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July 2, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:17:29

AN INTRODUCTION TO PEACEFUL PARENTING! Stefan Molyneux Interviewed

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	Stefan Manuth, thank you for joining us.
	My pleasure. Thanks for the invite. So, years ago when I got interested into, I guess, politics, culture, society, basically how everyone, everything, and of course I was introduced to this stuff by people like Gavin McInnes, Steven Crowder, that kind of crowd, Ben Shapiro even.
	And you were actually one of the first people I followed on Twitter.
	And this was probably 2015, 2016.
	And I remember seeing your content was posted all over like meme pages and stuff.
	And I probably watched some of your stuff on YouTube.
	I recall doing that too.
	But I also recall you being one of the first people to be banned.
	I don't know if I was that early in the whole stage.
	There were lots of people who went down like nine pins ahead of me, but I certainly was one of the biggest, for sure, without a trace of self-aggrandizement.
	Certainly in terms of numbers, it was pretty high.
	Maybe it wasn't that early.
	I mean, it was... I'm just...
	I don't remember exactly when, but I remember...
	Like, it just seems like a long time that you haven't been there.
	I think it was June or July of last year, if I remember rightly.
	Really? Yeah. Damn, I must have a...
	No, no, sorry, year before last.
	Was it year before last? Yeah, yeah.
	No, no, it was last...
	It was a little over a year ago.
	Yeah, because it was in the couple of months lead up to the election, right?
	November 3rd. So I think it was June or July of last year.
	Yeah, for some reason I thought it was much earlier.
	I don't know. Maybe my memory is just awful.
	Well, no, because I got kicked off a bunch of platforms before that or, as I like to think of it, cordially invited to express my opinions elsewhere.
	And so, yeah, I'd been kicked off a bunch of platforms before that.
	Those were really the two big ones and the ones that I had worked, I guess, the most to create.
	I mean, I was on YouTube in...
	2005. I was like the third guy on YouTube.
	And I was on YouTube in 2005.
	I think I did a fair amount to help them grow.
	And I worked really hard to defend them when they were physically attacked by that crazy female shooter and so on.
	So, yeah. But I saw it getting suppressed there, I think in 2018.
	And then the suppression sort of continued into 2019.
	At the end of 2019, I released my documentary on Hong Kong where I marched with the...
	I had protestors against the communists and took a couple of facefuls of tear gas for my troubles.
	And that did not help in terms of my reputation with the leftists in social media.
	In fact, you could have searched for the name of that documentary directly and you couldn't find it on YouTube.
	It had gone completely ghosted.
	And yeah, then the final hammer came down summer last year, and no warning, no strikes, no threat, just boom, just all gone.
	And no chance to download, no chance to transfer, although I have, of course, most of the videos, so...
	I think I was close to 500,000 on Twitter, and I would have been about 1.5 million on YouTube, except I'd put out a good video, I'd get a whole bunch of listeners or subscribers, and then they'd just claw them back.
	They'd just, oh, we're tidying up the rolls.
	Because apparently it's really, really important for everyone to be able to vote, except on social media.
	Then you've got to interfere with that as much as humanly possible.
	Yeah, sorry. But before me, I mean, gosh, I mean, of course, Alex Jones, Milo, who I know you've talked to, and I mean, just a bunch of other people were facing their own kind of troubles and hassles.
	And I think I hung on pretty well.
	I hung on pretty well.
	But I think the 2020 election and the fear of the repeat of Trump was just too much to let, I guess, anyone like me I mean, I wasn't massively pro-Trump, but I just really don't like – you know, when you've had a lot of lies told about you, you kind of get annoyed at the lies continuing.
	And my main purpose with pushing back on the media lies against Trump wasn't to be pro-Trump.
	It was just to be anti-media.
	So the people say, oh my gosh, look how much they lie about Trump.
	Maybe they're lying about stuff too, which they are.
	So that was sort of the goal.
	Yeah, I mean, I am kind of surprised.
	Maybe the situation that happened was, because I know there's a lot of people getting all of a sudden removed as a follower, or maybe you were getting, your stuff just wasn't showing up in my feed for some reason, but I remember just laughing at your tweets.
	I just loved the stuff you tweeted.
	You were one of the best people on Twitter, I think.
	Thank you. And I'd love to touch on this a little bit, but I know people are probably tired of hearing the big tech censorship thing being beat over the head and stuff, but I think it's also important that we keep bringing that up just because we're going to have people who come up just like I did in a couple of years and they're not going to remember people like you, unfortunately. Well, there is a pattern, right?
	Sorry, there's a sort of tide comes in, tide comes out, big heartbeat of human communication, which is that centralization leads to efficiency and broadcast, right?
	So you look at the Catholic Church in sort of the – what are colloquially called the Dark Ages up until – Martin Luther and the thesis at Wittenberg and so on.
	And so you had Latin as the common language, you had a universal Christendom, and there was great communication, great spread, some great art, and actually I've been corrected by some people from my earlier opinions and accept that with, I think, good grace that there was actually a fair amount of support for science and the exploration of the universe and so on.
	So that efficiency of Latin as a common language of the Church as a whole, that's, you know, like the big social media platforms.
	And then what happens, of course, is there's corruption that gets built into that, as I'm sure you're aware of.
	One of the big complaints that Martin Luther had about the Catholic Church was the sale of indulgences that the Catholic Church felt that they were...
	the ownership or they had ownership of all of the excess virtue that Jesus had and the saints had, and they could sell it to people who had sinned in return to get time of purgatory.
	And eventually it got to the point where you could buy your indulgences ahead of time, like I'm going to go do something bad, I'll need this ahead of time.
	And with that level of corruption drew in Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and there was a whole lot of deplatforming going on, right?
	And the sort of central unity of social media and, in this case, the Catholic Church was fragmented.
	That led to a lot of conflict.
	It also led to a certain amount of growth and secularism and more of a respect for philosophy and science and so on.
	You know, the good and the bad.
	So in general, there is this pattern, right, that it's really, really efficient to have a lot of centralization.
	But with centralization comes power, with power comes corruption, right?
	With corruption comes censorship.
	And then people fragment and there's progress from that.
	So this is why, you know, I'm on a whole bunch of different social media platforms now.
	Some of them uncensorable and some of them, you know, just stepping up and supporting philosophy as we move forward.
	But this pattern is very repetitive throughout human history that everyone's excited about this.
	The big audience, the big centralization, the common tongue, and so on.
	But as soon as you get a common meeting place, you get corruption and the desire to control the narrative, and the power junkies swarm in, and then you've got to fragment and move forward that way.
	For people who haven't been able to follow you since you've been wiped off Twitter, I guess, what have you been up to since then?
	Well, so I basically decided to stop doing politics.
	Now, for those of you who kind of got into me while I was doing politics, it's interesting to some degree.
	It's a little bit Groundhog Day over and over again, sort of the same thing.
	Oh no, they're doing something crazy on the left.
	Oh no, they're failing to stand up for their principles on the right.
	Gets a little bit repetitive, but I didn't start with politics.
	I started with sort of pure philosophy and self-knowledge and My original tagline was the philosophy of personal and political liberty.
	The personal liberty has to come first.
	It has to come first.
	I would rather be paying 50% taxes and have a happy marriage than have an unhappy marriage and have zero taxes in terms of just like general happiness.
	And so I can control the quality of my marriage to some degree.
	I can't control directly in any way the amount of taxes that I have to pay.
	And so I really, really wanted people to focus on how philosophy could actually help improve their daily lives, the quality of their life, the happiness that they have, the integrity that they can live with without going to jail for whatever, disobeying the law, whichever was discouraged.
	So I really started with sort of personal philosophy, with relationships, with how to find good people in your life, how to deal with difficult people in your life.
	I'm a big fan of talk therapy and self-knowledge and, you know, know thyself is the first commandment of Socrates, really the foundation of philosophy.
	So I was really, really focused on that stuff.
	And then... Well, frankly, I wanted to grow the show.
	So I started getting into philosophy.
	I started a show called True News back in the day.
	And yeah, I mean, partly just the general growth in podcasting and video casting and so on.
	But yeah, the show kind of grew up.
	And then in 2014, 2015 in particular, 2016, we just went kind of nuts.
	And I think at the end, I had like three quarters of a billion views and downloads on the various platforms.
	So, yeah, it was a really great thing.
	I'm kind of back to my roots. I'm working on a book on parenting.
	I read one of my novels as an audiobook, which is free, and I really, really strongly urge people, you know, if you want to put it on.
	I'm a trained actor.
	I went to the National Theatre School of Canada, so I know how to do the different voices, and it's the story of a British family and a German family from World War I to World War II, which is kind of autobiographical.
	I'm half Irish and half, well, half Irish, British, and half German.
	So, the audio book, I'm doing my call-in shows, I'm doing a bunch of live streams, working on a book, and I guess at a bit more distance, because I used to be like, I've got to read politics because I'm going to do politics, and I'll sort of browse it at the moment, but staying away from some of the COVID madness and all that kind of stuff is not the worst thing in the world.
	So, I'm kind of back to my roots, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.
	Yeah, my friend Brian told me to ask you about parenting.
	So I guess, what's new in parenting?
	Well, there's less of it, of course, because people always talk about the number of lives lost to COVID, but it's the seen versus the unseen.
	The real calamity of COVID and the lockdowns has been all the children who haven't been born.
	Varsely outnumbers the people who've died of COVID. But of course, the people who die of COVID They are there.
	You put them in the ground and you mourn them.
	The children who aren't born, you don't see them.
	So it's not really part of anyone's consciousness.
	It's like the people who die of COVID because of the lockdowns.
	You get something, you know, usually not very accurate on the death certificate.
	What people don't see is because of all the lockdowns, all the people who aren't getting cancer screenings, who aren't getting dietary advice, who can't get a knee replacement, so they're in pain, so they take a whole bunch of opiates and get addicted and then die from that or suicide or depression, all that kind of stuff, right?
	So, with parenting, the non-aggression principle, I'm sure you're familiar with it, right?
	Do not initiate force against others.
	So, non-aggression principle. So, my mind, I'm not just like, I don't just have the cranium of Humpty Dumpty, but my mind kind of moves in circles a lot of ways.
	So, I always see sort of overlapping circles.
	And I also was an entrepreneur for many years in the software field, so I'm kind of used to, you want to apply, like in life, in business, in love, in everything, you want to apply your efforts, right?
	Where you can have the most effect and the most control.
	If you believe in a particular moral value, then you really have to put it into practice first.
	If you want to have genuine credibility with others, there's no point lecturing people about the non-initiation of force, like, oh, central banking is really bad.
	Yeah, yeah, it is, for sure. Imperialism is really bad, yes.
	Yes, it is. Government schools are really bad, yes.
	Yes, they are. But it's very abstract.
	If you really want to be able to communicate effectively the non-aggression principle, you must, must, must put it into practice in your own life.
	Now, so what I wanted to do when I looked at the non-aggression principle and spreading it was kind of simple.
	Actually, yeah, it is kind of simple.
	I'm thinking, yeah, is it really that simple?
	Yeah, it kind of is, right? So that there's a circle, right?
	And there's a circle is...
	Where is the most violence in the world that we can do the most about?
	These two things, right? So big violence, yeah, you've got genocides, you've got wars, you've got predations upon the next generation, you've got theft and unfunded liability.
	We can't do much about those. We can't do much about those.
	So the most violence in the world that we can do the most about, right?
	That's where philosophy should be, right?
	That's where you should be applying your attention, right?
	It's sort of like if you're 300 pounds and there are fat people in Samoa and you say, well, I'm going to spend my whole life eating like a pig and then trying to deal with fat people in Samoa.
	It's like, no, no, no, lose weight yourself and then go help the fat people in Samoa or whatever, right?
	So when I looked at these, I still probably have somewhere in my notes these basic drawings that I did back at the beginning of all of this.
	I said, okay, where's the most violence that people can do the most about?
	Or another way of putting it is, where's the most violence that people can deal with without going to jail?
	Like you say, oh, taxation is theft.
	You say, yeah, but you don't pay your taxes.
	You go to jail, so pay your taxes, right?
	So I looked at the most violence that you can do the most about, and that is violence within the family.
	Spanking in particular.
	You know, it's not even that long ago, and the data is a little dated now, but probably not more than 10 years or so.
	Like 90% of parents spanked.
	And they spank a lot.
	I mean, some of the real-time studies of spanking have kids being hit multiple times a day.
	And for nothing. Like, I just posted something today.
	It's a bit of a 2011 study.
	One researcher, he said, look, I just want to study parents yelling at kids, right?
	So he said, you know, got a bunch of parents.
	Would you mind wearing a recorder?
	Just go about your day. Forget it's there.
	And he got the tapes back, and it was just like whack, whack, whack, whack, whack.
	And they were all, I think all of them but one were moms.
	And just like whacking kids, whacking kids for nothing.
	You know, for fighting with their sibling.
	Ooh, siblings fight, big deal, right?
	Or one mom was like trying to read and the kid was turning the pages of the book because he wanted to see what came next and she hit him for that.
	Like, there's crazy stuff.
	90% of parents hit.
	And I assume it's more than that.
	Just some people don't like to admit it.
	And of course the other parents, even if they don't hit, what do they do?
	They... They will take their kids and they will sit them down in the time-out square and they'll pick them up and put them back.
	You know, it's a form of incarceration as opposed to direct physical violence.
	It's still, you know, try that with an adult and you go to jail, right?
	Or they'll send them to bed without food or they'll lock them in their room, which is another form of incarceration and so on.
	And so, okay, there's the most violence that we can do the most about.
	Because, you know, I've been a stay-at-home dad for 12 and a half years now.
	Never yelled at my daughter.
	Never called her a name. Never hit her.
	And it's totally legal.
	You've got to pay your taxes, but you don't have to hit your kids.
	It's perfectly legal.
	I'm telling you out there, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm willing to go out on a limb and give everybody this legal advice.
	It is perfectly legal to not hit your children, to not yell at your children, to not raise your voice at your children.
	So I began to talk about peaceful parenting.
	This is what I phrase it, which is parenting.
	Like, what can you do if you don't have violence as your option?
	What can you do? I mean, this is the whole basis of the free market.
	The whole basis of the free market is how can society be organized if we're not...
	What if we actually have property rights?
	What if we don't use violence to get our resources?
	What if we buy and build and trade?
	And, you know, we get the modern world, we get science, we get our standard of living.
	What's it like to live in a world where you don't have violence as your go-to solution?
	And so what is it like as a parent if you don't have violence as your go-to solution?
	Solution. And I mean, I worked in a daycare when I was a teenager for many years.
	I never used any violence on the kids, even as a teenager.
	It's not really that hard to not hit people.
	I mean, I don't know about you, but for me, I can get through the day.
	I don't crack anyone.
	I don't hit my kid. I just don't punch my wife.
	It's not a big thing for me.
	No coffee? Okay, I'm with you there.
	That's a challenging thing, right?
	But not hitting people?
	I think we should be able to catapult from dawn till dusk without cracking people somewhere along the way.
	And yeah, it turns out that that actually is very doable.
	So I began to really promote...
	In wild, childish Gambino optimism, I began to really sort of promote this idea of, okay, we like the non-aggression principle.
	And libertarians have been, if you sort of go back through the classical liberal canon, liberals have been talking about the non-aggression principle, very small to no government for at least 150 years.
	You could push it back a little further, but at least 150 years.
	And what's happened?
	Well, in the time that we have been talking about, say, the American government for 150 years, it has gone from the smallest government in the world ever.
	The American government in its founding and for the first 80 years was the smallest government the world has ever seen.
	And what's happened since?
	Well, by focusing on politics, by focusing on lecturing people about very big abstract economic and The US government has gone from the very smallest government the world has ever seen to the very largest government the world has ever seen, with the most military bases, the biggest amount of unfunded liabilities, the most surveillance and control over its citizenship.
	So like that, if you're advocating a diet and everybody just gets fatter and you go from advocating a diet to the thinnest people in the world and then by the end of it, they're the fattest people the world has ever seen, at some point you've got to rethink your approach to communicating your diet.
	And so my sort of basic case was, look, most people...
	I mean, this is an old saying, right?
	Smart people learn conceptually.
	Average people learn by experience, usually bitter experience.
	And dumb people, they already know everything, so you can't tell them anything, right?
	So I said, look, if we want to communicate the non-aggression principle, what we need to do, we need to live it in our own lives.
	We need to raise children.
	Following the non-aggression principle.
	It's perfectly legal. It's a good thing to do.
	It's the right thing to do. Children are the most helpless and dependent members of society, and the fact that we still get to hit them is unbelievably terrible and will be looked in the future like we look at slavery or cannibalism, maybe.
	So I said, look, let's push back against spanking and let's raise kids that are the envy of the world.
	Let's raise kids that are the envy of the world.
	And then people will say, oh, wow, you guys are a happy family.
	Your kids love you.
	They're successful. They're verbal.
	They negotiate. Why? Because you don't yell at them.
	You don't hit them. You don't use violence against them.
	And if we believe in the non-aggression principle, then spanking is a total violation of the non-aggression principle because the only way you're allowed to use violence is in self-defense.
	And you can't claim that spanking children is self-defense and it makes no sense.
	It's not true at all. So I said, look, let's put politics aside.
	It's important, but it hasn't worked.
	And because I'm a highly results-based entrepreneur, like if you're an entrepreneur, if something doesn't work, you have to stop because you'll go out of business and you'll lose your life savings.
	And I remember when I was in the business world, I would sign these It's unholy amounts like – because we had to make payroll and the bank was like, oh, I don't know if you're going to have the money.
	We were waiting for a big check to come in and I would like sign these like, I don't know, $20,000, $30,000, which I'd be on the hook for outside of bankruptcy or whatever.
	I'm like, so we really have to make things work because I can't have this amount of debt coming out of this business.
	I can never get out of it, right?
	And so, for me, I'm just very practical that way.
	Is it working? No, it's not working.
	Let's try something else. And I thought, gosh, wouldn't it be great and moral if we applied the non-aggression principle?
	Forget the politics stuff, because, you know, libertarian candidates are never getting more than a couple of percentage of the vote.
	In fact, it's been going down since the 80s, right?
	And, of course, this was the Ron Paul thing, so I got a lot of pushback on that, which I respect and understand, but...
	I thought, gosh, you know, this is about 15 years ago.
	I said, let's just have kids and have wonderfully happy families, great relationships, great relationships with other kids, homeschool and negotiate and don't use violence and don't threaten and don't call them names and don't yell, don't raise your voice.
	And that will be a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful demonstration of our values.
	And then people will look and say, I want some of that.
	Because, you know, fat guys can't sell diet books.
	And if you are using violence in your own life, if you're hitting your kids or yelling at your kids, and all you're talking about is how bad the Fed is, the Federal Reserve is, then people are like, I'm sorry, I can't hear what you're saying over what you're doing, which is you are using violence against unarmed and helpless people in your own life called your children.
	So, if you're using violence and then you say the non-aggression principle is the right thing to do and taxation is theft, well, spanking is beating.
	Spanking is hitting. So, that was really the case.
	What's the most prevalent violence in the world, and that's spanking, that we can do the most about?
	You can control whether you spank or not.
	You can't control the Federal Reserve rate, but you can control whether you spank.
	You can't control whether the U.S. invades Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria, but you can control whether you hit your own kids.
	Not hitting kids in your social circle.
	And that was sort of my goal, my approach.
	And part of that, or I guess the more volatile or less controversial...
	And of course, you know, when you're steeped in moral philosophy, you kind of forget what's controversial to the normies.
	I use that. I know that sounds like a disrespectful phrase.
	I don't really mean it that way. But the people who aren't well-versed in philosophy, like...
	If you know how to speak Latin fluently, you'll probably break into Latin from time to time and forget that nobody knows it other than you and 12 other people.
	So what I did was I said, look, if you had people who were violent towards you as a child, like if you had abusive mom, abusive dad, and so on, that's not good.
	They acted in a wrong way.
	Now, they may have acted in a way that they thought was right at the time, but the way I grew up is it doesn't matter if things were thought to be right at the time.
	Nobody says, well, you know, but the slave owners, they thought it was right at the time.
	We have a moral judgment that spirals back in time, and that's sort of the basis of a lot of what we're evaluating in our cultures at the moment.
	So I said, you know, talk to them and so on, because my particular concern was, if you as a parent have people around you who are unapologetic users of violence against you and other children...
	Then how are you going to be able to raise your children with any kind of moral authority, right?
	It's really, really bad to hit kids.
	You know, here are the people who hit me and they're totally welcome in my house and I'm never going to say anything about it.
	So I said, you know, talk to them about it, try and work it out.
	And if they're relentlessly hostile and abusive and so on, even if they're your parents, you know, the focus is on the next generation.
	And you don't have to have abusive people in your life.
	And so that was, you know...
	It felt like and still feels like and I think is, you know, a fairly logical progression.
	But I made, I mean, endless amounts of mistakes.
	And one of the mistakes was, and I know this sounds like a little bit of self-praise, but one of the mistakes was, you know, I have a pretty good conscience.
	I'm a self-hack. I've never done anything wrong.
	You know, I've got a pretty good conscience.
	So when someone comes along to me like, you know, here's a moral rule you should live by, I may not have lived it perfectly or consistently, but, you know, I haven't been cruel to children.
	I haven't done any of that stuff.
	And so I think like in putting these ideas out, I kind of tripped over a landmine, which was how many parents out there really feel bad about what they did to their kids and don't want to apologize and therefore get mad at me for trying to raise the moral standards, right? Like the people who own the slaves aren't very big fans of the abolitionists and so on, right?
	So, peaceful parenting is really the distillation of the arguments around we are a society that, you know, there's an old saying that says you can judge a society.
	I think it's from Dostoevsky. You can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners.
	No! No!
	You judge a society by how it treats its children.
	You judge a society by how it treats the children.
	Why? Because children have no voice.
	They have no economic or political independence or rights.
	And they are the vast unchosen members of society.
	They did not choose to be born. And they certainly did not choose their parents.
	So this was my sort of logical thing, which was if a woman was through a forced cultural mechanism, forced to become married to a man who then abused her, and then she said, I'm not happy with this relationship, at least I think a reasonably moral person would say, well...
	You didn't choose to be in the relationship.
	He is abusing you.
	You have the right to leave.
	You're not required to stay anymore.
	This is not the culture.
	You don't have to stay.
	That's a reasonable thing, right? So, of course, if people said, oh, I was abused as a child in my show and...
	I would say, well, I think that's really bad.
	I think you should get some therapy.
	I think you should talk to your parents.
	You're not obligated to stay if they're unrepentant child abusers.
	But see, people just don't...
	We don't see that. We have nothing but sympathy for a woman who was forced into a marriage and then was abused by her husband.
	But we don't seem to have nearly as much sympathy for children who are born into a family that abuses them.
	And the woman who's in the marriage, she could have run away.
	She could have become a refugee.
	She could have done any number of things to sort of avoid or get out of the situation.
	I mean, look at High on Hersey Alley.
	She managed to get all the way from, where was it, Ethiopia or Somalia?
	Somalia, I think it was, all the way to become a politician in Holland, if I remember rightly.
	Whereas children, we're born into these families with no choice.
	We didn't choose people.
	We didn't choose to be born. We have no choice, no rights, no freedoms.
	So surely, and this is what I was raised with, and I'm sure you heard the same thing, Where there is greater power disparity, there are also greater moral standards.
	So you work in some place, you can date a co-worker.
	Most places will let you date a co-worker.
	But if you're the boss, you can't date your employee because there's too much of a power disparity.
	You look at Harvey Weinstein.
	Not only was the crimes that they committed or alleged to have committed egregious, but because they had power over these actresses, it's considered to be Even worse.
	You look at Bill Cosby and the rapes.
	He had power and authority and fame and money and all of that.
	And so where the power disparity is greater, there the ethics need to also be greater.
	But we don't have the same thing.
	With families, it's weird when you think about it, and I'm sort of trying to dislodge this matrix of the family structure as we understand it.
	We actually have a situation in the system which is truly incomprehensible from any rational standpoint.
	We say we must protect the most vulnerable in society, and where there is a greater power disparity, there must be greater and higher moral standards.
	And the less chosen the relationship is, The higher the moral standards we must have.
	And so if we look at children, they didn't choose to be there.
	They have no power, no authority, no independence.
	No capacity to escape, in most circumstances, abusive situations.
	And there we have the very lowest moral standards in society.
	You can yell at them, you can hit them, you can starve them, you can lock them in a room, all of these things.
	Now, in some places, spanking has become illegal, but most places, the vast majority of parents yell at their children, the vast majority of parents still smack their children.
	It just goes to show how little we actually are a moral society.
	How so much morality is just posturing and politics and, you know, if I claim to be a victim or I can get money from the government or I can make people feel guilty or whatever.
	But if we actually were to say, this is my challenge to libertarians, non-aggression principle, okay, where's the biggest violation we can do the most about?
	That's banking. And as a society as a whole.
	Should we not have our very highest moral standards apply to parents before absolutely everyone and everything else?
	Because, you know, when they say, oh, well, society's judged by how it treats its prisoners, I mean, criminal prisoners and so on.
	If we treat children well, we won't have any children.
	Criminal prisoners, or maybe just a few if they get a brain tumor and it dissolves their neofrontal cortex or whatever, right?
	And I did a whole series called The Bomb and the Brain.
	I spoke with the experts, ran through all the data.
	Adult criminality, adult addiction, adult dysfunction, adult promiscuity, entirely the result of child abuse.
	If you fix...
	Childhood, you fix the world.
	And if you don't fix childhood, everything else you do is just chasing the illusion of efficacy.
	So, yeah, peaceful parenting is sort of my hymn to making this case in a sort of very logical, data-driven, methodical way to make sure that people do understand that if we're not fixing childhood, everything else that we try to do is just a fool's quest.
	Sorry for the long speech.
	I hope that at least it calculates.
	It was very informing.
	But I always see, especially on Facebook, I see older people post that they can tell that the newer generation hasn't been beaten as kids or something.
	So I've always wondered about spanking, like does it actually make better adults or does it make horrible human beings?
	Like how, what the data is on that.
	And then secondly, I guess another question I'd have is what is the route you take when you have a kid who's badly behaving?
	What do you do in that situation?
	I certainly try not to The boomer question of Facebook, oh, these kids, they're so disrespectful, they can't get their acts together, turn your baseball cap around, pull up your pants, drop your Xbox controller and go make something of your life and all the boomer stuff that goes on.
	So the big, and we'll get to the spanking data in a sec.
	The big issue with the children raised...
	I'm just under Boomer, under the Boomer cutoff.
	My generation below, the Gen Xs, the Millennials.
	So the big issue is not spanking or a lack of spanking.
	The big issue is issues twofold.
	Number one, abandonment.
	Abandonment, abandonment, abandonment.
	The abandonment being that moms drop the kids at daycare, drop the kids with strangers, have nannies, whatever, so they could race back to work, so they could pay a lot of taxes and drive down the wages of men.
	It makes no economic sense, but just the power of propaganda, right?
	So, the generation post-boomers.
	The boomers, as we know, I mean, lots to say about them, and I won't be too harsh about anything, but basically they lived life for themselves and their own particular pleasures, and if they wanted to get a job and they wanted to have kids, well, anybody can raise your kids, but only I can do my job, which, of course, is the complete opposite of what is true.
	You know... Whatever job you have, you know, like eight minutes after you leave on the last day, everyone's forgotten all about you, but your kid will remember that time you didn't go see the play or go and play with them at the playground.
	They'll remember that stuff forever.
	And parental abandonment is experienced by children in daycare.
	If you're in daycare for 30 or more hours a week, you have virtually the same symptoms as if your parents have died, as if your parents have abandoned you.
	And that, you know, I understand for children...
	Particularly babies, infants and toddlers.
	Parental abandonment is the most stressful thing that can occur.
	Not being paid attention to by your parents is worse than your parents beating you for a child.
	Which is why children will act badly just to get parental attention.
	If the only way they can get parental attention is to provoke and be annoying and be difficult and cause trouble, they will do that.
	Because no parental attention, I mean, we understand this evolutionarily speaking, like no parental attention is death.
	Because for most of human history, there wasn't enough food to go around for everyone.
	And so if your parents didn't care about you, if you didn't provide even some value, maybe I'll just be a punching bag to them and I'll give them value that way.
	You wouldn't make it.
	Especially when you had tribes on the go and tribes who were nomadic and so on.
	Just leave the kids behind. Kids had a very, very precarious existence throughout most of human history.
	Like half of kids didn't even make it to the age of five.
	So you had to be pretty damn pleasing to your parents.
	So parental abandonment is the most existentially terrifying thing that a child can go through.
	And the reason why a peaceful society requires attachment...
	It's an amazing thing. I mean, the human brain, the human body.
	Incredible. Because what our bodies are scanning for is what kind of society are we going to live in.
	We don't know. We don't know when we're born.
	We don't know if we're going to live in peace or war and feast or famine.
	We have no idea. We don't know if we're living in stable pair bond society or big giant hippie flesh pit orgy society.
	We have no idea. We have no idea what sexual norms there are.
	We have no idea what the cultural standards are.
	So when we're born, we're just like narwhals.
	You're just scanning all the time.
	What's going on? What kind of society am I going to have to live in?
	Now, when you take a kid and you dump the kid in daycare, the parent experiences maternal abandonment and that programs the child That programs the child for a situation of scarcity, for a situation of want, for a situation of extraordinary low levels of social trust, for a situation where promiscuity, the spray and pray method of having kids, is far better than pair bonding.
	And this is particularly true of fatherlessness.
	So girls and boys, when they're born, they're scanning for the presence of males.
	If there are males, it means it's probably not a time of war.
	If there are males, it means that you're in a high-trust society, you're in a stable, secure society, and you adapt emotionally.
	And in every other way, you adapt to that leave-it-to-beaver society as opposed to some chaotic chaz-in-Seattle society that's going on.
	And so the boomers, they take the kids and drop them in daycare.
	The kids aren't getting breastfed.
	They're not getting much attention.
	And it's not because of the fault of the daycare workers.
	It takes 10 minutes to properly change a child's diaper.
	You've got five kids. That's 50 minutes out of every hour because they're going to poop or pee every hour.
	And then you're transferring fecal matter.
	The kids get sick. It's just a mess.
	And they don't get... Breastfed and breastfeeding, we know, adds a significant number of IQ points to the developing child, as does skin-to-skin contact, eye contact, all of that stuff, right?
	So if you have children who grow up in a society of plenty, but every emotional trigger that is being developed in them is war, chaos, disaster, famine, violence, lack of bonding, then you are priming people to be fundamentally out of step with their environment.
	And we know...
	I mean, this is how deep the biology goes.
	A woman, a girl, who grows up without a father starts menstruating significantly earlier because her body is scanning and saying, okay, how are we going to reproduce here?
	Because the genes just photocopy, photocopy.
	That's all they want to reproduce. How are we going to reproduce here?
	Is it stable, delay gratification, pair bonding, maturity, you know, a Christian society or a society of peace and relative stability or whatever...
	Or is it, you know, wham, bam, thank you, man, move on to the next one like you're, you know, some adult person in Jamaica or something, right?
	And generally, it's tropical versus cold climate, right, where these things tend to split.
	And again, I've done a whole series on this if people want to check it out.
	It's called Gene Wars, R versus K selection.
	R selection is where you just have a whole bunch of kids You don't really invest into them, and most of them aren't going to make it like tadpoles or baby bunnies or something like that.
	And that's your best reproductive strategy, and you just keep having kids until you run out of food.
	And generally what happens is you're preyed upon by the larger, more complex animals.
	Like if you're a rabbit, you're preyed upon by owls and hawks and foxes and wolves, the larger, more complex organisms.
	And the way that you...
	Survive and don't run out of food is you just get preyed.
	But because you can't do anything about being preyed upon, like a rabbit can't fight off a fox or it's going to get its ass chewed off, right?
	And so because you can't do anything to deal with whatever is preying upon you, and it could be things like, of course, in Africa, it's the viruses and the bacteria and so on.
	And of course, the big cats, the big predators and so on.
	So you just, you can't control anything.
	There's no point pair bonding.
	There's no point investing in your offspring because all they have to do is run away and eat grass, right?
	So you just have as many kids as possible and you just move on.
	No pair bonding. High sex drive, you know, making love like rabbit, banging like rabbits or whatever, breeding like rabbits.
	And that's our selection.
	It's a perfectly viable strategy for a particular kind of survival.
	Now on the K side, it's much different.
	K selection. You have fewer offspring, and you work to train that offspring in general, right?
	You think of the wool pack teaching the babies to hunt, right?
	You see the little lions, they're all piling over each other, learning how to hunt and chase, and even dogs in households will creep up, and cats will creep up, and they're always constantly practicing.
	You get the lasers, and they're all over the place trying to practice how to hunt.
	Because they can do something about it.
	Because their skill depends on whether they eat.
	You don't need any skill if you're a rabbit to chew on some grass everywhere.
	Just eat, right? Whereas if you're a fox or a hawk, you need a lot of skill.
	You need a lot of training. You've got to have fewer kids and you invest more in them.
	And so we have societies...
	Where we are, and again, it's not a plan or anything, it's just the way it's played out, we are training children for chaos, for instability, for aggression, for violence, for alienation, for...
	Spray and pray, rabbit-style reproduction without care, without thought.
	And this is where, you know, the sort of hookup culture comes from.
	It's just rabbit culture. All it is is just a bunch of bunnies doing the hookup stuff, as opposed to, you know, the case-selected thing, which is you've got to have a chaperone and no sex before marriage, and you've got to...
	Declare yourself before God.
	You're going to stay together forever. Because when you have that foundation of a pair-bonded couple that is going to stay together, then you've got a father who's present, you've got a mother who's present, you've got stability, and the children grow up in peace and serenity and security.
	And the pair-bonded nuclear family, by far, by far, by far, the safest place for children, bar none.
	The statistics, I mean, are beyond appalling.
	Like, if you are the child of a single mother and you have a non-father male adult living in the home, you are 35 times more likely to be abused.
	It is hell out there for children in the disintegrated family structure.
	And then... That's what happens.
	They grow up. So then, of course, the kids grow up and they don't have much ambition and they're maybe too much into drugs or video games or other forms of dissociated distractions.
	They have hookup culture.
	They can't get themselves started.
	And rather than say...
	We abandoned these kids.
	We ran off to pursue careers rather than raising our children.
	We expected, you know, Guatemalan nannies who barely spoke English to transfer the entire canon of Western values to our children because we were chasing the almighty dollar.
	We've really done something wrong.
	We should try and fix it.
	They look down, and because they have really deep down, at least I hope, somewhat of a guilty conscience, they say, ah...
	You know what the problem is?
	Those little brats didn't get hit enough.
	Now, here's the sad thing.
	If they had gotten hit, they would actually be better, because at least then someone would have been paying them attention, which is not what they got.
	So, you mentioned being fatherless, and you've also mentioned breastfeeding, skin-to-skin.
	Can you tell us anything about same-sex parenting?
	I don't know much about the data of same-sex parenting.
	And it really depends, I suppose, because when you talk same-sex, it could be homosexual in terms of male.
	It could be homosexual in terms of female.
	Now, the statistics in the male gay community are, of course, rampant promiscuity.
	That doesn't mean that there can't be pair bonding, but it's kind of tough in the culture as a whole to get that kind of stable pair bonding.
	The big problem with lesbian relationships is they are, and I think it's by quite a bit, they are the most violent human relationships on the face of this earth, outside of government and citizen and so on.
	So the issue that I would have in terms of that is, okay, what levels of violence?
	And this is why, you know, you hear all about the patriarchy and girl power and so on.
	It's like, yeah, but when the women run the relationships, they're the most violent relationships around.
	And this whole cycle of violence, this is another thing that I get in trouble for, so welcome to my world of getting into trouble.
	But the other thing, of course, is I consistently talk about this, the role of women in the cycle of violence, the role of women in the cycle of violence, because the vast majority of children are hit by women, by mothers, by primary caregivers, grandmothers, and so on.
	And if we can't solve that problem, then trying to solve the problem of violence is impossible.
	It's functionally impossible to solve the problem of violence if we're not talking about women's role.
	Because women, of course, get to, you know, play victim and faint on the couch and everybody rushes to their defense.
	And, you know, we don't want to upset women because they hold the key to reproduction.
	And our genes are like, do not annoy the ovaries.
	We need the ovaries, otherwise we're doomed, right?
	And I had this famous egg meme, I suppose, on Twitter.
	You may remember it.
	It's now lurking elsewhere on the web.
	So if we can't convince women to stop hitting kids, and men do, and I'm not trying to excuse men, but we know men are bad guys at times.
	This has been hammered into this for thousands of years.
	The caveman who clubs the woman and drags her off.
	We know that men's capacity of violence is there.
	But we constantly overstep or sidestep women's capacity for violence.
	Like we always forget that in interpersonal relationships where there's violence, half the time, half the time, it's the women who initiate it.
	And the women, of course, have the state on their side for the most part, which makes them, you know, even more prone to violence if they're that way inclined.
	And so this is another thing.
	I'm sorry. This is just where the facts lie.
	I desperately want a world that's more peaceful.
	I desperately want a world that's more sustainable economically and in particular in terms of relationships.
	I want fewer people in prison.
	I mean, all the things that every decent person would agree on, I want.
	It's just that I have relentlessly followed the data.
	Which is, you know, spanking, neglect, child abuse.
	I mean, sexual abuse.
	My God. I mean, Black Lives Matter.
	Hey, man, I'm all for that.
	You know, I want the black community to do well, to do better.
	Everybody does who's a decent person, right?
	Not much we can do as, you know, I guess two whitish guys.
	There's not a huge amount we can do about the fact that half of black girls report being raped by a black man before they get to the age of 18.
	Like, I can't fix that.
	I can't, like, suit up and protect all the little black girls.
	I can't. You know, and this is part of fatherlessness as well, right?
	I mean, because in many places three-quarters of the black kids are growing up without a dad.
	So I want to solve problems and I'm just, you know, for better or for worse, I'm cursed with the relentless data head.
	I'm just like a train track on the data.
	And the data is we can't solve the problem of violence until women accept their role in the cycle of violence, which goes very much against the grain because we all just want to nurture and protect and take care of women.
	And I love women delightfully incomprehensible creatures.
	But, you know, self-ownership is self-ownership and responsibility is responsibility.
	And they do the most violence to the most helpless in the world.
	And that's a tough thing for people to wrap their head around, that women do the most violence to the most helpless.
	You know, guys get into bar fights, maybe the guy's six inches shorter than he is, and that's being a bully.
	But a woman is like six times the size of a toddler and she'll still hit him, right?
	So it's a worse abuse of power differential and disparity.
	So women commit the most violence against the most helpless in society, and that's just a grim fact that we need to deal with.
	But men don't want to deal with it because maybe they were hit by their own mother or caregiver, and it's kind of emotionally tense for them, and also we don't want to upset the ladies.
	We've got to reproduce and all that.
	But, you know, I'm just, all I care about is just solving problems.
	That's all I care about.
	I don't care about the ideology.
	I don't care about, and maybe I should care more about people's sensitivities and sensibilities, but I don't think a lot of progress has ever been achieved by being overly polite to the bad habits of bad people, so...
	With regards to spanking, I'll just touch on this briefly.
	The data about spanking is very clear.
	I've done a number of interviews with Dr.
	Elizabeth Gershoff. People can find that on my show.
	FDR Podcast. That's Free Domain Radio.
	It used to be radio. FDRpodcast.com is the whole search feature.
	You can just look for Elizabeth and I've got, I think, three interviews with her.
	The data is very clear. The data is very clear.
	Spanking, all it will do is produce very, very short-term compliance.
	And then long-term, completely the opposite.
	You get rebellion. You get antisocial personality disorder.
	You are simply creating...
	Violence will always create the opposite of its intended goal.
	The violence will always create the opposite of its intended goal.
	I don't know, like, oh, you know, we're going to use state-coerced money to make sure that the world is kept safe from coronaviruses.
	Oh, look at that. It produced the opposite of its intended goal.
	Oh, I know. We're going to have the welfare state so that we can reduce income inequality.
	Oh, look, income inequality is getting bigger because people are getting trapped in an underclass.
	Oh, we're going to have the Federal Reserve to smooth out the economy.
	And it's like, yeah, it's now the smooth downhill to a Weimar-style hyperinflation or whatever, right?
	So violence always produces the opposite of its intended goal.
	And hitting children doesn't produce respect from them.
	It produces contempt. Because all you're doing is saying, I'm bigger and I can get away with it.
	I'm bigger and I can get away with it.
	Might rules, violence rules, size rules, power rules.
	And then we wonder why children grow up and have trouble Focusing on a stateless society or a smaller government.
	I mean, you've just taught them that you're bigger, you're stronger, you can get away with it.
	And by the way, kids, make sure you don't bully.
	You know, these government schools, like, the government schools survive because, and only exist because, guns are pointed at parents and others, guns are pointed at adults to fund the schools.
	And the teacher's salary is blood money from a stick-up called the state.
	And then they say, well, you've got to not bully.
	It's like, oh, yeah, you're getting paid.
	It's worse than bullying because you can't even get away.
	So, yeah, that's all I'm saying is we've got this principle.
	And it's a funny thing. You know, it's one thing I couldn't help but notice.
	It's maybe not the most staggering observation, but I'll mention it anyway.
	So progress is when you just get one true principle and build from there.
	That's all. Progress is just, like, get one solid principle and Don't bullshit yourself.
	Just build it from there consistently.
	Like, again, what's progress in physics?
	Oh, what if the speed of light is just constant?
	Well, that doesn't make any sense. What if you've got two spaceships flying away at opposite speeds?
	Speed of light is constant.
	C, man, that's it. Speed of light is constant.
	And we get the modern world.
	Nuclear weapons, not so good, although they've prevented a conventional war.
	Nuclear power, much better, and so on.
	And we get a foundational understanding of the world, because we just got one principle, which is true, and we just build everything from there.
	Or, I mean, look at Newton, right?
	Apple falls on his head, and he's like, hey, wait a minute.
	What if... Oh, it's going to be nuts.
	What if everything falls?
	What if gravity is a universal constant?
	What if the apple falls on me?
	I'm falling towards the earth, but I can't go down too far because there's the earth.
	The earth is falling around the sun.
	The sun is falling around the galaxy.
	Like, what if? What if we just have one central principle that's true and we just build from there?
	Human rights, right?
	The founding declarations of the United States.
	All men are created equal. It's okay.
	What if we... Take that principle and extend it and blow out slavery.
	Then you get the modern world.
	There's no modern world without the end of slavery because you can't get labor-saving devices that are the foundation of our wealth as long as everybody's investing in labor of slaves.
	You don't get machinery.
	I mean, you see this now with people that everyone wants to raise the minimum wage, which just means you get robots and touchscreens to replace workers.
	So you just take one principle.
	Okay, everyone's created equal.
	Everyone should be equal before the law.
	Okay. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
	It was originally, of course, life, liberty, and property, but the southern states didn't want that because it would have pushed back against slavery.
	So, yeah, life, liberty, and property.
	You can't both be property and own property, so you just take that one principle.
	Everyone should be equal before the law, and that blows away slavery, creates the entire modern world.
	So you just take these couple of principles, gravity, speed of light, human rights, boom!
	Just make them universal.
	No bullshit, no exceptions, no asterisks, no crap, no folds and wrinkles of the law based upon special interest garbage.
	Just boom.
	And so I'm like, okay, non-aggression principle, man.
	What if the non-aggression principle is like C, is like gravity, is like human rights?
	We're just like, okay, let's just build from that.
	Let's just build from that.
	No bullshit, no wrinkles, no asterisks, no exceptions, no Mobius strip, no justifications for the opposite, just...
	Just boom! Right there.
	That's the biggest progress that we need.
	Everybody accepts the non-aggression principle.
	Everybody. It's what we teach kids.
	What do we teach kids? Don't hit.
	Don't steal. Don't push.
	Right? Don't Don't take, don't push.
	Respect property and persons.
	Everybody in their personal lives respects the non-aggression principle, just as everybody can catch an apple when it falls from the tree.
	So you take what is personal and you make it universal.
	I just remember when I was a kid.
	I don't know if you ever did this when you were a kid.
	So when I first heard about the speed, I was a total astronomy geek.
	We were talking about trains.
	Yeah, I was a model railroad geek.
	I slept under my model railroad.
	I was a total astronomy geek.
	And I remember sitting in my room and I'd have my hand on the light switch.
	And I knew there was a speed of light, right?
	Because I remember because I would watch my friends playing soccer.
	If it was a long way away, they'd kick the ball and it would be like half a second.
	Then you could hear the kick of the ball, right?
	What is 600 and something miles an hour for the speed of sound?
	And I remember sitting by my door.
	I had my hand on the light switch.
	And what I would do is I'd hit the light and I'd close my eyes.
	And I'd turn it on. Hit the light and I'd close my eyes.
	Do you know what I was trying to do? I was trying to see my room half in light and half in darkness, you see.
	Now, of course, what are we, 30 frames a second on our eyeballs?
	Like, there's no way. It's way too fast, right?
	It's two and a half seconds to the moon for the light.
	It's eight minutes from the sun. Like, there's no way I was ever going to catch the room half in light and half in darkness.
	So if we just say, okay, progress is just taking one true principle and refusing to allow for exceptions.
	That's all it is. That's all it is.
	Because if you look at the world, okay, it looks really flat.
	It looks really, really... You go out to the prairies.
	I don't know what Maryland is like.
	You go out to the prairies. You go out to Utah.
	You're pretty flat where you are, right?
	It looks pretty damn flat. But, but, you know, you look at the Moon, hey, it's pretty round.
	Look at the Sun, hey, it's pretty round.
	You look at Mars, maybe you need a telescope, it's pretty round.
	You can even see Venus, kind of round.
	Okay, so what if we just take the principle that stuff's kind of round?
	And I guess you could even see that in comets, right?
	So you take the principle stuff's really round and you look down at the ground.
	Okay, well, that makes sense, right?
	Because gravity and mass, everything's going to end up kind of round because you've got a central gravitational pull and it's going to flatten things for the most part.
	And so for me, it's like, okay, well...
	All of the progress that we love is taking one firm principle and just making it universal and gritting your teeth and resisting our impulse to create exceptions.
	Because, oh my God, we're so tempted to create exceptions to all of our morals.
	Because exceptions are where the profits are.
	If you can get people not to steal from each other and then you can tax them, well, you're still stealing from them, but you've created an exception to thou shalt not steal called taxation that's made hugely profitable.
	And so every time we create a moral rule, it's so profitable to create an exception for ourselves, for our friends, right?
	You and I, we can't counterfeit any money, but that's all central banking ever does, is counterfeit money.
	They don't even bother printing anything, just type it into their own bank account.
	They don't have to pull a George Floyd and put a wet bill on a convenience store and end up dead and ensconced in stone, right?
	The government and power as a whole is all about creating moral rules for us and exceptions for themselves.
	I mean, I actually think morality was simply created for the exceptions.
	Like, the morality is just the slate of hands that's used to create the exceptions, which is where the real profit is, right?
	You know the old thing, like, if you're a bad and amateur thief, you...
	You rob a bank. If you're an intermediate thief, you own a bank.
	And if you're a really great superhero thief, you own a central bank, right?
	So, every time we create a moral rule, the first thing we want to do is create an exception.
	Okay, but... My friend, not this.
	Because it's so profitable.
	If you were the only thief in the world, you'd make out like a bandit because nobody would lock anything up.
	Nobody would take care of anything.
	There wouldn't be keys in anything.
	Everybody would leave the keys in their car.
	And if something went missing, they'd say, oh, I must have just lost it.
	Or, I don't know, maybe somebody took my car by mistake and there would be no police.
	So if you were the only thief in the world, man, you'd have the greatest life ever.
	As far as just material acquisition goes, it would be totally easy.
	If there are too many thieves, like communism or national socialism, then the whole system collapses.
	So you try to create this equilibrium where there's enough thieves but not too many that it becomes too difficult to be a thief and there's this predator-prey relationship that goes on in human society.
	But what if... All of the great things that we have are the result of people taking basic moral principles we all accept in our own life and just saying, this crap is universal.
	Like, let's just universalize the hell out of this thing.
	No asterisks, no exceptions, no double-blind clauses, no footnotes.
	Just, boom, non-aggression principle.
	What if we built a society from the ground up Non-aggression principle.
	What if we built a view of the universe where the laws of physics were truly constant and universal, but then we actually end up with a true understanding of the universe, so we can send some probe to Pluto.
	It's amazing. It's amazing.
	Send people to the moon and back.
	What if we just took the non-aggression principle and said, like, no fooling, that's it, man.
	That's what we do. We all accept it in our lives.
	What if our lives were the whole thing?
	What if there was no differentiation between the personal and the universal, just as Newton, right?
	The apple falls on his head, and he's like, well, I'm fooling on the ground, ground's fooling around the sun.
	What if the personal and the universal are the same thing?
	What if that which we accept in our lives, the non-aggression principle, It's universal.
	And we just organize things that way.
	It's going to be a hell of a fight. It's going to be a hell of a battle, I can tell you this.
	I've been fighting it for 40 years.
	But what if? What if?
	We'll get there, man. It's not going to be pretty getting there.
	But when we get there, it will be like awakening from a nightmare that's been going on for 150,000 years.
	Alright, and then I guess my final question would be, why do you think it is that women are more inclined to, I guess, hit their children?
	I normally have my Rolodex of easy answers, so that's a good one.
	You'd think I would have come up with something about that at some point.
	So women grow up with a lot of deferment, right?
	Are you a dating guy?
	Are you a married guy? I'm currently single.
	Currently single, okay. So there's something that Nietzsche said.
	It's kind of true, right?
	He said that the very famous, the very rich, the very powerful, and the very beautiful never know the truth.
	Because everybody, even unconsciously, just subtly...
	It changes things just a little bit around these people, right?
	So women, when they're young, are the queens of the universe.
	They're the queens of genetics.
	I have no issue with this. It's the way things are, and Lord knows they carry and bear children, which I have too much change in my back pocket.
	I feel uncomfortable. I don't know what they're doing.
	It's incredible, right? But so women get a lot of deferral as a whole.
	They get deferral from politicians, you know, the old thing, the real victims of war are women, you know.
	Men, hyper-addicted to heroin, women most affected.
	You know, it's just – it's the way things are.
	Not really much you can do about it other than just observe it as a natural phenomenon of our bifurcated genders.
	And so women get a lot of deferral and – at least in the West, right?
	Obviously in other cultures not so much – And so they don't necessarily have to negotiate as much because they hold the golden eggs, right?
	They hold the golden eggs. And because we come from a pretty complex, pretty high IQ society, we can't just do a pray and spray and move on.
	Like we have to stay and raise our kids.
	You know, kids take males like 25, 27 is when our brains finally mature.
	For women, it's I think in the early 20s.
	So you need a quarter century of child raising.
	Before your kids are full adults, right?
	And so we need women to commit to our children, to commit to us, to commit to the transfer of values, which they've been sadly woefully talked out of over the last 70 years or so, which is one of the reasons we're losing all our values is women won't transfer them and men are too busy out getting resources and defending what they think of defending the country for that.
	So women get a lot of deferral.
	And, of course, if a man goes up and really challenges a woman and she doesn't really like it, which she may not, and it's a well-known field in psychology.
	It's called the WOW. It's called the WOW. Women are wonderful.
	It's a very well-studied area of psychology where women are just perceived as more nurturing, as nicer, as better.
	There's just this deferral that goes on with regards to women.
	So I think that if a woman is just used to having people defer to her and if the woman doesn't like your challenges towards her, there's like 10 other guys lined up who want to ask her out and she doesn't have to put up with any of that stuff.
	So I think that there's a certain amount of...
	Grandiosity, minor megalomania, maybe a little bit of narcissism.
	It's not female nature as a whole.
	It's a whole complex thing, right?
	Women used to... So the power that women have is balanced by the dependence that they have, right?
	So the youthful, romantic, sexual market value power that women have...
	Is more than compensated in nature, as these things tend to be, by the fact that after the woman becomes pregnant, her sexual market value, in a free market society, in a free society, her sexual market value collapses for everyone except her husband, right, or the father of her child.
	And so the youthful sexual power is there so that women will make a great choice because after they've made their choice and they've become pregnant and they are pregnant, they have a baby, they're breastfeeding, their looks go a little bit, their bodies age.
	Women can get white hair just from being pregnant and breastfeeding sometimes.
	Then they're incredibly dependent.
	So the early power transitions to the unbelievable dependence that women have on a man to provide for them for like the next 20 years.
	Assuming, even with just one kid, but for more kids it's even more.
	Because, you know, you're not a dad yet, I assume.
	But man, it's like, it's a big job.
	And it like goes on and on and on.
	And, you know, stay home dad again, you know.
	Me and my daughter, you know, get up at...
	Nine o'clock in the morning. She's not much of a morning person any more than I am.
	And you're up and she goes to bed, you know, late-ish.
	And that's just your day, right?
	It's your day. It's a very big deal.
	And so the woman is then...
	And of course, prior to birth control, the woman is having a child usually every two to three years.
	Because, you know, she may not be able to get pregnant while she's breastfeeding.
	That's what a nature's kindness is.
	And then she's going to have kids from 20 to 40.
	Right? You know, and half of those kids won't make it and blah, blah, blah, right?
	So this youthful sexual power that women have is balanced by the dependents.
	Or it used to be.
	Now, of course, the youthful sexual power is not balanced by the dependents because, of course, the woman can simply run to the government to get resources.
	So if the woman chooses the wrong man, she can run to the government.
	If the woman does not save for her own retirement, she can run to the government.
	If the woman needs healthcare, she can run to the government.
	And so because this youthful sexual power is not balanced by any kind of dependency upon a voluntary relationship, such as pleasing a husband or being a contributing member of the household in a positive way or something like that, then this...
	You know, they talk about how men aren't growing up and you've got this perpetual adolescence and failure to launch.
	Hmm.
	The youthful narcissistic sexual vanity of many women, not all, many women.
	And just for those who don't know, I'm very happily married for 20 years and all that.
	So there's tons of exceptions, but there's a sort of general trend is that the milking of looks and deference and dates and dinners and trips and, you know, that's supposed to be maybe a year or two while the woman's picking her mate.
	And then she's supposed to get busy with having kids and not be that perpetual kid anymore, so to speak, or teenager.
	And now, because women can just keep doing that stuff, they don't have to settle down.
	They don't have to worry about hitting the wall in terms of money and finances.
	They don't have to worry about running out of money in their old age.
	Well, they will eventually because Social Security is going to run out of money.
	And so there's this kind of weird perpetual youth that goes for women.
	And they're not using that youthful coin to buy a great man who's going to protect and provide and take care of and shelter and give resources.
	And so they're just kind of cruising along with this stuff.
	And I think if they do eventually have kids, as a lot of them do, they're just so used to being deferred to.
	That they're just so used to getting their way and, you know, in a sense, stamp your feet and the world comes to pick you up, right, and take care of you.
	So I think that's one aspect of it.
	And I think the other aspect of it, because this doesn't explain why there was childbeating in the past, which, of course, there was.
	I mean, it's just brutal stuff. You ever want to be horrified, look at what happened to René...
	Rousseau's children, right?
	Rousseau was a great defender of children, apparently, in the abstract, but his own children ended up in these wretched orphanages where they almost certainly died.
	So in the past, though...
	Violence is the shadow cast by anti-rationality.
	Anti-rationality, which is why you get shootouts in organized crime, but you don't get shootouts at scientific conferences.
	And why don't you get shootouts at scientific conferences, at least yet?
	Because scientific conferences, in the ideal, they have a methodology for resolving disputes that is objective and rational.
	I mean, I remember once going to visit a friend of mine.
	I thought we were meeting at 7 o'clock, and I'm waiting on a street corner.
	It was cold. It's Canada.
	It was winter. And he eventually came to pick me up, and I was mad at him, right?
	Because I was like, yeah, I've been waiting for an hour.
	How were you? And he's like, no, no, no, you said eight.
	I said, no, no, no, I said seven.
	And he said, look, I wrote it down.
	Meet Stev. Eight o'clock, right?
	Okay, is that perfect?
	No, I think it was real.
	I think it was real. And so, okay, I had to let go of my being upset because I'd simply made a mistake, right?
	I'd said eight and I was there at seven.
	So that's an objective way of resolving the dispute is that he'd written it down and I accepted what he'd written.
	So when you have an objective methodology for resolving disputes...
	You don't go to violence. So why do people hit children?
	Because what the parents want the children to do...
	Can't be explained rationally.
	Can't be put forward rationally.
	They can't appeal to the child's reason.
	And I had Dr.
	Alison Gopnik who wrote The Philosophical Baby.
	She was on my show talking about you can start to morally reason with children at about 15 or 16 months of age.
	Children can start to detect statistical probabilities.
	At about 13 months of age.
	Babies are unbelievable when it comes to philosophy and understanding things.
	And we just think of them, these cute lumps of goo, you know, big eyes and drool and stuff.
	No, no, no. Their brains are like intergalactic when it comes to their potential.
	And so if, like I always had this as a rule for myself, if I can't explain something rationally to my daughter, I will not expect her to do it.
	It's on me. I've got to figure out a rational way to get my daughter to do something if I want her to do it.
	But if you feel that the child must do something and you can't find a way to explain it or you've never developed that skill or that way of interacting with your child, then the next step is violence.
	I mean, the government can't explain what the hell it wants to do with your money that makes any sense, which is why they have to take it from you by force.
	Because anti-rationality...
	The violence is just a shadow cast by the statue.
	And this is why philosophy, it's why philosophical parenting, peaceful parenting, kind of one and the same thing.
	If you get people to have rational thoughts, then they will not feel drawn to violence because they can simply explain themselves.
	I mean, in a study that was done, the one I mentioned earlier, where they were trying to study yelling, but they ended up studying spanking by accident.
	Literally, the mom was saying, this will teach you not to hit and hitting her child.
	And it's like, okay, it's hitting bad.
	It's hitting good. It's hitting okay if you're big enough.
	And, you know, if this guy grows up to hit women, we'll know exactly why.
	Why would this guy grow up?
	Why would this little boy grow up to hit women?
	Because he'd been hit by his mom, you know, 10 times a week for 15 years or 10 years or whatever, right?
	And, of course, if spanking works, then, you know, 40% of teens wouldn't still need to be spanked because it should have worked by then, right?
	It should have worked by then. If you can teach people to have simple, clear, cogent – and it's not genius.
	It's not genius at all.
	It's not – like I'm not asking people to master differential equations or, you know, Fermat's last theorem in order to be parents because then that would just be a rarefied high IQ occupation.
	It's the simplest thing in the world.
	It's the simplest thing in the world to just have a couple of simple principles.
	It's so easy.
	It's so sensible.
	It's not complicated.
	Like, you know, the Ptolemaic system, right?
	They used to think that there was perfect circles, right?
	Everything was a perfect circle because that was God's...
	Ideal shape. And then the retrograde motion of Mars, you know, where you zoom around quicker in the sun and Mars looks like it's going backwards.
	That got insanely complicated to figure out where Mars was.
	You need, like, pages and pages and pages of equations just to figure out where Mars was until, boom!
	Put the Sun at the center of the solar system, and now you know where Mars is.
	Because you know now that you've got Mercury, you've got Venus, you've got Earth, you've got Mars, and you know where the position is.
	You need like two equations to figure out where Mars is.
	So once you have the right perspective on the universe, it's really, really, really simple to get things done.
	And so I didn't have to sit there and say...
	I hit my child so that the child won't hit.
	And then you come up with all these weird justifications like that's somehow okay.
	You're not a complete flaming hypocrite.
	You're not an abuser. You're not a mean guy.
	You're not doing evil to a helpless and dependent child that you brought into this world to love.
	It's like, no. And then, of course, your child won't hit other children because that's just not the language.
	Like, my daughter's not going to hit another child.
	That would be like her breaking into fluent Japanese when she's never heard Japanese.
	This doesn't happen. It doesn't happen.
	She's confident. She's funny.
	She's very social. She's a great leader.
	I've got shows with her.
	She's witty. She's engaging.
	Well, because I've always reasoned with her and I've never intimidated her and never frightened her, I mean, why would you want to bring a helpless, dependent, wonderful being into this life to bully and...
	Finger wag and frightened.
	It's terrible. It's a terrible idea.
	So if we can get people to think clearly and simply, simply, it's so much easier.
	Oh, non-aggression principle. Let's not have any Ptolemaic exceptions to the non-aggression principle.
	If you wouldn't do it to an adult, you should never do it to a child.
	If you wouldn't, oh, but you see, they are, but kids, they, you know, their brains are immature.
	It's like, okay, so their brains are deficient relative to an adult.
	So what? You know, when you and I get old, our brains will be deficient relative to now.
	Does that mean if I forget my keys, my daughter can beat me up?
	Of course not. I mean, if somebody's got a deficient mental state, we should show them more kindness, not hit them.
	I mean, come on. So if you just have simple, clear ethics that are universal, It's very easy.
	I mean, I'll just give you a tiny practical example, right?
	So my daughter, wonderful, wonderful girl, she experimented with lying.
	She experimented with not keeping her word.
	Perfectly sensible. You did it as a kid.
	I did it as a kid.
	Everybody does it as a kid, right?
	You try sneaking candy.
	You try taking quarters from your arm's purse back in the day.
	It's just natural, right? You're exploring different kinds of behavior.
	Very easy conversation.
	Very easy. I said, okay, so...
	So we can break our word now, right?
	Because that's the rule, right? We don't have to keep our word.
	And she's like, oh, no, no, I don't want that.
	And it's like, okay, well, wait.
	So you broke your word.
	So that means I can break my word.
	Like, is it good or bad to break your word?
	If it's good to break your word or if it's okay to break your word, then I'll take that rule and I'll make promises and I won't keep them.
	Right? And if it's bad to break your word, in other words, if you want me to keep my word, then you should keep your word, right?
	I mean, that's fair, right? It shouldn't be one-sided or the other, right?
	This is a universal principle.
	And literally, five-minute conversation.
	And we moved on.
	I kept my word. She kept her word.
	And again, you know, there's little exceptions here and there.
	You can't keep it or whatever. But...
	It's really, it's not that complicated.
	It's not complicated at all.
	And it's so much easier.
	It's so much more enjoyable. So people, you know, when you see people using violence, it's because they can't...
	They can't express a rational perspective.
	They can't express a rational thought.
	They have a desperate need.
	And like if you imagine that you're gagged and blindfolded and you're in desperate need of water, you're just going to stumble around and you're just going to grab water because you're dying of thirst.
	And because you're gagged, you're bound, you can't speak, you're just going to grab it, right?
	And if you elbow people aside to get it, whereas if you can speak and reason, you can say to someone, hey man, can you get me some water?
	I'm really thirsty and I'll pay you later or whatever, right?
	And so... Violence is the result of the failure to communicate, and the failure to communicate is the result of the failure to think, or the fact that thinking has been beaten out of you.
	So more philosophy, more reason, more evidence will result in the compassionate and kind treatment of children, and will create a world that is such a paradise, it looks like we will in that world, I doubt I'll live to see it, I'll probably get some way there, but in that world, you know, we'll look back at this world like you and I look back at...
	The king's got shit all over him scenes from like the Middle Ages, like the Monty Python movie scenes where you just look back and you say, oh my god, you married a woman who'd never brushed her teeth?
	I mean, you bathed once a year, you animal!
	What's the matter with you? We'll look back at, you know, when they used to, like we look at the Aztecs or the Mayans, I think it's Aztecs, they had a god that survived on the tears of children and they would physically torture children to please their god.
	And we look back and we say, oh my god, that was barbaric.
	And we'll look back in the future at this society where we stuff kids in these terrible, terrible government incarceration tombs of the brain called schools, and we drug them if they're not having a great time in these communist indoctrination centers, and we dump them in daycare, and we use them as economic collateral to buy votes and sell off their futures to...
	Baxter is from China so that they end up as virtual economic slaves by the time they pop out into adulthood.
	And then we nag and blame them for not having Incentives and motivation.
	And we will look back at that and we will say, my God, what barbaric times we live in.
	It is unbelievably barbaric.
	Like we look at slaves. We look at slaves getting hobbled and slaves getting their backs broken on a wheel as punishment for running away.
	And we look at that and we say, my God, how could people live like that?
	How could there be these moral standards in the world?
	We're living that right now.
	And the greatest victimized class.
	I call it childism, right?
	Oh, everyone, sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia.
	No, no, no. Childism.
	Prejudice against children.
	Lack of recognition that children are the first and greatest members of society to be respected and protected.
	We don't solve childism.
	Nothing else is going to mean anything.
	And we will be dangerous and angry children with very powerful weapons.
	And that does not bode too well.
	I know that was your last question, so I may find it profitable to end there.
	Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I just really have to pee, so that's why I was...
	Wait, you see that movie with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels?
	You ever see that movie? Oh, you're too young.
	Anyway, it's an old Steve Martin movie.
	I know you've got to pee. And Steve Martin is playing a guy who's mentally challenged to drive a woman away so that they can rob her.
	And he says to Michael Caine, I need to pee.
	And they're sitting at a dinner table, and Michael Caine says, go ahead.
	And he's like... So if you made that face over the course, I would know.
	All right. So yeah, that's fine.
	If you're done with me, that's no problem. Stefan, where can people find you?
	So I am looking in your conscience like Voldemort.
	So I am freedomain.com.
	You can find me there if you'd like to check out my free novel, freedomain.com forward slash almost.
	If you want to browse the podcast, you can get there from Free Domain.
	But you can also go to fdrpodcast.com.
	There's a whole search feature. You can look at the videos.
	You can sort and organize by categories.
	And it's like close to 5,000 shows.
	So you're not going to run out of media anytime soon.
	All right. Well, Stefan, you've made a good case for peaceful parenting.
	So I hope people check you out.
	I'll put all your links in the description. And thank you for joining us.
	My pleasure. I appreciate it.

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