Based Camp - We Went Viral for ＂Child Abuse＂

00:00:00.000 We can't do it, man. That's discipline.

00:00:03.120 We don't believe in rules like we gave them up when we started living like freaky beatniks.

00:00:09.760 Yeah, you've got to help us, Doc. We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.

00:00:15.120 Most, perhaps all, the blame rests with the parents.

00:00:19.040 Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children, and hitting them?

00:00:30.000 These people, you must have lost your goddamn mind.

00:00:33.440 I guess I just hate to see a child go unbeaten.

00:00:36.000 Now I need to talk for a few minutes about why I find the research so distrustworthy in this space.

00:00:41.520 One, you're proceeding into the research from a prior that this is a human rights abuse.

00:00:45.760 Whenever anyone says every expert in a field agrees on something,

00:00:49.920 I pretty much immediately dismiss it.

00:00:51.840 Because I'm like, that just doesn't happen in science when there's no nuance.

00:00:55.280 Yeah, there is always more when science is happening correctly.

00:00:59.040 If you look at what the research is saying, if this has a massive IQ effect,

00:01:02.960 this has a massive effect on aggression, these people become antisocial and aren't able to-

00:01:06.960 They hate their parents, et cetera.

00:01:08.880 If these things were true at the levels that they're saying these things are true,

00:01:14.960 every single long-lived culture on Earth would not have convergently evolved this method of

00:01:22.320 interacting with children during this developmental stage.

00:01:26.000 What is really negative and what we are against is any form of punishment where the pain is the point

00:01:32.880 of the punishment.

00:01:34.240 What happens during a bop?

00:01:35.440 It is a light slap on the child's nose or face that is meant to shock and redirect and refocus attention.

00:01:44.240 The reason we do the face is because it requires much less pain to get the same reaction than

00:01:50.960 doing something like slapping the wrist.

00:01:52.960 We don't really do this for four-year-olds and up with our kids.

00:01:55.360 Yeah, because you can talk to them.

00:01:56.720 With a two-to-four range, because with my four-year-old, I could say,

00:02:00.400 this could kill you, and he can begin to cognitively understand that.

00:02:03.600 Two-to-four, you don't really get that.

00:02:06.000 And so when you need to denote, no, this is an extra level of don't do this when compared to

00:02:12.160 other things I have told you not to do, the only way to denote that other than physicality

00:02:19.280 is by emotionally elevating the conversation.

00:02:22.960 And I think that causes more emotional damage.

00:02:26.160 If you read the article, it says exactly what happened in the context.

00:02:29.440 He was about to push over a table.

00:02:31.520 I did the bop to reorient him because he knew he wasn't supposed to be doing that.

00:02:35.200 But then I immediately tell him I love him.

00:02:37.120 Now, this isn't something I can do if I'm punishing him through the emotional means.

00:02:40.800 Exactly.

00:02:41.200 If I had elevated the conversation emotionally, now I need to say,

00:02:44.480 daddy's mad at you, instead of saying, bop, you crossed a line, but daddy loves you.

00:02:50.640 And this is the problem, right?

00:02:52.080 So the urban monoculture would say to us, what you're doing is culturally non-normative.

00:02:56.960 Stop it.

00:02:57.920 And I'm like, I have seen the results of your normative parenting style.

00:03:02.880 These kids are miserable, anxiety, depression.

00:03:07.040 Illiterate.

00:03:07.840 You know, great messes.

00:03:09.600 Look at the ban, the rate of corporal punishment in the United States.

00:03:13.760 It pretty much directly correlates with the rise in depression among youths and the rise of

00:03:19.600 anxiety among youths.

00:03:20.640 God.

00:03:21.680 Hello.

00:03:22.320 I'm Dr. Richard Shea, here to tell you about my exciting new drug-free treatment for children

00:03:27.120 with attention deficit disorder.

00:03:29.440 Watch closely as I apply treatment to the first child.

00:03:32.320 Sit down and study.

00:03:34.960 If you would like more information on my bold new treatments, please send away for this free

00:03:38.640 brochure.

00:03:39.360 Thank you.

00:03:39.840 We no longer spank our children's butts because now we can spank their brains.

00:03:43.840 Would you like to know more?

00:03:45.200 So how do we feel being the new public face of child abuse?

00:03:48.320 Yes, we have gone viral yet again for punishing our child in front of a reporter in a way that

00:03:57.440 she interpreted as a form of corporal punishment and would technically be a form of corporal punishment.

00:04:03.600 Now, this gets really interesting because the internet went completely apoplectic when they

00:04:08.880 heard that this happened.

00:04:09.680 They could not believe that in the modern age, anyone would touch their child.

00:04:15.680 They're like, anyone who practices any form of corporal punishment is basically an animal

00:04:22.400 and inhuman.

00:04:24.160 And I'm like, that is a little concerning of a thing to say because according to a 2011 study

00:04:31.120 by Gorshoff, 89% of black parents practice corporal punishment and 80% of Hispanic parents practice

00:04:39.360 corporal punishment.

00:04:40.960 And then they're like, oh, obviously I need to add some caveats to what I said there.

00:04:45.280 No, actually what happened, this is one of my favorite instances of media baiting

00:04:48.720 or being attacked by all these progressives online.

00:04:51.280 And one of them immediately shoots back.

00:04:52.880 This just proves my point.

00:04:54.480 Blacks have more violent communities than whites.

00:04:57.040 There's a lot of backpedaling in that.

00:04:58.960 It's like one of the sharks got wounded during a freeding fencing and then all the other sharks

00:05:03.840 turned on it because now there's shark blood in the water.

00:05:06.880 Then it was, whoa, yeah, but it is true.

00:05:11.200 And it's something that is downstream of why we actually do this because a lot of people are

00:05:16.640 going to be like, haven't you seen the research on corporal punishment?

00:05:21.440 Why did you engage in corporal punishment knowing that so much of the research shows it's so negative?

00:05:29.920 And the answer here is a few things.

00:05:34.720 First, I do not believe the research is relevant to the type of corporal punishment that we are

00:05:41.200 enacting with our kids.

00:05:42.800 If you look at the research, it is predominantly looking at delayed ritualized punishment where

00:05:51.920 the purpose is inducing pain in the child as a punishment for something negative that the

00:05:59.600 child had done.

00:06:00.480 Yeah, I think when most, at least when I think of corporal punishment, I think,

00:06:04.240 wait until your father comes home and you get spanked or something.

00:06:09.200 Yeah, but we know from animals, so anyone who's just any familiar with dog training,

00:06:13.200 for example, or any form of mammal training, delayed negative reinforcement doesn't work.

00:06:18.880 Like it just causes behavioral problems.

00:06:21.440 This is something we see in any mammal that it's used in.

00:06:25.280 So I shouldn't expect anything different in humans.

00:06:28.720 Yeah, it would be inane.

00:06:30.800 Inane.

00:06:31.360 But then it has led to this problem in the field where there's these two starting assumptions.

00:06:38.640 One is this has been studied for a long time and everyone agrees on it.

00:06:42.800 Now, this is a problem.

00:06:43.680 Whenever you get a field and somebody says everyone agrees on it, no edge cases,

00:06:47.520 because at that point you have created a dogma within a scientific field.

00:06:51.120 Yeah.

00:06:51.520 And worse, if you look at what's being put out there about who and UNICEF and stuff like that,

00:06:57.600 they're like, this is a human rights violation.

00:07:00.000 They view spanking as a human rights violation.

00:07:02.560 Well.

00:07:02.880 And I will put up maps of countries on the screen where any form of spanking or anything like that

00:07:08.960 for kids is considered illegal in these countries.

00:07:12.960 They've been able to convince a number of countries to make this illegal.

00:07:15.760 And I think there's also, this is one of those things like with pregnancy and alcohol that,

00:07:22.160 especially depending on your genetic makeup or whatever, in Europe, this is more normalized too.

00:07:29.120 It's okay to have a small amount of alcohol while pregnant, but it seems very irresponsible

00:07:37.200 from a research perspective to tell anyone that because this is one of those issues of extreme

00:07:42.880 moderation that yes, only a very small amount is okay.

00:07:46.560 And frankly, it's safer for people who may not be able to control themselves to just say,

00:07:51.280 never do it.

00:07:52.080 And so people say, just never do it.

00:07:54.640 You're the worst person ever.

00:07:55.520 If you ever have any drink.

00:07:56.720 Although now people are starting to loosen on that, even in the United States.

00:08:00.400 And I think it's very similar with things like corporal punishment, because while if any study

00:08:05.680 comes out saying that some level of physical intervention that's not pleasant in immediate

00:08:11.520 response to bad behavior is okay, then you are going to get people who, instead of lightly,

00:08:18.480 lightly tapping or slapping or whatever purpose and the mechanism by which the form of correction

00:08:25.280 that we have works with our kids, because what is really negative and what we are against

00:08:30.080 is any form of punishment where the pain is the point of the punishment and that the pain is seen

00:08:37.520 as proportional.

00:08:38.800 If you are more mad at the parent or the child, extra broke a rule that deserves even more pain,

00:08:44.240 which is really different from what we're doing.

00:08:46.800 No, it is, frankly, we see the boys playing every single morning and the amount of pain they inflict

00:08:54.640 on each other while laughing and smiling the entire time.

00:08:57.840 It pales in comparison to essentially the taps or light slaps that we call a bop.

00:09:05.440 Actually, on viewing this, I decided to ask our kid if he felt that it hurt him.

00:09:10.320 And here is his response.

00:09:12.080 Did he ever hurt you?

00:09:13.120 No.

00:09:13.680 What, you sure?

00:09:16.960 Does it hurt when I bop you?

00:09:18.240 No.

00:09:22.000 Octavian, what are you doing? Are you strangling me?

00:09:24.640 Yeah.

00:09:27.680 Torsten, do you think daddy loves you?

00:09:29.280 Yeah.

00:09:29.760 Yeah.

00:09:31.600 I do.

00:09:34.960 It makes sense when you contextualize what he feels during a bop with what he feels during

00:09:41.680 regular play with his brother. And I think a lot of people complaining about this are people who

00:09:45.680 have never raised a child or at least never raised a group of boys.

00:09:49.280 So what happens during a bop?

00:09:50.720 And so I know I need to be clear, like the purpose of it, it is a light slap on the child's

00:09:55.520 nose or face that is meant to shock and redirect and refocus attention to something more productive.

00:10:04.000 So to anyone who's actually been around toddlers, and I know a lot of people haven't, they have this

00:10:11.040 phenomenon where they'll get locked in a mental loop that they can't easily escape.

00:10:17.200 It could be like they're in this mindset where they're just really wanting to push boundaries

00:10:21.520 and you say no, and that doesn't really register with them in the same way it normally would.

00:10:26.400 Or they're in a mindset where they really want something. And this creates this cognitive loop

00:10:32.560 that can be very difficult for them to escape. And they need to be snapped out of it to refocus

00:10:37.760 and reorient themselves, which is humorous even in the moment when a kid's in one of these cognitive

00:10:42.960 loops. You are often leading to less pain within the next 20-minute period for that child by snapping

00:10:50.320 them out of this cognitive loop.

00:10:51.760 So to be clear, we only get physical when we feel like they're safety or someone else's safety.

00:10:57.040 Yeah, that's really the only time we do this is when one of these cognitive loops is putting

00:11:00.560 them in or others in physical danger. But we'll get to the-

00:11:05.280 I was just going to say back to my point to close it up, tie a bow on it. It feels irresponsible,

00:11:11.200 and it would seem irresponsible to a peer-reviewed journal, to a researcher, to say this is okay

00:11:17.040 when you know that someone's going to take that information and they're going to backhand their

00:11:20.880 kid at full strength, or they're going to start beating their kid or punching them in the face

00:11:24.240 because they're like, no, research supports it. So I understand why there isn't research that says

00:11:30.000 that this is okay, because I too would worry about that. And we take abuse really seriously.

00:11:35.280 So the fact that Malcolm did this in front of a journalist and a bunch of people now think,

00:11:40.400 they think, because they're not reading the article, they're not looking at the context,

00:11:43.760 that you have backhanded your kid with the pictures wind up and they flew against the wall

00:11:48.320 and cracked the wall and just, she's looking in horror.

00:11:51.360 Hold on, we should clarify, why the face? Because this is an interesting point.

00:11:55.200 It's like somebody who's like, why don't you? And other people in the comments were sharing this

00:11:59.600 style of punishment is actually very common. Like it is the ancestrally convergent evolutionary,

00:12:06.800 if you're talking about cultural groups that have been successful, a lot of them do this.

00:12:10.480 So when they talk about like the way their grandparents would punish them, it was a slap

00:12:14.400 on the wrist, basically meant to like shock and reorient them. And they would often say,

00:12:19.840 I actually appreciated this to other forms of escalation. But when a child is in one of these

00:12:25.680 loops and you need to denote that something is actually, because when you're talking between,

00:12:30.480 we don't really do this for four year olds and up with our kids, but when you can talk to them,

00:12:35.120 two to four range, there isn't a way to explain the seriousness of a situation or denote this.

00:12:41.840 Because with my four year old, I could say, this could kill you. And he can begin to cognitively

00:12:45.680 understand that. Two to four, you don't really get that. And so when you need to denote, no,

00:12:50.320 this is an extra level of don't do this when compared to other things I have told you not to do.

00:12:57.760 The only way to denote that other than physicality is by emotionally elevating the conversation.

00:13:05.520 And I think that causes more emotional damage because then it's daddy is mad at you. You are

00:13:13.040 being rejected. No, 100%. When our kids, even by mistake, when our kids think that you are

00:13:20.480 like actually mad at them or rejecting them in some way, the hysterionics are like through the roof.

00:13:27.200 This is a level of punishment that is far above a bop, this emotional punishment, which, and people

00:13:32.720 can see, they're like, what do you mean? If you read the article, it says exactly what happened in

00:13:37.120 the context. He was about to push over a table full of food and drinks and utensils and all that.

00:13:43.200 And he was trying to push it over. He was having fun. It almost fell. It came inches from falling

00:13:47.120 over. Not inches, but maybe less than like centimeters, millimeters. And I then immediately

00:13:52.960 addressed it. I did the bop to reorient him because he knew he wasn't supposed to be doing that.

00:13:57.200 But then I immediately tell him I love him. Now, this isn't something I can do if I'm punishing him

00:14:01.680 through the emotional means. Exactly.

00:14:03.200 If I had elevated the conversation emotionally, now I need to say, daddy's mad at you, daddy's

00:14:08.160 something else. Instead of saying, bop, you crossed a line, but daddy loves you. And then I explain,

00:14:14.640 in restaurants, we need to be nice. And so I am giving him the context. Don't push boundaries in

00:14:20.400 this way within this environment. And I don't think that there is a kinder way that I could have elevated

00:14:28.240 that. And I think that this is a really interesting thing that people miss. There was actually,

00:14:32.000 because in Japan, it's been made illegal to do this kind of corporal punishment now.

00:14:36.080 And there was a great recounting on Reddit of this that I wanted to read.

00:14:39.680 Really?

00:14:40.080 Which was, I was an exchange student in Japan years ago, and a bunch of Americans and Japanese

00:14:44.480 students were sitting around talking about our childhoods. All the Americans made jokes about

00:14:48.960 the various implements our parents smacked or swiped or spanked us whiz.

00:14:53.280 See, that sounds though delayed punishment, I'm just saying.

00:14:56.480 It is delayed punishment, but hold on. And they were cracking up about it while our Japanese

00:15:00.720 friends were horrified. Japanese, our parents would never lay a finger on us like that,

00:15:05.200 indignantly. Americans, what did your parents do?

00:15:08.560 Japanese, mostly they told us they didn't love us, or that we didn't love them,

00:15:13.520 or that we'd ruined their lives and brought shame on our families. Americans, I'd rather be slapped.

00:15:19.920 And I think this is true. This is what you have to resort to when you remove this from the table.

00:15:30.320 Because in that two to four range, you can't really use the consequences of an action

00:15:35.520 to elevate it. You could really only elevate things emotionally, elevate the emotional states.

00:15:40.560 And then you need to ask yourself, realistically, do you think that's in the best interest of the child?

00:15:45.600 So if I go back to that 2011 study, something that you need to point out is even when we talk about

00:15:51.280 the other ethnic groups, even if we're talking about whites and Asians, which I ignored because

00:15:54.960 people don't care about those numbers, but 79% of white parents practice some form of corporal

00:15:59.200 punishment and 73% of Asian parents. The safe majority of Americans practice some form of this.

00:16:06.720 And you can be like, if everybody knows that this, because everyone is told when they're young,

00:16:10.960 don't do this. Why even I, like I went into parenthood saying, I'm definitely never going to do that.

00:16:16.240 Never.

00:16:16.640 And some parents can get away with not doing it because they have one girl or two kids or something

00:16:21.680 like that. But most families, when they get to four and above kids are like, I was wrong in thinking

00:16:27.280 that it was realistic to raise kids without this. And I think that the reason is, and the thing you

00:16:31.920 immediate really quickly, if you engage in it is all of these negative effects that researchers said it has

00:16:38.240 don't, I'm not noticing them. They're like, oh, it makes the kids hate you. Do you notice the kids?

00:16:43.520 They don't register it as like a, they register it as boundary setting. As you've pointed out,

00:16:49.440 it's sort of Roomba, right?

00:16:51.040 Yeah. My whole thing with kids and this is something that we've realized with play behavior. And I think

00:16:56.080 a lot of people have this theory around play behavior that it is, it exists to help kids learn

00:17:01.120 how to set boundaries with themselves, with others. It shows you where the boundaries are. So when you get

00:17:05.920 too rough, someone starts crying. Okay. You've learned that you get in a fight. Someone gets

00:17:09.600 hurt. You understand where the boundaries are. So you know how to push your own boundaries

00:17:12.880 and you know how to push other people's boundaries and you know when to go too far.

00:17:16.160 And this first came up as a concept that I heard about discussed when people were talking about why

00:17:22.320 do younger generations now constantly appeal to authority whenever something goes wrong because they

00:17:27.920 were never let to play by themselves with other kids and work it out among themselves when they could,

00:17:33.920 could not share a toy or whatever when they got in a fight. And so similarly, the way that we look at

00:17:38.960 kids, especially when they're young growing up is that they're a lot like a Roomba. Like they're just

00:17:42.320 flying blind, bumping into a wall, you hit the wall and then you course correct and go in the right

00:17:47.120 direction. And sometimes because the wall turns out to be a cliff or a stairway, we as parents try to

00:17:54.960 create a fake wall and that is where bobs show up. And if you don't do that as a parent,

00:17:59.920 then in the future, let's say your little Roomba is in a new house and you're no longer there to

00:18:05.200 catch it when it's about to roll off the staircase, they're going to get really hurt. They're going to

00:18:10.640 get really screwed over. I think something that's really important with this analogy,

00:18:14.640 like when we're talking about how our kids relate to their environments is I don't think that a parent

00:18:20.160 punishing their kid should ever be like an act of anger or an act of if you're ever doing that.

00:18:26.080 And it's very clear from the article that I like wasn't angry. I was just setting a boundary.

00:18:29.920 I do not get, and this is why I really don't want to go the emotional route was creating these

00:18:35.040 boundaries is because the emotional route indicates to my kid that there is some disapproval

00:18:42.560 of them pushing boundaries. Yeah. I liked that he was pushing boundaries. I like, you're like,

00:18:51.120 you punish your kids when you do something that you like. I can tell him, look, I love that you're

00:18:57.440 pushing boundaries. I love that you're vivacious, but here is where you have hit the Roomba has hit

00:19:02.800 the wall. Yeah. It's like a safe word. It's like a safe word. And yes. And kids, you can tell very

00:19:10.080 easily from my interaction with my kids, they understand this. The punishment is not an act of

00:19:16.640 rejection. It is an act of you've hit the wall here. You need to course correct. This isn't

00:19:22.720 appropriate. Yeah. We were all happy. This was all okay. And now I actually mean it when I say no.

00:19:27.040 Yeah. And this is another thing to understand about the piece, a really great thing to point

00:19:31.200 out in the piece is this same child. When we say we reserve this for only things that could hurt

00:19:35.840 themselves and others. At another point in the piece was running around with poo in his hands.

00:19:39.840 He did not get bopped for that. In another part of the piece, he was running around the restaurant

00:19:44.480 and he only got threat for a bop when he ran towards the door because on the other side of

00:19:49.200 the door, there was a street. With the table, he only got the bop because knocking over tables or

00:19:53.920 learning that behavior in a house where you have infants can lead to somebody getting seriously

00:19:58.240 injured or dying. Exactly. And so somebody can say, and I think that one of the reporters that I was

00:20:04.000 talking to, I was talking to a reporter today about this. She was really surprised. She was like,

00:20:06.800 so you weren't like angry at him for doing this wrong thing for almost knocking over the table. And I was

00:20:12.160 like, no, it's probably the first time he realized that he could knock over a table and he's like

00:20:16.640 exploring his environment. Huh? What happens when I knock over tables? My dad said no, but sometimes

00:20:22.640 he says no and I do it anyways. And there isn't some extreme repercussion to that. So let's try it.

00:20:28.320 Somebody can be like, never say no with your kid unless you mean it. That's absurd.

00:20:32.240 But there is a literal like movement among some parents to not use the word no, which I think also

00:20:38.080 shows how far in the extreme and the other direction we've gone.

00:20:41.440 And I think that, and I'll put the article about this on the screen that you're talking about,

00:20:44.720 because we have seen this. We've entered an environment where what happened was,

00:20:49.600 and I think accurately is research pointed out that delayed ritualized corporal punishment

00:20:54.960 had negative effects. Research in the space began to categorize this as a human rights abuse. So you

00:21:00.640 really couldn't be on the other side of the issue anymore. And it caused sort of a virtue spirals in the

00:21:05.840 space where now you have parents saying you should never say no to your kids. Because when you take

00:21:13.200 this angle of punishing my kids is bad, like any form of punishing my kids is that puts them in a

00:21:20.000 negative emotional state or that shocks them in the way that we do when we're punishing our kids.

00:21:25.200 And I don't know if I got to this, but the reason we do the face is because it requires much less pain

00:21:30.880 to get the same reaction than doing something like slapping the wrist. If you are slapping the

00:21:36.400 wrist and I want the same level of attention refocusing as the face or the nose, I actually

00:21:41.600 need to hurt them to get their attention. And I don't want the pain to be the point of this action.

00:21:47.120 It is the shock that is the point of this action, which helps reorient them, which the face does.

00:21:52.720 And if you look at animal training models, like dogs or something, you bought the dog on the nose.

00:21:56.800 That is the consistent way of doing it. And animals, when we first came to this model,

00:22:00.720 one of the things we always note is we were on a safari and anyone who's ever been on a safari,

00:22:04.720 you're sitting in a truck watching animals all day, like without music or anything like that,

00:22:08.400 just getting to think and talk. And as we were watching lions play with their cubs for a five hour

00:22:14.640 period. And so we got to really study the play behavior. And we noticed this pattern where the baby

00:22:21.200 cub would paw at the lion or do something. And the lion would growl or be a little angry.

00:22:28.480 We're doing that. We're saying, no, don't do that. But the baby cub would keep doing it.

00:22:32.480 And then it would get to the point where the lion would just swat the baby's cub face.

00:22:36.400 And the baby cub would look a little annoyed at a bit and then walk off. It understood this action

00:22:41.920 as different from other types of punishment. I should note here that some people have been like,

00:22:46.240 well, the lion has its claws retracted and you clearly injured your kid because the reporter

00:22:52.560 said she could hear it on the recording. And it's like, look, the reporter has to sell the piece.

00:22:57.200 Okay. She also mentioned that the kid was back to laughing and watching his iPad within 30 seconds.

00:23:03.040 And when I asked the kid the next day, does daddy ever hurt him or do Bob's hurt? He doesn't appear to

00:23:09.360 think they do. And even if you read the piece, honestly, it's pretty obvious the child was not

00:23:15.520 injured. The reaction we've seen in our kids, like when reporters are over, one of the things they

00:23:20.000 often comment on is how unusually well-behaved our kids are. And other people have commented on this as

00:23:24.880 well. I genuinely think because I was not at well. Okay. Not well-behaved, polite and kind. They say,

00:23:32.160 please, thank you. It's nice to meet you. They're regarious, but they're not. And sometimes I wish they

00:23:38.320 would be, but I also don't want them to be from a raising humans, but from a mother,

00:23:42.720 like not having to deal with things perspective. They're not the kids who like line up behind their

00:23:46.640 parents in airports and are quiet and compliant. And no, our kids are very rambunctious, but they're

00:23:52.640 very polite and kind. Like whatever it is, it seems to be working within the boundaries we're setting

00:23:59.520 for them. And that is being a polite and kind and thoughtful person. And then the danger with a

00:24:04.560 system like this is you teach them that violence resolves conflict. And so what's really heartening

00:24:10.960 to me is I see my kids when they quote unquote bop each other, right? Because they're developing this

00:24:16.000 behavior pattern and they're like, okay, this is how I tell someone that they've crossed a boundary

00:24:20.400 with me. And what they do is they just tap the other person on the head like this. And so it's clear

00:24:27.600 that in their mind, what is happening to them is not designed to be painful. It's about touching the

00:24:34.000 other person on the head. And so clearly this is in their world perspective, how they're observing

00:24:39.120 this. But now I need to talk for a few minutes about why I find the research so distrustworthy

00:24:45.520 in this space. One, you're proceeding into the research from a prior that this is a human rights

00:24:50.640 abuse. Like when they did that research on whether torture was effective, did anyone given that

00:24:54.960 torture is categorized as a human rights abuse by the dominant cultural group in our society,

00:24:59.520 did anyone really believe they were going to come back with an answer that's like,

00:25:02.720 yeah, torture, super effective. And with huge organizations just saying that it's been done,

00:25:08.000 that the data is sealed, nobody talk about this issue anymore, without really exploring where

00:25:14.160 the edge cases are. There just isn't that much research into exploring the edge cases here.

00:25:18.000 And again, it's so understandable because

00:25:21.920 abuse is a very serious issue. It is terrible.

00:25:25.440 It is. It is. But then we have to come to this question where this just gets absolutely insane to me.

00:25:30.400 If you look at what the research is saying, if this has a massive IQ effect, this has a massive effect

00:25:35.760 on aggression, these people become antisocial and aren't able to-

00:25:38.720 They hate their parents, et cetera.

00:25:39.760 They hate their parents. And then it's if these things were true at the levels that they're saying

00:25:46.880 these things are true, every single long-lived culture on earth would not have convergently

00:25:54.000 evolved this method of interacting with children during this developmental stage. There is not a

00:26:00.960 single, like when I look anthropologically, but historic Chinese or Japanese or European or

00:26:07.440 the large successful African groups, none of them have a ban on corporal punishment around kids.

00:26:12.880 All of them engage in some form of corporal punishment around kids.

00:26:15.440 When I mentioned this, some people were like, well, you know,

00:26:17.520 we used to do bloodletting, but we don't do bloodletting anymore. And I'm like, okay,

00:26:22.400 if every single human culture on earth had done bloodletting and we were the one culture

00:26:29.360 that didn't do bloodletting and we had only stopped it like 10 years ago, yeah,

00:26:33.360 I would probably look into that and be like, there is probably a reason that everyone was doing that.

00:26:38.160 The level of arrogance that goes into this position is almost astonishing.

00:26:43.360 To believe that you are the one culture in human history, this nexus of human morality that has

00:26:50.640 figured out something that everyone else got wrong. To have no humility when you realize how

00:26:56.000 rare this position is cross-culturally. It just astonishes me. But I guess a lot of people, they

00:27:01.520 just, this is a culture I grew up in. Therefore I am at a moral nexus in history and everything we

00:27:06.160 believe now is correct. And I will not be seen as having been abusive to my kids for not setting

00:27:11.760 physical boundaries with them. This is why we have this huge problem in the United States,

00:27:15.920 where when families are coming into this country, it's like all of the immigrant families do this.

00:27:20.240 Immigrants are coming from a lot of different places. All the immigrants do this because

00:27:23.520 everywhere else in the world used to do this before they started listening to these organizations that

00:27:28.640 are like, oh, this is always negative, never do anything like this. And what that means is this is

00:27:35.680 a very modern experiment. And throughout this video, I'm going to be playing clips because it used to

00:27:41.520 be, even 10 years ago, our society broadly thought of the parents who didn't do any form of corporal

00:27:46.880 punishment with their kids, like corporal punishment, as the selfish and abusive ones. The ones who did

00:27:52.720 not care about the long-term outcomes of their kids. Whether you're talking about the Simpsons.

00:27:56.880 I'm afraid young Ned is unusually aggressive, but I can't seem to find a cause for it.

00:28:02.400 We can't do it, man. That's discipline. I'm beginning to see the problem.

00:28:07.360 We don't believe in rules like we gave them up when we started living like freaky beatniks.

00:28:14.000 Yeah, you've got to help us, doc. We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.

00:28:19.520 Or South Park.

00:28:22.160 Hello, I'm Dr. Richard Shea, here to tell you about my exciting new drug-free treatment

00:28:27.120 for children with attention deficit disorder.

00:28:29.200 This treatment is fast and effective and doesn't use harmful drugs.

00:28:34.640 Watch closely as I apply treatment to the first child.

00:28:36.960 I want a horse. I want a big brown horse with a fluffy black tail with a diamond charm.

00:28:40.640 Sit out and study!

00:28:45.600 Sit out and study!

00:28:49.760 Hey, stop crying until your schoolwork!

00:28:51.920 If you would like more information on my bold new treatments, please send away for this free brochure

00:28:58.800 entitled, You can either calm down or I can pop you in the mouth again. Thank you.

00:29:03.040 Or Futurama.

00:29:04.480 Most, perhaps all, the blame rests with the parents.

00:29:08.240 And so I ask you this one question.

00:29:11.920 Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children and hitting them?

00:29:18.960 Uh, or boondocks.

00:29:21.520 So, girls, you, for these people, you must have lost your goddamn mind!

00:29:28.400 I guess I just hate to see a child go unbeaten.

00:29:30.880 I'm not a spanker, okay? But if you can bring discipline back into our school,

00:29:35.360 then I am behind you 100%. I wish I had the guts you do, sister.

00:29:40.080 And that's why we signed that petition in support of paddling pigs.

00:29:43.600 And this is a very modern, and even when that was happening, everyone was like,

00:29:47.680 hey, if we keep not enforcing boundaries on our kids, this is what basically all those shows

00:29:52.720 predicted. We're gonna have a society where kids, um, cannot deal with challenges anymore,

00:29:58.800 that they have an extreme amount of emotional fragility. And this is what we've seen as a

00:30:02.720 consequence of this. It very much reminds me of, it's like an obvious thing if you think about it.

00:30:07.360 Um, why would every culture on earth convergently evolve this? And people can be like, that doesn't

00:30:11.680 mean anything. Just because you did something in the past doesn't mean that it's still good to do

00:30:16.320 now that we have additional research. And it's like, ah, this isn't something like sunblock or

00:30:21.600 something like that, where you get this delayed effect that would only happen to adults above

00:30:25.520 a certain age. What is being predicted in the research is that these people are going to have

00:30:30.080 significantly lower IQs and significantly higher amounts of antisocial behavior and significantly

00:30:36.080 not like their parents. So if you had just one subgroup within a population that wasn't practicing

00:30:41.520 this, presumably you're going to get higher cultural transfer within that subgroup because

00:30:45.680 they're going to have higher cultural fidelity because they're going to have a higher opinion

00:30:48.720 of their parents. Um, and you are going to have a better performing cultural subgroup.

00:30:54.080 So you would have just naturally in certain places in the world had subgroups within a population

00:31:00.720 or populations with different child rearing practices living next to a population out

00:31:05.280 competing them if these effects were true, which just means it's completely implausible

00:31:10.560 that at least at whatever way this was normatively practiced in history, which I don't think was the

00:31:16.080 extremely formalized spanking system adopted during the Victorian period that this actually had

00:31:20.880 deleterious effects. And if you look at the ban, the rate of corporal punishment in the United States,

00:31:27.200 it pretty much directly correlates with the rise in depression among youths and the rise of anxiety

00:31:33.600 among youths. Though it also correlates possibly interesting with the rise of kids feeling like

00:31:40.400 they're best friends with their parents. Yeah. When you could say, why is this leading to this rise

00:31:46.000 in depression and anxiety among kids? What would be the correlation here? And it's when you teach

00:31:52.160 kids boundaries, you are teaching them specific things they have to learn self-restriction around

00:31:57.840 and a varying degree of self-restriction around different things. When a kid isn't regularly

00:32:02.320 encountering social boundaries, they do not as strengthen the inhibitory pathways in their prefrontal

00:32:08.400 cortex, which makes it very hard to shut down thoughts and wants. Like I have a want,

00:32:13.760 but I'm not going to do that thing. That's actually like a muscle in your brain. It's a pathway in

00:32:18.640 your brain that needs to be regularly exercised to properly work. If you are not regularly exercising

00:32:23.760 that pathway, you can't shut down intrusive thoughts, right? Leads to obviously lower rates

00:32:29.840 of mental health. The funny thing, the ironic thing, and this is part of that larger microcosm of how

00:32:36.160 the urban monocultures key value proposition of removing in the moment pain is counterproductive,

00:32:42.080 that parents who don't, who in the end, like parents, most parents say, I just want my child

00:32:49.120 to be happy. I just want my child to be happy. And so they do all these things to remove in the

00:32:52.640 moment pain for their children. And then in the end, they get children who are a lot less happy.

00:32:57.280 And if we had to choose between our children liking us versus our children being thriving,

00:33:02.000 happy, productive people, in a hot second, we choose for them to hate us if that's what it took.

00:33:07.200 Yeah. I think that this phenomenon is very analogous to the Hays movement, which we're always ragging

00:33:12.480 on, the healthy at every size movement, which is promoting the idea that is not unhealthy to be

00:33:18.160 obese. And obviously it's unhealthy to be obese, but telling somebody that in the moment causes

00:33:23.200 emotional pain. And therefore, by the urban monoculture standards, you're breaking a major

00:33:28.560 tenant of theirs. And they have adopted this position of, well, we'll say this. And then

00:33:34.560 you're like, you should restrict food to some extent, especially if you have a problem there.

00:33:38.720 In the same way that I don't think every child needs this, but I think some children do. Some

00:33:42.160 children dispositionally need this. And they're like starving yourself. Like anorexia is, has all

00:33:47.680 these negative effects. Look at this. And I'm like, I'm not talking about anorexia. I'm talking about

00:33:51.760 mild boundaries, mild self-restriction. And this is what it's become with spanking.

00:33:57.040 You point out that there's this method of course correction with boundaries that are

00:34:02.080 enforced physically rather than emotionally, that likely has healthier outcomes. And they're like,

00:34:08.960 maybe I'm just the kind of person who needs to have it all or nothing.

00:34:12.800 Nah, all or nothing is easy, but learning to drink a little bit,

00:34:16.240 responsibly, that's a discipline. Discipline come from within.

00:34:21.120 What's really funny to me is just for diets, now we have Ozembic. Just take a medication.

00:34:25.040 Don't be disciplined. Just take a medication. And similarly, there's the whole South Park joke

00:34:29.520 about Ritalin.

00:34:30.080 Yeah, Ritalin. Don't discipline your kids. Just give them amphetamines.

00:34:33.920 That's definitely safer. And we normalized that as a society. Keep in mind, at the same time as a

00:34:39.600 society, we were normalizing to not spank our children, to not engage in any form of corporal

00:34:47.040 discipline. We began to instead said, well, we'll just give them amphetamines. And there was a great

00:34:52.800 old Daily Show joke when the Daily Show was still like fun and kind of bass at times. And

00:34:57.600 Jon Stewart still says some really bass stuff. He goes on other shows and he doesn't follow the

00:35:01.200 script. And he's like, oh yeah, I think this trans stuff with kids is going overboard. And they're

00:35:04.320 like, whoa, I can't remember. He said something like that. But so he said, we no longer spank our

00:35:10.800 children's butts because now we can spank their brains.

00:35:13.280 No, that's great. And I think that's so true. That's where we have had, there's other ways to

00:35:20.000 solve this. And it's clearly, you don't think that if you have normalized giving kids amphetamines as

00:35:25.520 a society. But that's our approach now. Our approach to discipline and that that's dietary,

00:35:31.280 that's behavioral is now just medicate it. Well, and this is the problem, right? So the urban

00:35:35.920 monoculture would say to us, what you're doing is culturally non-normative. Stop it. And I'm like,

00:35:41.520 I have seen the results of your normative parenting style. These kids are miserable,

00:35:48.560 anxiety, depression, messes that are hirkle-dirkling under their covers because they're

00:35:55.440 afraid to engage with the world. When the average product of a culture, the dominant culture in a

00:36:02.080 society is bad, like it's not good for the kids. It is to me, a sign of parental neglect and that you

00:36:09.760 do not truly love your kids and that you are not willing to go against the social grain for what

00:36:14.400 you think is in their best interest. And I think that the cultures that don't do it won't exist

00:36:20.320 anyways. The society is kind of clearing itself out. And then a lot of people can say, why would the

00:36:25.040 urban monoculture evolve this very bizarre practice? Because as we pointed out, like almost

00:36:29.200 nobody actually does this once they have kids. Like some families stick to this when they're very low on

00:36:33.600 the number of kids they have. Lower or they just, some people have very compliant children.

00:36:38.400 True. But the, and we take a very unique child-rearing approach where we go with zones

00:36:44.880 of influence. Like if you, we had the Jordan Peterson will raise Sims where we talked about

00:36:49.440 this bopping practice before, if you watched that episode, but some parenting styles like his are about

00:36:54.480 imposing a dominant figure's domain over an entire household or environment. And the kids just must obey

00:37:00.800 that. We don't take that approach. We see everyone as an independent sort of sphere of

00:37:06.880 will and that bopping only happens when the kids put themselves in danger. It is not me enforcing my

00:37:13.840 will on them. It is a sign that they have just crossed a certain boundary and that is leading to

00:37:19.360 consequences from the individuals in their environment. And so that is really important to me. But why did the

00:37:24.640 urban monoculture evolve this? Because it can seem very odd, but it makes perfect sense. If the urban

00:37:29.360 monoculture doesn't have any selective pressures around raising its own kids because it doesn't

00:37:34.400 raise its own kids, it's a very low fertility group, it doesn't need to evolutionarily care

00:37:40.960 about the negative psychological effects of the parenting techniques that is championing. However,

00:37:46.560 if its primary source of recruits is people who are raised in often more healthy cultural groups,

00:37:54.560 it needs a tool in all cults do this to convince individuals that their parents abuse them. If you

00:38:01.600 go to a Scientology session, that's one of the first things they'll try to convince you of is that your

00:38:05.360 parents abused you. They're looking for this original, like how did the original thetans get in you?

00:38:09.920 And it needs to do that because they cannot distance you from your birth cultural group without

00:38:15.520 severing ties with your parents of their outside of the urban monoculture. And so it uses this

00:38:21.120 recontextualization of a normal part of child rearing that basically all cultures everywhere on

00:38:27.200 earth do, almost directly in line with how distant they are from the urban monoculture,

00:38:33.040 is this evil abusive practice. It's just a really great tool for it. So of course it hammers it home.

00:38:40.080 And it's in line with this core value proposition. Anything that is emotionally negative or emotionally

00:38:45.360 trying is a sin. When they saw that we had enacted a negative emotional state on our children,

00:38:52.160 they were like, you have committed a sin by our cultural framework. How dare you do that? But from

00:38:57.520 our cultural framework, this is just absurd because we're like, but it's obviously in their long-term

00:39:01.120 best interest. And this is where it gets to this thing. We're like, why is it that everybody,

00:39:06.800 even from our own culture, understood that the parents who weren't doing this historically were the

00:39:10.480 selfish ones. The classic story of how did Ned Flanders become like Ned Flanders are parents who

00:39:17.200 were beatniks and who were like, we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. We don't believe in

00:39:23.440 rules like we gave them up when we started living like freaky beatniks. Yeah, you've got to help us,

00:39:30.480 doc. We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. There is an experimental therapy that might help

00:39:36.160 Ned contain his anger. It was known as the University of Minnesota spankological protocol.

00:39:41.520 And it's true. You see these in these episodes and we've recognized that how do you create like

00:39:46.560 polite, disciplined people. Now in the episode, he was spanked too much and obviously eventually

00:39:51.040 in the episode, it leads to a mental breakdown from him. But it admits in the episode, yeah,

00:39:55.040 this does lead to polite, disciplined people. He is one of the most morally upstanding people

00:39:59.920 and one of the most pro-social people in the entire Simpsons universe. And I also think it's

00:40:07.040 really funny that we have this horrified progressive reporter, and I can only imagine like most black

00:40:12.160 families reading this and they're like, oh, this is just like white people problems. You've got that

00:40:16.080 classic scene from Boondogs where you need the wise black man to come in and show the white mom who has

00:40:22.080 the undisciplined child how you're supposed to. What bizarre white people things to think that you should

00:40:27.760 never ever practice corporal punishment of any sort when your kid is putting himself or others at risk.

00:40:34.800 I want candy! Damn it, I hate you! You're ruining my life! Please, Herbert, remember our agreement.

00:40:41.840 We have an agreement about how we behave in a store, Herbert. When it gets like this,

00:40:45.280 I just don't know how to make him stop!

00:40:47.280 Get my marshmallows!

00:40:48.880 Have you ever tried beating his ass?

00:40:50.560 Oh, don't kill me!

00:41:00.560 So there's that, but then the other thing I wanted to elevate here is what this creates.

00:41:06.480 Because when you as a parent become afraid of setting uh physical boundaries, like you cannot

00:41:12.400 escalate to this highest level of like actually you cannot do certain things in this environment,

00:41:17.920 then you stop bringing your kids with you. So people are like, why did your kids have iPads at

00:41:22.960 the restaurant? It's because you can't have a bunch of kids at a restaurant without iPads.

00:41:25.680 It just doesn't work at this age range. Anyone can tell you that. And then they're like, you shouldn't

00:41:29.680 take them to the restaurant. Like why take them to an environment where you might need to punish

00:41:32.800 them? Where you need to lean on technology that can sometimes have deleterious effects?

00:41:36.560 And that's the core problem. The solution when you follow all of these parenting guidelines

00:41:41.840 is just don't have your kids shadow you all day. But that obviously creates bigger effects in terms

00:41:48.320 of preventing the kids from being in an enriched environment and learning in the way that kids

00:41:52.720 traditionally learned. Yeah. And by the way, we should do a whole separate video on iPads and screen

00:42:00.000 time. I am constantly blown away by the things that our kids are learning because we let them have

00:42:08.080 some screen time. Last night, Octavian was talking to me about hydraulics. And I'm like,

00:42:14.880 what? You are four years old. How do you know about hydraulics?

00:42:18.400 I love watching factory videos.

00:42:19.760 Yeah. That's a new thing. It's all about factories.

00:42:21.840 Yeah. You need to change to the type of content they're consuming for something that is

00:42:26.640 relative for their age. And if you can get them into right, like good loops outside of what we call

00:42:31.600 a form of cheese pizza. Young person.

00:42:36.160 But we call it that not because it's of children, but because it's that for children.

00:42:41.440 Yeah. It is simple, repeated. Anyone who has a kid who's they've let on YouTube for a little bit

00:42:46.960 will know that they have found that kid watching videos of a car being dipped in paint and then

00:42:51.280 dipped in another paint. Like it's clearly hijacked some part of their brain that adults don't have.

00:42:57.040 Yeah. And it's a very dangerous for kids to just let them on these systems unrestricted.

00:43:01.680 Yeah. So the screens can be very dangerous and they can be mindless, but they can also be amazing

00:43:07.360 and empowering. So we're not totally against screens, but also like people need to get off

00:43:11.440 parents on restaurants. Do you want the kids screaming in the right? Like most parents who

00:43:15.280 give their kids screens at restaurants almost never have their kids on screens at home, but it's a,

00:43:20.960 you know what? Like you get to choose.

00:43:22.400 It's a necessary.

00:43:22.960 And this is one thing I love about the boondog scenes when the kid's being really disruptive and he

00:43:26.720 finally gets punished. And you can see everyone who was watching in horror before is now like

00:43:31.280 really pleased at the turn of the events. And I think that this is true. Like you have these

00:43:36.800 pearl clutchers on Twitter who are freaking out about this, but most people are like, yeah,

00:43:40.320 sometimes kids need to get bopped in there. I wish as Richard Anania said, he's like, yeah,

00:43:44.480 sometimes kids need to get bopped. This is a thing. Not every kid does, but some kids definitely do.

00:43:51.040 And we take no pleasure in this.

00:43:53.520 Hold on. I had gotten to the full end of what I was saying here. So you end with this environment

00:43:56.960 where you can't set this higher level restriction. The problem is that most environments where our

00:44:01.520 kids would play require them learning these extreme levels of restrictions. Our kids outside

00:44:06.800 encountering a bat that we ended up finding out had rabies, allowing our kids to play outside is

00:44:12.960 exposing them to insta-death risks within a rural environment. Letting our kids play in the woods

00:44:17.280 where there are snakes and there are potentially rabid bats and there are streams that they could fall in.

00:44:22.000 When you get five kids wandering around out there, there is a way I can protect them

00:44:26.160 and fit with all these progressive cultural norms. It's to prevent them from playing in those

00:44:30.720 environments. And that I think has much larger deleterious consequences. The people who fight

00:44:38.720 for these sort of restrictions on any form of corporal punishment, what they are imagining in their head

00:44:44.320 is the alternative to that is that they just sit down and have a logical conversation with a two-year-old

00:44:51.760 where that two-year-old understands don't touch bats because they might have this interesting thing

00:44:57.280 We do that when Torsten took like his poop out and all the time we sit down and we have a conversation

00:45:03.040 about it and there's a lot of repetition and there's a lot of why do you think this is bad and

00:45:06.880 what is it bad. But the poo isn't the same thing. I'm saying that often when we have to resort to

00:45:14.720 bopping, it's because we are not in an environment where that's possible. Was Malcolm in a position

00:45:19.440 where he could take Torsten to a quiet area where he wasn't overstimulated and have a calm conversation?

00:45:25.280 Other kids wouldn't be charging for the bat. Exactly. And I actually didn't need to bop any

00:45:30.640 of them in that instance. I just said, if you move closer to the bat, I'm going to bop you.

00:45:35.280 The restaurant. What? No ability to have a quiet reason conversation with Torsten in the restaurant.

00:45:41.600 Yeah, with multiple kids at the table in the restaurant, there was just no ability to have

00:45:45.680 that conversation. And so they're imagining the alternative is this quiet reason conversation.

00:45:52.400 When that isn't the actual alternative that they're choosing between the real alternative

00:45:57.120 to not bopping is depending on the kid. Some kids just don't need this at all. As we've said is

00:46:03.440 either you get emotionally elevated with the kids, which I think is infinitely worse. Like you

00:46:07.600 emotionally reject the kid or you show some level of emotional distress. And I never want my kids to

00:46:13.680 think that the correct reaction to somebody doing something bad around you is emotional distress.

00:46:18.960 Because then they get in these cycles of emotional distress. Like we're seeing with all these

00:46:22.080 progressives today. If you read the article, there was no level of heightened emotions. This

00:46:27.040 wasn't me getting mad or losing my cool or anything like that. I never want one of my kids to see me

00:46:32.080 act like that. That is incredibly important for me. Yeah, emotional regulation is so much more

00:46:37.680 important to us. And this is the thing where progressives are like, oh, you get these negative

00:46:42.960 outcomes from this style of parenting. The other alternative is to just not let them interact with

00:46:48.160 potentially dangerous environments or environments where you can't take them aside by themselves

00:46:53.280 with a large group of siblings. And that forces them into highly restricted,

00:46:58.320 unenriched environments, which is going to have massive deleterious effects. And this is a really

00:47:04.480 interesting thing. When you look at this child research, there is just not a lot of great research

00:47:10.560 around how do I create these dynamic, energetic leaders that are filled with vitality,

00:47:19.440 that meet the exact, that are opposite of what society wants today, that are polite, that are,

00:47:26.000 it looks around things like, what was the measure that they kept using? It was like self-satisfaction.

00:47:31.840 Self-esteem.

00:47:32.480 Self-esteem, which then in later studies, like this is the main thing that these studies sort for is

00:47:36.960 self-esteem, which we have found has no correlation with anything meaningful in adulthood in terms of

00:47:42.400 outcomes or anything like that. Just a lot of child psychology, it's basically junk. And if people

00:47:47.440 are like, no, a psychologist wouldn't lie about this stuff. It's been shown in the gender scientists

00:47:52.400 that over 50% of scientists are willing to not publish or occlude data if they think it could

00:47:58.160 reinforce the idea that men and women have different psychological profiles.

00:48:02.720 Now, do you not think that they're going to do the theme around this other field and people are

00:48:07.600 like, well, you couldn't get these big data sizes. You can manipulate data pools to say basically

00:48:13.280 whatever.

00:48:13.600 Well, especially with something like corporal punishment, it's so easy to pull data that in

00:48:20.160 the end is real abuse and in the end is really bad stuff. So I think this is uniquely difficult to

00:48:25.200 research because how do you control? First off, you can't even ethically do this as a researcher because

00:48:31.120 you can't ethically be like, you, hit your kid, but at this level, and also it's impossible at

00:48:35.840 this level of strength, because what if someone is just everything they touch is a little too rough?

00:48:40.480 I don't know. So this can't, I don't even know if it was, if ethics boards would permit research on

00:48:46.000 this if they- Well, and that's the other problem is that you have a lot of genetic effects. So they're

00:48:50.080 often not doing controlled studies when you're doing this area, i.e., oh, parents who are more likely

00:48:55.840 to practice some form of corporal punishment. Also, their kids are more likely to be violent,

00:49:00.720 of course, like the heritable trait, of course, especially if the adult is practicing it because

00:49:05.360 they lack self-control rather than because they have self-control. And that is a huge, and I just

00:49:10.560 can't go back to this point enough, a huge fear I have is that my kids will learn that the way you

00:49:15.520 react to somebody doing something you don't like is emotionally heightening the situation,

00:49:21.440 is an emotional plea. That is, from my family's perspective, so much worse, because you begin to

00:49:28.000 actually feel that as a kid. Like, you then enter this higher emotional state, and it causes these

00:49:33.920 really negative downstream reactions. And I suspect that when we took them out of daycare, this is why

00:49:38.000 all that behavior stopped, why all of the tantrums stopped, why everything stopped, which you'll see

00:49:42.480 in an episode that unfortunately I haven't released yet, but we had a bunch of graphs on this, and it was

00:49:46.080 really interesting for us when they were just in our environments. The other thing that I wanted to

00:49:50.880 note here is the cultural differences within America. Like, that a lot of cultural groups

00:49:59.040 practice this, just not the urban monoculture. I point out that American Asians practice this at

00:50:03.040 really high levels. American Hispanics practice this at really high levels. American Blacks practice

00:50:06.480 this at really high levels. But also different American white groups. So if anyone has read Avalon

00:50:12.160 Seed, and by the way... Albian Seed.

00:50:14.160 I'm sorry, Albian Seed. If you are a fan of the channel and you haven't read this book, it's probably the

00:50:19.440 book I would most recommend after our books. It's a great book about the four founding cultural

00:50:25.600 groups in the United States. And I think it can help a lot of Americans who might not realize that

00:50:30.560 they actually do have a cultural ancestry and where they got their ideas. Because you'll read the book

00:50:35.120 and you'll immediately be like, oh, my family was this group.

00:50:38.240 Yeah, I'm this team.

00:50:39.600 You're in Ravenclaw, or in Hufflepuff, or in Griffin?

00:50:44.160 Yeah, you can ask, where are you going to get a bizarre culture that would not allow the punishment of

00:50:50.720 children? Because it's weird. From most cultural perspectives, the idea that you wouldn't set boundaries

00:50:54.480 around children... And one of the things I love, and I hear some people argue, they're like, I wouldn't treat

00:50:58.080 an employee this way. And it's like, you wouldn't sit an employee and time out either. The way children's brains

00:51:04.320 process the world is different from the way adult brains process the world. And you, as an adult,

00:51:09.360 are biologically designed to interact with them differently than the way you interact with the

00:51:14.640 adults. And you have different impulses in the way that you're interacting with them,

00:51:18.400 often that were selected for by your cultural group.

00:51:20.800 This is one of those things that just baffles me. When I talk to people who are otherwise totally

00:51:25.680 logical, sane people who believe the research on this, and I'm like, wait, you understand that every

00:51:32.640 cultural group that we are aware of, almost every cultural group in human history practices this

00:51:36.720 form of corporal punishment. And you think that this is causing massive IQ effects, massive effects

00:51:43.600 on bonding with parents, massive effects on aggression, and that none of this would have been selected out

00:51:50.800 for in our species. That like, the way that everyone is interacting with kids, if it was causing these

00:51:56.880 massive negative effects, that it wouldn't be selected out in our species. Worse than that,

00:52:02.560 it's like, how do they think that in an ancestral context, people communicated with pre-verbal

00:52:08.800 children, or like children who were just coming into verbiage, but didn't understand concepts like

00:52:12.880 death? Like, obviously, this is a way that we evolve to interact with our children. It's,

00:52:18.560 it's one of these, like, just so obvious things. It's baffling when it's like puberty blockers or

00:52:25.600 something. When, like, for a while, this, the quote-unquote science was like, puberty blockers

00:52:29.920 have no long-lasting effects, and it's like, well, no, obviously they do. How could anybody think that?

00:52:35.840 How could anybody think that the way that you communicate with kids, when they're not fully

00:52:43.120 verbal and understanding concepts like death, is physically? Like, that that wouldn't be the

00:52:49.200 natural evolved way to interact with them. It is just bizarre and outlandish. Actually,

00:52:54.800 one of our watchers was talking in the discord, and she was like, you know, when I was young,

00:52:59.360 I was very severely abused, so I was against any form of corporal punishment. But then I started to

00:53:05.120 have a lot of kids, and I eventually reached a point where I was like, oh, obviously I need this.

00:53:10.000 And I got to it too late. She saw a huge improvement in behavior. And that's the other

00:53:15.040 thing was this, where, you know, the scientists can say whatever they want, but there's a reason why

00:53:22.800 the vast majority of Americans end up converging on this same behavioral practice,

00:53:28.320 because it's an evolved instinct in us and our children, and it works. It works so obviously

00:53:36.320 and loudly that when they're like, no, the data said it doesn't work, they immediately discredit

00:53:41.840 themselves. I mean, there are ways that they could argue against this. If they said something,

00:53:45.760 because, you know, if you read the research, it's like, it never works. And it's like, well,

00:53:51.040 now you've just immediately discredited yourself, because it obviously works. And everyone who does

00:53:55.120 it knows it obviously works. So if one of the things you're saying, if you're like,

00:54:00.160 oh, it has this long term consequence, like, okay, it may work for like five years,

00:54:04.000 but then it has this massive negative IQ effect. Okay, fine. I'd be like worried about it then.

00:54:08.800 But that's not what they say. They say it doesn't work at all. And it obviously works. And this is

00:54:13.920 why everyone ends up throwing out the science the moment they have a ton of kids. So anyway,

00:54:19.280 everyone knows that we have this theory, or a lot of people know that the urban monoculture

00:54:23.120 actually evolved out of a split was in the Quaker movement. And we have a lot of receipts for this.

00:54:28.160 But I think that this is a further example of this, of the cultural groups that I'm aware of

00:54:32.560 in the world, like in terms of historic cultural groups, pretty much the only one I can think of

00:54:36.560 that cheats children as sacred, like as higher order morally than adults, is Quakers. It would be

00:54:43.440 seen as really weird in any other culture to be that freaked out about this. But if you're thinking

00:54:48.560 like Quakers, of course, it makes sense. You might as well be slapping a Buddha statue.

00:54:52.880 Yeah, they are the sacred cows of, yeah, at least at that time, especially.

00:54:57.440 Weird practice within the Quaker cultural group of having children morally lecture adults. And we

00:55:02.560 point out that you actually see this within the urban monoculture, which is one reason why we think

00:55:05.520 the Greta Thornburg thing is bizarre. Having a child morally lecture adults from most cultural

00:55:11.520 frameworks is just an insane thing to do. If it's a child, obviously they have less moral knowledge

00:55:17.600 than adults. They have less self-control than adults. The adults should not be viewing them

00:55:23.200 as like their tether to like supernatural ideology or like a higher order of truth. But then secondly,

00:55:29.040 if you look at the cultural group that we come from, which is the Calvinist iteration of the

00:55:32.880 backcountry people. So we have elements of our culture from the Calvinist cultural group,

00:55:36.720 but also a lot of elements from the portion of the Calvinists that went to live in the back cultural

00:55:41.040 group, backcountry and part of that environment. We talk a lot more about this in the

00:55:44.480 The Pregnant Side of Crafting Religion if you're interested in this. But that's a little,

00:55:47.200 that's a group that grew up that evolved terms like little shits, which I grew up hearing all

00:55:51.600 the time. And it's a term of endearment towards children, but it gives the perspective of the

00:55:57.440 child status within the community. And the way that this cultural group would raise children is the

00:56:03.120 children would follow the parents everywhere they went. Within Quakers, the children were basically like

00:56:08.080 kept isolated, alone, given a fairly strict rule set, but not really punished that severely.

00:56:14.160 Within the backcountry thing, they just follow the parents around with whatever they're doing and

00:56:19.040 get bopped like this. You can read, like when you're reading about these backcountry people,

00:56:23.520 they bop their kids all the time. Like this is very clearly the traditional way that this culture

00:56:28.880 would enforce a value system. You weren't trying to hit the kid, hurt the kid, but you were trying to

00:56:34.320 shock and reorient the behavior. The Calvinist cultural group, which my family also does to some

00:56:39.600 extent, had different, they were extremely strict. And they would also try to enforce value systems

00:56:45.360 through emotionally shocking the kids. Yeah. Like having them stare into open graves and contemplate

00:56:51.120 like this will happen to you one day. Think on that young man when you are deciding like your moral

00:56:56.960 actions. Yeah. See, that's the emotional type that we're not so keen on. Yeah. No, it's not really the

00:57:01.920 emotional type. And I think that our family culture has a strong amount of recognize your mortality.

00:57:07.120 You're a hell of a lot more cheerful about it though. Yeah. I also, I need to show my son like

00:57:13.080 violent videos so that he understands the consequence. Like the oldest, when they moved

00:57:16.480 to the category of now they can understand that they could die. He now was like, oh,

00:57:20.480 I'll turn into a meatball or he'll go, oh, Torsten will turn into a meatball if he goes to the road.

00:57:24.560 No, he says, you're going to die, Toasty. You're going to die, Toasty.

00:57:27.840 That's what inspired, are you going to die?

00:57:30.480 Yeah. He had this great moment where we told him, you need to put on this life jacket or you're going to die.

00:57:36.720 And so he understood that and he put on the life jacket. And then we tried to get Torsten to do it.

00:57:40.480 And Torsten was like, no, I'm not going to put on the life jacket. And then Octavian turns to Torsten

00:57:43.600 and he goes, you're going to die, Torsten. You're going to die, Toasty. I love Octavian.

00:57:48.720 But that's also very, a back country way to talk and everything like that, which is to say that you're

00:57:53.520 not always fronting with heavy words and everything like that. Culturally even within our country,

00:57:59.040 there just isn't a respect for cultural diversity anymore at all. That this culture might have a

00:58:04.000 different way of relating to children and a way that I am continuing to adopt because I believe

00:58:08.800 it genuinely, like when I look at the breadth of evidence, people can wave these studies in my face

00:58:14.480 as much as they want. But I'm like, but I also see what would happen to researchers if studies that didn't

00:58:19.920 show this got published. And it's so easy to bias the stats when studying this particular field,

00:58:25.840 as Simone has pointed out. So I just don't engage with these. And if people are like,

00:58:29.840 he doesn't love his kid. This was a kid who was born early. And I, for months, every day would go

00:58:35.920 to the hospital and spend all day holding him against my chest. Because when I went over the

00:58:39.920 research, it looked like that had the best outcome for this kid. You know, the idea that-

00:58:45.680 This kid is not afraid of you. He loves you. He runs up to you all the time. He wants to spend time

00:58:51.520 with you. He's the one who snuggles with you all the time. This is not, and this is what would make it

00:58:55.920 extra heartbreaking and probably hurtful to him. If our form of punishment was getting mad,

00:59:02.000 it would break his heart. And every time, like there was even with his younger sister,

00:59:06.000 the other day, you moved her from climbing up the stairs to at the base of our kitchen,

00:59:11.440 because you didn't want her to be afraid. And then went upstairs to get something that you needed.

00:59:14.960 And she thought for a second that she was being rejected by you. And she was devastated. Like our

00:59:19.360 children definitely take the concept or the prospect of rejection so much more emotionally

00:59:26.080 seriously than any form of physical correction we've ever used on them.

00:59:30.400 Well, and that's because of how we use emotions in our household and how we have chosen to use this

00:59:35.360 form of punishment. Because they understand that the highest form of emotional punishment is like,

00:59:41.360 you've really disappointed me. That is a bop. I don't jump straight to that. I don't jump straight to

00:59:47.360 losing my cool or losing emotional composure. They have, I think, a much stronger emotional

00:59:54.480 connection to me than they would if I chose one of these alternative systems for delineating the

01:00:00.880 highest category of you are doing something that's dangerous or that you shouldn't be doing and you

01:00:06.720 are not listening to me. And this is actually, I actually think it's where a lot of physical abuse

01:00:11.360 in relationships comes from is our relationship does not contain any physical abuse in part.

01:00:17.680 And we did a video on this, like maybe men should hit their wives or something like that. In part,

01:00:22.560 because I am able to logically communicate with you and we are able to come to mutually beneficial

01:00:28.960 outcomes where we're like, okay, we have this difference of opinion, but we both care about the

01:00:33.520 same outcomes. So it's never a place where we're ever going to be at odds. Truly the only place where we

01:00:38.480 may be temporarily at odds is in knowledge. So we just have to resolve that.

01:00:42.400 So we just have to decide who has access to more knowledge. Whereas I think where a lot of physical

01:00:47.680 abuse in relationships often starts is one person is just not able to communicate the severity of

01:00:56.240 something they believe to another person. One instance I'm aware of is the wife who wasn't managing

01:01:01.760 the finances or anything like that would just gone out and gotten an expensive purse and they were

01:01:06.880 already broken in a ton of debt. And she had done this recently and he had told her not to.

01:01:11.760 I should say, I'm not saying that abuse is justified in that instance, but I am saying that this is

01:01:18.800 logically what leads many people down this pathway is I can't communicate with this person in any other

01:01:24.000 way. The problem with young children is that there is an age range where you need to communicate a

01:01:30.480 high level of threat from the environment and you need to choose the least painful option for communicating

01:01:37.120 that. And I believe the least painful option is a bop. And I should note that I actually think the kids are

01:01:44.240 pre-programmed for this because we bop our kids very lightly, but they take it much more seriously than I

01:01:49.920 would anticipate they would given that it doesn't actually cause any physical pain and it's very clear to

01:01:55.600 them that they don't internalize as causing much physical pain. And I think it's because they're

01:01:59.680 pre-programmed to be like, oh, whoa, something has happened that puts them into this sort of mental

01:02:07.360 restart mode. And I would say to an adult, if somebody lightly bopped you on the face like that,

01:02:13.440 would the pain be what shocked you? Or would it be the invasion of the personal space of your face?

01:02:19.760 It's the invasion of the personal space. That is the purpose of the bop.

01:02:23.440 And another reason why we choose the face, and I think why in nature the face evolved to be the

01:02:27.840 location that this works for, is that it's the most accessible spot if you're trying to make sure

01:02:34.000 the negative feedback is immediate, which in all animal models. And somebody's like, why are you

01:02:38.160 looking at animal models? Like your kids aren't animals. I'm like, we use animal models because they

01:02:42.400 correlate with human patterns, okay? If something is common across social mammal groups, it's likely going to be

01:02:50.800 a common behavior in our early ancestors, right? And we are likely going to have some pre-evolved

01:02:57.440 components there still operational. And yeah, I actually find it's interesting that this bop saying

01:03:04.240 was something that I grew up thinking was normal. This was something that my cultural group was like,

01:03:09.600 oh, of course you do it this way. But different cultural groups punish in different ways. And if

01:03:13.520 you look at the way corporeal punishment is administered in the South Park episode,

01:03:17.200 it's administered in a way that is similar to this. And when I look at Matt Stone and Trey Parker,

01:03:21.600 they seem one of them is Jewish, but the other one comes from a cultural group that's very similar

01:03:24.480 to my own. So I imagine that in terms of value sets, in terms of how they relate to kids. So I

01:03:29.200 assume that this is how corporeal punishment was practiced within their community, which I suspect

01:03:34.080 is much more likely to, at a lower pain threshold, be more effective. That's why we choose to face,

01:03:38.160 because it's the lowest pain threshold area. Do you have any final thoughts on this?

01:03:41.600 Corporeal makes it sound ethereal. Funny. I would just say

01:03:50.240 that eight passengers need to write us a check. You're welcome.

01:03:55.600 No, but look, that's clearly an instance where it's gone overboard and it's having a negative.

01:04:00.320 No, seriously. And yeah, for us, I want to emphasize that when we say we are against delayed

01:04:08.720 punishment, we really mean that even if we, like the time it would take to go and get a spoon to

01:04:13.200 hit someone with is too much time. And a lot of the punishment that you saw, even before the

01:04:18.880 passengers had the fallout of the post channel closing and the taping to chairs and all the

01:04:23.920 really terrifying stuff, there was still delayed punishment that was insane. Oh, you're not going to

01:04:28.800 have your bed for a month or your bedroom or whatever. Things would be permanently taken away.

01:04:33.280 Oh, and we should note that we don't do punishments other people think was normal. We've never put our

01:04:38.320 kids in timeout, for instance. We never socially isolate. We never say, oh, you don't get your

01:04:44.480 dinner now or anything like that. With this fairly mild form of punishment, we've been able to cover

01:04:50.880 pretty much all of our punishment bases without needing to go to delayed punishment, which I don't

01:04:55.360 think is effective. Timeout, stuff like that. Yeah. And this is precluding the frontline of defense,

01:04:59.760 which is always just talking with our kids. And this is something I would ask people to

01:05:04.000 seriously consider if they have a strong emotional reaction to this. Why is lightly slapping a kid in

01:05:09.840 the face abuse to you, but timeout is not? Why is timeout a lower order punishment? And you can be

01:05:17.200 like, well, because it doesn't involve physical contact. But why does that make it a lower order?

01:05:24.080 If the child finds timeout to be more concerning or more emotionally elevating, why is that? It is

01:05:30.400 just a societal thing which you have accepted is true without analyzing. That's the truth of it.

01:05:37.760 That's why you find one to be crossing a boundary and the other to not be crossing a boundary,

01:05:42.000 because you haven't thought through what was likely real punishments in our evolutionary context,

01:05:50.400 and the way we likely evolved to learn information was in this age range.

01:05:55.360 But that's obviously not realistic in a high fertility environment when you're in a dangerous

01:05:59.680 context. The funny thing, though, is like back to the lion example on Safari, because people on

01:06:04.640 Twitter, for example, when they bring that up, they're like, lions don't have words. They can't

01:06:10.560 use words. No, they totally would growl and warn them.

01:06:13.600 Yeah, they do have words. Lions used words first.

01:06:15.760 Little woman knew it was stepping over a line, but it was testing. Where are the boundaries?

01:06:20.720 This is the point of play behavior. And this is also a problem for kids,

01:06:24.320 as Simone has pointed out, because now we don't let kids test each other's boundaries.

01:06:27.920 One kid gets mad, they test the other kid, I'm not doing this anymore. We mostly let our kids work

01:06:32.640 this out by themselves.

01:06:33.760 Yeah, they're like, so-and-so's not sharing, or so-and-so hit me, and we're like, work it out.

01:06:38.080 Because they need to learn, yeah, boundaries.

01:06:40.480 And so one thing we often ask, actually, for example, if they're playing on their couch fort,

01:06:44.240 which we make for them, and then, oh, Toasty hit me on the couch fort. And I'm like, okay,

01:06:47.600 so do you want to stop and no more couch fort, or do you want to get over it and work it out? And

01:06:51.200 they're like, oh, I want to work it out. It's really, kids also, I think, want to work it out.

01:06:57.680 They want to play, they want to push those boundaries, and they're going to whine and cry about it.

01:07:02.400 Another thing we've noticed about the way that kids react is because if they're playing in a room,

01:07:07.360 and we don't have, we're not physically there, they're on camera and on mic, and we are watching

01:07:11.760 them still. And the amount of performative crying or whimpering or complaining or tattling that goes

01:07:19.360 on when parents are around or when adult authorities are around is insanely high compared to when they're

01:07:25.120 just amongst themselves. And they absolutely police each other when they think that they're not being

01:07:30.160 observed.

01:07:31.040 Here, when we're talking about this cultural subset, another thing that's really important within our

01:07:34.480 cultural background is that, and I mentioned this before, but I want to elevate it and put

01:07:38.960 a song here because it's, or a portion, let me see what I can get away with. But I would recommend

01:07:42.960 people listen to this song, He's Mine. It's a country song.

01:07:46.480 He had them by the collar, said he caught them shooting beer bottles down in a holler.

01:07:51.600 And I said, is that right? He said they won't speak when spoken to.

01:07:55.680 So which one here belongs to you? Left him in the eyes.

01:08:00.160 He's mine, not mine. And if you knew me then, there'd be no question in your mind.

01:08:07.120 Even though he's mine.

01:08:09.120 And it is about this way of relating to kids, which is to say,

01:08:13.280 our child breaking a rule gives me pride. It gives me pride that they're the type of people who test

01:08:19.040 boundaries. That doesn't mean I'm not going to set those boundaries and enforce those boundaries.

01:08:24.240 In one part of the song, the kids were drinking and shooting something out by a holler, which is

01:08:29.760 like a pit. And the neighbors brought them over and they're like, which one of these boys is yours?

01:08:35.040 And he's taking pride. He's mine. He, no, what's not said in the song, but it's very obviously true

01:08:40.480 because I grew up in these types of families. That kid is still punished at the end of the night.

01:08:44.080 The dad can be proud at his kid for being the rebellious sort of a person,

01:08:49.520 but you still get punished when you get caught. And that goes forwards into parenting as well.

01:08:55.200 And I think that to me, this is really emotionally healthy for somebody growing up is separating the

01:09:00.960 idea of repercussions for crossing certain boundaries and pride in my kids for being

01:09:09.360 willful and energetic. And I think that a bop system allows me to separate these two things

01:09:15.760 very effectively. But I think the real tragedy of all this, the real tragedy of all this,

01:09:21.280 oh, the research says this is they've gone so far in the other direction that now we have a

01:09:27.520 generation where kids are, we can't let our kids play outside. We can't let our kids explore the woods.

01:09:33.760 We can't, all of the things that kids used to do are now just genuinely not safe to allow kids to do.

01:09:41.200 I think if you are attempting with a large group of kids to practice this style of parenting.

01:09:45.520 And like when large by six kids of this young age range. And to me, that is heartbreaking

01:09:53.040 because I think that those things outweigh any of the negatives that may be incurred from this sort

01:10:00.000 of punishment. And a lot of people are like, do you really want like the pro natalist movement

01:10:04.960 associated with this? And I'm like, yes, I like couldn't want it associated with anything more.

01:10:10.080 The urban monoculture imperiously attempting to take our children away from us from breaking

01:10:16.720 a cultural norm that almost no ethnic minority group has within this country. So they're basically

01:10:22.640 saying we plan eventually everyone to be like us. When I tell somebody from this very small group of

01:10:28.480 wealthy white people who live in cities mostly, who have this extremist view around punishment and

01:10:34.720 kids. Most people in Africa do this. They're secretly thinking, yeah, they won't for long.

01:10:39.760 One day they'll all think like us in our culture, because it has this manifest destiny component to it.

01:10:45.440 It is the descendant of the old European imperialist mindset. And it's such a good framing

01:10:52.880 where when they're like everyone who practices, this is a monster. And then I'm like most black Americans

01:10:58.560 practices like the overwhelming majority. You're aware of that.

01:11:01.280 And then they have to walk that back because they haven't they haven't like there isn't there's

01:11:06.480 this cognitive dissonance in we want cultural diversity, but we don't actually want cultural

01:11:12.080 diversity and we want everyone to behave exactly like us. And they pretend or live in this world

01:11:17.840 where those two things are possible in the same world when they're just not cultural diversity means

01:11:24.400 OK with child rearing practices that are different from your own, which is what we fight for. While

01:11:30.160 we don't approve of stuff like spanking, I fight for a world where that is OK, because the person who is

01:11:37.040 in a best position to judge whether spanking their child is an OK way to relate to that child is somebody

01:11:43.520 who was spanked themselves as a kid. Yeah. But I think here's I guess here's one more thing that's

01:11:49.520 on my mind is a lot of people on Twitter who are horrified by the fact that we practice this

01:11:57.440 themselves were some were probably just we're going to say beaten, like actually hurt. But then I think

01:12:04.880 some were probably bopped and then they entered a culture in which a therapist or a friend or just

01:12:11.200 contextualization and seeing other people talk about these things made them retroactively see

01:12:17.200 it as abuse. And that's how the urban monoculture got them. It got their hook for them. It separated

01:12:22.800 them from the people who loved and cared about them most because that's a hard thing to do. How

01:12:27.040 do you separate someone from their family? Like most people should realize these are the people who

01:12:30.480 love and care about me most in the world. Like most parents, there's some bad parents out there. I

01:12:33.920 understand this. But generally, like often unless you're dealing with like genuinely narcissistic or

01:12:38.480 sociopathic parents, that is a true statement. And so you need to and I think tragically convince

01:12:43.840 people that their parents and and this is one of the things I said one of the true tragedies is one

01:12:47.600 of the ways that the urban monoculture enforces this culturally normative stance the most is through

01:12:52.560 divorce law. Because if you side with the urban monoculture on anything, you can utilize that to

01:12:58.160 take parents from the other parent in a divorce proceeding. Like if one parent spanks and the other one

01:13:02.800 doesn't, the non spanking parent can utilize that to get the kid. And often if the non parent wasn't even

01:13:07.920 non spanking before that, now they can become non spanking and use that to get the kid. I mean,

01:13:12.000 you see this with gender transition stuff, you see this with all sorts of stuff where the urban

01:13:16.400 monoculture, you just side with it and you get auto custody, which is horrifying. And I think that

01:13:22.720 people from the urban monoculture, they so dehumanize other cultural groups, they are genuinely

01:13:28.560 incapable of realizing that when other people are doing this, very few people want to hurt their kids,

01:13:34.480 hurting their kids. They are doing this because they believe it's in the long-term best interest

01:13:38.560 of their kid. And often with some reason that the urban monoculture is just dismissing out of hand.

01:13:44.800 The studies don't say so. The studies have been wrong about a lot of things recently. Okay.

01:13:49.680 And I can understand when I look at the nature of this deal, how the studies could have come to be

01:13:53.760 wrong on this issue. So I dismissed them. And it's because the anthropological evidence for me

01:13:59.760 seems to suggest that it does work. And the evidence within my own household, like I have seen

01:14:04.000 how my kids have reacted to this, what has happened since, because we didn't engage all our kids with

01:14:08.640 this. With the first kid, we have this mindset, we're never going to do this. We're never going

01:14:11.760 to do this. You know, by the time we're kids three, we're like, whatever. And so I've seen other kids

01:14:15.440 grow up with this and without this. And just the level of like awesomeness of them to each other

01:14:23.200 into outsiders has increased dramatically. So I also think it's really messed up to equate something

01:14:29.520 like this with actual abuse. And that's the other thing is just the extent to which the

01:14:34.160 controversy that has arisen because of this article trivializes real and actual abuse. It makes me

01:14:42.560 worried and sad because that is such a big issue. And to equate them, and it's hard because it's one

01:14:50.480 of those things where it's hard to know where the line is, but we know people and care deeply about

01:14:56.880 people who have been. Aila, for example, has talked about this a lot publicly, and I think she went

01:15:02.880 through it actually in abusive childhood. Yeah. And it's heartbreaking and horrible.

01:15:07.600 I think that's heartbreaking and I would not wish that on anyone. And it is absolutely messed up that

01:15:12.880 people equate a light bop on the nose to like reorient a kid's direction, like just restart their

01:15:19.120 system that doesn't hurt them. It's clear in the article, he was back to laughing and doing what

01:15:22.640 he was doing before within 30 seconds of the event. It's very clear. This was not painful to him.

01:15:27.280 It was like somebody being taped to a chair and beaten. That is absolutely insane. And that a person

01:15:34.000 online is like, you just never hit a kid. And I'm like, that is your cultural perspective.

01:15:37.840 And I don't think the cross-cultural evidence supports your position.

01:15:41.760 Well, especially when abuse and neglect is sometimes defined at least by the Department of Health

01:15:46.640 and Human Services in the U.S. is sometimes a failure to act in an effort to protect a child.

01:15:52.240 Sometimes you have to... From our cultural perspective, not employing this practice

01:15:56.000 is a form of abuse. Or whatever is effective. We're not saying you always have to bop. We're

01:16:01.760 just saying if you fail to do what's effective in protecting your kid, that also is abuse. Some kids

01:16:08.400 only respond to this in certain situations. Other kids... And I'd ask people what they need to change

01:16:14.000 their mind on this particular issue. Because, you know, we always talk about how like...

01:16:17.200 Yeah, because we changed our minds. We both came into becoming parents saying zero tolerance,

01:16:22.000 never know nothing ever like this. Yeah. I mean, so there's the Amy Chua,

01:16:26.640 this whole tiger mom thing, which was a big thing when I was growing up.

01:16:30.000 And people who don't know what happened, she did the type of punishment that I would say falls

01:16:33.840 well into the abuse category. But she did practice corporeal punishment with very aggressive,

01:16:38.800 high expectations for her kids. And everyone told her, in the public media and everything like

01:16:43.520 that, because she had two kids, that they were going to hate her and they were going to be

01:16:47.200 failures. Like, this wasn't going to work. Yeah. Which we see... Right now, a lot of people are

01:16:51.360 saying exactly the same thing. Your kids are going to hate you. Your kids are going to fight back.

01:16:56.240 Your kids are going to... Whatever. Yeah.

01:16:59.360 But what happened with her two kids? Remember, we talk about shotcalling. Like,

01:17:02.560 this is why Lazlo Polgar matters. Shotcalling is not anecdotal evidence.

01:17:05.840 Predicting that an unusual way of doing things will lead to an extremely unusual result.

01:17:12.560 Two kids both being successful and having a good relationship with their parent.

01:17:17.040 Predicting that is incredibly unlikely, statistically speaking. So it's not anecdotal.

01:17:21.840 So now we know what happened to her two kids. They grew up to become a Yale lawyer and a Harvard

01:17:26.640 lawyer and they're on good terms with their mom. They're like, I had some of the things I wouldn't

01:17:31.360 do with my own kids and stuff like that. And I have some reservations about this, but broadly,

01:17:35.360 they're on good terms with their mom. Like almost nobody says everything about my parents and my

01:17:38.960 childhood I love. Even ones who were in like the most hippie-ish style.

01:17:41.920 And some people have been like, yeah, but she later said she regretted her parenting style.

01:17:45.760 And I'm like, well, whether she regretted it or not really has nothing to do with the

01:17:49.440 outcome. The point is, is that she did do it. The kids did end up successful and the kids did not

01:17:57.200 end up estranged from her. So if you're saying, if you do this, your kids will not be successful

01:18:02.560 and will not end up liking you as an adult, at least in the one shock calling case that we had

01:18:09.280 exposure to was in my childhood, that is provably wrong.

01:18:13.360 So I think that even going much further than us, when I'm looking at the evidence I have that doesn't

01:18:19.120 come from these extreme filters, seems to support that, no, you're not destroying your kid's life

01:18:24.960 by raising them in a culturally unique way. And I think that I wouldn't do it that way,

01:18:30.800 but I think that there is potentially positive outcomes for even much more than what we as a

01:18:37.520 family are willing to do. And I think it'd be really cool if I could know that there was some

01:18:41.920 unbiased research in this. And something that's interesting to ask yourself is, would you change

01:18:46.160 your mind? Like we are going to have five or six kids at least, right? If all of these kids end up

01:18:52.320 successful and we do this whole weird thing that we did. Okay. Is that going to be enough evidence

01:18:58.720 for you to change your mind about us being right about these things? Or is it just no, because the

01:19:05.200 studies in that case, I think you're really just obeying a priest cast and not paying attention to the

01:19:11.360 disincentives within the academic bureaucracy. And we're also not saying this is right about,

01:19:15.680 this is right for everyone. But yeah, no, I think different cultural groups actually,

01:19:19.120 I think have, I wouldn't encourage every parent. In fact, I can think of many parents who I would

01:19:24.640 definitely not encourage to do this. Especially if a parent doesn't have emotional control,

01:19:29.280 I think that this leads to very negative results. If you are ever punishing your children

01:19:35.120 with anger, you have failed as a parent. But there are also some parents that we know that

01:19:39.360 are just, they're emotionally composed very different where they could in a sober-minded

01:19:44.000 way do this, but it just wouldn't hit right with the kids, poor word choice. But it just wouldn't,

01:19:51.520 it would come across as like, why did you do that? Because there are some parents who are,

01:19:57.120 I'm thinking about some very emotionally sensitive and attuned people who themselves would find this

01:20:05.360 very like too distressing. We already find it distressing, but they would find it very distressing,

01:20:09.280 to implement. And their kids would not, they would not see it the way our kids do.

01:20:16.160 Our kids are very rough and tumble.

01:20:17.360 Yeah, they think of a violation of the relationship they have with their parents.

01:20:20.720 Yeah. And that they need that delicate talking. They need their kid, their parent to just talk to

01:20:24.400 five or sorry, count to five. And just the thought of their parent potentially at the end of five,

01:20:28.800 being slightly disappointed in them is such an emotional and distressing thing that they

01:20:32.160 immediately halt at four. But so they should not, they should not bop because bop would be just

01:20:37.280 counting is enough to distress these children. So there's some delicate children for whom I would

01:20:41.600 totally not recommend this. Our kids are not those kids.

01:20:44.480 Yeah. And our kids and Simone, you've been around our kids. I think most people who know us know that

01:20:48.960 we are very considered parents and how we do things. Our kids do not register this

01:20:55.120 as like adversarial or me.

01:20:57.360 There are kids who would, there are kids who would, and this is not right.

01:21:00.560 There are kids who would. And in that instance, they might need a different strategy, but for our

01:21:04.480 kids, it's more just like a fact of life. When I do certain things that could be dangerous,

01:21:09.840 like I've just noted like the room, but oh, here's the wall. I need to turn around.

01:21:13.520 Yeah. It's like bumper cars. Here's bump. They bump right off. It's almost like they

01:21:17.920 literally like a bop is almost like the bop is here. Our kids just go right into it. And then they go off.

01:21:24.240 That's it. It's almost like they, they bring it on. I'm not saying they, they ask for it.

01:21:28.480 Yeah, but it is actually very interesting how they emotionally relate to it and how

01:21:34.080 little it is seen as something like spanking or something like that, where there's this fear

01:21:38.720 going into it, which I think is often worse than the spanking or something.

01:21:42.320 I think it's probably part of the psychological torture.

01:21:44.880 Yeah. I had some nannies and stuff from different cultures that would do things like spank me when I

01:21:48.240 was a kid or do different forms like ear bopping or something like that, different forms of punishment.

01:21:51.920 And in spanking, you get the emotional roll up to it. That's so worrying.

01:21:56.560 Literally, when I think about all the types of punishments I got when I was a kid,

01:22:00.560 of all of them, the least painful is bopping. Bopping is so much less painful than a parent

01:22:05.760 telling you they're disappointed in you or they're angry with you. It's so much less painful than a

01:22:10.160 spanking and all the lead up to it. It's so much less annoying and anger inducing than a timeout.

01:22:16.080 It is of, I could choose among all the punishments in the world that I could get as like a, okay,

01:22:20.800 you crossed a line here. It isn't one that I, as a kid would choose. And not everyone would do this,

01:22:25.040 but I think it's pretty clear from our kids that they're the same way. And I really like

01:22:28.240 how it's a way to signal that they've gone too far without putting any emotional wall between us,

01:22:34.240 without the first thing I'm saying when I bought my kid is I love you, but this is not the way we act

01:22:39.520 in this environment. Yeah. I love you, Malcolm. I love you too. And I'm glad that we're able to

01:22:44.720 stand up for this and fight for differing cultural practices. Leave no child unbopped.

01:22:52.560 Bop all the children. Bop all the children. We literally just said not that, of course,

01:22:57.440 but yeah, I don't like being the advocate for this. I wish this weren't a hill that we were

01:23:04.720 apparently dying on right now. Yeah. We do not advocate for general corporeal punishment.

01:23:09.680 We do not advocate for any of that stuff, but we do advocate for bopping. I do advocate

01:23:17.680 for some forms of physical contact in terms of- I just wish it didn't have to be us advocating.

01:23:24.320 But it does, because if we're going to, if we are going to be fighting the urban monoculture's

01:23:29.600 imperiousness in terms of how people raise their kids- Wait, no one else is going to stand up for this,

01:23:33.920 aside from Richard Hanania, who's the only other person who has balls in this world.

01:23:37.440 Along with some of our listeners, you know who you are. So, yeah.

01:23:41.760 The number of death threats we get are, oh, I'm going to go up and kill those people and take their kids and-

01:23:47.120 The most specific threats this time around.

01:23:50.480 Yeah. Like, you better be watching the news. I'm going to get those Collinses.

01:23:53.680 Yeah. In Valley Forge, we're going to come watch the news. Interesting.

01:23:58.880 I wonder how the devil people threaten to attack us with is going to hold up against the AR-15.

01:24:03.600 But no, but here's what I'm thinking when I hear something like that. I'm like, oh,

01:24:07.360 this is the consequence of not bopping a kid. He never learned personal boundaries.

01:24:11.840 Your first thought is, oh, this person who just gave us a death threat didn't get beaten enough

01:24:16.400 as a kid. I don't know.

01:24:17.680 No, I do not think that their parents raise them well, or that they understand what good parenting is,

01:24:22.000 because they appear to lack emotional control or the ability to soberly analyze the situation.

01:24:27.520 No, the progressives would just be like, no, he was beaten as a kid, because all the research shows

01:24:32.000 that when you were beaten as a kid, you're violent. I'm just saying. But anyway, let's go get our kids.

01:24:37.360 I love you, and you are amazing. Let's go find our children.

01:24:39.680 Oh, and one thing I'd say, if people are like, how do you choose when you accept the science and

01:24:44.880 when you're really skeptical of the science? Whenever anyone says every expert in a field agrees on

01:24:50.160 something, I pretty much immediately dismiss it. Because I'm like, that just doesn't happen in

01:24:54.480 science when there's no nuance. There is always more when science is happening correctly.

01:24:59.840 If something is a, everyone agrees on this, like climate change or something like that,

01:25:04.240 I'm all of a sudden, okay, press F to doubt. That's major sus. Because it's just, you don't

01:25:09.760 get that. And I will say that at the end of this, it's all about moderation. Because it's really bad

01:25:15.840 if because you equated lightly tapping a child's face with beating them, that your child ends up

01:25:21.920 emotionally fragile, depressed, and then ends up committing suicide or something.

01:25:26.320 Okay, let's go get the kids. Okay, these things have consequences. This isn't happening in a vacuum.

01:25:30.880 I love you, Simone. I love you too.

01:25:32.160 Most, perhaps all the blame rests with the parents. That's right, you. And I asked you this one question.

01:25:42.080 Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children, and hitting them?

01:25:50.000 I wrote about this. And it's number two on their site all day.

01:25:56.240 Oh, my God.

01:26:01.520 But anyway, what is really flattering is that as someone who, before meeting you, minored in photography

01:26:09.040 in school and everything, right, never expected my photos to be in the Daily Mail and the Guardian.

01:26:17.280 I'm like a top billing photographer, you guys.

01:26:20.240 Yeah.

01:26:20.960 Anyway, we'll get started.

01:26:22.720 This is going to be at the end, obviously.

01:26:24.320 Oh, I wasn't counting that for.

01:26:27.280 Oh, yeah. Okay, hold on.

01:26:28.640 I've got to think about how I start this, because I want to start it with one over.

01:26:31.360 Sure. Well, I can, I'll throw out a pitch.

Based Camp - May 28, 2024

We Went Viral for ＂Child Abuse＂

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