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Jan. 10, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:09:04
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Good morning, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux. Hope you're doing well.
11 o'clock in the morning, at least where I am, on the 18th of October 2020.
Yes, the year of doom for many people.
The year of doom for free speech.
The year of doom for a lot of independence.
The year of doom for a lot of peace around the world, and particularly in leftist-controlled cities.
So... It is a desperate shame what is happening out there, but the consequence, of course, of failing to adhere to first principles, of failing to respect and elevate philosophy and philosophers is something that, as the old objectivist saying says, you can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
It's a sad time.
It's a sad time. But nonetheless, we individuals can still do great things with our lives.
So let us turn to that and talk to the fine listenership of Freedom Aid.
Alright, so first up, we have a caller, a listener rather, who is calling in.
We were talking a bit about early childhood, babies and stuff, and he has a comment.
He asks, how do you handle the transition between giving an infant everything it wants and needs and setting boundaries with a one to two-year-old?
Oh, that's it. I thought that'd be a little bit more to the question.
Oh, sorry. It was very short.
It was very short. Right, right.
That's a great question. It's a great question.
It's often struck me that, I mean, those of you who've been around parents or who are parents, I guess we've all been around parents because we're children, but there's this phase.
And now whenever I hear phase, You know, there's the two huge ones, right?
So there's the terrible twos and puberty, right?
The teenage years, right?
The tweens and the teenage years. Those are the two sort of big phases.
And whenever I hear phase, oh, he's going through a phase, or she's in this phase, or she's in this eye-rolling phase, or he's in the fist-slanch, foot-stomping, no phase, or whatever, then my sort of spider sense goes up.
I get all kinds of alarms deep in my...
Soul, because to put something in the realm of phase is to put it outside of your, the parents' actions, outside of your behavior.
Now, of course, there are some phases.
I mean, puberty as a phase of hormonal transition from child to, I guess, budding adult.
Well, that is a very real phase.
And assuming that you give your child adequate nutrition and so on, it's something that occurs beyond your willpower, beyond the willpower of the child, and so on.
All of that Yeah, I'm down with that.
That makes perfect sense to me.
And yet, those usually aren't the phases that are talked about.
The phases that are talked about, from infancy to toddlerhood, so what happens in the mind of the parent, which is really important to understand, because if you understand that, then you'll know what to do, right?
So what happens in the mind of the parent is...
Both individual and social.
So in the mind of the parent, of course, if the parent says, my selfish baby was up three times last night, I got so angry I yelled at my baby, this would be the actions of a crazy slash immoral person.
And very few people in society At least, thank heavens, would say to such a person, oh yeah, yeah, my baby's going through that same selfish phase.
It's driving me crazy. I get so angry.
Because we don't describe moral agency, moral responsibility to babies.
In the same way, there are countless videos on the internet of two things, right?
So, I mean, lots of other things too, but these two things, number one is following a trail of destruction through a house.
Things torn, shoes chewed, and so on.
And then the camera pans to a very guilty-looking dog that hides its head under its paws.
It goes and hides under the bed or something like that, right?
And this is considered funny.
Although, of course, there's some impatience sometimes in the voice of the people who are filming, but it's considered kind of funny.
And the other is children who are like very young children, sort of maybe two or three, who are inexplicably left unattended for quite a long period of time.
And then the camera follows another trail of destruction, which is sort of mess and so on.
and then it finally will pan to the kids sitting in a closet covered in peanut
butter or covered in flour or whatever mess or covered in you know their faces
covered in chocolate and and that's also considered to be like oh what did you do
it's kind of amusing and it's kind of funny and it's kind of amusing and kind
of funny although it's not that amusing to leave children unattended for that
length of time at that age but anyway so that is considered funny why is it
considered funny because the children and it's usually like a slightly older
kid and they're like a really young kid like 18 months or whatever or maybe 12
And whenever they can walk, they can be led astray by the elder siblings, so to speak.
So it's considered cute because, and it makes sense that it's that way, kids don't really have...
They're not like the dogs, right?
They're not consciously destroying property out of anger, you know?
They're just doing what dogs do, they're just doing what kids do, and that's the way things are, and it's amusing.
But it's only amusing because there's no moral responsibility that is assigned.
So anger arises out of the assignment of moral responsibility.
Anger arises out of the assignment of moral responsibility.
Now, just to sort of forestall, because really important, I don't want to make sure this point is very, very clear, there are You know, like, let's say that a dog jumps out and barks at you, right?
There was a video I saw the other day with my daughter where a guy was filming his own garage, and he's like, wait, is that?
What is that? Wait, is that?
Wait, that's not my dog!
And then the dog sort of darts out from his own garage and starts barking and yelling at him, and that's when the video ends.
And, of course, it's kind of startling.
So... You might get sort of fight or flight out of that.
But fight or flight is not the same as anger.
Fight or flight peaks based upon external stimuli.
It's designed to have you stay safe in the face of that external stimuli.
And then it subsides either because you succeed and keep yourself safe or you fail and die or something like that, right?
So that's the fight or flight system.
But anger is different.
Anger is... Violation of anticipated moral norms.
Or you could say, moral norms, I'm sort of including in that things like politeness, civility, consideration, thoughtfulness, whatever it's going to be, right?
Violation of expected norms.
The wife, to take a stereotypical example, right?
The wife does not get angry at the dog for failing to remember her anniversary.
She will or may get angry at the husband for failing to remember her Their anniversary, right?
So these are two very different things.
Because she's not giving any moral responsibility to the dog for this, but she is giving moral responsibility to the husband.
So with toddlers, the question then becomes, okay, what changes fundamentally between infancy and toddlerhood where a limitation on preferences, a limitation on Sorry.
An expansion of moral responsibility, really.
The creation of moral responsibility that occurs for a two-year-old that is not there for a baby.
So, what happens and why people get so upset with toddlers, and that by assuming two onwards are terrible twos onwards, people get so upset with toddlers because they...
Have assigned expected standards which they did not assign to the babies.
I'm sure we don't have to go over this in great detail.
It makes sense, I'm sure.
So once we sort of understand that, then we can figure out how do we transition, right?
Or should we transition?
Sort of an interesting question, right?
So there's two reasons why This moral responsibility starts to settle on the two-year-old.
It could be a little younger.
I'm not saying specifically two, but around two.
I'll just say toddler, so people understand, right?
So there's two reasons.
The first is that a baby can't get anything for himself or herself, but a toddler can, right?
They can go into the cupboard and get candy.
They can open the fridge and get something.
They can reach things.
They can grab things. They can hide.
They can, you know, all of that kind of stuff, right?
And they can sneak, right?
They can sneak things that they're not allowed to have, which babies can't do any of that stuff.
So we don't assign moral responsibility to babies because babies have zero independence from their parents and zero capacity to act against.
Well, I shouldn't say, of course, they act against the parents' wishes because they wake up at night and the parents are tired or whatever, but they have zero capacity to will An outcome, right?
So babies can't get their own food.
All they can do is apply negative stimuli like crying until the food is provided, right?
That's all they can do. They can't do anything for themselves, whereas toddlers, of course, can.
And it really is amazing just how quickly this all begins to erupt in the mind of the toddler.
So the fact that they have independence is a central reason why the moral responsibility starts to be inflicted.
And because they have independence, there's also then an expectation of conformity to parental rules, parental expectations and all.
So the parents now say to themselves, ah, Now that they're independent, they have to start self-limiting because I can't watch them all the time, so I have to start inflicting rules that they must be expected to obey so that they don't end up doing the wrong thing or grabbing the wrong thing, right? Now, that is something that I've sort of mentioned this before on the show.
When I was a toddler, my father was playing tennis and obviously was having an enjoyable or challenging game because, of course, what happened was I ended up wandering off, crawling off, going into a garden shed and drinking weed killer, which fortunately did not become a me killer.
So, yeah, that certainly was a pretty...
Essential thing that happened with me, and that was an example.
And of course, my father, by all reports, and this is one of the reasons why my mother was not very pleased with him.
And I don't know the exact...
I probably should, but I really don't know the exact etymology of my parents' divorce.
I know that I was very young.
But I know that this was one of the things that was either why my mother didn't want...
My father to take care of me, or maybe it had more to do with their divorce or something like that.
So I was able to do that because I was not a baby.
If I was a baby, I'd be in a pram or something.
I wouldn't be able to go anywhere, right?
Anywhere at all. So there is now an expectation when the child becomes a toddler, there is now an expectation of conformity to standards.
The child has moral responsibility and the parent now expects the child to behave in the correct or moral or good fashion and then, of course, reserves the right of punishment should the child fail to obey the parent.
Now, here's the other thing.
If you look at the teenage years, you really can see exactly the same phenomenon occurring.
So, in the toddler years that the baby The toddler is unable to fend for itself within the house, but the toddler is able to make its own choices within the house, right?
Now, if you look at the teenage years, what's happening is the teenager now has the capacity to enact his or her will outside the house, right?
Outside the house.
Now that's pretty important.
That is pretty important.
So, where the parent now has to monitor the child inside the house, in the teenage years, you end up with a situation where the parent now has to monitor the child outside the house, which becomes sort of increasingly difficult, if not downright impossible.
So, that's really, really important to sort of process for people and to understand for people.
Now, to start to get the child to limit his or her own behavior, I mean, it's important, right?
I'm not an unparenting dude, right?
I am not an unparenting dude.
I don't believe that children have the capacity to limit themselves in ways that don't harm everyone else and all of that.
So that is another thing that's kind of important to me.
So, when you expect children to start to monitor their own behavior, to limit their own behavior, you have to understand that it's due to growing independence, and it's due to a lack of reliance upon you, immediate needs.
Babies can't get their own candy, toddlers can.
Toddlers or young children in latency and so on, pre-puby, they usually can't go out and roam the neighborhood and get into trouble and hang out with the wrong crowd and all that kind of stuff, but teenagers can.
So that's important.
Now, where does punishment come from?
Where does punishment come from?
Punishment comes fundamentally for children and for society.
Punishment comes from a lack of modeling, from a lack of modeled behavior.
Punishment Punishment comes from hypocrisy, fundamentally.
Punishment comes from hypocrisy.
I'll give you a simple example. So, parents, don't At least I've never heard of it.
I can't imagine it. I mean, it could happen in crazy, crazy situations.
But parents don't have to punish their children for failing to learn their native language correctly.
And I'm not talking when they're older in terms of grammar and stuff like that.
I just mean that parents don't have to, when it comes to just absorbing your native language, right?
Absorbing the language that's spoken in the home.
Parents don't have to. Deal with that.
They don't have to train and punish and so on.
For reading, yeah, it's a little different.
Maybe, again, training and punishment is not so key, but just the child.
And it's a freaky, I mean, if you've not been around it as a parent, man, you've got to see this.
It's incredible. It's like watching an entire city arise from the ocean in a giant hissing tsunami.
Because kids, you don't even know where they're getting all their words from.
But suddenly they just go from single words.
And then they have, I can't remember the technical name, but they have half silly words for things.
As they're struggling, like with my daughter, she would call spiders beady bow.
She would call electricity electricity.
And grapes were bagai.
And there was lots of...
And I went through this phase for quite a while when I was a kid.
So... If you have this process of children just absorbing language like a sponge, because the parents are modeling the correct colloquial verbal use of language, the children pick up this language, learn this language, speak this language with almost no Praise or punishment.
I guess there's a little bit of praise.
And you don't have to sit there and say, no, no, no, it's not bagai, it's grape.
You just have to keep using the word and they'll adjust accordingly.
Because the parents are modeling the native language correctly and consistently, the child absorbs that language correctly.
And speaks it fluently.
There's no punishment, no reward.
It sort of reminds me of what somebody was saying about video games and kids, right?
Because that's a great mystery.
He has ADHD, but he can play Fortnite for 14 hours straight, right?
So he can clearly concentrate. And video game makers, they never say to kids, right?
They never say, oh, this game is pretty boring.
It's pretty easy. It's pretty bad.
I mean, it's a good game, but it's pretty easy.
It's not challenging. They always say, this is a tough game.
This is a challenging game. It's easy to learn, hard to master.
That's kind of the crack that you want for video games, right?
And kids flock to those games, which is why they don't play the very simple games that they played as a kid when they get older.
It's not like Talking Angela or whatever.
They don't play those when they get older because it's not a real challenge.
So kids love challenges.
They love mastering difficult things.
The problem with school is not that it's hard.
The problem with school is that it's boring.
But of course, you can't fix the school, so you just have to drug the children.
That's a very sad inevitability of state-run educational miasma, not even educational.
You've got to use the right language.
So children learn to speak English, say, fluently and easily without threats, punishments, rewards, or any of that stuff.
It's an amazing, incredible experience.
In the same that, in general, they will learn the basics of moving.
Rolling over, sitting up, walking, running, bike riding, and so on.
And again, it's an amazing thing.
It was a couple of years ago, and I taught my daughter how to ride a bike.
And I say I taught my daughter how to ride a bike like I was doing something other than holding on and letting go and holding on and letting go.
And then when she got it, it was like an absolute giant rush.
And she just flew. She just flew.
I had a mom moment the other day.
We were biking back. A fairly lengthy bike ride we went on, about an hour and a half.
And of course, it's tough to bike ride when you're chatting the whole way.
And she was, you know, kind of flying down a hill.
I just got a helmet on and all of that, but she was flying down a hill, and she's a big no-hands person, right?
And I'm like, yeah, she's been doing it for a long time.
She's good at it, but she sort of flew past me.
Woohoo! Check it out, Dad!
I'm like, oh, check out your dad having minor palpitations.
But she did fine.
And of course, here's the thing, too, is that my concern is that, and it's important to remember this as a parent, so my concern at that moment was, if I yell out at her, in a sense, to be careful, then she might wobble.
I mean, this happened once when she was trying to jump over something, and just as she was about to jump, you know, I got a bit nervous, and I said, be careful, and then she fell.
I was like interrupting her flow, and that's, sometimes you can create accidents out of fear of accidents, and that's sort of a good lesson to learn as parents.
So if you model the behavior that you want, then you don't need punishments.
You might need some course correction, you might need some encouragements, but you don't need negative stimuli really, right?
And I remember laughing about this some many years back.
We had duct cleaning in the house.
One of the joys of ownership.
And they found a couple of candy wrappers in my daughter's vents.
It's pretty inevitable.
And again, we don't eat sugar Monday to Friday.
We have a little bit on the weekends, but that's about it.
And this was kind of funny, right?
And the reason why this was kind of funny...
Is that she caught me sneaking candy once or twice.
See, when, and this is again, I can't remember how many years ago.
This is quite a number of years ago.
And I have a bit of a sweet tooth.
But of course, when you have chocolate in the house and you want a piece of chocolate, if you have little kids around or kids at all, I suppose, if you have a piece of chocolate, the first thing they want, of course, is a piece of chocolate, right?
And So I snuck a candy.
I snuck a piece of chocolate.
And I walked into the room.
And, of course, I was hiding it.
I just had it on my tongue. I wasn't chewing it.
Anyway, she just glanced up.
She's working on a drawing. She just glanced up and said, Oh, what's in your mouth, Dad?
Right? So... I mean, what am I going to do?
Lie to her? No. Oh, I had a piece of chocolate.
Oh, I want a piece of chocolate. Yeah, okay, go ahead.
So she saw me sneaking a piece of chocolate, right?
So how, quote, mad could I get at her for doing what?
Sneaking a piece of chocolate, just like I did.
She wasn't disobeying me.
She was obeying me. Because kids are very empirical, right?
It's the old worst thing that a parent can say.
One of the worst things is, do as I say, not as I do.
And so what you want to do is model, hey, if you want your kids to self-limit, then you have to show them you self-limiting.
Don't keep it quiet, right?
My daughter creates really beautiful, wonderful chocolates.
And she's really, she's good.
She barely eats any when she just have a little taste and all that.
But she's 11 and she will bake and cook with chocolate and barely have any.
And I know that because I'll sometimes do it with her and we can also tell the ingredients.
Not that we really check or anything like that, but you can kind of tell, right?
And if she says, you know, Dad, would you like to buy one of my chocolates?
So, you know, maybe I'll buy it.
And then she says, don't you want to eat it?
I'm like, oh yeah, I do.
I'm not going to because I just had a really good dinner.
But no, I would love to eat it, but I'm not going to because it's a weekday.
Can I just keep off sugar? That kind of stuff, right?
Sugar is just one of these things you've got to give up post-50 for the most part.
So I used to have like a Mr.
Big and an orange in the evening every day when I was younger.
Ah, the days are long past.
So, you just model the behavior that you want, and you're vocal about it, and you explain, oh, man, my tongue, you know, when your kid's a little, you can say, like, my tongue totally wants the candy.
Oh, it's so good.
And my mouth is, like, watering just thinking about this candy.
Oh, it's so good. My belly, on the other hand, does not want the candy.
My belly My weight does not want the candy.
Like, none of that. And so it was a hassle, right?
Especially when there were lots of commercials.
I remember my mother saying, and this always sort of reminded me of, I think, what happened to her personality and her defenses.
She would always have this...
We'd be watching TV, and a commercial would be coming on, and she would always get impatient kind of the same way, and she'd say, ugh!
Now there's so many commercials, you can barely even watch the program anymore.
She'd get really bitter and upset about it, like this was the big issue in her life.
And I understood even at a fairly young age that she was saying that because she barely had any natural personality.
All the defenses and avoidances were taking over and there wasn't any original program, so to speak.
It was all just... Advertising, right?
Advertising generally appeals to vanity and she got a nose job and was all kinds of trying to make herself pretty and stay thin and all that because I'm not sure she felt she had much else to offer a man and I'm not sure I would disagree other than she would offer him trouble.
So you had to get up to change the channel and now we have channel changes that are remote.
Why is that? Because we wanted something for nothing, right?
So to speak, right? We wanted to change channels without getting up.
Now, of course, it's healthy for you to get up and walk over, change the channel, but it's a drag, particularly when you want a channel flip because of...
And there was a phase. I don't know if they do it anymore.
I think they do, but there was a phase when the volume of the commercials was way higher because they knew people were going to the bathroom, were going to the kitchen, so they'd crank it up so they could still get their message.
It was pretty obnoxious. So, yeah, changing the channel if you're watching some sort of quiet show and then, welcome to...
Some ad would come in.
Sorry if you're falling asleep, but...
So, we want something for nothing.
In the past, if you wanted a show, you'd either have to go to see a show, like go and see a play or something like that, or if you were very rich, the play would come to you, right?
And I told her the story of Hamlet many years ago.
And the play is the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king.
So now we can just turn on the TV and there's endless entertainment and so on.
Whereas in the past, people would entertain each other with stories.
They would entertain each other with shows.
You know, I remember a friend of mine and I putting on puppet shows for kids, for friends when we were younger and all that.
And so you just have to do that kind of stuff, right?
So, we want something for nothing, and that's perfectly natural.
Also, we want to overeat, right?
It's not that hard to figure out why, right?
We want to overeat because we evolved without fridges, without freezers, without any consistent expectation of nutrition, right?
So, if you are a hunter, right, you go out and you hunt and you catch some animal, good, then, you know, you feed well, right?
I mean, Oh gosh, what was it?
The island where they put these guys.
One island they put guys.
One island they put women.
Try to survive without anything.
And the guys, you know, were able to kill an alligator.
And the women were all plucking tiny snails from the tide pool, one calorie each.
And the guys were able to kill an alligator.
And I think they estimated the alligator had like 15,000 calories worth of meat on it, right?
But they couldn't keep it, right?
They couldn't keep the meat. I mean, you can in winter, I suppose, but then you've got to wait for it to thaw, and it's kind of challenging if it's below zero or whatever.
So, of course, you're going to eat like crazy because you don't know the next time you're going to have a successful hunt.
So our desire to overeat was a survival mechanism, and that's why our body doesn't always signal us that we're full in time, right?
And so all of that makes perfect sense.
So, yeah, we want something for nothing.
We're kind of lazy, and our laziness creates great industriousness.
Like, we don't like to hunt, and so there's this massive farmer-to-table supply chain, you know, which you can talk about with kids for a while.
Pretty fascinating stuff.
So, yeah, we're kind of lazy, and that laziness produces the most amazing technology, right?
We don't want to hire people to come and entertain us, and plus they might suck.
You just go to karaoke night, right?
And, although that's not paid, but...
We're lazy. And so because we're lazy, we have giant TVs and the internet and all this kind of stuff.
We don't want to walk over a message and we don't want to go to the post office, so we've got email, right?
So our laziness produces massive advancements.
Our desire to get something for nothing, so to speak, really produces incredible stuff in the world.
But we've evolved way beyond where we started, but our bodies haven't caught up, of course, right?
I mean, evolutionary pressures have largely ceased for the last 200 years, for good and for, well, it's exciting, it's challenging, and it is just the way it is, right?
And I appreciate that, by the way.
I really appreciate that. Lack of selection pressure because with my upbringing, well, it's hard to say, but it is quite likely I would have been selected out.
So it's almost like I went to a shed when my dad was playing tennis and thought, oh, this is going to be my childhood.
Maybe I'll take the weed killer. That was surprisingly dark.
But anyway, I like to let you guys know what I'm thinking of time to time.
Happy to be alive now.
Not back then, really at all.
So, yeah, you just model the behavior, and you share this kind of human condition stuff, right?
Human condition stuff is not really philosophical.
It's just the intersection between abstract values and bodily functions, right?
It's human, right? I'm not a guy who feels tired.
I mean, if I don't get enough sleep, I'll feel tired on and off during the day.
But I'm not a guy – it happens rarely – but I'm not a guy who's like, oh, man, I can't keep my eyes open.
I have to go to bed. I'm like, well, I guess it's time to go to bed.
But I'm not tired. And that's just the way it is.
It's just the way it is. And my daughter's also not that way inclined.
My daughter is not somebody who feels tired.
In fact, once or twice when we've been out for New Year's or whatever, out at a party or back when you could and all that, it's like three or four o'clock in the morning.
Even I'm getting tired. And she's like, hey, what do you guys want to do now?
I don't know, sleep. Would that be okay?
So, yeah. We know we should go to bed.
Sometimes we stay up.
You know, this is how it started, how it ended meme.
How it started was some guy cracking books to study, and how it ended was a picture of the Twitter bird, right?
Kind of understandable. It's kind of understandable.
We have this human condition stuff, right?
We want to eat more than is good for us.
We generally prefer rest to exercise, and we are attracted to fertility markers in men and women that don't necessarily add up to really good partner material.
We want to have sex with a woman or a guy who's hot, but sex produces children, and it's not, of course, exactly one-to-one ratio of hotness to quality parent, quality partner.
So, yeah, we have this human condition stuff.
We like sugar more than vegetables, but vegetables are better for us.
I don't have to tell you all of this stuff, right?
We've all done it. We've all done it.
We've all done it. I mean, I've sometimes, if I'm watching a show and it's kind of late, I'm like, oh, I know I should go to bed.
I know I should go to bed. I know I should go to bed.
And it's not even like I'm so ferociously thirsty to see the end of the show.
It's just like, I'm so comfortable.
I just don't want to get up and do it.
I don't want to get up, right? And that's, you know, we all know this.
We all know this. And so kids need to understand that this is not something that your father is perfect at and you need to learn, right?
I mean, I'm pretty good at language, but, you know, so she had to learn some language.
Actually, this happened just last night.
Just last night.
So I'm reading the audiobook of my novel, Almost, which is...
It's so good.
It's so good. It's so good.
And... I read ahead, right?
I don't just sort of dry read. And so I read ahead and remember the voice I need to use and try and figure out the best way to approach a scene and little bumps and markers and all that.
All the stuff I learned at theater school, right?
So it transitions in emotion and all of that.
And sometimes it's a couple of takes and all of that.
So I was reading ahead in the novel last night.
I'm about maybe 55, 57% done reading the book.
And you can get it at fdrurl.com forward slash almost for free.
It's what I posted on social media.
Because people are like, dude, where's your politics?
Why aren't you doing politics and all that?
And I'm like, well, it's all in this book.
It's a free audiobook. Everything that I have to say about the current situation is in this book.
So, I was reading ahead last night, and...
Of course, it's been a while since I read the book, and so I didn't remember all the twists and turns and plots, and I was like, man, this is great.
I mean, you write.
Why do you write a book? You write a book because what you want to read is not present in the world, right?
Why do you create a philosophy show?
Because the philosophy that you want or need or prefer is not present in the world.
You create a product because what you want or need is not present in the world, right?
So you create a book because of that, right?
I'm reading ahead and I'm like, oh, I know I should go to sleep.
But this is so good. And it wasn't like, I wasn't reading it like, I'm such a good writer.
It wasn't anything like that. It was just like, wow, what a great story.
Or wow, what a great plot twist.
Or wow, what great characters.
Or wow, that's a really cool description or whatever it is, right?
So yeah, this happened last night, right?
Happened last night. Should have gone to bed earlier, but I was enjoying so much reading ahead of my novel.
So it's all just human condition stuff.
And These are some of the physical considerations, but, you know, there are other considerations as well.
If somebody's being mean to a child, do I step in and say something?
Well, that's an important question.
If somebody is saying something that I consider to be wrong morally, factually, politically, and so on, do I say something?
And this isn't really the case with people in my personal life.
But it can be the case out there in public, right?
Do you do something? Do you say something?
And so on, right? And that's a big question.
It's a big question. So modeling, you know, if you see someone being mean to a child, you know, sometimes it can be tough to say something, right?
I don't want to stand up for this, right?
And it can be a delicate situation and you don't want the child to get in trouble.
Like, look at how you embarrassed me in public kind of thing, right?
And so these are complicated, tough questions.
And once you get the child to understand that, you know, hey, welcome to the glories of life.
Life is a beautiful, wonderful, amazing, powerful, miraculous thing.
Asterisk, right? It's just the asterisk talk, right?
It's glorious! Asterisk.
Yeah, but it requires some pretty significant management in order to maintain, right?
You've got to exercise, you've got to eat well, you've got to get your sleep, you've got to stay safe in various situations and so on, right?
Or, you know, like as my daughter and I were talking about when she was pretty young, around the question of risk, right?
Say, oh, well, you know, if you go out and ride your bike, you can spill, right?
And you can get your strawberry knee or whatever it is, right?
And a friend of hers got into a pretty bad dirt bike accident.
So, yeah, these things come with risk, right?
We say, yeah, there's risk, right?
And... This fantasy that we can eliminate risk is one of the most horrible things that is occurring in the world.
Like, oh, we can eliminate risk by locking everyone up in their houses.
We can eliminate risk by shutting everything down economically.
We can eliminate risk because of COVID, right?
Sorry, I have to remember that I'm also speaking to the future as well as the present, right?
And you can't.
You can't. What's the estimate?
It's that seven times the life years have been lost through shutdowns, that have been saved through shutdowns.
Seven times? So you can say to your kids, well, it's dangerous to just grab your bike and go riding around the neighborhood.
It's dangerous. Even though it's, you know, not particularly, right?
I mean, there's a lot of reductions in issues around children and so on.
Not so much in England, apparently with the young girls and all that.
But you can say to your kids, you know, I feel uneasy when you're out there in the neighborhood and you're out there just roaming around.
Bad things could happen, abductions and bullies or whatever it is.
So then you want to keep your kids home.
You want to keep your kids close.
And then they get fat.
They lose muscle mass.
They develop vision problems because they're always staring at a screen two inches from their face, right?
So, actually, I'm half and half about the close reading causing eye problems.
I don't know if that's true or not.
I think it's true, but look it up for yourself or talk to your optometrist.
So, you want to eliminate the risk of something bad happening to your kid in the neighborhood.
You keep your kid home. It just sits around.
And then, you know, an object that's in motion tends to remain in motion.
Inertia, right? An object that's at rest tends to remain at rest.
So, your kids get out of the habit of getting out and exercising, and then they don't want to go and do it because they're getting kind of Hillsbury Doughboy, puffy marshmallow legs situation, right?
And they haven't developed athletic skills, so they tend to avoid athletic competitions because they don't want to be humiliated.
Like, it becomes a whole self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing inertia.
So yeah, let your kids go out and play, in my humble opinion, if you're in a reasonably safe neighborhood.
Because the alternative is, okay, good.
They're in the house. I don't have to worry about them.
Oh, dear. They are now pre-diabetic and they're 12, you know, or they're overweight or whatever it is, right?
So that's going to make dating tougher and just get a lower quality partner.
You know, it's really bad.
That's the issue, right? When my daughter was – this is when she's going down the hill, right?
Yeah. I want her to enjoy biking.
I don't want her to feel caution and fear because she's doing something.
And also, of course, when your kids get older and now she's on the, I guess, casper puberty or whatever, right?
So you kind of have to trust their – you kind of have to trust their risk assessment.
Because, you know, when they're little, they don't know the consequences of behavior too well, so you kind of have to manage it.
You have to be there pre-pain for them in a way.
But, you know, when they get to be...
She's almost 12, right?
So they can manage their own thing, right?
And, you know, I... As far as my risk assessment goes, you know, I'm still pleased.
I'm still pleased. It's been a heavy price, but I'm still...
I'm still pleased. And...
People who said far fewer controversial things or less controversial things have also been erased.
And so it wasn't like if I had played it safer, it would have been necessarily.
I would have necessarily been safer, right?
And you can make these games of self-limiting fun for kids, right?
So... I did sort of left hand, right hand.
There's lots of different ways to do it, but left hand, right hand, right?
The left hand was my tongue, the right hand was my belly, right?
So my left hand would be reaching for something sweet, and my right hand would smack it away.
And it would be like the war of the tongue versus the tummy.
The tonguey versus the tummy.
And this can be fun, and it really does communicate to the child that, yeah, As the saying used to be when I was a kid, when you'd eaten too much, you know, your eyes were bigger than your stomach, right?
You thought you wanted all of this, but you couldn't finish your meal.
Your eyes were bigger than your stomach.
And that's just a human condition.
We want more than we have. And, you know, we're like Prince's mother, never satisfied, right?
And that's the human condition.
That's why we have civilization. It's why we evolved in the way that we did, and why we have all of this great stuff.
We're not satisfied. It's why we have 5G burning a hole through our gonads, because apparently people want their Netflix 12 milliseconds earlier, so they'll give up, I don't know, sperm production or whatever theory it is that's behind the sort of falling sperm counts in the West these days.
Yeah. And you'd be absolutely astounded.
You don't want kids to feel at all isolated.
Now, if you present yourself as perfect, because perfection is also the origin of punishment, right?
Because, listen, we all fail in our resolutions.
We all fail in our resolutions.
Every day, probably, you could look at something and say, well, I wanted to do this, but I didn't quite get around to it.
Or I didn't want to do this, but I did it anyway.
I shouldn't have done that, really, ideally, but I did.
Like, we all, in a sense, fall off the wagon.
There is no such thing as perfection in all of these myriad complexities of human life.
And that's the human condition. There's nothing wrong with it.
It's just life. It's just life.
It's not a bad thing. You can say it's a good or a bad thing, but it doesn't really matter.
It's like saying, is the level of gravity a good or bad thing?
You tell me the alternative, right?
The alternative to a failure is death, right?
Failing to meet ideal standards.
And again, who even knows what these ideal standards are?
Unfortunately, we live in a world where truth tellers are punished, so truth becomes complex and all of that, right?
So, it's a big challenge.
And that's just part of the Gordian knot that we have to unravel every day, that we walk God's green acres, right?
Whereas if you present yourself as perfect and You present your child as needing to evolve to your state of perfection.
Well, your child is going to very clearly see that you're not perfect.
They're going to see...
I remember a friend of my father's who took me in for a summer.
I'm not going to get into any details here, but some may be important.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. He worked out in the bush.
He was a professional. We were out in the bush.
He got horrendously drunk one night with some other people.
I was like 15 or 16.
I spent the summer with him in another part of Canada.
I remember him. He had this great beard.
He was a good guy.
He was a good guy. I was glad to spend the summer with him.
He had a nice family and all that.
And I remember him so drunk, he was banging a tin cup against the wall of the prospector's tent that we were in and singing at the top of his lungs.
And I had no problems with it.
I mean, it was good to see that kind of thing.
But he drank to excess.
And that was pretty apparent the next morning when he awoke like a vampire from a thousand years sleep.
Kind of thirsty and headachy.
Like, no woo-woos. No, no.
No, no. And so, you know, you can see this.
You can see this excess in adults all the time.
You know, the child might hear from the father.
You have to say no to things. You have to be disciplined.
And yet... He may have, you know, pudgy middle dad bod.
He may, you know, fail to correct someone who's telling something that's not true.
He may not stand up for himself or he may stand up for himself too aggressively and drive people away.
It's going to be failures because that's what life is.
Life is brief flashes of success is followed by intermittent failures, right?
If you only ride your hopes of happiness on the flashes of success, Then it's like saying, well, I'd love to navigate the world, but I'm only going to open my eyes when the lightning flashes.
It's like, well, I don't really think that's ideal.
So your child is going to see you failing in the same way that my daughter saw me sneaking a piece of chocolate, which I have no regrets about.
Oh, I shouldn't have sucked that piece of chocolate.
No. No, because then we had a great conversation about food and temptation and this, that, and the other, right?
So, if you share with your kids that you're not perfect, that there's this human condition thing, which creates unresolvable paradoxes, and it's not like, oh, you'll spend the rest of your life wrestling with temptation because Satan is blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no, this is why we have good things.
This is why we have great things.
This is why we have technology.
Our desire to get something for nothing.
Our desire to have rewards without effort.
Our desire to not have to get up to change the channel.
On the TV. It's why we have all these great things.
The good and the bad are all blended.
I know it's all kind of like a yin and a yang thing, but it's really the good and the bad are all blended in.
And it's just a human condition thing.
Nothing wrong with it.
There's nothing to be fixed any more than there is, you know, if we didn't have a hunger for more, if we didn't wrestle with ideal standards, we wouldn't have philosophy.
We wouldn't have technology. We wouldn't have, with this conversation, wouldn't exist.
So I'm not going to bag on the fundamental human characteristic that Is why this conversation exists.
That would be pretty sad, pretty silly, right?
So, that to me, and I'm sorry for the long speech, but I won't even get into the teenage stuff, right?
And the teenage stuff, though, right?
Okay, I will, very briefly, right?
So, with the teenage stuff, if you want your child to perform the great exorcism of carving out peer pressure from her life, If you want your child to resist peer pressure, we all know the answer to this now, right?
This stuff should be worn into your brain like train tracks, right?
So the way that you get your child to resist peer pressure is you resist peer pressure yourself.
You resist peer pressure yourself.
And if, as a child, your child sees you Constantly bowing down to peer pressure, right?
Somebody refills your wine glass, you know, and you don't say no, right?
And you drink maybe a little bit too much or you eat maybe a little bit too much because, you know, people suggest it or you go to social or family functions that you really don't want to on a consistent basis without any explanation as to why and all of that.
And if you just don't feel like doing something, you just won't do it and all of that, right?
So, if you...
Model susceptibility to peer pressure, to social pressure.
Then, of course, your child is going to end up bowing to peer pressure, or at least be highly tempted by it when puberty hits, right?
And the independence kicks in.
So, try not to be hypocritical.
Be honest about hypocrisy.
And you won't have any trouble with that stuff.
I know that's a big thing to say.
But it's true. If I am hypocritical in my home, which, you know, it happens.
It happens. Again, human condition, right?
If I'm hypocritical, in other words, if I sneak a candy, right?
I say to my child, don't sneak a candy, right?
And the reason I was sneaking a candy is I didn't want to say, I can have a candy and you can't.
I didn't want to get into that conflict.
It was kind of weasely. Again, it's not a huge issue in life or anything, but it's important as a teaching moment.
Just try not to be hypocritical.
Be consistent. And speak openly about your failure to live up to your ideal standards, which is something your kids have to roll with.
Because, I mean, are there ideal standards these days?
No. There are no more ideal standards.
It's kind of what I started about in the conversation today.
What are the ideal standards?
Thou shalt not bear false witness.
Tell the truth. Yeah, okay.
And get your career destroyed, right?
That's the impossible situation, right?
That's the impossible situation that we're in now as free speech falls around the West, right?
Tell the truth. Don't bear false witness.
Don't bear to peer pressure. Also, having an income is nice, right?
So, yeah, these are big challenges, and navigating them is complex.
And, yeah, so I think...
You need your child to see the path by which they can become you, assuming they want to be, and if they don't want to be, then you've got to really fix your life and model something that your children can aspire to.
But if you're perfect and they're fundamentally flawed, then there's no path from them to you.
There's no path from them to you.
You know, like you enter one in a GPS, you enter some destination and say, there's no path from you to there.
Would you like to take a helicopter?
Or go on foot? Camel, maybe.
And so if you're like, yeah, you know, I still struggle with the same things sometimes.
It's getting easier, but I still struggle with the same things sometimes.
I mean, you've seen me eat too much.
You've seen me not want to do something and then not do it, which I should do it.
So yeah, it's just life.
And it's not really a bad part of life.
It's just any more than gravity is a bad part of life.
It just is. Then she's like, oh, okay, so the skills I learn now, Will be the skills I can still use when I'm dad's age or mom's age.
Right? That's just the way it is.
That's just the way it is.
But if you're perfect, then you're kind of inhuman.
And it is hypocritical.
It is hypocritical.
And a kid kind of fundamentally gets that.
Because if you say, I'm perfect, and you shouldn't ever miss your ideal, Or my ideal.
You should always rise to the ideal.
If you say that, then you're not an ideal parent.
So you've already cracked your credibility to begin with.
So anyway, I hope that helps.
And yeah, always focus.
Change comes from within.
That's the way to go. That is the way to go.
Model and you won't need to punish.
That's the way to go, too. So I hope that helps.
And yeah, Do we have another question?
Look at that. An hour to fix parenting, planet-wide.
Hey, that's not bad. I would just like to invite the caller, the listener, if he has any comments on that, to follow up.
Otherwise, I don't think we have anybody straight away.
Yeah, that was my question, and I agree with pretty much everything you said.
I think specifically...
My question was more oriented towards, I don't want to impose my will, as you've mentioned before, on her.
She's 12 months, and there are some instances where, as parents, we have to impose our will, whether it's changing a diaper or making sure she doesn't do something to hurt herself.
So, I think what I was curious about is how you handled...
I mean, because I don't want to let her do whatever she wants and kind of walk all over us.
I want to walk that line between not imposing our will but not being a permissive parent or unparenting.
So when you talk about diapers, though, what age are you talking about?
Well, right now she's 12 months and she can be a little wriggly now.
She was always great as, you know, three months, six months, nine months.
And now she's starting to, cause she's, she can crawl and she wants to move around and she's developing her independent self.
And, you know, she wants, she's, I can crawl.
I want to go over there. So she's a little squirmy when we try and change her now, but...
Well, I mean, is there a favorite song or a story or a funny voice or eye contact or something that you can engage with her?
Because a lot of times, you know, the mechanic rarely chats with the car when he's changing the oil.
But with kids, I think a lot of times what you can do is you can engage them in some conversation or some story or something like that, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I'll, like, kiss her feet and sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider.
She likes that song. So, yeah, there's things we can do where...
But, I mean, we're not, like, forcing her down or anything like that.
When I say imposing our will, I guess I mean, like, we're going somewhere and she's an infant.
She's kind of pretty verbal. Like, definitely when she's three months, it's like, we're going somewhere.
If we could ask you, we would, but, you know, we're just going.
And now... I guess we could ask her, but she's not really...
So, I mean, we're still like, if we're going to go somewhere, if we're going to go to her grandparents, then we're just going to go.
It's not like she really has an input in that.
So, I don't mean like we're like forcing her to do stuff, but...
Yeah, she's got to be with you, right?
Yeah, like we are.
We're not using like physical force and she's not like crying and screaming.
Like, it's obvious she doesn't want to do it.
If she was doing that, we wouldn't do it.
But I just mean like we're imposing our will like...
She doesn't really have a say.
Well, I guess she does. I mean, if she didn't really want to go somewhere, she would put up a fuss.
And how's her language skills at the moment?
She says mama and dada and light and a few colors.
So she's got some words.
Some what colors? Blue.
I'm sorry, I thought you said some FU colors.
I'm like, really? Some colors.
It's fracking blue. Yeah.
Okay, that could be a whole other conversation.
So, does she have something that she likes to keep with her?
Does she have the teddy bear or something that she likes to keep with her?
No, not really.
Okay, that's good. That means she's got a good bond with you, I guess, right?
Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, generally, me or her mother.
Right, right, right. She wants one of us.
Right. Usually it's her mother because her mom stays home and I go to work.
And then when we're around the grandparents, though, she'll cling to me, which makes me feel good.
Oh, that is nice. Yeah.
That is nice. Yeah.
So, yeah, I would say that with regards to going to the grandparents, I assume she enjoys it, and so that probably isn't a big issue.
And also, she's at that age where, assuming she's got a good relationship with her parents, being with you guys is just kind of what she wants to do, right?
Yeah. And so, if you were to abandon her, so to speak, she'd probably be more upset with that.
But yeah, as she gets older...
You know, I think it is important to just remind her that, you know, she needs to have an understanding as to why you go.
And look, I'm sure there's wonderful things about the grandparents or anything, like, why on earth do you go, right?
Oh, we don't bring her there and leave her there.
We all go together. No, no, no, I understand why everyone goes, right?
Oh, these are my parents, in the same way you enjoy spending time with us, we enjoy spending time with our parents, and plus they have a great relationship with you and all that kind of stuff.
And also, you know, remind her and say, look, if there's things that you want to do differently at the grandparents, we don't want to just bring you, like, a sack of potatoes, right?
You know, like, what do you like?
What do you not like about going to the grandparents?
Like, there's all this kinds of cool stuff that she can start to have her preferences respected.
I'm not saying you don't respect her preferences at the moment, but as soon as you can, just start to ask her what she likes, what she doesn't like, and this kind of stuff.
Oh yeah, I'm really excited for that, to be able to have those kinds of conversations with her.
Good. It's just now it's because and we try not to say like no and get like because we went to the pediatrician and she was like oh when you don't ask her can you do this say it's time to do this and when you give her a command and I kind of was like we're not really the giving commands kind of parents like if she's putting something in her mouth I'll gently take her hand away from pull it away from her mouth say oh please don't put that in your mouth and she generally responds to that positively.
Right. So Do you think that's a good thing that we're doing there?
Yeah, I think so.
The more choice that you can give children, the better, right?
Because there's always going to be differences of opinion.
I mean, you can stop and track this over the course of a day.
Like, there's really, there are so many differences of opinion.
You know, even what should we do?
What should we have for dinner? You know, what do you want to do this evening?
Everybody has a different idea.
And that's good. I mean, kind of weird if everyone borg into the same thing all the time, right?
So everyone has a different idea about what to do with their time.
And... Learning how to negotiate that is really, really important because you can't have relationships if you can't negotiate differences because then you either end up as a bully or you end up as a victim or you end up with a self-erased, which is kind of a subset of victimhood and so on.
Self-pity, resentment, like all that kind of stuff cooks in, right?
You do want to try and figure out what your kids want and learn how to negotiate with them about what to do.
And it's so much more fun.
Because, you know, I don't know if you've had this kind of thing where if you have family members and, you know, let's say your wife doesn't want to go do something, but she just kind of comes along and huffs, I doubt your wife would make you sound like you've got a great family and all that.
But I kind of enjoy something if someone is there against their preference.
I just can't enjoy it, right?
Yeah. And, you know, I can't enjoy saving Private Ryan if she ever would be.
But, you know, you just can't, right?
So I just say, look, if you don't want to come, like if you don't want to come, maybe I can find some way to encourage you to come or whatever it is, right?
But if you don't want to come, I don't want to drag you.
I don't want to drag you. Now, you can come with the assurance that I'll try and make it as much fun as possible.
I can remind you of the other times you didn't want to come someplace.
And, you know, she didn't want to come on some hike that I was going on.
And then I eventually talked her into coming, and she found a baby snake, which was like the coolest thing for her.
She just loves critters like that.
So, you know, you can negotiate and remind and all of that.
And I'm not above bribing with a trip to Menchies.
I hate to say it, but I mean, I've got to be frank with you guys.
It's kind of a joke. And it's not always that we go.
But yeah, it's like, okay, well, you know, I'll just go on a hike and then I'll drop past...
Maybe we'll go to the dollar store.
Maybe I'll just go to Bulk Barn and just nose around the candy aisle.
I mean, it's kind of like a joke, right?
It's not always that we do it, but whether it's right or wrong, I'm just not above it because I just enjoy her company so much.
So that is the courage.
And it sounds like your kid's obviously got to be pretty smart and trying to give her as much free choices as early as possible.
It's great. You know, it's like that old cheesy poem, you know, like if you love something, set it free.
If it comes back to you, it's yours.
If it doesn't, it never was. The more choice you give kids, the more they'll choose you.
The less choice you give kids, the more they'll choose their peers or indoctrination or the media or whatever, right?
So, yeah, it's just one of these funny things.
Just give people as much choice as possible and the more choice you give them, the more they'll choose you, right?
And the bit about negotiating too, I guess we kind of did have a little negotiating period, even though she's pre-verbal.
She had this measuring spoon in her mouth that she'd love to chew on.
And I'm like, okay, well, it's not a choking hazard and it's fine.
But then she started crawling around with it.
And I'm like, what if she slips and jams in her mouth because she falls on it or something?
So I'm like, oh, please take that out of your mouth.
And I kind of grabbed it from her and then she cried right away.
And so I'm like, oh, So I gave it back to her and I'm like, oh man, am I buying more of this?
I cry when I want something back.
But then we kind of negotiated.
I'm like, okay, well, I'm gonna have to pick you up and hold you if you want to chew on it.
Or you can crawl around with it in your hand.
And she kind of did that.
And if she went to put it in her mouth, I go, please don't put it in your mouth.
She'd take it out of her mouth again.
That's really good. That's a solid B. As far as parenting goes, and that's like fantastic.
Well, that's kind of why I asked the question.
It's like, I want an A. So I'm like, let's get a little course correction.
Look, I don't know what the A is, right?
So I'm not going to tell you you've got to conform to my ideas.
And listen, the B is completely facetious.
It might have been a perfect day. My first thought would be something like this.
Okay, what is the softest fruit you have in your house?
Probably strawberries or something like that.
Yeah. Yeah, okay.
Maybe something a little bigger?
I'm trying to think. Do you have like a soft apple or something like that?
Bananas. That could work.
Okay. And so I'm thinking like a soft root, maybe banana-sized or whatever.
Sorry, apple-sized or whatever.
So what you do is you say, you know, can I... Can I just hold your spoon for a second?
I want to show you something. You know, hopefully she'll, at some point, it may take a little while, she'll pass it over, right?
And say, here's the owie.
Ooh! You're like, ow!
Ooh, right? Here's the owie.
Imagine. Picture.
Think. And you may just point, like, this piece of fruit is your mouth.
If you fall, and then you jam the spoon into the fruit, right?
Ow! Jam the spoon into the fruit.
Ow. That hopefully will give her the connection.
Because right now, she is obeying without understanding, if I understand this correctly.
I think I'm giving in to her a little more than she's obeying, but...
I don't think she understands why she can't have things in her mouth, probably.
Right, right. And she doesn't understand why she can have the spoon in her mouth when she's sitting, but not when she's crawling.
Right, and then probably doesn't differentiate it between her other toys that are meant for her to chew on.
Right. Oh, yes, that's right.
That's right. No, and I totally understand what you're saying.
She slips and hits the hardwood or something, and that thing's going to go back into her esophagus like a spear, right?
Yeah. And I think a lot of this can be taken care of with, I was thinking yesterday, because I asked this Friday, a lot of it's probably just prevention, like, don't have that stuff around.
Like, once we notice that she's got her eye on something that we don't want her to have, just kind of hide it.
You know, I gotta tell you, that's not ideal for me, because then, it's like, things just disappear.
Right. Yeah, okay, yeah.
I did think of that, because, like, I don't want to do that when she, in the moment, right?
And we kind of, like, I don't like this surreptitious, she's not looking, and then we take it from her.
I suppose there's not much of a difference if it's separated by hours, because then she's probably still thinking, where's that thing that I liked a few hours ago?
Well, and she will say, she'll reach for it, she will indicate that she wants it, and then you'll have to lie to her.
Spoon, or, I mean, I know she's...
Well, I don't think I want to, I wouldn't lie to her, so...
So then you'd say, Daddy hit it?
Well, I guess that would, I would have to say that if I didn't hide it.
Well, it's over here.
Right. It's in the drawer, sealed in a container.
I'm admitting the fact that I put it here to keep it from you.
And a dragon. Right.
Right. And that, of course, then it's like any time that she doesn't have what she wants, she would go to you and say, where is it?
And then you're kind of in a cycle, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
So if she understands that the owie, right?
And maybe you could draw it, maybe you could do it with one of her stuffed toys or something like that, right?
But... So that she understands that if she, it may take a little while, right?
If she falls, and she's still learning, if she falls, she will hurt herself, right?
With a spoon in her mouth.
And, you know, I think there's ways to get that across.
A year, I mean, I think so.
I think so. Now, of course, if there isn't a way to get that across, then you go from a B to an A, right?
Which is, you didn't just grab it from her violently.
You didn't just hide it from her, right?
You just, and she understands.
But then you have to make sure, you have to bookmark that in your head, right?
If this is the best that could be done, which is, you know, straight A +, right?
Then what you have to do is when she becomes verbal, you know what you have to do?
You have to bring out the spoon.
You have to bring out the spoon.
And say, do you remember this?
Do you remember how I used to love chewing on this?
And it's probably teething, right? Or whatever's going on, right?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, I said you couldn't crawl, and I need to explain that to you.
So that she knows that what you...
And it's not about the past, right?
But it's about the future. So then if there's some rule that you can't explain to her...
In the future, then she at least will trust you that an explanation will come in time.
Yeah. But great stuff, man.
By the way, she's a lucky girl, man.
You know, we should all be so lucky to be...
Yeah, we all should be so lucky as to be reincarnated as our own children, right?
Yeah. Wouldn't that be a great thing?
Wouldn't that be a great thing?
Amazing. So, yeah, I hope that helps.
But yeah, I mean, fantastic work.
Fantastic work. That's...
Brilliant. And, you know, I... Well, pat yourself on the back, too, because it's all because of you.
Well, thanks, man. I appreciate that.
And here's the thing, too, right?
I mean, you know, maybe you could do what you can.
It's a risky thing to spread peaceful parenting, for sure, right?
But if you can sort of spread that kind of stuff around, otherwise, you know, if you have friends who are not doing it, you know, what they'll get is a little bit more...
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I don't think I have any other questions, so thank you very much.
I really, really appreciate that.
Hey, I have no problem with a relatively short show.
It's nice getting the monologues on for a while.
I'm really enjoying the newer shows.
I'm still working on some presentations, still working on the Peaceful Parenting book, so stuff is still cooking along, and I hope, I hope, I hope that people will.
I get into almost.
It's funny, you know, because I was thinking about this.
It's a long-form novel, right?
It's like 350,000 words or something like that.
It's a Lord of the Rings, right? It's a long-form novel.
And I guess I have some thoughts.
I mean, my concern is not that there's much to be done about it, because it's also why I get a chance to put the book out, is that people are so used to short form, like Facebook, Twitter, stuff.
People are so used to short form.
And that's why I recorded this as an audiobook, because putting it out as just a book, I don't know that people are into reading long novels anymore, even though I think...
I don't think a word is wasted in it.
I'm sort of reading it over.
Now, of course, with the hindsight of having written it some time ago, reading it over and saying, oh, could I cut this?
Could I cut that? Well, no, that shows up later.
Oh, no, that... I have this whole...
I mean, when I was writing the book, I had this whole wall of like, well, this has to fit to here, and this has to go in here, and the reason this is here is because of that and all of that, so...
And the sort of slow build of the characters and the dominoes of childhood to adulthood from tiny personal events that are huge in childhood to huge events in the world decades later.
It's all there, so I don't really know what I could cut.
I hope that you will check out the book.
It's fdrurl.com forward slash Almost.
Again, it's free. And throw it under the car.
I'll tell you what. Just give it an hour.
Give it an hour. Get to the Battle of the Gardens and just see if it doesn't grab you by the intellectual and emotional gonads and so on.
Just give it an hour. Give it an hour.
It's free. And see if it doesn't get you hooked.
I think it will. I hope it will.
Thanks, everyone, so much.
FreeDomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
I really, really would appreciate it.
Listen, I know it's been a tough year for everyone.
I'm not alone in that.
I know it's been a tough year for everyone.
I'm not asking, obviously, for anything that you can't afford.
I'm not asking for anything that you can't spare.
But if you can, and if you value the work that is going on here, I would really, really, really appreciate it.
FreeDomain.com forward slash donate.
Thanks to James, as always.
Thanks to you, my glorious, brilliant listeners.
Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful day.
I'll talk to you soon. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
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