QnA 1!

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Tom: Dear Old Dads, the podcast that can't cook on the oven, but you better stay away from the grill. I'm Tom Curry. I am joined by Thomas Smith and Eli Bosnick. I guess we're going to answer some, some questions, guys, here.

0:00:32 Thomas: Yeah

0:00:39 Eli: A. M. A.

0:00:40 Tom: We go. Listeners a whopping, uh, you know, month or so into the show. And I gotta tell you, like, the, I've been blown away, and I mean this, I mean this really genuinely, like, the, the feedback we've gotten from this show has been so intensely heartfelt, like so intensely heartfelt. I feel like we, like, really touched a nerve with this show, which is really what we were hoping to do, um, and so we wanted to do an AMA as one of the first things that we offer, um, as like a little, like, extra content, because I think people really want to, like, reach out and have that connection. So guys, which question you want to start with?

0:00:41 Thomas: I

0:01:12 Eli: Start with this one right here at the top.

0:01:14 Tom: Question is from Matt. "I, Tom, and Thomas, but not Eli, how did you break the news of impending progeny to your elder kids, and how did they, and you, handle it? Is there anything you would change?" Um, I don't remember it being a big deal, honestly. Finn was, was eight, um, he's probably seven, I guess, um, when the announcement was made, and, um, he was just jazzed about it, like he was excited about it. He was not, um, know, there was no, there was never with him any inkling of like jealousy or, you know, I don't want a brother or anything like that. Um, wasn't surprised as I was, I think, um, he was, he was fucking jazzed about it

0:01:45 Eli: Tom's sitting on a bench sharing a beer with his son. I got some news, man. Oh fuck. Oh god.

0:01:52 Thomas: Son's like, yeah, that happened to me too, man. Yeah.

0:01:57 Tom: But I don't, I don't think, I don't think we made it a big deal, um, I don't remember it being like a big heavy conversation or anything, so I didn't like take him out to lunch or ANYTING, you know, and like sit him down. And, how, just, we just told him. Happy, and he was excited. So, yeah.

0:02:11 Thomas: I think some good parenting advice for all the time, possibly, because I think, well, A, it depends a lot on the kid, obviously. That's always the answer. Depends on the kids. And it depends on the age gap, too, Tom. I know you're working with a much different age gap than I was. But I think in general, if you can include kids rather than talk at them, it's always better. Better.

0:02:32 Eli: No. The cops come when you do that, Thomas. You shouldn't do that She

0:02:35 Tom: Got

0:02:36 Thomas: And for Phoebe, it works perfectly because Phoebe is such a, this type of person where we were like, Hey, you're going to have a baby brother. And you know, we're going to need your help, like feeding him and, you know comforting him and doing, you know, and, and and you know kids are so dumb, they believe you. They're like, Oh shit. I'm in. Oh man. Okay. There's a lot of responsibility on my shoulders.

0:02:55 Tom: Some work to do

0:02:55 Eli: Starts smoking Standing outside, tapping her foot. I didn't sign up for this, man. I didn't sign up Just wanted to play with some fucking crayons.

0:03:00 Thomas: She enrolled in some parenting classes, you know, did all that. No, but it's fun to include them. And then they, I think they do. I think that changes how they perceive it. You know, I think That's something that my parents never did for me a single time ever in my life. I was always talked at and things were happening that I had to cope with or deal with or, you you know, whatever. And I think that is shitty. I think it's cool to to kind of give them a little bit of, you know. It makes them feel a little important. Makes them feel little big, you know. And kids love feeling big. That's their favorite thing. So, yeah, that's how I would recommend it.

0:03:10 Tom: Yeah Question is from Tim. For those with children under five, will you get them vaccinated ASAP with the newly approved COVID-19 vax for kids?

0:03:38 Eli: Oh

0:03:43 Thomas: Yes. What good timing on this. We just did this. This is fucking and great. Yeah, this is just, oh man, we could do a whole show. That's not our show. This is a different show that should do this. Some sort of fucking, oh, maybe SIO serious inquiries only should do it. Um, the, the way they handled this fucking vaccine for kids under five is just a nightmare. Like they just really, uh, yeah.

0:03:48 Eli: Oh god oh It's ready, it's really, everybody, no, no, it's not, no, it's not, we're not ready yet. Oh my fucking god, my god, I'm just gonna fucking lose my fucking, there's never been a crueler man than me reading headlines about this childhood vaccine, vaccine, thank you. Know how everyone's always like, I bet if they put a mic behind closed doors you'd be canceled, like that's not true because I'm not a racist or a bigot, but I'll tell you what, if there was a microphone every time I read a headline about the childhood vaccine, at the very least I'd have to enroll in some anger management classes. Yeah, boy is due to get stabbed, which, we're recording this earlier than you're hearing it, because that's how podcasting works, but, but I got him within the first week and I'm so excited to get this kid stabbed. I am so excited. I called every pharmacy around me. I knew stuff before they did, every pharmacy I called. They were like, well, that hasn't been approved yet. And I was like, actually it made it out of commission this afternoon. So maybe keep up.

0:04:19 Thomas: Yep. Oh, totally. Yeah.

0:05:06 Tom: Yes

0:05:06 Eli: But yeah, we found one of

0:05:07 Tom: You

0:05:08 Thomas: Love that, by the way, medical professionals just love it. They're like, oh, you know more than I do, great, that's fantastic. Yeah.

0:05:13 Eli: But yeah, we found a state testing site and we're going to get him stabbed. And I'm just, can I just, I going to say something. It's not, it's not okay. It'S not appropriate. And I, mean this. I don'T mean this and I sh I shouldn't say everyone who dies of COVID from now on. I'm okay with it. I know.

0:05:36 Eli: I DON'T mean it. I don't. I don't know why I said that. I didn't say it, I didn', someone else said that, I wasn't here, and please, like, I'm just joking, please don't be like, I am immunocompromised. Am I fucking right I really genuinely like don't want anyone to feel bad, but the, the notion that the swooping illness plague can no longer come in and steal my boy out of my arms, because they were like, well, I don't know how many children we've done, so we

0:05:29 Tom: Do which is

0:05:47 Thomas: My grandma fucking yeah god

0:06:05 Eli: Need to go to the houses and count them again. We submitted it, but we forgot to sign the bottom of the paper. So, you guys are just, the other, other thing is when you have an unvaccinated baby, anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are just being surrounded by werewolves, right? And look, I know, I know, again, that we were all there and we've all been in it, you can't murder them right right you because in the zombie apocalypse you get to mow them down with a thing you made right you get just shut, but instead I'm just at a Starbucks with some woman wearing like a don't tread on me shirt, thinking to myself, like, this motherfucker's not vaccine, if you cough on my baby, lady, I will step on you until you are goo. And

0:06:06 Thomas: Fucking a yeah and society tells you you can't punch those fucking assholes in the face yeah for some reason yeah shotgun them just yeah yeah

0:06:31 Tom: Ridiculous yeah

0:06:51 Eli: Just, like, everyone in your life, you had to buy in, the testing, and the this, and the, and I'm, oh my gosh, it's just I'm a happy

0:06:57 Thomas: A lot of family arguments a lot of family agreements over at the Smith with the Smith oh I know, you don't you don't have a fucking Fox News idiot family, yeah, I know, did

0:06:59 Eli: Oh not in my fucking family not not well so here's the thing, here's family, I've, I've talked about this before, my family is exactly half doctors and reiki practitioners, so there was this, yeah, my, my cousin, who I adore, is a grandmaster reiki practitioner, and all the, who, but you and woo-wee-woo -we right, the right so the joke in my family is you can stand up at Thanksgiving and say, there is no god, god is dead, and they'll tell you to pass the potatoes, but if you sneeze everyone starts screaming at each other, so when the shot came out in my family, we all sort of held our breath and looked at the bullshitters, and we were like, come on, guys, not on this, like, it's, you can't do it on this, and they, to the person, every single one of them was like, get that fucking shot, get that, but I know, I, I love magic water, but let's stop fucking around, we, we called a beautiful, a beautiful fucking truce in my family where we were all like, hey, we're gonna stop playing pretend for these three months, and then we're going to get right back to it. She, like, brought out some fucking, I don't know, eon machine, hooked it up to my nipples at Thanksgiving, and I was like, fuck yeah,

0:07:22 Thomas: The FDA also authorize a Reiki shot too, like, to go?

0:07:36 Tom: Good

0:07:43 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, good.

0:08:14 Thomas: Sure.

0:08:14 Eli: No, read my aeon meter and make sure I don't have too many ghosts in my blood, whatever you fucking say, cuz, yep.

0:08:19 Tom: Yeah

0:08:21 Thomas: Right on about the headlines. I a similar thing. They look again at fucking another show's responsibility to do this. But I think it's that that they like were so terrified of some kid getting a shot and them being like, ow, that hurt a little bit more than maybe I thought it should. And then that person would report that to the fucking hotline of, of killed my kid or whatever the fuck, you know? And so they made it like super diluted and they took too much time, all that bullshit. And I, we spent any like you, you too. Anyone with a kid in this age group has spent the entire fucking COVID since since the first vaccine being like, cool. And when's ours? When's the one for the kids? And headline after headline. I don't know who the fuck was writing all these headlines, but always be like, oh, two weeks. It's coming.

0:08:44 Tom: Right yeah

0:09:13 Thomas: It's always, oh.

0:09:12 Tom: It was always just about a yep

0:09:14 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:13 Eli: Just they're going into plan now, and then And next week, by next week, they'll have the...

0:09:17 Tom: Right

0:09:17 Thomas: They've got the trials going. Oh, trial just ended. So within three weeks, two years of that. Two fucking years ofthat. There was one, and I'm so sorry that I kind of took it out on Lydia a little bit. But she there was one where she was like, hey, headline, you know, shared me the news thing of the thing. This was like six months ago. And I just told her I was like I'm not I just don't. I'm sorry. I don't the only headline I want to see because and this is, again, not her fault. But she would share that every time of like, oh, it might be because she's really hoping for this fucking vaccine for her kids, which I totally understand. But by the time it was like the sixth one, I waslike, hon, just I don'T want tosee it anymore. Like literally the only headline I will ever want to see again in my life about this is Thomas Smith. You go make an appointment now.

0:10:00 Eli: Tuesday. Right. You can get an appointment on fucking Tuesday.

0:10:01 Thomas: Yes. Yeah, exactly. It is. You are getting it right as we speak. And we're typing this headline and the newspaper machine is printing it somehow.

0:10:06 Eli: And the same time, and this is why I sympathize so much with our listeners who are like immunocompromised, who have other conditions where they can't be vaccinated or the vaccine doesn't work. Like, all jokes aside, is at the same Time, all the news is like COVID's fucking over. So you'd be like, New York State announces you can cough directly into a baby's mouth. And I'd be like, oh, can you, though? Right now, though, what if we waited just a little while longer? Preschools announced that each baby will be rubbed against each new baby a number of times. And I was just like, I'm having a nap. Also, Thomas, I know your kids are in daycare. My son has been in classes. And so children, and this is a whole episode, children get sick every

0:10:14 Thomas: Yeah. Yep. Right. All

0:10:54 Eli: 14 seconds.

0:10:54 Thomas: The time. And I get also sick from them every 14 seconds.

0:10:57 Eli: Yeah, but every time my son would get a cough, I would be like, if this is the fucker. And it never was. Never was.

0:11:04 Thomas: Never was.

0:11:05 Eli: Never was, never was, and I was like, yep.

0:11:06 Thomas: My kids didn't get it either. I don't know how.

0:11:09 Eli: But every, because that's the difference, I think, if I could claim anything over our wellness people who don't have kids, is that when you were like, oh no, I picked, you weren't like, oh god, I hope my family doesn't die. I hope this doesn't get, I hope it doesn't, I hope some asshole who learned his science from the Joe Rogan podcast doesn't kill my baby at Target.

0:11:24 Tom: Yep.

0:11:24 Thomas: Yeah.

0:11:36 Thomas: And like the arguments with the family, I had a whole side of the family that just didn't do it. They just, every single bullshit view. And they are here. What the most frustrating part is they're actually smart people. So they, they would find smart ways to be wrong. You would be like, look at this. I looked at the whole study in Israel. It was always Israel for some reason, or like, Like, oh, there's the ship, you know, the ship. And based on that, and they'd have all these extrapolations of blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, it's been whatever, two fucking years or whatever.

They've gotten it all twice, all over through them twice. And we've never fucking gotten it. And maybe it's because, you Know, we actually listened to a goddamn expert. Not to say that if you got it, you made a mistake. But like, given where we were and the information we used, like, we were able to use that information to the best of our ability. And got really lucky as well and avoided it. And my idiot family who took no precautions and, you no effort to actually avoid it in any meaningful way. Wouldn't you know? Lo and behold, they got it twice in that period of time.

0:11:41 Eli: Oh, Oh, yep. Yep. Mm. -hmm.

0:11:41 Tom: That's Un, yeah.

0:12:38 Tom: Shocking, shocking. It's almost like vaccines are effective, fucking effective, ineffective.

0:12:39 Eli: Yep. But Yeah, um, the things I shouldn't have said on this podcast aside, yes, I, I, my son gets it this Saturday. I could not be more relieved. Um.

0:12:54 Thomas: How's your son with shots?

0:12:56 Eli: It depends. All right, because unfortunately we got spoiled, there's, I don't know if you have have this at your pediatrician, we've got one genius shot giver at the pediatrician, but you can't, you can't fucking request, she's like free bird, sometimes she just shows up. Yeah.

0:12:57 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. You try to like show up at the right, get in line. Oh, you're going to take, we have to go to the bathroom. We all have diarrhea right now for an hour.

0:13:20 Tom: Yeah.

0:13:21 Eli: This, she's so good, and so I'm just like, please, please let it be her, because if you've ever had a person who's bad at giving shots and a baby, you're you're never more frustrated with another, and this is a medical professional, right. If she handed me the needle, I would be like, here son, squirt it in your mouth, drink it, right, like, me judging anyone's shot giving ability is ridiculous. And yet at the same time, dude, when my girl Doreen is there, my girl Dorina's like, hey Max, look at this, she waves her hand, stabs him in the neck, comes away clean. She should have been an assassin. Like, Doreena's wasted at my pediatrician's office, but yeah.

0:13:25 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, know, I often talk about having Kaiser and somehow nobody understands what that is. But one of the benefits of Kaiser, which is the full on medical, every single vertical, horizontal integration, integrated medical experience. One of the benefits is for shots, we go to the shot factory where, you professional does nothing but give shots to the exact type of person that you're getting the shots for all day, day in, day out, 100,000 hours. So they're all very good at it. Um, I think it's so interesting that it really depends on your kid, because as I've talked about before, broadly speaking, there seems to be the type of kid that's very fucking aware of things, thinking ahead, worried about things. And that's, of course, Phoebe. And then there seems TO be the kid that'S just in the moment going along. And would you guess which one can do shots and which one CAN'T?

0:14:33 Tom: Yeah.

0:14:47 Thomas: And Phoebe, hmm,

0:14:47 Tom: Also though like, to that same point, like, some kids are really distressed by pain and other kids are really like totally unemotionally connected to pain or much less so. Like my stepdaughter, like she saw her blood, she would fucking completely lose her mind, little discomforts and little pain, she, she could not contextualize any of that, so getting a shot was like, I mean, it was like fucking holding a tiger down. You, son Finn is a lot like, I am, like, is it, like, he doesn't really care if he's hurt, unless something's like, unless there's a bone sticking out, he'll just be like, yeah, we'll just, it's, it's all right, like, and everything's fine.

0:14:58 Thomas: Right, hmm. Yeah, That's interesting.

0:15:25 Tom: And he's always been the same way.

0:15:26 Thomas: For me, it's always been between I always assumed it was more about the kind of the anxiety mindset that Phoebe has and that I have. And, you know, where it's like the looking ahead is the problem because she will start freaking out an hour before anything, even though we try to hide it from her. She's too fucking smart. So I was all strategic about this. I told him, you know, I didn't want to tell him anything because Phoebe will freak out immediately and Arlo will sit there and I won't be sure if he heard it or not.

And and Phoebe was like, oh, because I told him, I was like, hey, we're going to get that medicine, you know, that super special medicine I told you about, that mama and dada were able to have, and you know, you can't have yet, we're gonna get it, and she's like, how do they give it to you, and I was like, and I just, I did a misdirect, I was, I found something else to talk about, as you know, and whatever, other, look over there, whatever the thing is, and I tried to keep it, and for one, I was like, I knew in my mind, I'm game planning, I'm like, Phoebe is a thousand percent going first, first, because if she has to see Arlo get a shot, she, I will, she'll jump.

0:15:35 Tom: Yeah, Yeah, She'll

0:16:08 Eli: No.

0:16:26 Tom: Lose

0:16:26 Thomas: She'll run. There will be a Bugs Bunny shaped hole in the wall with the ears somehow that also made a hole. And I always thought it was funny that, be gone. And so I had her go first and and it's hard because other kids are getting shots. And so I was, I was trying to control like what she was seeing and I was really wanting her to not know ahead of time, you don't, cause she will, will freak out, and she somehow, oh my god, she's too fucking smart, I kept everything from her, she hadn't seen anything, and then we're like, all right Phoebe, your turn first, and the minute the nurse touched her arm, she knew, and she cut, she went and covered her shoulder and pulled her arm out of socket and threw it across the room and

0:16:26 Tom: It.

0:16:26 Eli: Yeah.

0:17:06 Tom: Right.

0:17:06 Thomas: Would not let us access her arm, he learned Brazilian in jujitsu somehow, like in, like in Neo and the Matrix, she was just like, I know kung fu. And then just wrapped her arms in a pretzel around. It's amazing. But the, the COVID shot, I will tell you, to maybe alleviate some of your fears, anybody whose kid hasn't gotten it yet, the COVID shot is nothing. This is not like other.

0:17:08 Eli: Yeah.

0:17:29 Eli: The dose is totally different now.

0:17:30 Thomas: Yeah. This Is not like getting blood drawn, which, Oh, that's, that'S been the biggest challenge for kids is getting their blood drawn early on when they need like to, Jesus.

0:17:31 Eli: Yeah. Doreen My dude, Doreen puts

0:17:40 Thomas: Yeah. That's the tough part.

0:17:41 Eli: Puts him in an arm bar

0:17:42 Thomas: This shot, Phoebe was freaking the fuck out and it was comical what a nothing burger it was. Like they literally, it's almost like the diabetes thing where you get a prick of blood. Like it's, it'S that little of a thing. The, the nurse was just like, boop, done. And then I was like, see Phoebe, what were you, you know, I got to be that like, Hey, you were kind of really freaked out about how, you Know, and it Was kind of nothing like try to apply that in the future. And Then, uh, Arlo is always, again, he's not aware he's He's in the moment of whatever he's doing.

0:17:42 Eli: All good.

0:18:08 Eli: He's just jabbing himself in the corner with all the one she had on the table.

0:18:09 Thomas: Yeah. Well, and I find it adorable in a different way because even when he had to get blood drawn, which ever since Phoebe had it done the first time, you know, she, again, it's impossible to do it again. But Arlo, he'll be doing his thing, pay attention to whatever. And then I can, it'S so interesting to witness the difference because him, once the owie starts, he 'LL be like, ah, you KNOW, he'S feeling the pain. He starts feeling the pain, but it's very much a temporary thing. He'll feel the pain. And then when the pain goes away, he's like, ah, and it's kind of over. And with Phoebe, all of the reaction is before the thing. And then I guess kind of during it, you know, it's like this massive buildup of stress and anxiety. And then afterwards, it'S the emotional injury of having had that happen to you. And Arlo just has none of that. It's just like, ow, okay, done.

0:18:43 Eli: Yeah.

0:19:00 Tom: It's over, done.

0:19:00 Eli: Yep. Well, also, I don't know if you guys have this experience where you get your kid a shot, but there's a moment where they're a little stronger, and they're like, hey, you got, you gotta hold your kid, and you're like, of course, you go to like gently move the arm or whatever, and you realize you

0:19:09 Thomas: Oh my god.

0:19:15 Tom: And they fight like a goddamn tiger. Oh,

0:19:17 Eli: Right,

0:19:19 Thomas: Unbelievable strength.

0:19:19 Eli: And you, you kinda gotta use adult strength and you spend your whole life being like, hey, don't hit your kid, don't ever be rough with your kid, but there's just this moment where you're like, I'm gonna use a little bit of adult strength on you, but I love you so much I love me you're too strong, but I'm, I'm holding your arms to your sides with love, this is love You're not being scarred by this, we're all good.

0:19:22 Thomas: Yep, yep. You have to, you have to. You have to! Oh god, it's so hard. You HAVE to. Yep.

0:19:43 Eli: This is, and honestly, this is what I wish anti-vax parents would say, I wish anti-vax parents would just be like, my kid fucking freaks out, I am an anti-vax parent for six seconds during every shot. That That lady, even Doreen, she stabs my son, and he looks at me with his eyes and heart, and he cries like

0:19:31 Tom: Yeah. Oh, Yeah. Yep. Up

0:19:44 Thomas: Yep! Yeah, it''s true, it' s true. Oh

0:19:55 Tom: All

0:20:02 Eli: He will only cry at this age.

0:20:02 Thomas: My God, I know. It's like

0:20:05 Eli: And I'm like, exactly.

0:20:05 Thomas: The shoe from Roger Rabbit when it goes in the dip. Yep. That's how they look at you.

0:20:09 Eli: Yeah, exactly, and of course there's a part of you that just, I want to run to the internet and be like, tell me I don't ever have to do that again. And of course, there's like a bunch of people being like, hey, you don't have to ever do that. Every time he gets a shot, I have to ask some asshole question like, so this is a good one, right? Right. This is an important one. And they're like, yeah, man, it's for milk leg. It killed 90 percent of the population before the year 2000. I'd be like, Yeah, I guess we could do that one. That one seems important. But, you know, if you ever do one for the fucking, I don't know, maybe I'll tell, you know, something like I'm going to be the fucking judge. Yes, I'll take two of those, but none of that one, huh?

0:20:09 Thomas: Oh, yep.

0:20:28 Thomas: No, this is a bullshit one. Yeah, I know.

0:20:48 Thomas: Yep. Yep, uh,

0:20:49 Tom: Right, right. So this question comes from Amanda. If you could no longer co-parent with your spouse, but instead had to choose one of your co-hosts to raise your children with, whom do you choose as your new parenting partner? And I would offer, guys, that you can choose not just from this show, but hosts from our other their shows as well. Let's open the pool let's broaden the pool

0:20:59 Thomas: God, oh

0:21:10 Eli: Ooh.

0:21:09 Thomas: I was gonna say cuz this is I think that's Tom's way of saying like dear God any other Cuz this could could a real show ender

0:21:13 Tom: No, I'm is This is where the camaraderie breaks down, guys. Oh,

0:21:21 Thomas: Yeah

0:21:21 Eli: Are we talking extended podcast -iverse? Marsh and Andy, David

0:21:27 Tom: I don't know no, those aren't co-hosts. Like, let's co-hose to be somebody you've got a show with. What was the other one?

0:21:32 Eli: Smalley. Okay. David Smiley. Okay. So So, only people who put up with my existence professionally.

0:21:37 Tom: Right. Yeah, someone that gets paid to talk to you.

0:21:45 Thomas: Okay.

0:21:45 Eli: Anabosmic.

0:21:47 Thomas: Oh, that's kind of cheat No, your spouse.

0:21:47 Eli: It's on D &D Minus. I nailed it.

0:21:49 Thomas: Hold on. The logic of the question is you can't co -parent with your spouse?

0:21:51 Tom: It's right there in the first clause.

0:21:53 Thomas: Yeah.

0:21:53 Eli: Damn. Damn. I like Andrew's a pretty baller dad. I think I would take Andrew.

0:21:58 Tom: One vote for Andrew Torrez.

0:21:59 Eli: Yeah.

0:21:59 Thomas: I feel like if you really want to make sure your kids excel academically, I feel like he'd be a good ticket there. He'd be doing extracurriculars that you'd be like, fuck, I didn't even think of that. Does that exist?

0:22:06 Eli: Right? Nurturing. Good cook. Mm -hmm.

0:22:13 Thomas: Wow. That's a good one.

0:22:13 Tom: This is a tough question. I, it's, you funny because for a long time, uh, was actually, do you guys have godparents for your kids? I mean, like, or the secular version of godparents. Cecil. Was actually for a long time, he was, he was the godparent to my kids, so like that's sort of like built in there. But also I know he wouldn't want to do it, but I'll tell you what, if you hand Cecil a responsibility, he'll fucking crush it. So I have to give it to Cecil.

0:22:23 Eli: Yes. Yeah.

0:22:36 Thomas: Oh. Is to Oh, Cecil would be like your dad. He'd be like, I never wanted kids in the world, but now these are mine. So I'll be a great dad. I feel, I feel like that.

0:22:46 Tom: He would Oh,

0:22:50 Eli: Also, seen what a softy Cecil is with his cats. Cats And I have to assume he would love a child at least half as much as he loves those fucking cats. I'm not gonna say as much because I don't want to exaggerate, but yeah, I think he would. Honestly, as much as I think we all think Tom, Cecil would be a hard-ass, I think he would be a complete and total softy with his kids if he had any.

0:22:53 Thomas: Oh Oh yeah.

0:22:54 Tom: Yeah, he I I I think he would too. I mean, like, yeah, it's hard for me not to pick Cecil just because I've got 25 years with him. So I would have to pick Cecil, and Cecil in so many ways does remind me of my dad, like a lot of the really best ways.

0:23:29 Thomas: Fine. I was going to say both of you guys, I guess I'll go with Aaron Rabinowitz, whatever. No, uh, uh, I'm, I think I am actually torn between choosing you guys. I feel like if I want my kids to obviously just be fucking of good time, fun and hilarious, I choose Eli. If I it would be nice to not be the bad guy in my, oh, yeah, I think I'm going with Tom. I feel like Tom would, cause it's, it's just, no, no, it's not that you're the bad guy, Tom.

It's just that in a relationship, it's like the old thing with the running from a bear, like whoever's the slightly more hard ass of the two of you ends up inevitably being the bad guy all the time, because it's just which person's limit you reach first, you know? And if, and if Lydia has like a very, very high tolerance for shenanigans, uh, until she doesn't, by the way, with the kids, which happens, but, like, for of the time I'm like, hey, didn't we say we were doing a rule where they don't do that, you know? And then I'm just, you know, be nice, I think Tom would be like even more than I, so I would get to be the good guy more with the kids and be like, ah, sorry kids, it's

0:23:36 Eli: Terrible choice, you want your kid to grow up Jewish.

0:23:54 Eli: Yeah, yeah,

0:24:05 Tom: Oh, right.

0:24:37 Thomas: Time, your other dad says your other Dad said we can't, can't fucking ever eat dessert in your life.

0:24:38 Tom: Tom said it

0:24:39 Eli: Tom said you guys saw me place the single bullet on the kitchen table, I don't know what it means, you don't want to know what it means, but I guess we should all just go to bed and put on, on our pajamas, huh, that's right,

0:24:55 Tom: Whoever brushes their teeth first gets to sleep inside the house tonight. So story comes from Mutated Wisdom. How willing or unwilling are you to let your kids watch or play with things that might be a little too violent or mature for them, and what was the situation with that in your own household growing up?

0:25:11 Eli: I'm very interested in this, let's start with what the situation was like growing up, because I'm, I, I have no idea what it was like, I have guesses about both of you, but I would be very interested to hear

0:25:23 Tom: My My dad was, uh, he, he pretty heavily monitored our content. Um, I, I, I've fucked with it a lot, but primarily with reading material. So like my dad, I didn't watch anything was PG 13 until I was 13 at my dad's house. So my dad took a lot of that stuff fairly on its face, fairly face value. My But dad is and was an absolutely voracious reader. He reads constantly. He always has a book. I was, although I'm less so now because I fall asleep too easily, I was absolutely an unbelievably voracious reader. And when you try to understand, I would go to the library and my dad would say, you cannot, and this is for real, be like no more than 10 books this week. And that was disappointing. That was upsetting. I would walk with a book in my hand and read. I would stay up all night reading. I read constantly. I was all, I would sit at the dinner table and read, I got in trouble.

0:26:11 Thomas: Wow.

0:26:21 Thomas: I go to the library and get 10 books. I'd like, is this all my books for the rest of my life? Yeah, okay. I guess. I

0:26:27 Tom: I love, I get in trouble for reading so many times. I can't even tell you how many times I got in trouble again, trouble in school.

0:26:35 Tom: I my dad would read Stephen King and Peter Straub and Dean Kuntz, but also like John Sanford. And he just, he read voraciously and he little Grisham, some occasionally, but some, but my my dad would read. And then when he was done with a pocket book, He would throw in the trash and I would fish that fucking book right out of the trash.

0:26:44 Thomas: No Grisham, huh? I feel like your dad would be a Grishom guy. I

0:26:57 Tom: And I would hide it. And And I would read that book, and then I would throw it down a sewer grate.

0:26:57 Thomas: Love that. I'm done with this book. I have consumed this book, I will throw it away.

0:27:06 Tom: It's done. He just threw it right there. The thing is, I kind of don't blame him. He read so much, what would he do with them all? He could donate them back to the library, but the library doesn't... At some point, they stop taking your shit.

0:27:09 Thomas: Oh, give them to someone? Yeah.

0:27:15 Eli: To The library, they honestly if we're ever kidnapped by terrorists and someone real quick is like, "Describe Tom's dad," I'm gonna be like, he throws books away when he's done with them, and they'll be like, "Oh, okay, no, I get it, I do get it, he finished," because he's done, he is done with that book, So it's trash now, can't

0:27:33 Thomas: Yeah.

0:27:33 Tom: He's done with it. It's gone. It's over. So I would reading, from the time I was in fourth and fifth grade, I was reading, I read it, and I read The Stand, and I read, you know, 15 or 20 Dean Kuhn's books.

0:27:44 Thomas: Not terribly sentimental, your dad, Tom, not terribly sentimental.

0:27:48 Tom: No. No.

0:27:48 Thomas: Not even like, oh man, that was a great book, maybe I'll pick it up up again someday. You know, let me just put this in my bookshelf that I guess you didn't have.

0:27:54 Tom: He literally does not have a book on his bookshelf. I don't think if you went to his house, you could find a single book that he wasn't actively reading. I don'T

0:28:03 Eli: Have a favorite book if you don't love anything

0:28:04 Thomas: It's in the Cold War and he's receiving information that he's like, I can't know. Nobody can know that I got that.

0:28:12 Eli: Pictures

0:28:06 Tom: Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha! I really don't. It's funny, because, like, he's a woodworker, so he has these beautiful bookshelves, and they're full of, like... not books. So they got like fucking knickknacks on them.

0:28:24 Thomas: He's like someday I will read a book worthy of this bookshelf. They

0:28:28 Tom: I'll save

0:28:26 Eli: Of this show none of none of them have earned it yet they have not earned their rest on the bookshelf

0:28:28 Tom: One when I like one. God damn it.

0:28:32 Thomas: Haven't earned their rest. They did not Earn: their rest in the bookshelf that's

0:28:38 Tom: Most of the stuff that was inappropriate that I read, uh, or that I had access to were books. And I read a, I read it a huge amount of like wildly inappropriate and they were wildly inappropriate, wildly over my head, but I didn't watch or play inappropriate video. I didn'T watch watch movies or tv or play inappropriate video games for my age much more the opposite actually

0:28:47 Thomas: Interesting: oh

0:28:48 Eli: Yeah Yeah. I don't want to like tell on myself too hard here but ever like look back as an adult and realize that 100% of your kinks are your childhood author's kinks you're just like ah shit Steven I wish you'd gotten more hugs my guy you

0:29:08 Thomas: Yeah I'm trying to work out what dr seuss would have led me to yeah

0:29:16 Tom: I love hopping on pop I: don't Know: Like. I get

0:29:19 Thomas: Yeah

0:29:19 Eli: Oh you beat me to it yeah I was gonna say crushing crushing my house um mother hated and I should point out hates everything violent um so like anything with the slightest amount of violence was absolutely banned right she wanted of no violence. I had a toy gun. Bought a toy gun at, what's that place you go, Virginia? Where it's like a, we're pilgrims, or we're close to pilgrims or whatever the fuck. Williamsburg. Colonial Williamsburg, and I really wanted this toy musket gun, and my mother, I don't know where she even fucking got them, but she did, covered it, covered it in Amnesty International stickers.

0:29:23 Tom: Every

0:30:06 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:08 Eli: There's the one

0:30:08 Tom: I fucking love your mom. That's amazing.

0:30:09 Thomas: No, this is is, I love this, this is how I might end up being as a parent. Wow.

0:30:10 Eli: Yeah, There was absolutely no violence. My dad and I would watch action movies together, but I was like into my mid-teens, and I was probably 14, 15 by the time we were allowed anything action related, but my dad loved action movies, and we had a boys night out every Wednesday which ended with us renting movies, and so that's where we got into the action movies. But yeah, I was a teen before we got to violence. My parents were incredibly sex positive, allowed me to subscribe to Playboy myself, like they Figured out how I could do that, um, I had a really good, this is its own episode, but I had really good porn talk with my dad really early, which honestly I might have taken a little too seriously because I didn't watch porn, uh, that wasn't drawings until I was in my like mid to late 20s.

0:30:42 Thomas: What?

0:31:00 Eli: Uh, because my dad explained, like, hey, you gotta understand, like, like you got to ethically source your porn, and like, you know, these people are being paid, and how are they being paid, and do they want to be there? And if you find something anonymously on the internet, like, how do you know everyone had a good time and all that stuff? So I just watched cartoons fuck each other for the first like 30 years of my life, cause I was like, that cartoon is fine, it's just a drawing.

0:30:59 Thomas: Which, Card, you like, Donald Duck fucking just plowing you. Yeah.

0:31:29 Eli: Watched them all Thomas. I Watched him fucking all. There are Cartoons that I only know from hentai and rule 34 websites to the extent that sometimes people will like show, what was that show, I never watched it, Ben 10, the first time I saw Ben 10 on TV I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, and I was, oh no, there's, that's just the versions of them that I watch, they're usually they're using their fists for totally different things, don't worry, it's fine, everybody, it's fine, Professor Doofenshmirtz is gonna keep all his clothes on. So, so yeah, that was the balance for me in my household. What about you, Thomas? Sure.

0:31:30 Thomas: Well,

0:31:31 Tom: Oh, hell

0:32:06 Thomas: Think that you could probably guess, you know, first off we just didn't have anything first off, and then secondly, no, we, my parents were very strict with that stuff. I couldn't watch anything beyond the age range, probably similar to Tom's dad, where it's like, you know, roughly the age age range you were allowed to. And also like conservative kind religious family, it's sex is the taboo thing, but somehow violence is like kind of fine, which is the exact opposite of what, I love the way you were raised, Eli, lie, because that's exactly what I think should be true.

I can't, I wait, I'm gonna get another, you know, seven or eight, uh, cuck iTunes reviews out of this, but I think we're just way too, we're way too into violence as a, as a society. And it really, especially I already was averse to it a little bit, but especially now that I've had kids, um, they are so beyond precious to me that I just hate how casually we consume stuff that's like just, just people dying and getting hurt. Like it just, it just really breaks my heart. But I understand that like, I'm just a beta cuck and I don't want my kids to die. And you know, that's how I'm, a pussy, cause I want my to not be killed.

Um, really don't like violence, but I understand that like it's fiction and whatever. It's just that I, there's a healthy connection to it, and there's a, uh, every single thing has guns, connection to you wonder why there's so many shootings in our country and obsession with guns, and why we'll never do anything about it, they're everywhere, they're everywhere in every movie and TV show, the

0:32:09 Tom: Yeah. Yep. Yep.

0:33:31 Thomas: Gun is the powerful, like, fucking magical object that everybody has, every, we just worship guns and violence as a society, and I hate it, but anyway, I was, one, my funny memories about this was, my dad probably mostly didn't care, but like would also enforce rules, you know, was good at enforcing rules and keeping us to the age expectations.

And I remember one fucking, uh, vacation we took, which the only thing we ever did as a family was we drove down to Southern California and watched a Dodgers game because my dad liked the Dodgers, and he was from Southern Califonia, so since everything revolved around him, that was the one trip we could take, was, was that.

And we, as a part of that, we were kind of hanging out and going to the mall or whatever, and at the time, Austin Powers was in the theater, uh, it must have been Awesome Powers too, I think, because I would have been too young for the first one, I I believe. And that's a PG 13 movie.

But because of my fucking religious, all the women in my family being religious, and like that, that mindset of like somehow sex is this impossible thing that nobody should ever think about or know about or ever do ever, that my fucking older sister, I'll never forget this betrayal.

I think I was 12, and like my 13th birthday was like in a month or or something, like it was, I was 12 .92 and my dad even was, was like, yeah, no, you can see it, you can whatever, go see Austin Powers, whatever, it's fine. And then my older sister, like, talked my parents out of it, like, nah, it's, it's too, it's to grow, to

0:33:32 Tom: What

0:34:57 Thomas: To sex too much, and I was like, what the fuck, you, I'm 12, I'm turning 13 a day, like it's come on, and it was just such this fucking betrayal, I forgot, I forgot about it. I'm going to go yell at her. No, I'm just kidding.

0:34:57 Tom: So funny.

0:35:02 Eli: Shoot. Her a text. Hey, just remembered watching Austin Powers 2 as many times as I like this afternoon. This

0:35:19 Thomas: But like that is that mindset that this like fucking busy body religious, you got to control what everybody's doing. Fucking mindset that I just, I am so glad that is not going to be in my household. You know, it's just, I hate it, but I totally would love to take the approach that you had, Eli. I think that's really good. I am very sensitive to violence. My kids might see it sucks because there's a lot of stuff that's kind of cartoony, me violent, but it's fine. Cause it's like a superhero going pow, you know? And you're like, yeah, okay. But in reality, like that that, guy just died. Like he got, he got punched by Superman into a wall. I mean, it says he's alive in the movie, but he died like in real life.

0:35:50 Eli: He's dead, he's dead, yeah, the the soft peddling of violence in children's cartoons is fucking nuts right because just the fact the fact that it's not a bullet and it's a green laser and the guy goes like doesn't mean that you're not sending an image about shooting people you disagree with, right? And especially when you consider, like, and the problem is we have this like, don't be a bummer culture, but it's like, I don't know, man, almost every time someone lands on our planet, Superman punches him, like real fast, like real fast.

0:35:55 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:36:28 Tom: Well, now I'm curious because you guys play video games, and video games are notoriously pretty violent.

0:36:28 Eli: Oh, Tom?

0:36:36 Tom: But hang On, because I'm much of a video game player at all, but I do remember I bought my son a PS3. I bought it used from some guy at the gym, and he gave me a whole stack of games. I didn't know anything about any of the games, games, and so I sat down with my kid to play some of the games that I had gotten with this PS3 that I bought from this dude, and like again, total fucking idiot, I didn't know anything, and one of the games I popped in, I may have told this before, one of the things I popped him was Call of Duty Special Forces. I

0:36:33 Thomas: I

0:36:37 Eli: Yeah. Yeah.

0:37:09 Tom: Never heard, I didn't know, like I wasn't like part of this culture, like I'm aware of Call of Duty now, but this was like a long time ago, so I put it in and I was like, "Oh, it's like a shooting game," and I was thinking, like, GoldenEye, like if you remember GoldenEye from the Nintendo 64, and that would not have bothered me, N60, like at the, at Finn's age, like right, this fucking game loads up, and like people get shot, and they fall on the ground, they're like, oh god, mother, mother, oh, the pain, why'd you shoot me in my stomach, it'll take me days to bleed out, and it it's just it's like fuck I like I I ejected that thing and threw it in the trash like as fast as I could possibly so

0:37:21 Thomas: Do I remember Goldeneye? Yeah. Mostly because it's like 16 pixels and you can't even tell what the fuck happened. Yeah. Yeah.

0:37:40 Eli: That's

0:37:49 Thomas: Like one of your dad's paperbacks. Yeah.

0:37:52 Tom: I and then I want to tell you guys like my porn story growing up, it's pretty fucking weird, but like I am real curious how you guys plan to manage violence if, if you're opposed to cartoonish violence or concerned about it, because even games like like Scooby-Doo, like used to play Scoobie -Doo video game with my son and you're like hitting bad guys with like sausages and shit. Oh,

0:37:53 Thomas: Done with this game.

0:38:09 Thomas: What happens in that game?

0:38:13 Eli: Mm -hmm. Yeah, I mean, so the good news is there are now so many games that solve exactly that problem, right?

0:38:22 Tom: Good.

0:38:23 Eli: Some of them have violent, violent elements, but you can turn them off or ignore them entirely. Um, so there's like Animal Crossing, right, which is a universe of games that you can play for hours and has zero conflict, right. The most conflict in the game is that tarantulas, if you run into a tarantula and you don't catch it with your net fast enough, it'll bonk you and you wake up with a black eye. That's it. But

0:38:23 Tom: But- but Okay, but what age do you graduate to like Mario? Okay.

0:38:51 Thomas: Well, Mario's fine.

0:38:51 Eli: Well Well, so that's, that's the thing. I think you could explain it to kids as they go, right? That you can, you can be a part of this conversation with kids because there's no longer, right? Our parents couldn't have a conversation about media with us because they were entirely disconnected from it, right? They couldn't sit down and play video games with us that, you know, the hysteria around video games often came from people who were looking at a screenshot or were being told about a video game rather than like actually knowing what was going on in the video game and what the point of said video game was. At least for me, I have such video game literacy that I am deeply aware of what video games I want my son playing early and how I want to introduce violent elements of video games. Nintendo versus, really, really good about that kind of stuff.

They have shooters, for instance, um, they have an entire shooter series which is a paint fight, it's like a, a paint water gun fight, so all the fun of a shooter except just kids running around, uh, it's called Splatoon, and they're just painting each other, right? So you got to paint the other guy's area before he can paint you, and when you paint him you're stunned for a second, but it very clearly differentiates between like violence is okay and these mechanics can be fun.

Um, so yeah, like there's so many games out there at this point for kids to play that aren't violent. And again, sort of like with me and and and less so with violent video games and TV and stuff, I think it's about having the conversation.

0:39:00 Tom: Okay.

0:39:12 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:40:21 Eli: Right, and just saying like, you have to understand that this is pretend, and what is this trying to sell us, right? The joke, my, my wife, my wife does this and I can't tell if she's making fun of me or not, my son, um, likes a YouTube playlist of Disney music videos, videos, that right is his screen time now, when he gets it, is he wants to watch a YouTube playlist that starts with Under the Sea and goes through a bunch of the

0:40:31 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, man, I think my kids are on that same one.

0:40:44 Eli: Yeah. It fucking rules, but in between occasionally an ad will pop up, right? So unlike most parents that just wait and skip it, I sit down with him and we watch the ad, and I'm like, what's this ad trying to sell us? And my son's like, I don't talk yet, dude, but now my wife has started doing it, and I think as long as you sit down and just have a conversation about that, media, um, can interpret it well for them.

Uh, and honestly, it's funny you were talking about books, that's what happened with books and me a lot, because I was a voracious reader as well, not 10 books at the library, but I was a very voracious leader as a kid. The difference is I would finish a book and then immediately my dad would be like, what did you think, what was it about, right?

Even if it was a book he knew super well, he would ask me about it, we would have a conversation about it. And so I always felt like I was in dialogue about what I was reading. And if I loved something, he would read it, right? My parents started reading the Harry Potter books at the same time as me because I

0:40:47 Tom: Oh,

0:41:41 Thomas: No.

0:41:41 Eli: Was so obsessed with them. You know, my mom was a book reviewer for the, Globe. Um, she Uh, was the children's book review for Boston Globe and she's actually, her quote is actually on the back of the second Harry Potter book, which is less impressive now because JK Rowling sucks, but it was really cool. She used to get the books early, and she used to have to read it like speed read it so she could review it, and then she'd give it to me, and I would speed read until the dad could read it, and we would talk about it, until the books on tape started to become popular, and then we would, and this is honestly one of my happiest childhood memories, we only had one air conditioner at one point, and it was in my parents' room, so we got the CD player

0:41:51 Thomas: Wow. No, that's awesome.

0:42:15 Thomas: God, so fucking poor. It's weird to grow up poor.

0:42:18 Eli: Thank you, we see, see, I can also be poor on this show. We brought the CD player upstairs and we would just lie there and listen to the Jim Dale Harry Potter books like as soon as they came out. And honestly, some of that like happiest memories of me and my parents is just sitting there listening to the Harry Potter bucks together.

0:42:31 Tom: Those are wonderful, yeah

0:42:38 Thomas: Oh, good to know. Well, let's see where I think there's a bunch of stuff. Oh, the violence in video games is a tough thing. I think we I do want to say from the outset, just because I know people are super sensitive to this. I don't think violent video games are causing the violence. In our society. And I don't, you know, I don't buy into that. Like, you the shootings happen, it's like, ah, the violent video games are the real, I don't buy into that.

And I'm not trying to say that. I do think that just there, from being a kind of a one, wanting my kids to be good people who value human life very highly. I think it is at least important to, as you say, Eli, have the conversation and put it in context. There's nothing wrong with playing a shooter when you're the appropriate age, you know? Like I play the it's there's other games that have more of a problem with.

In fact, as a kid, I don't know why. And maybe I've always just been kind of like sensitive in certain ways, but without anybody telling me to or anything, indeed, I don't even think my parents knew about these games. When Grand Theft Auto came out, I was just like, I don't want to play that. Like, I don't like

0:43:32 Eli: Right.

0:43:32 Thomas: The like, oh, you go up and you just beat a fucking pedestrian to death. Yeah.

0:43:34 Eli: You could just kill someone. I

0:43:36 Thomas: Like I just DON'T, I DON'T like it.

0:43:36 Eli: Remember my friends being so excited for it. They were like, no, no. Dude, if you go to this part of the map, you can get a hooker. Then you can have sex with her and then you can kill her. And I was like we have very different wants in our fantasy lives I

0:43:47 Tom: Yeah.

0:43:47 Thomas: It's I don't, like that. Like, I don't think that is good, you know, like I don't know to what extent it matters or causes bad behavior in people. I don't, that I don't know, and I'm not making a claim about that. I just don't think it's good, and

0:44:00 Eli: I think all art, video games included, is capable of being puerile, right? Don't— there are certain movies I don't want my kids to watch, there's certain books I don't want my kids— right, I don't want my kids to read The Girl Next Door ever, not ever, not ever under any circumstances, ever, right? Do I think anyone on the planet, anywhere, ever, of any age should read that book. I think that, you know, they say like you're a bad guy if you think the book burning, my exception is that book, I'm like, you can burn, sometimes the words are in the wrong order, we messed it up, get rid of that one, and I think it's fine to say that with video games as well, right? Think what we we're largely heard as kids was all video games are violent, all video gains are this.

0:44:41 Thomas: That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:44:43 Eli: Now, here's the one thing I will say, as well-intentioned as my parents were, um, much as they talked about ethical porn with me, which was really good, something that I plan to talk, and this, again, I know this is its own episode, but something that I plan to talk to my son about that I think is really important is that porn isn't real. It does not does realistic libido, it does not depict realistic sex, and

0:45:07 Thomas: Donald and Daffy, they can't go at it like that in real life, as hard as they do, and your cartoons yeah but main thing about this that I wanted to emphasize, and I've said this on, I think, Philosophers in Space, but I truly hate how our society has this exactly backwards. You can watch a PG-13 movie and and it's like for your kids, or whatever it might be, something your kids would watch, and there cannot be so much as a sliver of a nipple in it, but if there's, you know, 18 people who get shot to death, it's completely fine, nobody bats an eye at it, they don't care and in real life, one thing I hope my kids experience is sex and nudity and what all that kind of stuff in real life eventually when they're ready. What I hope they don't

0:45:11 Tom: Right. Right

0:45:14 Eli: Daffy needs lube.

0:45:44 Eli: Right the

0:45:53 Thomas: Ever fucking experience is getting shot or having someone near them get shot. I don't understand why that's the thing we're comfortable with everybody seeing, and the thing that every humans get to someday have a nice, healthy relationship with is sex and the body and all that stuff. And we're terrified of it. And if there's any depiction of certain parts of mainly women's bodies, then it gets a rating that's higher and you can't watch it. And it's just it blows my mind how backwards that is.

0:45:56 Tom: Yeah wait

0:46:19 Eli: Example I always use for this that blows people's minds is that Jaws is PG. Jaws the original Jaws, his rated PG.

0:46:24 Tom: What the fuck, what, Jaws is PG

0:46:23 Thomas: Right. Well, is that before? Well, isn't that the before PG-13? So it was like either PG or R or something like that.

0:46:32 Eli: I don't know, but I know that it's PG, it's just my, it's my fun little facticle, is that Jaws is PG. That

0:46:36 Thomas: Yeah.

0:46:38 Tom: That's insane, I just looked that up to be sure because I thought maybe you were full of shit. That movie scared the shit out of me when I was a kid, like

0:46:43 Thomas: Yeah.

0:46:43 Eli: Movie scared the shit out of literally everyone who watched This is what everyone who watched that movie says. Yeah, here's how long I could not touch water after watching that film

0:46:52 Thomas: Yeah.

0:46:53 Tom: That movie was genuinely terrifying, and then, oh my, that movie is fucking PG, holy shit well

0:46:54 Eli: Right

0:46:59 Thomas: Well, okay. So yeah, PG-13 started in 1984. That's could be wrong, I don't have time to look it up. But I believe back then it was like there weren't as many ratings, and so you toggling from PG to R or whatever was, like, you, arbitrary, if one was marginal, it might go swing hard the other way, yeah yeah

0:47:13 Tom: It's still fucking arbitrary as hell like, that whole rating system, it's not where we're going, but that whole ratings system is a fucking nightmare. I agree completely that our, our, are completely backward. You can have have consensual sex, and most sex that most people have will be hopefully consensial, but violence is almost never consensural. And like unless you're a fucking cage fighter or something like violence is always never consenual. So like to, to stigmatize something that brings like people joy and is generally thought to be like healthy and, and consensual, and then to like not stigmatize something which is just like unhealthy, like it's a fucking, you can't. No

0:47:16 Thomas: Yeah right unless

0:47:34 Eli: Airsofts

0:47:53 Thomas: It's unbelievable

0:47:54 Tom: One's ever going to sell that to me as as good idea at all. I, two related questions, though. Like, did you guys have, now I know this answer from you, Eli, but did you have BB guns growing up, you

0:47:54 Thomas: Oh dad had a couple BB guns and not, he didn't have any serious guns because I don't, I don't think he, my dad was not at all a violent person, didn't wasn't into any of that stuff, but he did have have BB guns and like a couple, I don't forget what the fuck they're called, but like a couple that are on the spectrum of like toward real gun, but not quite, you know, I can't really, like pellet gun, and there's some other, just nah, because we lived in the country, as I always say.

And there's, we had them because of actual like animals and shit that, you know, actual needs that we would have. I wasn't ever allowed to shoot him, but I think one time I shot a rattlesnake with, but mostly when it came to killing rattlesnakes, this is not a joke, I know this will be something that Eli would think was a joke, but I was kind of left to my own devices, and I had to use a shovel most of the time, even though, like, I think I reached an age where my dad stopped maintaining the guns, or would he just didn't care enough to let me use any of them, and

0:48:29 Tom: Get

0:48:30 Eli: Coyotes

0:48:50 Thomas: So So yeah, no,

0:48:50 Tom: Closer kid, we don't want you at a distance killing those fucking rattlesnakes what

0:48:52 Thomas: I literally almost got bitten by a rattlesnake because I just thought it was dead and like went to just get rid of it, and it was still barely alive. And I somehow reacted in time to not have it bite me. It was an insanely stupid thing I was doing. I was a kid who was thinking like, oh, that rattlesnake's dead. And furthermore, I'm a very brave young man who doesn't, you know, care that it's a rattlessnake. So I literally reached to go grab it, and it swiped at me and I dodged it with my, my hand before I could even think about it, and I was like, wow, I'm really glad my nervous system did that, I have no idea what the fuck just happened.

And that's the one that I really had to finish off with the shovel. Anyway, point is, yes, I did, but my dad didn't ever, my brother was able to use these guns at some point for something, for either for shooting, you know, snakes or whatever it would need to be, uh, but I never was. And I think a lot of my upbringing was my dad just ran out of fucking parenting juice, like he just fully just ran out of it and just did not care

0:49:27 Eli: Oh no

0:49:47 Thomas: Hmm

0:49:47 Tom: Just as a quick aside to your rattlesnape story, when I was, uh, I was a kid, very little, like, uh, until the middle of first grade, but sometime between like three and six in that, in that range, uh, lived in Florida in Tampa, and we had our house, and then we had a couple of acres of fenced off land that was often like, like it was like a nice yard, and then like kind of wild back in the, in the back couple of acres, so it's like Florida wild, you know, so it's like all full of like fucking snakes and bugs and all that kind of Florida shit, and I was, I was little, and I remember watching Spider-Man, Spider-Man gets his powers because he gets bitten by a spider, and so I ran around in my backyard thrusting my hands into bushes in like cracks and walls trying to get bit by stuff, and I would get bit buy shit, and then I would run over the house and try to lift up the house because I was waiting for like my powers to come

0:50:14 Thomas: Oh god, yeah oh my god holy crap

0:50:47 Tom: In and uh, I'm fucking, I'm so lucky I didn't get poisoned, like we had we

0:50:48 Thomas: Yeah how did you not lose a hand or something

0:50:53 Eli: Yeah and

0:50:53 Tom: Had all kinds of shit in the back, like it was fucking Florida so you just had, like, we had coral snakes occasionally in the backyard, so very venomous, like I didn't get bit by those, obviously, but there's all kinds of Florida shit back there, and I'd be like, I want powers, and I fucking ran around trying to get bit, it by shit

0:50:56 Thomas: Jesus

0:51:03 Eli: You yeah

0:51:07 Thomas: Yeah I'm glad they didn't make an alligator man comic it would have been

0:51:12 Tom: No

0:51:12 Eli: Because you know, if Tom had gotten bit by something and died, his dad would have just thrown him in the trash because he was done with that kid. Oh

0:51:20 Thomas: Yeah, damn, done with this kid, all

0:51:22 Tom: This This, this was my mom and stepdad. They had absolutely

0:51:24 Thomas: Right.

0:51:24 Tom: No, no.

0:51:25 Thomas: Yeah. They might have literally done that

0:51:25 Eli: Yeah, no, they didn't, no shelves to place kids on yet, yeah.

0:51:27 Thomas: Yeah

0:51:27 Tom: My stepdad, when I was, when the reason I ask about weapons a little bit is when I was in that same Florida house, my step dad as a gift gave me a hatchet to play with, and so I would run around in the backyard with a hatch it just, and I'm, I'm not first grade, because I moved in with my dad in the middle of first grade, so I'm sometime preschool kindergarten And and add to this that, again, remember my other story that they thought that I was intellectually disabled, right?

0:51:41 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, that's too young, yeah. Oh.

0:51:56 Tom: So and they gave me a hatchet, and so I ran around in the backyard and all around and just chopping trees down, just chopping shit it it

0:51:56 Thomas: My god, oh. Right, yeah. Wow. Which is the funnest fucking thing as a kid, okay, am I, right, Tom, like that was the most fun, because, because, like, we did, you know, we had the firewood stuff that we had to do that I mentioned before so I did have, like, you know, know, we had a giant, like, a big mall I had to split wood with, and we had some axe stuff, and I didn't really count that among the weapons, but I was older when I got to, fucking older than first grade for one, because those things are so heavy, but uh, but no, I never had like a sharp little hatchet as a first grader running around, that's, uh, that sounds dangerous.

0:52:09 Tom: Was yeah I

0:52:09 Eli: My

0:52:26 Tom: Just I thought it was great.

0:52:31 Eli: My My fam

0:52:32 Thomas: Wow.

0:52:32 Tom: Ran around the neighborhood with a fucking hatchet as a first grader. I had BB guns when I was older, but

0:52:32 Eli: Yeah No, we went to Disney World, but that seems fun, to the hatchet. I'm gonna go visit my grandparents, we go to Disney World, we do Sea World, but the hatchet thing, man, I missed out, missed out. So, uh, my dad had guns, uh, rifle, shotgun, two handguns.

0:52:51 Thomas: I would not have guessed that you

0:52:55 Eli: Yeah she

0:52:57 Tom: Was that, yeah, with your mom, did she put Amnesty International stickers all over him?

0:53:00 Thomas: Should have, especially

0:52:59 Eli: Was not a fan of the guns, that was a big thing, and when I became a, yeah.

0:53:06 Thomas: Knowing your dad's fucking temper, like, why, why did he, what why did he have these he he could have killed a rival dad several times, am I wrong, yeah?

0:53:09 Tom: I'm prone to violence with a hell of a temper but

0:53:10 Eli: Yeah yeah There was a weird, like, I might need this to kill a guy vibe going, we all didn't yeah, it wasn't great, and then when I become a sad boy, he was like, oh, no, no, no, and so he locked him he locked them in like a safe where they just never were touched again. Um, I did get an air rifle when I was 16, 16 or 17, that was the first gun I was allowed to touch, and I had to use goggles and earmuffs every time I shot it.

0:53:21 Thomas: That's not good. Yeah no fucking kidding yeah

0:53:46 Tom: That's great though, that's just teaching like good firearm safety that's That's

0:53:50 Eli: Thomas

0:53:48 Thomas: That, that is good well goggles I had, um, in fourth grade, a friend of mine, his, like, relative, I don't know if his brother, cousin, relative, or something, shot him, um, the eye with a, with could have, have been a BB gun, but I want to say it was something a little more serious than that. He survived, but he lost he he lost his eye.

0:54:01 Tom: Oh, oh, you

0:54:06 Eli: Don't be ridiculous No one gets shot in the eye with a BB gun, that's just a made-up thing, the that's why I'm saying that Oh you

0:54:12 Tom: Guys, do my story about this? Are you? Yeah.

0:54:11 Thomas: Yeah I don't know shit, did I forget a story

0:54:18 Eli: Don't know this This is amazing, this is amazing, I'm so excited, no.

0:54:19 Thomas: Okay here we go, I

0:54:23 Tom: So. All 17 or 18, and my best friend's mom was a Cub Scout troop leader, and she roped me and my buddy, Rick, into being like, we're going to do the firearm training safety range guy thing. So we go and, like, we're, we're teaching Cub Scouts firearm safety.

So we've got these, uh, BB guns, and we've got balloon targets set up, and the kids were, teaching the kids, you, the rules of firearm safety, the rules of range safety, like, we're having them, like, lay prone and shoot these balloons, but we're 18, 17, 18, it's summer of like my, my senior year, and we're fucking bored, we're just bored, cause there's all this downtime between, like, groups of students, we have to be there at like five in the morning and it's just a fucking shit show, and so my buddy's girlfriend shows up, and, like, she's bored, and we're all just kind of hanging out, we've got like two hours between the next group, so at some point, something, something, 17, and, like, buddy Rick goes out down the range, and Jill, his girlfriend, starts shooting him with this BB gun, like, in the legs and in the back and everything, like

0:55:31 Tom: A, ha, ha, ha thing you know, and he's dancing around and jumping and yelling, and he's like, you know, like everyone's kind of laughing, and it's like, all right, one, and then something, something, it's my turn, so I gotta go out in the range, and, like, I think they're gonna, like, shoot me at the same distance that they, that we shot Rick, they've shot my buddy. Well, I walk out, like, I'm not even like 10 feet, and my buddy just starts unloading on me, just starts shooting at, like, super close range with this fucking BB gun, and it hurts far more than I thought it was gonna hurt, and he's shooting me all over, and so I turn around to yell at him, as I turn, turn around, he looks, and he sights the gun right up, and I watched him do it, and he shoots me right in my left eye with

0:55:29 Thomas: Uh, ha, ha, ha, or okay they Oh, yeah.

0:56:12 Tom: This fucking BB gun, and it's like one of those things where you're like, fuck, I see it, boom, and it, like, because, are just spring-loaded, but it hits me directly in my left eye, and I thought I lost my eye, my eye immediately, like, closes an instinct, and then I'm bleeding, my eye is bleeding, and it's like watering like crazy immediately, and, like, I, I hold my hand out, I see blood and water and all, you know, and so I'm like, I fucking just lost an eye. So I run at my buddy and I knock him to the ground, but he's still my best friend. So I'm like, you can't, I can't hit him with my fist because he's my best friends, but I'm so mad. So I'm clubbing him with my forearms, because in my mind that was like an acceptable way to beat the hell out of him without putting a fist to my best friend, you know?

0:56:52 Tom: And then his dad, I'm screaming obscenities, there's Cub Scouts everywhere, I'm screaming obsenities, bleeding out of my eye. His dad comes over, his dad Jim comes over, and he puts his hand on my shoulder to, like, grab me off of his son, and I just throw Jim off me, I was much bigger than Jim, so I throw Jim back and stand up, and I'm cursing and yelling, I'm walking down the street, and I finally get the courage up to open my, my left eye a little bit, and I open it up, and I can see, and I'm like, okay, good, I still have an eye. The bottom line is, like, I get shot in the eye with this fucking BB gun, I have to, like, lie and make up a story to my dad, because I didn't want him to know, I don't want him to be, I don't want to be in trouble, so I was

0:56:51 Eli: Obviously yeah

0:57:29 Thomas: Oh

0:57:29 Tom: Like I got stung by a bee in the eyes, like, I go to the eye doctor, the eye doctor's like, that's not what happened, tell me what happened, and I, I, to this day, I barely can see out of my left eye. The eye is damaged, it damaged the optic nerve, and my left eye is just a shapes and colors eye. Like, I can't focus it, I have no, yeah, my left ey is fucking useless. It's just like I got my right eye, and then, like, lefty is just, that's just a decorative eye.

0:57:34 Thomas: Really? Wow.

0:57:52 Tom: That's not, for that's for using. So my eye gets patched up, and like my face all around my eye is bruised up and fucked up. My eye gets like patched up, I've got to wear a fucking patch and put drops in, and she's like, yeah, you might still lose the eye if you know, it gets infected. And so the next day I go back to Cub Scout firearm safety, and the Cub Scouts are there, and they line up, and one of the kids doesn't put his goggles on right away, and I lift the patch up, like, this is what happens if you don't wear your goggles, and those kids put those fucking goggles on so fast. My eye was a fucking purple swollen mass. It was just, oh, it was so gross for

0:58:06 Thomas: Jesus.

0:58:25 Thomas: I think that's exactly what happened to my friend. Although his, still ended up being like black and like the, that's cause your, your eye doesn't, doesn't look any different from the outside. Right. Or okay, yeah. My friend, He had that forever, and it sucks because I remember playing, he played basketball, and, like, we played sports, and then after that, like he couldn't really play because he couldn't, I mean, I think he had the same thing where he had, like some amount of vision. Anyway, wear your fucking goggles and don't shoot. I have no interest. No, I am the country boy, you know, and it sounds like, Tom, you are to an extent too as well, but, like I have fucking less than zero interest in my kids doing anything with any projectile anything ever. There's no, what is the upside, what is the upside, oh, they'll, someday they'll be ready to shoot something, what the fuck is that stupid, oh

0:58:39 Tom: My eye healed, the orb of the eye healed, just the nerve beneath it is damaged I got, I got one other weird story. So you mentioned, like, Eli, how you guys manage, or how your dad helped you guys manage porn, I'm curious if you guys, did you guys ever find like your dad's porn stash, so my dad had Penthouse letters, which he did not throw away when he was done with. I don't know that he's done with them yet. My dad had Penthouse letters, and right.

0:59:31 Eli: We Yes!

0:59:32 Thomas: Actually, yeah, I just realized, yes, forgot got we know what the bookcase was for, okay well

0:59:45 Eli: Right.

0:59:47 Tom: I didn't find them. Like I had some weird fucking babysitters. So I had a lot of babysitters growing up because my dad worked so much. So my dad had to rely on lots of different babysitters, some were very good, some where egregiously horrible. Like I had, I had really fucking weird experiences from babysitters but I had well shit. Now I think think about it I had two babysitters

1:00:06 Thomas: That's terrifying me too Is it better now, is it easier to find babysitters, aren't, because we're gonna need one, but yeah yeah and

1:00:07 Tom: Yeah babysitters are better because you can vet them through like care.com and shit now, so you can actually background check them. Back in the day it was just some, some you knew from the neighborhood, so like just yep

1:00:16 Eli: Yep. Just a random person who was like, I'll, I'll watch your kid sure

1:00:23 Thomas: Like half of all random people are fucking horrible in some way, yeah yeah, holy

1:00:24 Tom: Oh my god yeah we had, we had the weirdest experiences being babysat ever, but like this one girl in particular found my dad's porn stash because she would like go through all of his stuff and while he was gone, and then she would sit, and we would all sit, and I'm, I'm fairly little, I'm like third, fourth grade, somewhere around there, and she and my brother and I would sit on, on the bed, and she would look at the porn and she would read the letters out loud, the Penthouse letters, out loud to us, and so my first experience

1:00:28 Eli: Are they're

1:00:37 Thomas: Shit, okay, what are penthouse letters, I don't know what that is, okay

1:00:57 Tom: Yeah

1:00:58 Eli: Like erotic letters they're erotic stories told as, like, "Dear Penthouse," I never believed it would happen to me

1:01:00 Tom: Yeah, they're right exactly exactly

1:01:02 Thomas: Okay, okay I wasn't like, dear penthouse, I didn't like last month's issue with the weather, that was like complaining to the editor,

1:01:11 Tom: Letters to

1:01:09 Eli: No it wasn't the Patreon comments, yep

1:01:12 Thomas: Yeah Yeah.

1:01:12 Tom: The editor so my, my first experienced with porn was actually driven by our teenage babysitter, who like sat there and like read these fucking explicit letters and like showed us the pictures, and like, like, would just go through all my dad's Private shit. And that was, it was terribly inappropriate.

1:01:25 Thomas: Wow. That is so fucking horribly inappropriate. I can't even. Wow!

1:01:36 Tom: Are you kidding me? It was terrible. It was horrible. Like I said, I had some fucking really weird experiences with babysitters. So, you know, Haley and I have talked about how we're going to handle, it's so funny because we talked about how we wanted to handle porn our house because when we got together, the boys were 10. Now the boys are 15, 16. Our intention at first was we were gonna buy what we thought of as like relatively innocuous porn and leave it somewhere for them to find, um, try to like get them some gateway into something that wasn't incredibly troubling.

1:02:09 Thomas: Set up like a spotlight to shine on it and like some audio that's like, cool oh

1:02:12 Eli: Yeah.

1:02:10 Tom: Right. Like. Oh. Here's. Like, like, did you guys find like your like. Fucking like a Victoria's Secret catalog or something like?

1:02:18 Eli: I.

1:02:18 Tom: And you're just like, "Yeah, that's fucking.

1:02:19 Eli: Started.

1:02:19 Tom: Mine now." Like, right.

1:02:15 Thomas: Yeah

1:02:20 Eli: With the uh, swimsuit issue.

1:02:22 Tom: So like, that was actually the plan was like, oh, we'll just kind of like get like a subscription, like Playboy or something, but you can't get those magazines delivered anymore, they don't have paper. Magazines by subscription that were like, it's all fucking digital. And by the time the kids were, god, like 13 or so, they had phones and.

1:02:31 Thomas: Yeah

1:02:40 Eli: Yep.

1:02:41 Tom: So at that point, that ship has fucking sailed. Like, you have to recognize that that ship is sailed. And then it becomes a conversation, which I've had, had, had with Finn, and I, I am sure that Hayley has had with Donovan, where I've talked to Finn about like, look, man, you're gonna find a bunch of shit online, and here's, here's how to kind of manage some of that, here's what to look for, and don't go down certain paths, because it's gonna wire your brain all weird, you don't want to do that.

1:03:07 Eli: Yeah.

1:03:07 Tom: So. We, we've had to have those conversations, and it's funny because, like, it was more uncomfortable in that conversation than Finn was, he was very like, "Yeah, I get that. That makes sense. Yeah, absolutely, all right, like, yeah, whatever, yeah." So went much smoother than I thought, but yeah, it's a different world, you got to recognize, like, unless you put a net nanny on, you give your kids a computer, you give your kids the phone, you've handed them the internet. Yeah.

1:03:07 Eli: Right.

1:03:15 Thomas: Oh

1:03:30 Eli: And you've also handed them, and we got it, I, I feel like every episode of Dear Old Dads ends with us being like these fucking perverts trying to fuck our kids, but you, you've. Also handed them a bunch of adults who, because of whatever's going on with them, very explicitly seek out places where children think they are safe and introduce them to this kind of thing. Right? So like, there was recently the really big Roblox porn thing that happened, uh, someone, like, like, broke into one of the major games on Roblox. I'm telling this wrong, so if you're a Robloxer and I apologize for besmirching your people, but someone broke into one of the major games for kids on Roblox and posted the Kim, Kim Kardashian porn video.

1:03:40 Tom: Oh.

1:03:40 Thomas: How

1:04:14 Tom: Shit.

1:04:14 Thomas: Quaint that thing from like thousands of years ago yeah

1:04:14 Tom: Nice. Yep.

1:04:15 Eli: Yeah. Right. But, like, at the same time, it's like someone was like, ha ha, here's a place where millions of children go to play, like Freeze Tag or whatever. I will place a porn video there. So, like, often, so with the internet, we don't get to decide when our kids are ready, it's not like our parents, who sort of, all the media that came through the door literally passed through hands.

1:04:24 Tom: Yep. Yeah.

1:04:25 Thomas: Well

1:04:40 Eli: That's why it's so important to have that conversation. And again, like, I was very lucky that, um, had good friends and stuff, but I had some incredibly bad sexual experiences as a 19, 20 year old because of what porn had taught me about sex. Right, worry, they were bad for me, they weren't bad for anyone else, it's.

1:05:00 Eli: Fine, it's, it's funny, but I promise it's a funny story, it's fun, you all enjoy it, I believe I got, I got, got good angles on it, punch lines and everything. Yeah.

1:05:00 Thomas: Uh,

1:05:15 Eli: Right, well, on that note, gentlemen, that wraps up our first Q&A with, um, I think we managed to get to four questions, four questions there, but don't worry, if you submitted questions, uh, many of these are going to be their own episodes, so we will, uh, you will definitely hear these questions, if you didn't hear yours this time, don't worry, again, again, like I said, we will probably be using these for shows in the future. Let's just take a moment. Thank you all so much. We're recording, recording. This is the beginning of July, and thank you for all the positive feedback y'all have given us. It really means a lot. So gentlemen, before we go, important question: why do fathers take an extra pair of socks when they go golfing, just.

1:05:55 Tom: Oh, God. Because there's a hole in one?

1:05:58 Eli: In case there's a hole in. One.

1:05:59 Tom: Oh, God. I'm embarrassed to have guessed it.

1:06:00 Thomas: Nice.

1:06:05 Eli: Yes. It begins, the infection grows.

1:06:10 Thomas: Whereas as a golfer and a dad, I was like going through legitimate reasons. It's like, oh, let's see. You might, uh. Get a little soggy on one of your foot. Maybe you've hidden the hazard and you want to go into the hazard. And get it. No, it's not. That's a whole. Okay. There might be a hole in one guy.

1:06:16 Tom: Because threw your other ones in a tree.

1:06:24 Eli: In a rage, exactly, all.

1:06:27 Tom: All

1:06:33 Clip: Want to meet sexy DILFs in your area? Email the dads at DearOldDads.com or, better yet, send us a message on Patreon. You can follow us on all social media by checking the links in the show notes. And if you need more podcasts in your life, you can find Tom on Cognitive Dissonance, Thomas on Serious Inquiries Only, and Eli on Godawful Movies and all the Puzzle in the Thunderstorm shows. Dear Old Dads is edited and produced by my favorite DILF, Tom Smith, who also wrote and recorded the intro music, which is used with his permission. This podcast is a production of Daddy Issues LLC. Copyright 2022. All rights reserved.

1:07:11 Thomas: Make sure you should say their name. I'm not sure if you said Matt.

1:07:14 Eli: Did say Matt.

1:07:14 Thomas: Why don't you give me this questions from Matt just so I can cut it earlier just in case.

1:07:15 Eli: Yeah.

1:07:19 Tom: Question is from matt I

1:07:20 Eli: Already said that, Tom, I'm. Putting that in so you can keep it, the whole thing, people Understand, Tim.

1:07:21 Tom: Know this