Rev Left Radio - Papa & Boy: Children, Parents, and the Cruelties of Class Society

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Shawn and Aaron from Srsly Wrong join Breht to discuss their brand new animated series exclusively on MEANS TV, "Papa & Boy". Topics discussed included 90s cartoons, themes of class and hierarchy in Papa & Boy, childhood from the child's perspective, the complexities of parenting under capitalism, the limitations of the nuclear family, cycles of abuse and trauma passed down from parents to children, our own relationships with our fathers, non-violent parenting, and much, much more! Check out Papa and Boy at MEANS TV: https://means.tv/pages/papaandboy Check out Srsly Wrong podcast: https://srslywrong.com/ Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have the one and only Sean and Aaron from Seriously Wrong. Back on the show, this time to discuss their brand new animated series for Means TV titled Papa and Boy. I just, as I was telling them before we started recording, watch the entire five episodes with a little, I had a little sneak peek, you know, and watch the first five episodes. It's really funny, very interesting, and knowing it comes from this skit that they were doing in their podcast for a long time is also very interesting. I've been listening to Seriously Wrong for many years. So, Sean, Aaron, welcome back to Rev Left. How are you guys doing today?

I'm doing really good. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, awesome. Happy to be here. Great to be talking to you again. Absolutely, yeah. It's been a while, but we always make sure I think at least once a year we talk to each other. So that's good.

so yeah let's get into it that the new animated series for means tv entitled papa and boy and the tagline for the show is quote an original animated series for means tv about hierarchy class and the fraught relationship between children and the cruel societies that they inhabit so the first question is how do you guys weave these themes into the show and do papa and boy stand in for broader groups or classes yeah so in papa and boy stand in proper groups or classes yeah so in Papa and Boy, they live in a system, the Fatherson system, a father's in society, which is a sort of parallel to our society in a lot of ways, a capitalist society, where they have this, these deeply entrenched ideological ideas about the naturalness of fathers ruling over their children

and where fathers are kind of an oppressor class and where boys are a oppressed subordinate class. And there's a historical tension between these two groups. And that was one of the things that we thought was really funny that we wanted to explore was the idea, you know, hitherto, the history of hitherto all existing society is the struggle between Papa and Boy. That was the idea that sort of spun Papa and Boy from a recurring segment on our show about a father and a son debating various issues into something that has this grandiose political context. So the themes are, they're woven into the show because it's what we find funny. And we also kind of just stumbled into, we're playing around and we stumble into these weird parallels and

then we explore them. But yeah, at a base level, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of hierarchical dynamics that you can project onto the Papa and Boy relationship in different contexts, the most obvious one being like a class war dynamic. Yeah, we just tried to follow what we found funny. Yeah, I think with the fraught relationship between children and the cruel societies they inhabit, by making the core sort of class struggle of this society between papas and boys, it also, I think, kind of really makes clear this aspect of the ideology of society that children are born into a pre-existing world that already exists. We children are, children are constantly being born into this capitalist society in our real world and have to be inculcated

into it, have to be shaped and molded so that they fit into and can operate within capitalist society and be given the ideological assumptions of capitalist society. And that's kind of the idea of the fraught relationship between children and systems that aren't necessarily built to work for them. And in this sort of cartoon world, it's, it's really that, that is, um, magnified to like a comical degree. With children in the world right now, they're inheriting this planet that's on fire that has, um, you know, we have this ecological crisis. We have a social crisis. And the children are coming up in this world, uh, in the real world. And they're inheriting this planet that is not only not made for them, but is on the, on the teetering on the brink.

of destruction. And that sort of existential situation of children inheriting a world like that is also kind of a through line, a deep inspiration for why we wanted to pursue the show. Yeah. Yeah, I really love the hilarity of that episode when you're talking about hitherto existing societies and how the bloody Papa emerges from history or even emerges from the boy, these boys are turned into these blood-soaked Papa.

I thought that was very funny, while also pointing to some interesting dynamics subtly, one of which I think is that the parent-child relationship is certainly the most unquestioned hierarchy. The hierarchy of tenant and landlord, capitalist and worker, the various other multitudinous forms of hierarchy that can manifest in society, many of which have over the last several hundred years, especially since the Enlightenment, but put under, you know, exceeding criticism. But the parental child one seems

like a different thing that is sacred in a way that the other ones aren't, is less susceptible to critique and is more assumed and more internalized as a sort of common sense than analyzed at all. And so that makes, for an interesting

dynamic on its face, but also it makes it easy to plug in various other forms of hierarchy, that manifest societally into the parent-child relationship. And it's also just the fact I listened to an episode by Dan Carlin who does a hardcore history.

He did a whole episode on child discipline through the ages. And it is absolutely the fact, the truth of the matter, that what we would call child abuse today, even flagrant, disgusting forms of child abuse, were taken as the norm of discipline and the authoritarian relationship was just taken for granted for all of human history.

And you do wonder, like, what do millennia of basically functionally abused children growing up into adults, creating history? Like, that is a rabid circle, cycle, if you will, in and of itself. And it kind of made me think about, you know, your show made me kind of think about that aspect of it as well, as you're sort of, you know, navigating modernity and the way that these relationships take place today. Yeah, I think because of those sort of, developmental nature of children, you know, they're born knowing basically nothing but having this intense ability to learn and also born extremely tiny and completely vulnerable and in need of

everything being given to them at birth. There's this, uh, sort of unquestioned nature, as you say, to the hierarchy. Like it seems obvious to most people that parents have to control their children, children, maybe not by any means necessary. We've kind of got away from that a little bit in the modern age. We do have some conception of child rights or like some things are abusive towards children. But on the whole, the idea that parents should have unquestioning command over their children is so deeply ingrained in society still today. And I think a lot of it is because people just were raised that way themselves, and also they can't imagine any other way of relating to their children, any other way of helping their children understand, you know, don't touch the hot stove.

You don't have to necessarily punish or control children to get them not to do that. You just have to help them understand why it's a really bad idea to touch a hot stove. Yeah, you don't have to burn them to, like, you don't have to like burn the kid as a punishment. because they touched the hot stove. The hot stove will handle that sort of feedback itself. But you want to prevent that ideally. But a really interesting thing that we found through working on the show and also on the podcast and exploring topics of child liberation is that this natural idea of hierarchy,

the parent-child hierarchy is not just something that's naturalized in that context, but that sort of archetype, that idea of the benevolent parent and the punished child, that logic is used in the logic of colonialism, racism, sexism, and workplaces, where bosses want to say that their workers are children, that their workers can't be trusted, that their workers need to be controlled and punished. And we used that naturalness, the quote-unquote naturalist of the parental relationship, as justification for all of these different hierarchical things. And the more we played around with these ideas,

the more we found kind of these interesting commonalities where the command control and punish relationships of the household are reflected also on society. And we think that they don't really work very well in the household either. And that it's better to have, you know, to the highest degree possible, respectful, communicative relationships with children

that treat them as full human beings to the highest degree possible. But, yeah, it is really fascinating to look at the history of this kind of stuff. And it was kind of something we stumbled into just from joking around. But there's really, really rich political connections here between this parent-child dynamic and in the hierarchical dynamics of wider society. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, when you talk about the dynamics in colonialism, you know, there's the idea of the white man's burden, this infantilizing idea of people specifically.

racialized people in the global south in the workplace you know one of the things that always sucks the most in my experience about working any job really is the infantilization of the worker um and and the replication in a lot of ways of the hierarchy of the school room you know reliving and re-manifesting in the workplace i mean even the ideas of like pizza party time and you know oop you guys were good this week we get ice cream at the end of it it always struck me as like we're full grown fucking adults what are we doing here you know yeah how What about a salad party. I appreciate nourishing my body.

I want a cost of living raised so that I can afford my own food all of the time whenever I need it, not just a pizza party. Exactly. Yeah, but there is this kind of like, it's like dangling the keys in front of the workers. Like, oh, you like this, right? Oh, pizza. Yay. Woo. It's like the assumption that they're, yeah, children.

Absolutely. All right, well, let's shift to the animation itself. I'm just kind of interested because in the title card, if that's what you call it, I got like a lot of Renan Stimpy vibes. You even, and one of the episodes used like a little SpongeBob, 10 minutes later, interlude little shot. There's a general 90s cartoon sort of aesthetic here. So what cartoons did you guys watch as kids and what cartoons in animation style inspired or influenced Papa and Boy? Yeah, the title cards definitely have the John Kay, Renan,

Stimpy vibe, but thanks to our incredible title card artist, Matt, who's an old friend of mine who came in to do the show. And the general aesthetic of the show, definitely like Saturday morning cartoons was kind of the feeling that we were going for. There's also a bit of a home movies influence that were also animated and flash like home movies was, which is the great Brendan Small Show on Adult Swim, which also has kind of a mumblecore thing that we sometimes get into. do. Early on, I remember thinking that I wanted the kind of vibe of Calvin and Hobbs,

although the art style is very different from that. I just, I liked the way that there's like this tall and short duo like going on adventures together. And that was like an early aesthetic influence when trying to design the show. I can't remember. Is that a Simpsons thing? there's a there's a bit of common sense in the animation world that your characters are going to be much more they're going to have a lot more staying power their designs if they're recognizable in silhouette and i think that played a role partially in the designing of them shan did all the designing and a good chunk of the animation i wasn't as involved in that side of it but boy having that little propeller hat and papa's mustache and the pipe and stuff it helps make them look unique in the even in silhouette you can tell who these characters are and I think that's something a bit of like common sense that came from the Simpsons if you look at the Simpsons characters they're all recognizable in silhouette and yeah I think in terms of what cartoons I watched as a kid Simpsons was really big up there and then some of the

adult swim shows I guess they were on Teletoon in Canada undergrad's Mission Hill home movies Boondocks. These were all shows that I really liked, kind of in high school, getting out of high school, that I kind of set the, what I thought of is like a really good funny cartoon. Yeah. Another one I just want to throw in there as Clone High is like my favorite cartoon show of all the time. When I was a kid, it blew me away. And I still think that there was a real influence on my sense of humor from that, although the aesthetic style of pop and boy is pretty different. see I've never I'm a 90s kid I was born in 89 I assume both of you are roughly around my my same age and I think there probably is a difference in the cartoons we got between America and Canada because I don't think I've heard about clone high oh yeah clone high was it was co-produced between MTV and Teletoon which is our like local Canadian cartoon network so we we had I think we probably had more clone high in our lineup here because our local it was like Cannes financed partially by the Canadian government but it was on MTV which is a more obscure cartoon a more obscure place for cartoons but yeah definitely check it out my my really really really really funny show um just an incredible show i'm here to talk about my show but that is seriously one of my favorites i could do a reboot

of it stew oh damn i'll definitely check that out well another thing that i wanted to talk about is that you know i've been a fan of seriously wrong for for many many years uh as we've talked about in a previous episode before I even started Rev Left or at the very beginning when I started Rev Left. I sent you guys an email. It had to be in 2017, if not earlier, about, you know, doing the collab and, you know, ever since then we've been kind of entangled with one another's projects and sort of encouraging one another, and I've always loved that. But all throughout the history of your podcast, but especially as of late, you've really focused on children, on their experiences, on their perception of the world, on their liberation. What do you find so interesting

here and how do you tap into children in their inner lives and the dynamics between parents and children because if I'm not mistaken, neither of you have children of your own. Yeah, I think you're right that it's been a part of the show very early on. I think our third episode ever was partially about spanking children and that spanking children is a really weird, wrong thing that is hyper normalized in society where like I was just getting into a lot of. of arguments online being like, no, there's actually a lot of evidence that like spanking kids doesn't, it might make them more obedient in the moment, but it has all these other negative effects and there's research showing it makes them less obedient in the long term. And it has causes issues

in parent-child relationships and just getting all these people being like, oh, no, I was spanked and I'm fine. Or like you, you'll get it when you have a kid. You'll know that it's the only way to get them to listen and stuff and that just it was a big like thing for me that I was like this is wrong and like people just think that it's okay and also the way children are treated in school which we've already kind of alluded to of being like hyper-controlled like when they can go to the bathroom when they can drink water what what time you can eat how long you can play for what you have to read and think about every moment being hyper regulated and like my experiences in school being like that actually really sucks and like I don't think it helped me learn very well. So the the liberation of

children or the position of children in society was something that just has always been of interest to me as part of like what we need to think about politically. And I think it's just because also like people's childhoods are the most formative years of their life. Your childhood experiences shape you for the rest of your lives. So it seems like just a really obviously important part of what politics should be looking at, the experiences of children and the adults that we're training them to become. Yeah. And another piece of it too is I think that we as adults were really like conditions.

to be afraid of being childish or to be caught being naive and like we're we're I sort of think of people as you know like all adults as being these these like big kids who are like pretending to be adults on some level like we are shaped by these early childhood experiences and part of that thing is we we sort of inculcate children with this idea that to be childish is somehow a negative thing that we use the term childish as a term for derision for all these negative things like being inexperienced or being emotional and stuff like that. So adults have we have the sense of shame that we might be children, even though we know we're not.

We have the sense of shame that that we might be children. So we that's, and I think that that really gets to like why often people are really trying to like prove how serious and adult they are and all these different means. For example, people are always really afraid to admit that they're learning something. they always want to pretend that they already knew. And if they learn something, it always happened, like, off camera when you're not talking to them. Like, if you have an internet debate with someone, they're never like, oh, I just learned this for the first time. They'll, like, debate it to the end.

And then, like, a couple weeks later, you'll see them using your arguments as if they always thought it. I think that sort of thing is, it's really tied into people sense that they're, to be childish as negative. to be naive as negative, and that we need to be these very serious stoic adults. And so our show has always had, in addition to that early, there's an early strong influence on the anti-school stuff and the anti-spanking stuff back in 2014 when we started.

But also we were really playing around with play and like how we get playful on the show and we do these little sketches and we improvise and we get goofy and sometimes we're wrong and sometimes we're learning things. and we became fascinated with enacting that on the show in a way. And over time, these things, I don't know, they started to become threaded together

in the way that I thought about politics and the world. And also, I think even it applies to children in a particular way, but even us adults who we've inherited this world, it's out of our control, there's all these things happening that are far beyond our decisions. And then we have to sort of position ourselves within this inherited situation, and then start making steps towards making the situation better.

So we're taking responsibility for the situation, but we're not taking, we're not the cause of the situation. And that sort of dynamic is interesting to me. I think it's a universal thing in leftist politics. But there's a particular metaphor in how that applies to children. So all that stuff is really fascinating to me, to us. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the shame and discomfort that you were mentioning around,

you know our own sense of being childish or really having an inner child and the attempts that the lengths we go to to sort of you know wrinkle over that or obscure that reality by putting on the social roles of serious adulthood and kind of squashing that that child within us I think a big a big reason is because that that inner child if you will is our most vulnerable part you know it is the part within us that is yeah deeply vulnerable in so many ways emotionally it's like that that that open heartedness there's like the deep softness at the core of our being that if we choose to open to it can be a profound even spiritual experience but a lot of times there's a lot of fear around touching that soft spot a lot of fear around looking that vulnerability directly in the eye and in the cases

of children where they had you know abjectly bad or even abusive um really Sometimes that that child within is a deeply traumatized a part of us that even to look at can be retramatizing in and of itself. And so I do think there's a lot of psychological elements to adults trying to even without even knowing that's what they're doing kind of distance themselves from their own inner child from their own sense of profound vulnerability. Yeah, absolutely. And I think in politics in particular, the tenderness that we would show towards. children, we should try to show to ourselves and to others and also the sense of play that children bring to the world. I think is something that we can really crucially try to grapple onto ourselves and use as a tool for political change. And I think that's one of the things

that's going on underneath the surface of Pop Envoy when you're watching it. There's a sort of tension between free play and these sort of outbursts of human individuality and this very rigid and stifling system trying to keep people in these boxes. Yeah, definitely. And just for what it's worth, because the argument, you know, when you get into these anti-spanking arguments or whatever is always, well, you know, you'll learn when you're a parent or whatever. And it's complete bullshit. I'm a parent of three kids. I have a seven-year-old and a 10-month-old right now, as well as a 13-year-old. And I've never, from the very beginning, I've been committed to nonviolent parenting. I'm not perfect at parenting. I lose my cool, you know, I do the, because I said so, shit, you know, that you guys poke fun of in the cartoon, but have never, laid my hands on my kids and there's no reason to. And in fact, my seven-year-old son is very, very sensitive, very emotional, you know, very vulnerable. And me and my wife, we often talk about, like, imagine if he was put into a family that did do corporeal punishment, that did hit him when he's having these strong, overwhelming emotions that he can't control because he's a fucking

seven-year-old. And then just to start smashing your hand into that little precious child body to try to get them to act a certain way or to stop crying or whatever the fuck. It is like just so insanely barbaric and that is from a perspective of somebody who has kids. You know, it's just I can't imagine laying my hands on my children and I understand that people were raised differently and like my parents and their generation were differently and they're not bad people. They just assume this is what you're supposed to do because it's what my parents did and that's what their parents did.

But we really do got to break that cycle. And I think some of the stuff that you touch on in the show, even if obliquely, is this sort of passing down of trauma, the passing down of, you know, his dad did this and his dad was like that and his dad was like that. And that, that I think is a really important thing to, to kind of focus on how exactly trauma gets passed down by traumatized people, you know, to onto their children who then repeat those cycles because that's all they know. It's something that is not necessarily fully explicitly pointed at in your show, but definitely hinted at and gestured toward. Would you agree with that? Yeah, definitely. It's, when we're,

joking around in this space and exploring these ideas, things keep on bubbling up from hierarchical society and parenting and stuff. I think in particular, in episode three, we really do try to underline that circularity of it and that like we're seeing the pop-on-the-show is not just an authoritarian, like, cruel parent. He's also a slightly he's he's a he's a vulnerable kind of pathetic extension of this system that he he himself faced these unfair systems and then he replicates those systems because he he wants to fit in that he wants to do things right he wants to avoid outside criticism he wants to get that outside praise um and boy is attempting to to break the cycle on that and that's sort of the tension of the

show the tension of their relationship and i also think it's it adds the complexity because throughout the show, it's clear that the Papa, you know, does love his child, right? He does spend so much time with this boy. He's trying to do things, you know, given the insane society that he lives in and the insane conditioning that he was put under. There is a sense that it's not just pure abusive cruelty. There's like, I do love you and I am ultimately doing this because I think it's the right thing to do, even though the actions I'm taking are explicitly the wrong thing to do. And I think that complication is present in almost every parent, you know. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think that people do these kinds of things to their children because they're scared themselves, and they've experienced this cruel world already, and they have seen what it can do to people, and they want to almost protect their kid in a way by preparing them for a cruel world, by showing them that they have to, they, they, showing,

them a version, a smaller version, hopefully of what that cruel world can do to them to toughen them up or prepare them for this society. But it ends up, yeah, reenacting those cycles and just perpetuating the system. Yeah. Yeah, we wanted, I mean, one of the things that we find really funny in comedy is the sort of thoughtlessness and brutality of oppressors, of people in these dominant positions they get their own sort of logical justification for their place in it and they're kind of indifferent to or unaware

of what they're actually doing and we really wanted to explore that with pop of the character while at the same time we didn't want to push it too far we wanted him to remain a sympathetic person that we can sort of see ourselves in in this complex and horrible environment so yeah we tried to strike a balance there

between the brutality and, you know, ignorance and the way that he's replicating these systems, but also that tenderness, because ultimately, like, we're critiquing these systems of hierarchy because we believe in an endorsed tenderness as a political perspective, a political. Ideally, the system would not be so cruel and it would not be so heartless. It would have part. It would be tender. It would not be cruel. And we wanted to demonstrate that that exists within these people that he,

He's not an automaton of the system. He's a middle manager who's enforcing these rules onto his kid because he thinks that's what he has to do. And then he also is someone who, his connection, the connection between Papa and Boy in the show is stronger than the system at points. But there's this tension there. And that's what we find interesting. Although I should say also, like when we're writing the show and we're setting it up and we're figuring out how everything, we're really aiming on like how can we keep this funny the whole time but this is the kind of stuff that we think about so it just naturally sort of seeps in like we never set out to make

a particular political argument except to explore these characters and scenarios we laid out but there's between the things that are kind of explicit and the things that are hinted at I think there's a lot politically going on that people can chew on here yeah yeah absolutely and not not the least of which is this you know dystopian advertisement soaked background you know that they live in which is very much of course like our like our own constantly being uh you know advertised to in a million different or from a million different directions and you can't even drive down the street without the you know the blaring signs and the neon advertisements selling you one thing or another um so that that background sort of

dystopian ad so capitalist you know insanity is is definitely there and kind of sets the sets the context and the pace a little bit. That's a perfect example of something that was just really funny to do. And also, like, useful in storytelling to be, you know, advertisements. You can tell people a lot about the world by, like, what's being advertised in the assumptions behind the advertisements that just kind of, yeah, came about naturally, but also works so well with all the political points being made. There's a bit of postmodernism there in that, you know, many postmodern novels in particular

would play with that, you know, advertising in the 90s, for example, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, others in that genre, they would, you know, punctuate their stories with a million different ways, the absurdity of advertising or the absurdity of modern society, not as an explicitly like, hey, we're taking this as an object of derision, but as like the background ambient noise, in fact, in white noise, Don DeLillo's white noise, it's very prevalent. like the narrative will just break into like some chatter from the radio or the TV in the other room selling you some shit and it is i don't know if that was a conscious influence on on you guys when you're making the show but i definitely see a bit of that 90s postmodernism find its way in if if you guys agree with that or not i think i see it there yeah i'm i'm not super familiar with those uh people you know like i know the names but i haven't read their work so but the way you're described

it makes perfect sense. Yeah. I think for us it felt like a good way to be able to flush out the sort of lore and context of this dystopian Fatherson capitalist hellworld. But I think the connection that you're drawing sounds true. Although I own a David Foster Wallace book. I have not read it. Yeah, well, some of them are incredibly fucking long, so I don't blame you. But a natural question that arose when I was watching this and enjoying it is who is the intended audience it's it's somewhat unclear in a very interesting way like there are like cartoons that are obviously made for adults like south park there are cartoons obviously made for kids there are cartoons that kind of walk the middle line like adventure time or um a gumball i forget the full name my son loves it but the gumball cartoon for

example there's like hidden adult jokes but it's primarily for kids and i was thinking like you know could i watch this show with with my seven-year-old's son and i definitely could and we would find it interesting and it's sometimes shocking um you know the revolution episode in particular would be quite a hoot to to experience with him but i'm just wondering if you even conceptualized that as a question or if you just made your shit and like whoever likes it likes it um or if you had an idea of an intended audience in your mind when you were making it yeah i think the way the show kind of flowed out from the sketches we did on the show and then turning it into like full sketch radio drama episodes.

I don't think in the beginning we were thinking about that too much because I assume almost everyone who listens to our podcast is an adult and just kind of assume that the audience is adults. But when you're making that transition into the animation medium, the question does kind of naturally arise of like, is this something that kids are going to be able to watch as well? And we did think about that and talk about that. a little bit. And what we, I think, arrived on was that we, uh, we're just going to keep making

the series that we had been making already, uh, but with an eye to saying that, yes, this is something you could watch with your kids if you wanted to do. Now, there's probably going to be some things that you'll have to explain to them or like questions they might have. It's, uh, it's not like the most child's, it's not completely directed at children, as you say, but, but I do think that it's something that kids would find really interesting and stimulating in different ways? Yeah, there's a few things that happen or things that are discussed, that very sort of like insurrectionary ideas towards parents that you wouldn't see on like a typical children's show. So, yeah, like parental guidance suggested maybe, especially as you get into the second half to the series.

But, yeah, we, well, the adult, the, the, the Papa and Boy radio show, the radio drama series that we've been doing that that show gets fairly adult um at points and depicting violence and war um and uh in the radio version i'm more comfortable saying this is probably this is something more for adults but yeah in the in the cartoon show um we we did make the conscious choice to not go so far as to exclude families and children um and we think that there's a couple different layers that the show works on. So like our primary audience would be people who, you know, the same type of people who listen to our show, which is very politically oriented people on the left who like comedy and like to think about, have like that interplay between jokes and also cognitive concepts. That

was kind of who we were writing for our imagined audience. But I think we also, we kept it within reasonable bounds that I feel comfortable letting parents know that. I think children can watch it. I think even young children could watch it. There's nothing, the things that there's no, there isn't excessive gore, there's no sexuality. There's almost no swearing. There's maybe one swear.

I don't think there's any swearing. I don't think so. Yeah. So it's, it's, I mean, the way it works in our society as parents make these decisions for our own children, but if I was the dictator of children in the world, it would be mandatory for all of them to wash it. I think there's something we can get out of it.

And at the end of every episode, you do this little lessons thing, which I kind of thought was interesting and would be useful if a kid was watching. But the lessons are from the Papa and the Boy, but from their perspective, and oftentimes the lessons that they draw a clash with one another. Why did you decide to throw in that little lessons thing at the end? I'm not sure why. We were brainstorming around because in the Papa and Boy radio drama series, we did this fake after show called What Will Popper? Papa and Boydue next, where there's fictional people talking about how much they love this show and trying to guess what would happen next, because it's kind of like a mystery drama, the radio version.

And we wanted something kind of equivalent to that, like a place that we could land at the end of every episode. And we took influence from Sailor Moon there. And Sailor Moon, the American dub, had this like cheesy lesson at the end where they're like, it's always important to support your friends and that sort of thing. But when we were writing it, we found that it became a really, good place to underline an aspect of the episode, make a political point hit harder, or underlie attention between Papa and Boy as a storytelling device. It was something that, like,

as soon as we discovered it, we were like, yeah, okay, this is, this is part of the formula here. Yeah, it also became a place where the sort of political messages could be, yeah, really put an underline on it and have the boy character speak a bit more articulately about the, I guess, boy perspective in general because one of the things that was different with doing the show versus the radio series is we have to compress everything quite a bit more and we also wanted to shrink the world a little bit and have it more focused just on this one papa and boy pair and like if you look at the first episode a very very simple story of a papa wanting to get his boy to take a bath and the boy is saying no so he punishes him

And it's in the lesson of that episode that you get the boy making this really explicit political point about how the Papa's at the top of the advertising industry are working both sides of both Papa's and boys for their own benefit and stuff. And yeah, we ended up finding it a really stimulating way to add a very direct political message and to get more of this boy perspective into the episodes. Yeah, and that's also where Papa explains why you should have a bath, because we thought that we have a responsibility to the children of the world. They're watching an episode that's about this dispute about whether or not to have a bath. And we want to make sure that we're giving parents the tools to have that conversation with their children. So having Papa explain that actually baths are important in that context and be right. It's something that we, not every episode, but it's something that we tried to give a shout out to when we recognize, like you actually probably should eat your vet. vegetables. So maybe we'll give that a mention that like eating vegetables is nutritious and that's why

we eat them. But there's kind of a, you know, Papa will never tell boy actually why to do these things in the show. But as a learning tool and as part of the overall picture of this little world, we wanted to try to include that a little bit. Yeah. And I think when, everything is important. Absolutely it is. Yeah. And it's also funny in the show that I noticed like when the conversation gets to a point where Papa no longer has adequate answers. His, his almost, his turning point is to say, because I said so. And ultimately, that's the end of discussion, you know, no more questions. And he turns up the radio in one instance. And I thought that's very funny. Didn't you hate that when you were a kid? Like, wasn't that the ultimate? Like, if my parents

deployed that because I said so on me, it was like dropping a nuclear bomb on my social, like, my childhood consciousness. It was like, it was the, it was so horrible. And, and also there's just this feeling of like wanting to debate or understand it and just getting this raw this wall of raw power that you can't do you just have like that means the conversation is over it was so so unfair so yeah we we tried to take some influences in both the radio show and in the animated series on what were the things that we as children were most unsettled by in the parenting child dynamics And because I said so is near the top of the pile for me, because I'm the type of person that I really want answers to questions, like, why should I eat vegetables? And if you give me a good answer, then I will eat them, even as a child.

Yeah, that's funny because I even have a little bit of empathy for the parents on this one because, you know, I've certainly been in a position where I'm explaining and trying to be, you know, as patient as I can. And then eventually, you know, it comes out of me too. It's like, because I said so, man, just please, you know. And it's like when the parent has been backed into a corner and there's nothing else to say or do, it's like, because I'm the parent and I simply said so, please listen to me. But ultimately, I think your analysis is right. It is this brick wall. And from the child's perspective, from their, you know, conscious point of view, it is very unfair.

And it's dismissive. And it's just like, well, that's not giving me any help in navigating the world. It's not helping me understand the dynamics of what's going on here. It's just brute authoritarianism. that can be very stifling as well. So it's kind of tough on, I see it from both sides a little bit there. Yeah,

I can definitely see moments where you kind of need to do something like that. But I think there's always opportunities even afterwards to, because it's one thing that because I said so in the moment, if there's like you got to do something now or there's like a time crunch where the emotions are wearing them, but it's like you can still explain why to eat vegetables later or whatever. Like you have the conversation once tempers are down. Yeah, and Papa and Boy, the animated series, if we approach it as a guide to parenting,

I think we're going to be let down. Fair enough. We've been approaching the youth liberation topic through a series of episodes on our podcast recently. And it is, these are really complex questions. And I do sympathize with parents who are put in tough positions by a variety of things. And like, yeah, everyone has bad days. Everyone uses tactics for interacting with their children, which are less than the perfect ideal, heavenly Christ-like parenting that we'd all probably prefer to be able to always channel. I think, too, a lot of the time, like, talking about the rights of children or child liberation, sometimes people come down too hard on parents.

And maybe that's something that our show and the way it's set up with this Papa Boy dynamic is kind of plays into to some extent. But I think in the real world, most parents are just trying to do their best. And they're also extremely limited by time, by the pressures of capitalism, of needing to earn money to make sure that there's a roof over their kids' heads and food in their kids' mouths, et cetera, that I can, I think it's very understandable why a lot of parents, make these mistakes or don't have the time or the energy to really put into self-development or parental development or trying to figure out different ways to approach all these gray areas that come up when you're raising kids. I think there's a real danger of putting too much blame on parents who themselves are just doing their best to navigate these hierarchical systems that we live in. Yeah, the father sin system is the real enemy here, not Papa in our show.

But I do like that point, too, though, like, you know, the imperfectness of parenting, but there's always the opportunity afterwards, after, you know, maybe there's a blow up or, you know, the parent loses their cool and snaps at the kid or, you know, the kid has a meltdown or whatever. And you didn't handle the situation perfectly or even up to the standards that you as a parent set for yourself. There's always that chance and that opportunity to go back later when people have calmed down on each side and have that meaningful conversation, that respectful, egalitarian conversation that open and honest communication with the child. And so even in those moments where as a parent, I fail to live up to even my own standards, I do keep in mind, like I can always

come back a few minutes later, sometimes a little longer, and have that deeper, you know, more fleshed out conversation that actually helps my child learn the ultimate lesson that was trying to be taught in that moment. And so for a parent that's always there. And so I like to stress that as well. Now I want to kind of bring you both in calmly and gently into my therapist's office and set you down on my psychoanalytic chair and ask you, what were your relationships with your parents like? And does any of that come into play here? Yeah, I think for me, it definitely, like, I've talked about this a little bit on our show before, but my mom was a small business owner. I guess still is a small business owner, I should say.

And she made me go to work all the time in the summer from when I was 12 years old on. And like when I was a kid that I experienced that as like the greatest injustice ever, like not being able to have summer times, feeling like I was being forced to work. It felt like the injustices of parents dominating children and the injustices of capitalism were made like very clear to me very early on through this, uh, uh, dynamic of my mom being like, oh, it's really great if I have my kids at the store helping me out there useful to have around or whatnot and teaches them things about earning money and, you know, I understand her perspective and why she thought it was a valuable thing for us to learn. but I really, really hated that. And I feel like it was a big influence on my politics and probably a big influence on why the child liberation question was a big part of how I think about the world and how I think about these political questions.

So for me, that's the biggest thing I can think of. Like I didn't have a super strained relationship with my parents. I think overall they did pretty good job. But that particular aspect of it, that one injustice, I think, really, yeah, marked to my politics. Yeah, I don't think there's not much direct influence on the show for me. But I did, I had a strained relationship with my father growing up. And it seems like saying that, like the natural thing would to be like, oh, so that's reflected. And that's why you did Papa and boy, you're dealing with these issues or something.

but really in the radio show and stuff and in the cartoon show we were always playing with these archetypes like I remember Dan Harmon co-creator of Rick and Morty on one of his podcasts he said that he thought that the most touching and impactful story possible for him and this probably has to do with his own personal life is the tension between father and son and the appeals to recognition of the father he was really moved by that And I remember that having an influence in the sense of like our original radio plays, our radio dramas, more than my specific relationship with my dad, although my relationship with my dad is really great now. There is one part in the radio series that takes direct influence from my dad and my relationship with him, which is episode four of the radio series. there's this smoking papa my dad is a smoker who smokes inside with the windows closed and I can tell them all day

that's not something you should do and that he's going to pay dearly for it and we kind of blew that up into a plot of the episode and also something from that too which is it's exaggerated like I feel bad to tar my dad with this because it's not actually reflective

of how he treats me at all but I did have this kind of a sense of like, my dad is so into his own shit that I could tell him anything. I could tell him that the, that I was just crowned king of the world. And he'd be like, oh, that's cool. Anyways, check out this old car that I found on Craigslist. Isn't that a great deal? So we kind of, I had that sense, but it's not.

I've told my dad about big things in my life and he didn't do that. That was just my projection based on him loving to talk about cars so much. but yeah so in episode four there is some direct processing of my relationship with my dad there and my fear that he'll he'll die from smoking and from not taking his health seriously and stuff like that is reflected in that episode but overall I think we're really focused more on archetypes because the show really evolved from us yeah doing these sketches in the episodes and like when we started doing those it wasn't because we were thinking necessarily about our own relationships with our parents.

It was just like, what's a fun little situation we can put ourselves in? What are some roles we can play? We can step into to explore these ideas in a different way. And like a parent explaining something to a child, a child rejecting their parents' explanation or yelling back at them or credulously believing something ridiculously they're telling them, there's a whole bunch of really interesting things you can do with that parent-child dynamic.

And we're both guys, so it easily just kind of flowed into father-son most of the time. We're playing these father-son games all the time. And it just kind of really grew out of that. But I think, yeah, kind of necessarily as you're exploring those things over time, you bring in elements from your own experience. Sure. My dad recently died of alcoholism at the age of 55 a few months ago. And it was really a deep lesson for me, just his entire life,

because he actually is the perfect example of somebody who was stunted and crippled really from abuse he suffered as a child both in the form of physical abuse and like weird punish like over punishments like you know you're seven eight nine years old you did something bad you know your punishment is to go eat in the dark laundry room with the dog on on the floor right shit like that and then he was also sexually abused by his pediatrician and so he lived a life where obviously alcoholism helped deal with the profound pain and hurt at the center of his being, but also his inability, his deep need for love, but his inability to do it in the proper way. So he was somebody that got married and divorced five times.

And it was so clear to me that his inability or his trouble with women, and he would often be unfaithful and move on very quickly, is like he wanted to be loved so badly. He wanted that love that he never got in childhood, but he didn't know how to give to himself and he couldn't find it by you know searching through through validation from from women either sexually or romantically and so it's so clear that that has a huge role and that shaped who he was and then as I come into my own as a father you know my son my last my latest son he's 10 months old now was born a week after my dad died and so these these moments are very concentrated for me and it's like it's my responsibility now to kind of break this cycle

and to see it so clearly and to see what it did to my dad and then to just like every fucking day wake up and say i'm going to make sure do everything i can in my power to break that that cycle and give my sons in particular but all of my kids a different you know a different shot than he got so yeah i think that's that's really a wonderful way to approach it and yeah i'm sorry to hear about your dad passing and all that stuff that's horrible uh yeah and i i do hope that if i get to be a parent someday that i also am able to break the cycles and be a better parent to my kids than I was parented by. And that's actually perfect for this next question, which is, are either of you interested

in any way becoming parents in your life? Why or why not? Yeah, I definitely am. It's not really on the horizon for me currently, but I would like to make that happen. I think I'd really like to be a dad. I would like to as well. And it is on the horizon for me because my partner is pregnant right now, which I actually said publicly before right now, but I just can't. Wow. Yeah, no. I, uh, yeah, no, that's, that is true. And it's a Rev. Left Radio world premiere. I just couldn't, I couldn't, uh, get through that question with that, with keeping the secret any longer. Because I've known for a long time. But yeah, early, early in 2023, I shall, uh, shall have kin to, uh, experiment with discipline.

I'm very excited to hear how that goes, but I'm sure in both of your cases, you'll both make wonderful parents because there are very few people in general, very few men in particular that think so deeply about the dynamics of parenting and what being a good parent is and what the rights and privileges of a child should be, you know, very few people think about it in-depth as both of you. So, yeah, I'm very happy for you. Congratulations. And, you know, if both of you become parents, I'm confident you'll be, you'll be wonderful fathers. Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, no, that's, that's really nice. Yeah, and I'll definitely, I'll try my, my best. But, yeah, it also just, I want to pick up on what you're saying

about these past historical cycles of trauma and your family experience, because I, that really resonates with me also in what I've learned about my family over time. And, like, part of, Part of my relationship with my dad has been really learning about what he went through and what previous generations of parenting have been like at different times. And my dad has this story, this horrible story of him, my grandfather being physically abusive in the house and my dad at the age of, I think, five, something like that, picking up a two by four and swinging it at his dad. and hitting him in the back of the head and cracking him in the back of the head as a small child,

to which required my dad to be taken out of the house for over a year because my grandfather was so angry with him at having done that and broken the hierarchy of the household in that way. And I feel so lucky that my childhood trauma around this kind of stuff extends to because I said so's. And the amount that I faced is so much smaller than what my dad in particular, but I think both of my parents faced. And that is, it's in the DNA of the show in one way or another that we're not teleologically moving to better and better parenting over time. But I definitely see big improvements and compared to the stories that I hear about the past. And also, like, I know lots of cool parents like yourself, Brett, like people who think about

this kind of stuff, who feel a sense of responsibility to their children that extends beyond putting food on the table, but nourishing a human life. And I see that as a trend that's increasing over time. So I'm really, yeah, I'm really grateful that, you know, our parents could overcome the things that they had to overcome and without putting it all onto us. Like, I'm glad I found out this story when I was already an adult instead of as a child, for example. Yeah, absolutely. And just to make it clear in the case of my own dad, he did go, he made sure that he didn't

pass down any form of abuse. So while he was, had his own issues, and I had a constant different array of stepmoms and step siblings, and he couldn't keep his marriage together. He ultimately succumbed to alcoholism. did make it a point to not pass down any cycles of specific abuse, sexual, physical, or otherwise. And maybe that's the best he could do. Maybe that is him, you know, doing the best he could do to break his cycle and then hand down something a little bit better to me that I could then turn into something even more beautiful for my children. So, yeah, our parents, as imperfect

as they sometimes may be, it does seem that in a lot of cases they did their best to kind of, you know, not pass down the worst shit that happened to them as kids. And we should all be grateful in that instance. Yeah, definitely. All right. Here's a question. I have one or two more and then we'll wrap it up here. And this is not on the outline.

So this is the sort of me springing it on both of you. But what is the biggest, most common or just maybe a mistake that jumps to mind that you think parents make when raising kids or that, in more particular, that fathers make when raising boys? So it could be small. It could be big. It could be somewhere in between. but any sort of common error that you think parents often make, even if they're not fully aware that they're doing it. One of the things that really interested us that started our,

the radio, the Papa and Boy Adventures radio series, was this concept of, and it turns out there's great descriptions of this in like Youth Liberation literature. Although it's just something we kind of came up through playing is, often parents will have a sense of who or what they want their kid to be. that overrides that child's own sense of free experimentation, play, and so on. And I think that is, I mean, I want to say that that is something that I want to be really conscious of myself is like putting on, like children don't exist to serve adults. They don't exist to play the roles that parents set out for them.

They don't, children are full human beings. They're part of a developmental trajectory towards adulthood and their own. own selfhood and personhood needs to be respected during that process. And I think in particular when it comes to father-son relationships in a patriarchal society, there are very rigid and strict ideas that are often put on boys by their parents, in particular their fathers, to meet these masculinist ideas, these sort of old-fashioned, quote-unquote masculine ideals. It takes a variety of forms, some of them more cruel or brutal than others. Like, for example, you know, parents trying to stop their kids from dressing the way that they want

or if they have an interest in something that the father thinks isn't masculine. I think that is like a real serious issue in how, like, patriarchal trauma is passed on through generations. And I think there's even micro versions of that that you can see. in broader context. I just think generally, like, I'm not, I'm not a parent, and I know that it's like sometimes the third rail for people to think critically about parenting or their own parenting or to be criticized.

And so I'm not criticizing anyone in particular. I don't know anyone in this category, but the idea that we're going to set out an entire path for a child instead of allowing them to freely, like, the blueprint parenting, putting a blueprint onto who your child should be and punishing them for not meeting that criteria, I think is a really, really toxic thing and a really, really common thing. Yeah, I think just really listening to your kids is important and like making sure that you understand where they're coming from and why. I think there's a lot of bad information or

or bad assumptions or incorrect assumptions out there about children and about why they do things and like this idea that kids are always just rebelling for the sake of rebelling or they're trying to be manipulative and like sure i think kids will experiment with lying or they'll experiment with just saying no for the sake of saying no especially when they're much younger but i think a lot of the time there's not a curiosity from parents on like who their child actually is and this is just tying into what Sean was saying about like not trying to shape them to be some particular thing but kind of allowing them to be who they are but I think that it oftentimes comes down to really trying to get to know your kids and their emotional experiences and not

projecting your own emotional experiences on to them and assuming that just because you're experiencing what they're saying as an attack or as something against you that might not be where they're coming from. So I think, yeah, trying to have a more gentle approach of really connecting to your kids and like making sure that they know where you're coming from and that you know where they're coming from it's the same thing as any other kind of relationship of really like making sure both people feel heard and seen and you can once you have that i think you can find solutions to a lot of problems much easier but you have to make space for each other in the relationship and in a parent-child relationship i think that uh responsibility for that comes down

on the side of the parent for the most part. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, both of those were great, great answers. I would just add my two cents is one of the things, and this is kind of off the exact question, but one of the things that I've learned with young children in particular, is to really, as a parent, to try to be very conscious of the fact that they have and they experience huge emotions

that they just simply have not had the time to learn how to cope with. And so when a child is screaming and a child is having a meltdown or that even the emotional valence is rage or anger or tantrum, that fundamentally the first impulse should be to try to cultivate compassion for them because they are absolutely biologically overwhelmed with a cascade of chemicals that they can't possibly understand much less control. And it's particularly amusing to me when parents want to be very strict with their children about this stuff, but they themselves, like all the adults we know, including ourselves,

have hard time dealing with our big emotions. And we're supposed to be veterans in this damn game. And still, you know, we succumb to sadness, to jealousy, to rage. You know, I throw tantrums even as a 33-year-old fucking adult. So the idea that kids should be anywhere near an adult with their capacity to regulate their own emotional tumult, I think, is an insanity that doesn't get questioned often enough. And I think the only real way to handle big emotions, you know, when you're talking about a certain age, even rage and tantrums, is with profound compassion. and the big thing that I try to do is not try to punish that explosion of emotion, but to try to explain and articulate how those emotions are totally natural.

You don't need to repress them, but you can't let those emotions make you hurt other people and you have to find ways to try to regulate those emotions. So if you have rage, that's fine. I don't want to pathologize the fact that you're feeling a very real, you know, genuine emotion, but you can't then, you know, break something in the house or physically, insult your mother or whatever, you know, you have to actually kind of now, like, let's sit down, let's calm down. Breathing techniques is great for this.

Let's try to come down to some level of homeostasis where there's a little bit more calm, and then we can talk about, you know, what's happening and how those emotions make you feel, et cetera. So that's just something I, it's like a little thing that I've always wanted to kind of put out there is like, you know, you have to understand how hard it is for even adults to control our emotions, much less children, and then just lead with compassion when that's the case. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, too, sometimes kids are having experiences that their parents might not understand.

Like, I think about autistic kids specifically when you mention meltdowns. And I think a lot of parents, when they experience autistic meltdowns for the first time, they can be quite intense and they can really, like, yeah, take that personally or just not be willing to really try to learn and understand what their kid is going through. And that, yeah, that can apply to a lot of things if your kids exploring their gender, doing other things that the parent might be nervous about just to really, yeah, try to to understand what they're experiencing and meet them on that level. I think that's so true.

Another thing that came to mind with that point, Brett, and I thought it was a really good argument. the I have memories like very very faded memories of these sort of like kind of ego battles with my parents that mirror the sort of ego battles that I would have as an adult within politics or my work life or something like that where there's this sort of like mono a mono vibe where people are like digging their heels in and starting to fight with each other and I was thinking about this and reflecting on this recently about how whatever goes on in my body that makes me like tense up when if I'm being criticized in a way that I think is unfair or that I'm being put in some sort of zero-sum conflict position. Like I feel like these are things that my body learned how to deal with in certain ways when I was a really young person. And I haven't experienced this from the parent's side.

So I'm hesitant to tell people what to do. but I know that internet debates that I've been in as an adult were shaped by ego battles that I had with my parents over toys when I was a child. And so that that context, I think it's worth thinking about it in the context of parenting because like we've been kind of circling around this point. It's like parents have the power, adults have the power over children. I think a virtue if you have power in a situation is benevolence, a virtue is to recognize when your strength, whether that's physical or intellectual or emotional

regulation, et cetera, so far exceeds your interlocutor that this is not a conflict. This is not, there should be no ego battle between young children and their parents, ideally, I think. And like, yeah, as the powerful person in a scenario, we should always try to show benevolence. And I think it's interesting. It makes me think like that it's actually kind of similar to other contexts where there's power dynamics. Like it's one of the fun things about Papa and Boys, all these parallels that sort of emergently show up. So I haven't really thought this through yet. So hopefully there's in a really weird implication. But like when a boss is having conflict with employees, there's a systemic power that comes with the boss's side of that equation. And there's such a high virtue and benevolence in resolving conflicts that way. I feel like that general principle of benevolence in power as a virtue as something I really want to underline more as a theoretical toolkit for like how to be a politically responsible and ethical person in the world.

Yeah, definitely. I love that. And I would also just say as the last thing to mention on this front is, you know, I really, being a parent has really shown me how just how difficult it is to be a single parent, because so much of effective parenting is made much easier with the ability to have like a good solid partner when one of you gets overwhelmed, one of you gets upset, especially with multiple kids. The other one can step in and you guys can kind of talk behind the scenes about, you know, cooperating and what's your approach to this, you know?

And it's really shown me how absolutely fucking difficult it is for any single parent out there to have to raise a child alone, especially lower income where you're pressed to the fucking wall in our capitalist society when it comes to paying your bills and just the daily grind of trying to exist and provide for your children as well as trying to then come home with a full tank of gas emotional patience and you know work through your children's problem it's fucking difficult and obviously a really solid partner helps but the bigger solution to that problem I think ultimately is a community is is going back or learning from evolutionary history in which you know, children weren't always isolated in the nuclear family, but had extended family,

had communities that helped raise children. In some instances, in some parts of the world, in some cultures, there's even a purposeful obscuration of who the actual father is so that multiple men in the community take on their responsibility and help out. And I think in our hyper-individualized, atomized, capitalist nuclear family society, when that nuclear family falls apart and all of that burden falls not only on one couple but one person. It is a monstrous burden indeed. And our society should be geared to having more compassion for those people and geared towards trying to alleviate that stress. Because doing it alone, I mean, it's almost an impossible job, you know, I mean, it's almost an impossible job already. But the people that have to do it alone

with little to no help from the broader society are really unsung heroes in my, you know, in my uh my estimation yeah yeah it just makes me think of like you know conservative arguments against uh social programs or like basically anything that helps provide people with the things they need to survive and the idea that like oh people won't have anything to do if you uh take away the necessity that they need to work or else they'll starve and it's just like people will exist in communities there will be children to raise there will be relationships to explore like it's just like it's so ridiculous that there won't be anything to do because there's so many things that need to be done in the social realm right now that just can't happen because

we're all on this capitalist treadmill constantly that um yeah capitalism really destroys community in so many ways and makes parenting among so many other things so much harder yeah well said and it's it's always nice to um you know we we we we in this very individualized society, we are always worried about asking for help being a burden, but I just want to underline and remind everyone that asking for help is actually a wonderful opportunity that you're giving someone else to feel good and be part of something. And I'd imagine when it applies to parenting, there's this feeling of asking for help with managing, raising children, there's got to be a real barrier bar to it because of all these

weird cultural ideas. But that is something, I feel fairly comfortable giving this advice to parents is like, don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it because other people value it as well. Like if you think of how great it makes you feel when you get the opportunity to help someone who really needs help. It's, it's, and we don't, we don't have those natural, kind of like, organic communities. I struggle with this around the village raising a child thing because it's, I'm worried about it being something like parents feeling like, oh, I'm supposed to have a village for this child. I'm failing as an individual.

But like, that's the whole point is that you're not, you can't, like, you shouldn't think of yourself failing as an individual like that. But with the context we find ourselves in our inherited situation, it's not easy to connect children to the community as easily. But I think that wariness about asking for help when you need it is something that we could all, you know, parenting or not get better at making space for in ourselves and acknowledging that it's something that asking for help and giving help are the basis of community. So it's a good place to start if you need help.

Totally. Yeah. And there is that asymmetry between, you know, our internal willingness to give and even our realization that it feels good to be asked that somebody wants that thinks that you can help and then to be able to follow through and actually offer that help to somebody. Obviously, it feels wonderful on our end. But then when it comes to asking somebody else, we're so hesitant, you know, then the whole calculation changes. I don't want to be a burden to them. I don't want to put my shit on them. They're dealing with their own shit. Well, we're all dealing with shit all the time. Welcome to existence in the cosmos. But I really take that point to heart because it really. really is true. And society at the very least should make it easier to ask for help and easier to get it. And I think we can all agree on that. And I also just want to point out the class dynamics of raising parents because it doesn't get talked about enough. We all know that in every aspect of society to be at the top of the class hierarchy is beneficial. You're treated much differently in a court of law if you have millions of dollars to spend on lawyers than if you have nothing. And I think it also comes out in parents. I have this sort of pithy slogan that's probably not totally fair, but gets at the point, which is like rich parents don't raise their

kids. And that's probably hyperbole. But I just am trying to point out the fact that when you have resources, you immediately buy, you, you know, you get a nanny. You get somebody to check in. You know, you can have somebody stay overnight so you can get a full night sleep and sort of nurse your child overnight. Historically, right, we can get much, much darker in like slave societies in which slave owners would put the burden of, you know, even sometimes breastfeeding their children onto their, you know, their slaves and the brutality of that. And so I think even today, you know, very rich parents have the resources to get the help and to kind of fill that void in a way that working class and poor parents absolutely do not.

And so not having those resources, the only other resources available to us is each other. And that should really be emphasized. Absolutely. And another thing along those lines where we're talking about, you know, society as it is and the unfairness of it, is disproportionately, you know, women are given the work of child rearing societally. There's like the question about can she have it all, which is a question like can she have both a job, her own interest and raise a family at the same time,

which is not a question we ask of fathers. It's not a question that we ask of, you know, parents who are men. So, yeah, the deep unfairness of the way that society treats parents And single parents in particular, I think, is really tainted by misogyny. I remember, I don't have the details on it, but I remember there was some sort of turn in the 90s. This is really vague. Hopefully this is this is 100% correct.

But the general idea is that public polling showed that there was not very much sympathy for single mothers. So as a result, it became not a political priority to support them. And that's just like the most horrific, like shitty. It's so obvious that we should be supporting the parents of children across the board. There should be generous parental leave, should be access to child care, access to healthy food, and so on. But it's not the way that our system has treated people. And just the opposite. Often parents with children are treated with contempt as if they've failed to have responsibility.

A single mother is, and this is, this is, this is. deeply misogynistic stuff, the idea that a single mother was irresponsible, and that's why she is raising a child by herself. And then to think of, it's hard enough to raise a child in a nuclear family. It's hard enough to raise a child right in a community. And then to put all of that burden on an individual, and while at the same time holding her to these impossible standards, blaming her for whatever happened that caused her to be a single parent, whether that she's abandoned or whatever else, like that stuff runs really. really deep and I think it all merits a lot of thought and reflection of how we can create a

society that better respects people along these lines and better, you know, helps close the gaps between the unfair ways that women are treated versus men in the context of parenting or the way that poorer families are treated in comparison to richer families, the way that racialized communities are treated in comparison to white communities. in a white supremacist society, this all really merits a deep, deep look. And hopefully, revolutionary change towards a society that values parents and children and doesn't treat them as disposable or contemptible. Yeah, amen, amen.

And you're actually 100% right. I was listening to something, I think, earlier today, about the 90s and Clinton's welfare reforms. And, you know, of course, there's Reagan talking about welfare queens, which is racialized and, you know, misogynistic. But then Clinton, you know, his welfare. his welfare destruction was like, you know, welfare should be a second chance. It shouldn't be a way of life. And this is like this ideological foment that resulted in the stripping away of welfare

programs that specifically assisted single mothers. And then now during the pandemic, we had this experiment with just giving parents fucking money for having kids. And we cut child poverty in half in this country. And then they stopped the program. And it's just the cruelties, the unnecessary, you know, the cruelties of life are always going to be there, no matter what system you live under, but the unnecessary imposition of extra cruelties by a pathological, political and economic system really just kicks us when we're down in every way. And specifically, as you said, women and single mothers in particular, it's brutal. So yeah, I guess to wrap this up and to kind of end on a little bit of a higher note, I guess what

would you ultimately want people to take away from this show? And importantly, where can people find this show on Means TV and your podcast? Seriously Wrong. Yeah, so you can find our podcast at Seriously Wrong.com, S-R-S-S-L-Y, W-R-O-N-G. We're also on all the podcast services, Patreon, yada yada, and we're still doing Papa and Boy radio shows into the future. We've got another one planned, so definitely check that out. And Means TV, you can find at Means.tv, it's a streaming service owned by the workers or contractor members, which means that we are like shareholders and the profits of the company and or profits of the co-op rather and you can sign up at means.tv slash join and check out papa and boy episode one and two are released currently

as we're recording this and there'll be another one every week until we hit episode five which is the finale in terms of what people can we hope people can take away from it I mean I think of the top level I really hope that people find it funny that it makes them laugh it makes me laugh to watch at my favorite moments. So that's first and foremost the priority. Hopefully it's something that makes people laugh and think. But then also maybe it's the jumping off point to think critically about hierarchical systems, youth liberation,

but also more broadly in society of like how we set up the society to be stratified into commanders, controllers, and the punished and what it might look to recreate society. to honor children, honor the parents of children, and honor everyone by, I don't know, creating a directly democratic ecological commune of communes where everyone is paid according to need and where everything is kept in common

through a lending library style dynamic instead of private property and billionaires are abolished and everyone has what they need to survive, just an idea. Hell yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, I co-sign. All right. Yeah, I co-sign as well, and I will link to both the podcast and the show in the show notes so people can find it easier. Love the setup of Means TV.

I love how they're structured as a co-op, how everybody that contributes is invested in the overall co-op as a whole, and people should really support it and get hilarious, wonderful content in the meantime. time. So thank you both for doing the show, for coming on this show, for doing your podcast, for continuing to do what you guys do, which is fill this very unique and very important spot on the left as far as the values and the principles that you articulate. I'm very grateful to all of your work, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before we're on one of these episodes talking again. And maybe if you do do a second season, I could pop in and maybe do, you know, maybe a voiceover for a background character or something. That would be awesome. we'll reach out if if uh if season two happens um yeah i really appreciate you uh having us on

uh to talk about this and the work that you do on on your show here um and definitely if people like papa and boy and they want to see season two don't be uh don't be afraid to ask uh because if a lot of people ask then then we'll probably do it oh yeah let's do it all right thank you both so much talk soon yeah thanks No, I would not give you false hope on this strange and mournful day, but the mother-and-child reunion is only a motion away. Oh, a little daughter of mine, I can't fall the life of me. Remember a Saturday.

I know they say let me just don't work out that way. And the course of a lifetime runs over and over again. No, I would not give you false hope on the strange and mournful day But the mother and child reunion is only a motion away Oh, little darling of mine I just can't believe it so Though it seems strange to say I've never been late so low

Such unsteerous way In the course of lifetime runs Over and over again But I would not give me false hope On this strange and long whole day When the mother and child reunion is only a motion away. Oh, the mother and child reunion is only a motion away. Oh, the mother and child reunion is only a moment away.

Mother and child in union is only a motion away. Oh, the mother and child reunion is only a moment away. Oh, the mother and child will you can. Oh, it's only a motion away. All the mother and child you got is only a mom in the right, why, why, why, and the mother.