Name: How Much Freedom Do You Allow Your Kids to Have?
Uploaded: 2021-10-07T17:48:17.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Much Freedom Do You Allow Your Kids to Have?' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Much Freedom Do You Allow Your Kids to Have?' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-07. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience.
You don't let your kids just cut loose on YouTube, do you?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Luckily, one of my kids, all she likes to watch on YouTube is like, there's a
girl named Sniper Wolf,
who's very funny, and she does like these reaction videos to stuff, but it's
very G-rated,
and she loves watching her, and, you know, there's, you know, but I keep an eye
on what they're doing,
and I don't allow them to just start going crazy.
Yeah.
Because it's just, you just, you know, you never know.
I mean, one day, you just stumble upon an ISIS beheading video, and now you
have, you know,
your kids fucking waking you up in the middle of the night crying and screaming
because they
can't get this image out of their head.
It's terrifying.
It is.
To be on the other side of it, too, because when you're young, all you want to
do is throw
off the chains.
Oh, yeah.
And then all of a sudden, you're like in the position of putting the chains on.
Yeah, you kind of, it's like, how much freedom do you give them?
Like, how much do you talk to them about stuff?
How much do you let them figure the stuff out on their own?
You know, it's tricky, and it's a weird world because it didn't exist previous.
Like, it's not like we're dealing with something that we went through when we
were children.
There was no Google when we were children.
There was no, you know, LiveLeak.
You ever go on LiveLeak?
I know about it, but yeah.
Horrible videos.
You can watch a lot of car accidents and animal attacks and just wild shit.
Yeah, yeah.
That's not, you know.
Although I have been on that.
Yeah, I have stumbled into that.
But that didn't exist.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch something fucked up, you had a plan
for it.
Like, when we wanted to watch Faces of Death, somebody had to get the video.
One of our friends had to watch the door, you know, so like we were in the
basement.
One of the friends had to watch the door, make sure the parents didn't come
down.
And then we put it on the VCR, and we were ready.
Like, if someone came down, you'd pop that fucking tape out and hide it.
These kids today, all they have to do is just have a phone, you know.
And a lot of times kids are 11 and 12.
They have phones.
And 12-year-olds with a phone, I mean, they're going to start Googling people
fucking, people getting killed.
They're going to see the most crazy shit.
Have you seen this?
Your friend's going to say, have you seen that?
And then you're going to look on your phone.
There's no way to stop it.
There's no way to stop it.
Kids have wild fucking workarounds for like little restrictions.
My sneaky little fucking kid, you know what she did?
She screen recorded my wife when my wife went and put in a password for her
screen time.
Nice move.
Very nice move.
She handed her phone over to my wife.
My wife goes in and puts a password in for her screen time.
So she can only get an hour's worth of screen time a day.
And then my wife checks.
She's like, how the fuck do you have four hours of screen time?
What's going on here?
So she, and then she figured out that the, really?
The little monster.
Yeah.
Did you guys have public access when you were growing up?
Like public access TV.
I used to see some of that.
I remember that's my first exposure to Faces of Death was after 10 o'clock.
They could show whatever the fuck they wanted for whatever reason.
Really?
Not blatant porn, but porn.
Really?
I saw, that's what the Bud Dwyer video of him shooting himself in the face.
You saw that on TV?
To the 21 Guns Salute when I was going to bed and I was when I was like 10
years old.
What?
Yeah.
Huh.
No way.
And then this guy ended up, I was talking with some of my friends when I was
back at home in my reunion.
This guy was, we all knew about him when we were like 12, 13 years old, had a
show, painted up like an insane clown posse type character, and would have like
blood, girls, vaginas, lips, all sorts of wild shit.
Really?
Wild.
And it was just like, the government was putting it on technically because of
public access.
So in public access, there's no restrictions like there are with the Faces?
That's what I was asking.
I don't, I did not, you guys didn't have, that's like what Wayne's World was.
That's my only thing I knew growing up was like Wayne's World on the SNL was a
public access show, but then we actually had public access, and that's where
wild shit was happening after 10 o'clock.
I had a friend of mine who had a public access show.
My friend Larry Rapucci, who's a stand-up comic in, I think it was Larry's show,
but he was a stand-up comic in Boston.
We all did a public access show when we were like struggling comedians.
You did it too?
Yeah, I wore a dress.
I wore a dress and a wig, and I was like, we had like a dating show.
This is the wild guy that I would, this is from the 90s, I think.
I found it on YouTube, it still exists.
It's like very David Lynchian, man.
Dude, so, it's just so weird to watch now.
Damon Zex.
Yeah.
Oh, so he would, that's him on the right and him on TV?
Oh, so he really planned this out.
This was some weird shit.
Wow.
This is 96?
Again, he's doing coke, he's doing tampons, it's all, like again, I was a kid
when I was seeing this stuff.
Wow.
It's like, to me, it's not that strange.
Looks like Robert Smith in The Cure, man.
Someone found him, I don't know, I'm sure he's like on Facebook or he's
probably doing this stuff still.
Let's find him.
Well, he's going to find out now.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Wow, yeah.
Hardcore.
So he got away with this, this was all on...
Yeah, but he wasn't even the only one.
There was a clown called like Angsto the Clown that was like, I'm sure Red Band
knows about this stuff,
because he was a little bit older than me in the same area.
That's probably why he was probably watching the same shit.
Where were you brought up?
This is why, it might make sense now.
Where were you brought up?
In Columbus, Ohio.
Huh.
Wow.
I mean, and then looking back into some of the stuff that was happening there,
it kind of makes a little bit of sense,
but if this wasn't going on everywhere, that's sort of like strange to me.
I never saw it in Boston, but I might have been out of the loop.
It might have existed, I just wasn't aware of it.
But I thought the regulations were across the board if you were broadcasting.
I didn't think that public access was different.
Is it because it's local?
Maybe, and then there's like free speech laws that we're getting into.
I don't, again, I was a kid, so I have no idea.
I was just, I was excited to see it.
I just, I haven't, it's not, it won't be available until spring, but for the
last couple of years,
I've been working on a book, you know, like this is the thing I thought I'd
never do.
I used to be annoyed by people who thought about their kids before I had kids,
but I have a book that I just finished called Outdoor Kids Inside World.
It's about, you know, kids in nature, raising kids.
And yeah, man, if you'd asked me, dude, like 10 years ago, I'd have been like,
no way I would do something like that.
But it's harrowing, man.
It's like scary.
What is scary?
Having kids.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Worried about them.
Just like, yeah.
And like trying to guide their, guide their experience, you know, and for me, I
don't know.
Yeah.
I've, I've found that, um, that, that, you know, exposure to nature,
experiences in nature,
understanding nature is like winds up being an avenue of approach that I have
with them
that works for both of us.
It's like a common language, you know?
But yeah, man, it's, it's, it's, it's terrifying.
And then the, and then the, the feeling of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy that you
get of things
that meant that when you were young, things that meant a lot to you and felt
very authentic
to you, like freedom, freedom to consume what media you wanted, freedom to talk
to who you
want to talk to, freedom to go where you wanted to go, um, that later you're in
a position where
you're, um, denying, denying someone something that you really wanted in an
honest way when
you were young.
Yeah.
Um, I had a conversation with Jonathan.
It's a push and pull, man.
Jonathan Haidt about that.
You know, he talks about the, the concept of free range kids about he lets his
children
wander, it was Jonathan Haidt, right?
Was, right?
The coddling of the American mind.
Um, he lets his kids wander around New York city.
Like he lets his kids walk home from New York city.
And you know, he's talking about one time his, uh, his kid got a little lost
and they were
really, really scared.
You know, it was like they were trying to find them and it's like a terrifying
feeling,
but that ultimately the development that the child receives from being able to
navigate
the world on their own is very valuable, but there's a risk.
And so you like have to weigh this risk versus reward.
And the opposite of that is people do helicopter, helicopter parent.
And we know how that turns out, right?
That's not good.
When you overly coddle your kid and your, your, your kid is not exposed to any
sort of
adversity or any sort of danger or any sort of adventure or any sort of, uh,
independence
that it could be stifling.
And then it takes a long time for the child to develop outside of that parental
environment.
Once they become free there, like there's different kinds of kids, right?
There's kids that grow up in bad neighborhoods with very little parental
guidance and they're
18.
And then there's kids who grow up completely coddled and completely protected
and insulated
and they're 18.
And then they run into each other.
Totally different life experiences.
Yeah.
And I was the former, you know, I was the kid that didn't have a lot of
guidance when I was
a kid and I was a kind of a lock key, a latch key kid.
I'm glad you just used that word.
Yeah.
It's a common word, right?
Common phrase.
Well, apparently it's not.
No.
I grew up with that word.
Yeah.
Latch key.
I was commenting on how my wife in her early years was a latch key kid.
And she's like, I haven't heard that word in a long time.
I'm like, that used to be a word, dude, like latch key kid.
Yeah.
You got a key.
You got a key and you get, you came home and no one was home, you know, when I
was 12
years old.
Yeah.
Just, I mean, it wasn't like five days ago.
Someone was pointing out to me that that word doesn't get used anymore.
Yeah.
Well, kids don't, I mean, it's kind of a different thing.
You don't really see 12 year old kids walking home with a key and opening up
their front
door anymore.
I mean, I think about my children and how young they are and I can't imagine
them doing
that, but I did that.
And I think that the independence that comes from being a kid who walks home
from school
by yourself and opens your door by yourself and, you know, and then my parents
didn't
come home until, you know, whatever it was, they worked till five and then they
were home.
I was out.
I would go places.
No one knew where the fuck I was.
There was no phones.
There was no cell phones, you know?
Yeah.
I could leave them a little post-it note or something like that.
It's been interesting to watch as a parent, the way that you, that different
parents find
what dangerous things they're comfortable with.
Friends of mine, like my friend Kelly lives in New York, right?
And she'll talk about, and we have similar mindsets about exposing kids to risk
and her
kids will take the subway, right?
Or whatever, home.
And to me, where I live and having not had kids that age in the city, like, I
can't picture
what she's getting at.
You know what I mean?
I go like, wow, that seems just kind of like crazy.
Yeah.
How old are the kids?
You're responsible.
I'm trying to think, how, 14 and nine or 10, somewhere in there.
And I don't know if they've been at it for a while.
But either way, like, things that some people would regard, things that people
from the outside
would regard as, like, hard to picture, you know?
Yeah, so, but at the same time, I expose my kids to, like, danger that I have
decided
is, like, an okay danger to court.
I'll expose them to being, you know, they can be around grizzly bears.
They can be unescorted in areas that have a lot of mountain lions and bears.
We take small boats out in the very big water.
We do all kinds of things.
But it's, like, things that I've decided are good risk.
Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.

How Much Freedom Do You Allow Your Kids to Have?

The Joe Rogan Experience.
You don't let your kids just cut loose on YouTube, do you?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Luckily, one of my kids, all she likes to watch on YouTube is like, there's a
girl named Sniper Wolf,
who's very funny, and she does like these reaction videos to stuff, but it's
very G-rated,
and she loves watching her, and, you know, there's, you know, but I keep an eye
on what they're doing,
and I don't allow them to just start going crazy.
Yeah.
Because it's just, you just, you know, you never know.
I mean, one day, you just stumble upon an ISIS beheading video, and now you
have, you know,
your kids fucking waking you up in the middle of the night crying and screaming
because they
can't get this image out of their head.
It's terrifying.
It is.
To be on the other side of it, too, because when you're young, all you want to
do is throw
off the chains.
Oh, yeah.
And then all of a sudden, you're like in the position of putting the chains on.
Yeah, you kind of, it's like, how much freedom do you give them?
Like, how much do you talk to them about stuff?
How much do you let them figure the stuff out on their own?
You know, it's tricky, and it's a weird world because it didn't exist previous.
Like, it's not like we're dealing with something that we went through when we
were children.
There was no Google when we were children.
There was no, you know, LiveLeak.
You ever go on LiveLeak?
I know about it, but yeah.
Horrible videos.
You can watch a lot of car accidents and animal attacks and just wild shit.
Yeah, yeah.
That's not, you know.
Although I have been on that.
Yeah, I have stumbled into that.
But that didn't exist.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch something fucked up, you had a plan
for it.
Like, when we wanted to watch Faces of Death, somebody had to get the video.
One of our friends had to watch the door, you know, so like we were in the
basement.
One of the friends had to watch the door, make sure the parents didn't come
down.
And then we put it on the VCR, and we were ready.
Like, if someone came down, you'd pop that fucking tape out and hide it.
These kids today, all they have to do is just have a phone, you know.
And a lot of times kids are 11 and 12.
They have phones.
And 12-year-olds with a phone, I mean, they're going to start Googling people
fucking, people getting killed.
They're going to see the most crazy shit.
Have you seen this?
Your friend's going to say, have you seen that?
And then you're going to look on your phone.
There's no way to stop it.
There's no way to stop it.
Kids have wild fucking workarounds for like little restrictions.
My sneaky little fucking kid, you know what she did?
She screen recorded my wife when my wife went and put in a password for her
screen time.
Nice move.
Very nice move.
She handed her phone over to my wife.
My wife goes in and puts a password in for her screen time.
So she can only get an hour's worth of screen time a day.
And then my wife checks.
She's like, how the fuck do you have four hours of screen time?
What's going on here?
So she, and then she figured out that the, really?
The little monster.
Yeah.
Did you guys have public access when you were growing up?
Like public access TV.
I used to see some of that.
I remember that's my first exposure to Faces of Death was after 10 o'clock.
They could show whatever the fuck they wanted for whatever reason.
Really?
Not blatant porn, but porn.
Really?
I saw, that's what the Bud Dwyer video of him shooting himself in the face.
You saw that on TV?
To the 21 Guns Salute when I was going to bed and I was when I was like 10
years old.
What?
Yeah.
Huh.
No way.
And then this guy ended up, I was talking with some of my friends when I was
back at home in my reunion.
This guy was, we all knew about him when we were like 12, 13 years old, had a
show, painted up like an insane clown posse type character, and would have like
blood, girls, vaginas, lips, all sorts of wild shit.
Really?
Wild.
And it was just like, the government was putting it on technically because of
public access.
So in public access, there's no restrictions like there are with the Faces?
That's what I was asking.
I don't, I did not, you guys didn't have, that's like what Wayne's World was.
That's my only thing I knew growing up was like Wayne's World on the SNL was a
public access show, but then we actually had public access, and that's where
wild shit was happening after 10 o'clock.
I had a friend of mine who had a public access show.
My friend Larry Rapucci, who's a stand-up comic in, I think it was Larry's show,
but he was a stand-up comic in Boston.
We all did a public access show when we were like struggling comedians.
You did it too?
Yeah, I wore a dress.
I wore a dress and a wig, and I was like, we had like a dating show.
This is the wild guy that I would, this is from the 90s, I think.
I found it on YouTube, it still exists.
It's like very David Lynchian, man.
Dude, so, it's just so weird to watch now.
Damon Zex.
Yeah.
Oh, so he would, that's him on the right and him on TV?
Oh, so he really planned this out.
This was some weird shit.
Wow.
This is 96?
Again, he's doing coke, he's doing tampons, it's all, like again, I was a kid
when I was seeing this stuff.
Wow.
It's like, to me, it's not that strange.
Looks like Robert Smith in The Cure, man.
Someone found him, I don't know, I'm sure he's like on Facebook or he's
probably doing this stuff still.
Let's find him.
Well, he's going to find out now.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Wow, yeah.
Hardcore.
So he got away with this, this was all on...
Yeah, but he wasn't even the only one.
There was a clown called like Angsto the Clown that was like, I'm sure Red Band
knows about this stuff,
because he was a little bit older than me in the same area.
That's probably why he was probably watching the same shit.
Where were you brought up?
This is why, it might make sense now.
Where were you brought up?
In Columbus, Ohio.
Huh.
Wow.
I mean, and then looking back into some of the stuff that was happening there,
it kind of makes a little bit of sense,
but if this wasn't going on everywhere, that's sort of like strange to me.
I never saw it in Boston, but I might have been out of the loop.
It might have existed, I just wasn't aware of it.
But I thought the regulations were across the board if you were broadcasting.
I didn't think that public access was different.
Is it because it's local?
Maybe, and then there's like free speech laws that we're getting into.
I don't, again, I was a kid, so I have no idea.
I was just, I was excited to see it.
I just, I haven't, it's not, it won't be available until spring, but for the
last couple of years,
I've been working on a book, you know, like this is the thing I thought I'd
never do.
I used to be annoyed by people who thought about their kids before I had kids,
but I have a book that I just finished called Outdoor Kids Inside World.
It's about, you know, kids in nature, raising kids.
And yeah, man, if you'd asked me, dude, like 10 years ago, I'd have been like,
no way I would do something like that.
But it's harrowing, man.
It's like scary.
What is scary?
Having kids.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Worried about them.
Just like, yeah.
And like trying to guide their, guide their experience, you know, and for me, I
don't know.
Yeah.
I've, I've found that, um, that, that, you know, exposure to nature,
experiences in nature,
understanding nature is like winds up being an avenue of approach that I have
with them
that works for both of us.
It's like a common language, you know?
But yeah, man, it's, it's, it's, it's terrifying.
And then the, and then the, the feeling of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy that you
get of things
that meant that when you were young, things that meant a lot to you and felt
very authentic
to you, like freedom, freedom to consume what media you wanted, freedom to talk
to who you
want to talk to, freedom to go where you wanted to go, um, that later you're in
a position where
you're, um, denying, denying someone something that you really wanted in an
honest way when
you were young.
Yeah.
Um, I had a conversation with Jonathan.
It's a push and pull, man.
Jonathan Haidt about that.
You know, he talks about the, the concept of free range kids about he lets his
children
wander, it was Jonathan Haidt, right?
Was, right?
The coddling of the American mind.
Um, he lets his kids wander around New York city.
Like he lets his kids walk home from New York city.
And you know, he's talking about one time his, uh, his kid got a little lost
and they were
really, really scared.
You know, it was like they were trying to find them and it's like a terrifying
feeling,
but that ultimately the development that the child receives from being able to
navigate
the world on their own is very valuable, but there's a risk.
And so you like have to weigh this risk versus reward.
And the opposite of that is people do helicopter, helicopter parent.
And we know how that turns out, right?
That's not good.
When you overly coddle your kid and your, your, your kid is not exposed to any
sort of
adversity or any sort of danger or any sort of adventure or any sort of, uh,
independence
that it could be stifling.
And then it takes a long time for the child to develop outside of that parental
environment.
Once they become free there, like there's different kinds of kids, right?
There's kids that grow up in bad neighborhoods with very little parental
guidance and they're
18.
And then there's kids who grow up completely coddled and completely protected
and insulated
and they're 18.
And then they run into each other.
Totally different life experiences.
Yeah.
And I was the former, you know, I was the kid that didn't have a lot of
guidance when I was
a kid and I was a kind of a lock key, a latch key kid.
I'm glad you just used that word.
Yeah.
It's a common word, right?
Common phrase.
Well, apparently it's not.
No.
I grew up with that word.
Yeah.
Latch key.
I was commenting on how my wife in her early years was a latch key kid.
And she's like, I haven't heard that word in a long time.
I'm like, that used to be a word, dude, like latch key kid.
Yeah.
You got a key.
You got a key and you get, you came home and no one was home, you know, when I
was 12
years old.
Yeah.
Just, I mean, it wasn't like five days ago.
Someone was pointing out to me that that word doesn't get used anymore.
Yeah.
Well, kids don't, I mean, it's kind of a different thing.
You don't really see 12 year old kids walking home with a key and opening up
their front
door anymore.
I mean, I think about my children and how young they are and I can't imagine
them doing
that, but I did that.
And I think that the independence that comes from being a kid who walks home
from school
by yourself and opens your door by yourself and, you know, and then my parents
didn't
come home until, you know, whatever it was, they worked till five and then they
were home.
I was out.
I would go places.
No one knew where the fuck I was.
There was no phones.
There was no cell phones, you know?
Yeah.
I could leave them a little post-it note or something like that.
It's been interesting to watch as a parent, the way that you, that different
parents find
what dangerous things they're comfortable with.
Friends of mine, like my friend Kelly lives in New York, right?
And she'll talk about, and we have similar mindsets about exposing kids to risk
and her
kids will take the subway, right?
Or whatever, home.
And to me, where I live and having not had kids that age in the city, like, I
can't picture
what she's getting at.
You know what I mean?
I go like, wow, that seems just kind of like crazy.
Yeah.
How old are the kids?
You're responsible.
I'm trying to think, how, 14 and nine or 10, somewhere in there.
And I don't know if they've been at it for a while.
But either way, like, things that some people would regard, things that people
from the outside
would regard as, like, hard to picture, you know?
Yeah, so, but at the same time, I expose my kids to, like