the educational system that was set up about 150 years before they were born.
Because the alternative is to, what is it that Michelle Reeves says, that we are continually sacrificing the interests of children to promote a pseudo-peace among adults.
And I think that is a very telling statement.
Children have the least power.
And I was always taught when I was growing up the greatest power disparities should give you the greatest ethical responsibilities, right?
So the CEO can't date his secretary.
Why?
Because there's a power disparity so he has to have a higher ethical standard with his secretary than he would for some woman he meets in a bar.
The greatest power disparity as a whole is between adults and children, and yet that entire ethic gets completely thrown out the window, and it's like, well, I've got all this power, and society's really screwed up, so the people who'll have to suffer the most are children, because otherwise we have to take on adults who can make our lives more difficult.
Pretty much, yeah.
I mean, if we had a formula that said, you know, with power comes transparency and accountability in equal measure, then things might look a little different.
You were talking earlier about this over-regulation of the world.
Perhaps it's not just about the rules but who the rules apply to because we are certainly becoming more and more regulated as a human community.
This sense of regulation is disproportionately aimed at people But not at corporations.
They're being deregulated and deregulated and deregulated, which then, of course, gives them this free kind of license to manipulate and to do whatever they want, and to drive the world economy in the direction that we've been witnessing in the last 10 years.
If I blow my money on a roulette table, nobody bails me out.
No.
It's unfair, isn't it?
Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing, of course, when The first thing you want to do when you're a big company and you have a powerful government around is to use the government to get above the law.
I mean, because the government is itself above the law.
You know, one kid will go to jail, sorry, one kid will get huge repercussions for hitting another kid, but you can start an illegal and unjust war, cause the deaths of over a million people, and you get a pension and a presidential library named after you.
So I think there's going to be a huge amount of corrosive cynicism coming out of the young as far as the rules of the elders go, because it all just seems to be a bunch of nonsense made up to keep those in power, keep them more powerful, and the rules only apply to the kids.
There's two other things.
Sorry, just I want to make sure I don't rant your show away because you're the guest.
The first thing that was struck when you were talking about the judging of children in classrooms, it's very interesting because the one thing I remember was when I was a kid was that some of the kids would go home.
I mean I had a friend whose dad was a professor.
His mom worked in a bookstore.
They were both literate and well-read and he went home to a sort of calm and rational and peaceful household that was actually a huge amount of fun to visit.
Some kids would go home to these drunken brawl fests of chaos and rage and so on and it seems to me that this is not something that – It really, I think, adds humiliation to humiliation to judge these two children by the same standards.
I don't think it's something that teachers can really do.
Teachers can't fix those kinds of problems, although we pretend that they can.
But I don't know, I mean, I think that seems to be a more of a community response, like a community would know where there's dysfunction within a household and provide the kind of support.
But we've really atomized, again, not to look backwards too glowingly at the past, you know, I want to shoot the 1950s like they're through some sort of honey brand muffin of nostalgic perfection.
But it seems to me that there was more of a community in the past where people could talk more about these things.
We've kind of institutionalized a lot of interventions and I don't think that there's enough incentive, I don't think there's enough knowledge to deal with these kinds of issues and we end up judging all the kids the same as if they all come from the same environment when they're not and just makes it even tougher on the kids who have it tough to begin with.
Look, for that very reason what I'm interested in is where are the pockets of community that are resisting this kind of trend and creating something new because out of this kind of pressure that you're talking about and how dysfunctional it all is, you know, this universal grading system that is so false and damaging actually.
Now, where are the pockets of more intelligent education that are resisting the pressure and growing something very, very new?
And there's quite a lot of it.
And it's very, very interesting.
I'll mention, for one, Alfie Kohn, K-O-H-N, Alfie Kohn, who's an education and psychology professor from Harvard University.
Brilliant guy, and he talks a lot about how grading itself is a myth.
The idea that we need to grade children on this universal standard scale is absolutely mythical.
You don't need that in order to figure out which child is good at doing what.
Even all the way up to university level.
There's a lot of evidence where grading will in fact diminish the academic output of a child because it's inherently shaming to be compared, to be ranked to other children, to be assigned a number for your work is powerfully shaming.
When you introduce shaming to a person, when someone starts to feel ashamed, I mean, that's such a painful emotion.
And even talking about the brain again right now, in shame you lose your focus.
Shame is biochemically, brain chemistry, incompatible with your academic focus, your ability to learn, your ability to form memory and to retain memory.
So we upset children at their cost and ours.
And you don't need to grade children.
You don't need homework up until children are in senior high school.
That's all a myth.
And this is, you know, I'm not just whistling Dixie here.
This is based on a lot of very good high-quality research.
You know, I really recommend that you look at Alfie Cohn, some of his videos on YouTube, as well as his books.
Punished by Rewards is one, and there's many more.
He's got a beautiful DVD called Gosh, I can't think of the name.
Something to do with grading and homework and how destructive it is.
I'll put it in glowing letters on the screen when I look it up after.
It's just great stuff.
So look, there are many, many school communities around the world that are resisting that.
We were able to find a primary school for our daughter that was parent-run.
And we had a no homework policy, a no exam policy.
Unfortunately, we don't have a high school that way here, but she never experienced pressure to learn for her whole primary school History.
So for her, learning is all about pleasure.
It's about passion, really.
The saddest stuff to hear in the classroom was everything that we would say.
The teacher would put on a movie or put on something, and the first thing you'd hear was, is this going to be on the test?
I mean, what a sad question to ask.
I mean, the problem with a test, of course, is that it's an endpoint.
And there's no endpoint to learning.
I mean, I still feel completely retarded about 99.999% of the important things in the world.
I've been studying this shit for 30 years.
But the kids, you know, it's like if you're going to drive to a hotel, when you get to the hotel, you stop driving.
And if you're going to learn something for a test, you get to the test, you stop learning.
And it becomes a grave marker rather than a judgment of any empirical validity.
If you want to reduce somebody's academic potential, the first thing to do, the first tactic is give them an exam.
And then they start working to the exam, not working on just the joy of learning.
Joy drives this thing much better than anything else, much better than fear and shame.
And this has been tested again and again and again in the research.
You pay, you can also, this applies to the workplace as well.
This is an enormous myth.
Everyone still believes, not everyone, a lot of people still believe that the way to get, for instance, executives in the workplace to perform better is you reward them with higher pay.
And then that, in a way, that rationalizes this idea that if you remove the ceiling on pay packets, so if you give an American executive, for instance, 500 times than the average wage.
That's supposed to be this equation that they'll perform 500 times better and it simply does not work.
And in fact, what happens is if you, I mean, we all need to be paid and we all need to be paid well enough, of course.
We want an enjoyable life and we want security and health.
But if you make the incentives all about, you know, in business, higher pay, more money, more money, or in school, more grades, more grades, more points, more marks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Or as they do in primary schools here, you know, if you're a good boy or a good girl in class, they will give you candy at the end, you know that, or gold stars.
So we, you know, even in school, we're starting to pay the children.
This is a currency.
The gold star system is a currency.
We're paying them to behave like what we want to make them behave.
People believe just blindly that that drives better performance.
It actually doesn't.
It puts the brakes on performance.
You know, we do what you were saying earlier is this on the exam.
We work to the exam and that means we don't retain the knowledge anywhere near as well.
It also breeds.
This becomes a farm for cheating or at the very least for taking shortcuts.
If you're going to pay me for this performance, what I'm going to do is I will figure out a way to give you what you're asking for, for the least effort.
I won't take risks, I just will do the minimum.
There's a beautiful example from a piece of American research.
You know, people were worried about literacy.
How can we get our kids to read more?
So what they did is that they started offering children these vouchers that you can exchange for junk food if you read five books.
So all the kids in the school raced out and read five books and they all got these vouchers to eat some junk food that's probably terrible for their health.
So everyone thinks, hey, presto, this works beautifully, doesn't it?
You know, statistically, they're reading more books.
And then someone decides, lo and behold, to scratch the surface a little bit.
What the kids are doing is picking the books that had the least text, the bigger writing, the more pictures, and when asked, you know, what did you understand from this book, they'd forgotten all about the damn book.
They just wanted that piece of paper that you can exchange for a piece of greasy pizza or something.
Well, the message is very clear that reading has no intrinsic value.
It must be done for the sake of reward.
Learning has no intrinsic value.
It must be done for the sake of the kibbles and bits that you get from an A+.
These things are not pleasurable in and of themselves.
but they must be done for some end that an authority controls and is going to give you.
And that carves out individual motivation and joy.
I mean, we are fountains of possibility, and it's like getting a big elephant to step on a hose.
It just blocks it all off and turns it into something that you become a rat running through a maze looking for cheese.
And as soon as you get it, you stop running.
It makes you purely reactive, inert, and highly controllable, of course, because you're responding to external stimuli and sticks and carrots rather than any kind of internal joy and desire.
Anyway, I'm sure we're on the same page.
If you want to treat your child in your classroom like a rat running a maze, what you're going to get is a rat that runs a maze really well.
and your kid gets the cheese.
Do you want a self-motivated, self-assured individual that asks questions?
An individual that drives their own learning, that's the opposite way to do it.
But the magic word you said earlier on was intrinsic.
And there's a lot of work being done now in universities to try to learn all about intrinsic motivation.
That's what makes people happy but also what drives a better economy ultimately and is academically far, far more successful when instead of paying people to perform, we find what will intrinsically motivate them.
That's to do with some kind of, you know, what makes you passionate?
What gives you pleasure in your heart in terms of your learning or your work?
You know, I tell you what, in my private practice, every day I work with people who are, by and large, very, very successful, financially and professionally, but they're the people that decided to be, whatever, a lawyer, a doctor, because mummy said that that's where the money is, or dad said that that's where the money is, and the misery that that creates.
The depression, the misery.
The misery, I call this the misery of the successful.
Yeah, look what I'm doing.
I'm making money, which is great, but guess what?
I get to spend this money two weeks in the year.
The rest of the time, I am suffering at work, day in, day out, doing something that means nothing to me, something that I don't love.
And that is so heartbreaking.
So often I ask people, look, did your teachers ever ask you, who are you and what do you love?
And they just blink and say, what do you mean?
Why would a teacher ask me that?
That is absolutely tragic.
I wanted to be a mathematician.
I didn't want to be a doctor.
I wanted to be whatever.
I wanted to join the Navy.
I wanted to be a mathematician.
I didn't want to be a doctor.
I wanted to be a piano player.
I wanted to be an actor.
You know, this dormant, untapped passion that is a huge unused treasure, I think, in our societies.
And, you know, when a school moves towards intrinsic motivation, that really makes me happy, I think.
That's some of the stuff that will produce a better world.
Yeah, and I mean, obviously, when you make money, your lifestyle adapts itself accordingly, and then you actually become very risk-averse.
I mean, the idea of lowering your income to pursue a dream Okay, idiots like me on the internet will do that and go from being executives at software companies to yelling into a microphone for donations, but for a lot of people it's really hard to make that adjustment because they've got themselves embedded in a whole lifestyle that it's really difficult to break the orbit of because they've got to feed the beast of their consumerism in their house, their mortgage, their cars, their kids, the colleges, whatever's going on, and that is a, you know, that is a treadmill that, you know, the gold just starts to hit you on the head.
It doesn't even something you can take pleasure in.
Absolutely.
I mean I really feel for that.
A lot of people are trapped and the longer that you leave it, the more that you feel so trapped by your own mortgage and I mean how many people have the energy and the heart to stop a particular profession at 50 and go back and learn something else, you know, or at 40 even.
It's very, very difficult.
So, you know, the earlier that we start and The moment that children start to speak, how about listening to their passion and honoring that?
I'll tell you what, if you want good behavior amongst children, this is an enormous recipe for that, when they are given opportunities to do what they're interested in, what they love.
Somebody once said to me, I had a little debate about the kinds of schools that I love for children, and this woman said to me, so you're telling me that if your child says, I just want to eat chocolate all day long, That that's what we should do, which is a very cynical response.
And I said to her, is that what you think a child is?
Do you really think that a child is a person that will just eat chocolate all day?
Honestly, I don't think you've met a child.
Children are, as we were saying earlier, they are hungry for knowledge.
Even their play, often their play has some kind of an educational outcome for them.
They learn so much about negotiation, communication, imagination, problem solving, inventiveness, etc.
I think that there's a very distinct role for parents and teachers to provide opportunity, but also be guides to help the child to be grounded, to invite them to ask the kinds of questions that will take them to the most satisfying answers in the world. to invite them to ask the kinds of questions that For me, it's not about neglecting the child and leaving them alone with their self-education.
I think education is primarily about relationship.
We still do.
The adults have a very important role in that.
Yeah, it is a tragically narcissistic society that believes it has nothing to...
to learn from its own children.
It's a society that believes it has all the answers and that anytime children deviate from those answers, the children is axiomatically incorrect.
And of course, we would never accept this with any other segment of society, this kind of prejudice, this kind of downgrading of possibility, this kind of negative view.
You know, if I said, well, you know, blacks are born with original sin and the devil has them in its grasp or whatever, I mean, I mean, racist would be a horrible thing to say, but you can say all of these kinds of negative things about children, and you have to control them, or they'll run wild, and they'll just eat chocolate, or you can have these incredibly negative views of children, and nobody calls you and says, that's incredibly prejudiced, and in fact, it just says everything about you, and nothing about the children around you.
But that's still something we have to get to, the promotion of children to full-on personhood.
is still something that we are distant from.
We've worked with minorities, fantastic, we're getting closer with that.
We've worked with women, fantastic, we're getting closer with that.
We're even working with prisoners of war, fantastic, we're getting closer with that.
But the extension of personhood to kids, that's going to be, I think, one of the biggest steps that we ever have to take.
Did you know that in England, when they developed the first, I think it was the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, To animals, eh?
That happened...
Before they had the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, politically.
Animals come first.
Everybody comes first.
The child is at the end of the line every time, historically, and it's still going on now, which is just an extraordinary thing.
You know, we tend to either... Children are under attack.
No question, they're under attack.
And either we attack them or we overindulge them and then blame them for whatever the result of that is.
So it still ends up as an attack.
I think the overindulgence comes out of a guilt of absence.
I mean, if you've been away from your kid all day, and you've got an hour before bedtime, you don't want to have rules and conflicts, and you just tend to give them what they want because you've been away all day.
That kind of parental guilt is different, I think, from the one we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation, but it has significantly formative effects too, I would argue.
Yeah, I don't have any time for you, so here's some of that stuff that you saw on TV that's really expensive.
I bought it for you.
Show it off to the other kids in school.
That really works for marketers.
Oh yeah, it certainly does.
Connection is the opposite of consumerism.
If you're happy with your company, you don't need as much stuff.
Now listen, Robert, I want to make sure we don't talk all night.
I also want to obviously talk to you after the show about why you've taken all of Canada Sunshine and how I can conceivably get it back.
I hope that you can fax it up here.
It's just on loan.
We'll take good care of it.
We'll give it back just as we found it.
I'd like to get you back on to talk about some of the, we've obviously done a fair amount of criticism, which I think is helpful and healthy.
If we could have another show perhaps to talk about, I'm very interested in the support that you feel, and I think you'd make a good case for the support that needs to be extended to parents, because that's something we can all do.
You know, we can't end fiat currency, we can't stop war, we can't dismantle dictatorships with our bare teeth, but we can reach out to support parents within communities that we know, prior to risk stakes being irrevocable, and so if I can yank you back on some other time, it would be great to talk about that.
Very happy to do that.
Alright, and if you could mention your website to my listeners, I want to make sure I drive as many people to your work as possible.
Sure.
Here's my website, ouremotionalhealth.com.
But there are, how do you say in Canada, hyphens or dash?
Hyphen.
Hyphen, so our-emotional-health.com.
Alright fantastic and I will put links to the books which I recommend.
I really appreciate the work that you're doing.
I also wanted to commend you on your writing style which is you know passionate and eloquent and focused and motivating and I write a little myself and I really do I want to compliment you on that.
I know that takes a lot of work and I think you did a great job with the books and I hope that we can get them some more exposure through this venue.
But thank you so much for all the work that you're doing.
I mean as a dad, as a therapist, as a writer, as a communicator, it's great to, you know, look across the night sky and see some other stars out there above the mountaintop.
So thank you for all of that.
I really appreciate that and thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you.
I did know you through YouTube, so it's nice to meet you almost in person and from the other side of the planet.
So let's keep doing this.
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