Do you think you could murder someone?

Answer: Yes.

Or, your answer should be yes. It's important that you answer yes to that question.

www.SlaterRadio.com

Cicero wrote, “The first bond of society is marriage; the next, our children; then the whole family and all things in common.”

So, if there’s a breakdown somewhere in society (School shootings, gang violence, general chaos and disrespect) look to the root causes of that breakdown - the “first bonds of society”.

When Senator Moynihan in 1965 wrote “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action” 25% of black kids were born without a dad. And it was a call to action! Today, it’s 72%. How sad is that!

Of all races, 72% of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers. 60% of all rapists. 70% of juveniles in state institutions grew up in single- or no-parent house. And these are kids with NO dads. The rest maybe had dads who were “present”, but were absent or violent or alcoholic or whatever.

Poverty is not a predictor of crime. It’s lack of dads

"Failure for me is not trying" -Spanx founder Sara Blakely

"The greatest ingredient in a joyful and productive life is failure.” -Gold Medalist Scott Hamilton

"I wouldn’t be up here if I hadn’t fallen thousands of times and made mistakes.” -Super Bowl MVP Nick Foles

"Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today.” -Jordan Peterson

The story of Ryan Holets, the police officer President Trump honored at the SOTU.

Original headline, "Police officer adopts homeless mother's opioid-addicted newborn". AMAZING STORY! Every American needs to hear this. I want to be as good of a man as Ryan Holets.

https://tinyurl.com/y8yz8jkd

I'm debating if I should get the black or pinto beans at Chipotle, and this man survived by eating dirt.

Listen to this if you want you first-world problems to disappear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPtkn3fJQBI I have a concern as a parent. I don't want to give Jack too comfortable of a life. It's so odd, we work so hard to provide for our family, but what if we make life TOO comfortable>? No kid has ever lived with as much material prosperity as we have today. No one ever. That sandwich you kid ate this afternoon - the bread, the meats, the cheeses, the pickle, the mayonnaise and mustard - the most powerful kings in history couldn't eat a sandwich like that. How do I get my kids to appreciate that! Ben Sasse has a great part of his book The Vanishing Ameican Adult about his kids thinking Air Conditioning was a necessity of life. How could they survive without it?! The same way everyone did until the last 40 years. The owner of a steakhouse in NYC was on Fox & Friends and was asked about finding good employees. He said it's hard to find wait staff. They used to be SERVANTS. But today they have a greater sense of entitlement, "They're not used to working. They're starting their first job later, and you meet someone who is 23 and they've never really had a job." People are upset with him because they HEARD that he wants his employees to be slaves! No. He wants them to be servants and serve the customers. The word serve literally means "to be devoted to" and "provide for". In an era of entitlement, if your first job is being a server - and you're whole life you've BEEN SERVED - it's going to be hard to make that change of perspective. There has been a lot of questioning why so many teenagers and young adults are anxious and depressed. There are a few big reasons, but here's one of them: Kids have grown up their entire lives CONSUMING constantly, and producing very little. We are a CONSUME culture. This is especially true for kids. They go their entire lives constantly consuming; expecting to be entertained and served, non-stop. Kids are doing very little producing or creating. Do you want kids to feel fulfilled and want kids to feel like they have meaning? They need to create and produce. This is the story we shared yesterday of a homeless program in Denver hiring homeless people to do menial jobs. One of the homeless men said: "When you take a good person down, broken, discouraged, and you give them an opportunity to be proud of their self — to stand up and do something for their self — that's one of the greatest gifts anybody can give to anybody," What is he talking about? Producing! There are a lot of rehab facilities located out in the country. Why are they in the county? Because you get to work! Rather, you have to work. It doesn't matter what the work is. It's all about creating instead of consuming. I asked one of our greatest generation members the other day, "what's one major difference between today and then?" He said back then there was DIGNITY in manual labor. There was no stigma attached to begin a good hard worker, regardless of the kind of work you were doing. Today, we have this talk of, "Immigrants do the jobs Americans won't do." Wait a second. Why wouldn't an American do it? Because we've lost the concept of the DIGNITY OF WORK. Too entitled. Waiting to be served. Wanting to consume. This man went on a long odyssey from Texas to Canada. He said he learned to respect men who work with their hands. He learned to admire people in the country. They have a SIMPLICITY OF CHARACTER. I love that. A wholesomeness. A closeness to the earth. This is what I want for my kids. How do I do it? How do you do it? I don't think you need to live in the country to experience this or to teach your kids these values, but you need to be intentional. They need to work. They need to produce and create. I'm going to be on the lookout for mindless consumption. I know this leads to unhappiness over time. Arthur Brooks, author of The Conservative Heart, says there are 4 essential aspects of true fulfillment: faith, family, community (defined as two friends who feel pain when you suffer and joy when you thrive), and meaningful work. Meaningful work is: Do you believe, when you go to work each day, that other people genuinely benefit from what you do. Not, "Am I well compensated?" but "Does it matter?" That's meaningful work. Charles Murray says one of the keys to happiness and fulfillment is doing something that involves effort over a period of time. In other words, consumption doesn't bring happiness. PRODUCTION bring happiness. I think this is one major reason why kids are so much more anxious and depressed than ever. It's not in spite of the fact that kids have more material prosperity and comfort and abundance than ever. It's BECAUSE they do. That's a long way of saying, "Help!" How do you raise your kids to be PRODUCERS and not consumers? Please leave some examples of what you've done in the comments.

https://youtu.be/BcTMK1ityQA This is the test Thomas Edison gave to potential employees. It's 146 questions. You have to get 90%. Compare that to current Standardized tests where 55 is considered passing. When I was a HS junior the passing grade was 65. My senior year, they lowered it to 55. Shockingly, our school got so much "smarter" that year. I have the entire test below. I got maybe 3 right. To be honest, I didn't know the first 5 and gave up and scrolled quickly through. I knew 1 or 2 and thought maybe I would guess another one right. I'm not proud of this. But the questions do seem a bit random. But this was on purpose. He wanted employees with good memories. This is a Scientific American magazine article in 1921, If I had a man in my employ who was right only half the time, or a little more than half the time, he would last just long enough for me to find him out, and that would not take very long. But our schools consistently and persistently give passing grades to students who are right above 60% fo the time. I consider this a disgraceful procedure. If they can't teach the boys and girls to be right more consistently than that it is about time they admitted their failure and gave up the effort to teach them at all. In the good old days when a student had to be right practically all the time or take a caning and occupy a position of general disgrace, the school and the college produced far better results. I consider that a man who makes a grade of 50 on one of my tests has scored da total failure… A man who has not got 90% of these facts at his command is deficient either in memory, as discussed already, or in the power of acquiring facts, as I shall presently make clear. And either deficiency is fatal for my purposes." We talk a lot on the radio about raising kids to maintain their natural curiosity. Kids growing up LOVE to learn about the world, but schools KILL curiosity in kids around 3rd grade. This is Thomas Edison, "Somewhere between the ages of 11 and 15, the average child begins to suffer from this atrophy, this paralysis of curiosity, this suspension of the power to observe. The trouble I should judge to lie with the schools…it is clear to me that our schools and colleges are turning out men who not merely have failed to learn, but have been robbed of the capacity to learn. I think of Frederick Douglass. He was born a slave and later sold to someone in Baltimore. He got his first taste of reading from his master's wife. His master put a stop to that. But the seed was planted. Young Frederick became obsessed. When he would go on an errand he would bring pieces of bread and meet up with the poorest little kids in the city who were desperate for food. He traded with them. In his words, he would trade them bread for "that more valuable bread of knowledge." The obsession he had with learning to read - with learning about the world - our kids are all born with that, but the modern education system kills it. This TED Talk is a must watch on this issue: But back to Edison's point specifically, I think it's important that we memorize things. I want to learn to memorize again. It's a part of my brain that has atrophies over the years. For all of human history, men memorized everything. My challenge is to memorize a poem. I'm going to start with Rudyard's Kipling's IF. Then Invictus. Whatever you want, it doesn't matter. Memorize the Declaration of Independence with your kids. Let's first agree that memorizing is a long lost art and we as humans should improve this muscle. What poem will you start with? How can you do this with your kids? I'm excited to hear your memorizing goals. I'll join you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqVHk2B4-0I&t=7s I went to the park the other day. It couldn't be a safer place in a Purell-dipped little suburban bubble. I let my 15-month-old son Jack walk across the grass all the way to the other side, maybe 25 yards away. The guy I was with asked why I'm letting him walk so far away. Wasn't I concerned something bad could happen. No. I wasn't. I mean, I didn't LEAVE HIM ALONE at the park. I could see him, but I guess parents have to always be an arm's length away? I reject that. I want him to be able to exist with out me standing right behind him. I want him to be able to look up, look behind him or around him and not see me, and still know it's okay. Because it is okay. Remember "The World's Worst Mom"? She let her 9-year-old ride the NYC subway alone. A few years ago, CPS threatened to take away a 10 and 6-year-old because the parents dare let their kids walk home from the park. A South Carolina mom who sent her 9-year-old to play in a popular park was arrested for not supervising her child. She was held overnight in jail, and her daughter spent 17 days as a ward of the state. In the fall, an Austin, Tex., mom who let her 6-year-old play outside within view of the house was also visited by the cops and then child protective services. CPS interviewed her kids individually and even asked her 8-year-old daughter “if she had ever seen movies with people’s private parts,” the mom told me. “So my daughter, who didn’t know that things like that exist, does now. Thank you, CPS. You get the idea. "But Slater, there are way more abductions now than back in the day!" No. Not really. We just hear about child abductions more because each abduction is national news. And for every 1,000 children abducted, only about 1 or 2 are abducted by strangers. I'd rather risk it and let my kid learn FREEDOM with a good run in the grass. Have you heard of the Abernathy boys? Thye lived in Oklahoma 100 years ago. They begged their dad to let them ride on horseback from Oklahoma to Santa Fe, New Mexico. His dad finally let them. The older brother was 9. Th youngest was 5. They encountered sandstorms, hail, wolves, they got sick along the way but made it back alive and happy. The next year, they asked dad to ride from Oklahoma to meet Teddy Roosevelt's ship that was landing in NYC harbor. 2.5 months and 1,000 miles later, the boys arrived and greeted the former President. Then, the boys decided to kick it up a notch and ride a car. They dove, at the age of 14 and 9, New York to San Francisco by car. 62 days. In 1913. Check out eh lessons they learned, We learned to look a man in the eye and judge him by the grasp of his hand. Wealth and education aren't as important as the way a man approaches life, and we came to appreciate a willingness to help. ... Geography came alive for us. Each trip was an expedition of discovery. I learned all the states, the cities, and the capitals. We saw everything from lead mines in operation, to oil wells being drilled. ... Through Teddy's influence and our tours of Washington, we came to admire those who strive for good government. Bud later became a lawyer and served his community as both district attorney and county judge, a leaning surely traced in part to those early lessons. We learned to endure hardship with patience, especially in those heartbreaking days toward the end of our coast-to-coast trip, when Sam Bass' death and our trials in the desert seemed to test us more than we could bear. I'm not ready to throw Jack on the back of a horse and let him ride to Denver, but we can let him run to the other side of the park. Bravery and independence; If our kids don't learn this, if we crush their desire to be free, we're robbing them of what they need to change the world.