The Culture War - Tim Pool - The Culture War #30 - Surrogacy, Men's Rights, and Modern Parenting w/ Jeff Younger & Katy Faust
Aired: 2023-09-15
Duration: 02:00:29


=== Surrogacy and Men's Rights (15:33) ===

[00:00:00]  One of the things that came up during our Timcast IRL episode with Mr. Jeff Younger was the concept of surrogacy.
[00:00:14]  And surrounding the issue of men's rights, a lot of this stuff starts coming together, along with a bunch of other ideas around artificial wombs, abortion.
[00:00:23]  There's a big conversation here, especially when it comes to surrogacy and men's rights as it pertains to their children.
[00:00:31]  When you go to divorce courts, who the courts favor, and I'm trying to just do like a wide spread on all these subjects that we've talked about before.
[00:00:40]  But on today's episode of The Culture War, we're going to be discussing all of these things and what it means for society and where we go.
[00:00:46]  I think there's a big question around the traditional gender roles, the roles of mothers and fathers, and how we navigate what's happening to our society.
[00:00:54]  Last, not last week, but a couple weeks ago, we talked with Fresh and Fit, Who have basically, they've lamented the modern state of dating and their solution was more focused on adapting to it and becoming something different as a man.
[00:01:08]  Whereas Jason Howerton, high value dad, said, no, no, you have to resist these things and retain those traditional values that make you a good father.
[00:01:15]  So I think we have a lot to discuss and to elaborate on.
[00:01:18]  We have a couple people joining us today.
[00:01:20]  Katie, would you like to introduce yourself first?
[00:01:21]  Yeah, my name is Katie Faust.
[00:01:23]  I run the children's rights nonprofit, Them Before Us, which insists that adults bend to children's rights rather than insisting that children conform to adult desires.
[00:01:32]  That makes me a fierce advocate.
[00:01:34]  I'm sorry, a fierce adversary of surrogacy in all forms.
[00:01:38]  In essence, children have a right to their mother and father.
[00:01:42]  And we look at every marriage and family issue from the definition of marriage to divorce to same sex parenting, reproductive technologies, adoption, cohabitation, everything.
[00:01:51]  Through the lens of the best interest of the child.
[00:01:54]  So that I'm going to be representing what I hope is a very accurate picture of children's interests in this conversation.
[00:02:00]  And we have Jeff Younger.
[00:02:01]  Hi, my name is Jeff Younger.
[00:02:03]  I got embroiled in family law unwillingly when my ex-wife tried to transition my son to a girl and the entire government of the state of Texas basically sided with her and tried to chemically castrate my son at the age of eight.
[00:02:17]  And so that took me down this rabbit hole of exactly what parental rights are, how they're actually understood in the legal system.
[00:02:27]  I would like to say that I think Katie Faust has a sincere love of children, and I admire a lot of her work.
[00:02:33]  I do disagree with her on surrogacy.
[00:02:35]  Well, we have a lot to talk about.
[00:02:37]  I want to talk about, obviously, traditional gender roles come into play here, the differences between men and women, men's rights, dating, relationships, all of that stuff will be big.
[00:02:45]  But we can just get started with surrogacy in general, because this was a point of contention on our episode of IRL when you were here.
[00:02:52]  Yes, sir.
[00:02:53]  There are a lot of women who are not even conservative.
[00:02:56]  who have a distaste for the idea of surrogacy.
[00:02:59]  So I'm wondering if either of you wants to start, maybe Jeff, you could present your argument and how you feel about it.
[00:03:04]  Sure, so you mentioned two possible ways of dealing with the changes in the world, the technological changes in the world.
[00:03:11]  One was to try to maintain traditional ways of living, right?
[00:03:17]  I call that cargo cult thinking.
[00:03:19]  It's maintaining the forms of traditional life, But without all of the other things that enable it, right?
[00:03:27]  There's another approach which says you should just give into it and become a libertine, and I disagree with that as well.
[00:03:34]  If you go onto my Twitter profile, you'll see that I call myself a paleo-futurist.
[00:03:40]  And what I mean by that is, I believe that we should try to take traditional values and project them into an inevitable ultra-science future.
[00:03:47]  And the question we should be asking is, what values are we trying to hold?
[00:03:52]  Not the forms by which we've held them.
[00:03:55]  What values are we trying to hold and project them into this future?
[00:03:58]  Now the reason surrogacy ever came up to me is because a whole bunch of my followers, young men, We're telling me they were doing this, that they had most of them.
[00:04:06]  I, in fact, I met with them about a month ago in Austin.
[00:04:09]  I went to an event and they all hooked up with me.
[00:04:11]  I spent a lot of time with one, one fellow who was already going to Argentina and is planning to do this and has already funded it.
[00:04:18]  And almost all of them said to me the same thing.
[00:04:20]  I saw my dad destroyed by my mother in divorce court.
[00:04:24]  And they said it that way.
[00:04:25]  They didn't say it was destroyed by the courts.
[00:04:27]  It said it was destroyed by their mother.
[00:04:30]  And they do not intend to have that happen to them, and they were taken from their fathers forcefully.
[00:04:35]  And so their idea is to have children where they actually have rights, and then they can get married to a woman, but she won't be able to take their children.
[00:04:41]  And I think it's a rational approach to dealing with the risks of marriage in the modern world.
[00:04:46]  That's a horrifying reality.
[00:04:48]  It is.
[00:04:49]  And I've also heard many similar stories.
[00:04:51]  This is why you have... It's not exactly why you have some of these groups like... Men go their own way.
[00:04:56]  Yes, MGTOW, right?
[00:04:57]  I'm opposed to MGTOW, by the way.
[00:04:59]  Yeah, do you want to... Oh, I wanna.
[00:05:03]  Elaborate and give us your view.
[00:05:05]  Absolutely, 100% sympathetic to Jeff's position.
[00:05:08]  He is absolutely correct about how the divorce courts stack the deck against men and against fathers, and very often allow the woman to weaponize the courts against men who all they want is to love and be connected to their children, but then they end up paying through the nose for kids they never get to see.
[00:05:26]  And I feel bad for the men, but I'm enraged on behalf of the kids.
[00:05:30]  Enraged.
[00:05:32]  What they are losing, what Jeff's sons have lost is not something that can ever be quantified.
[00:05:37]  Not at all.
[00:05:38]  It's a lifelong loss that they are going to, they're going to experience that wound forever.
[00:05:42]  They're being starved of not just the male love that all children need, but the biological identity that comes from being raised by their own dad.
[00:05:50]  I mean, what the courts have done to Jeff and what they are doing to thousands of other men across this country is criminal.
[00:05:57]  And you see why I love Katie Faust.
[00:06:00]  That is why one of the planks at Them Before Us is to fight no-fault divorce, which very, very often hands the most power to the women.
[00:06:07]  No-fault divorce is probably the proximate cause of all this.
[00:06:10]  I agree.
[00:06:11]  But let's talk surrogacy.
[00:06:12]  Well, actually, I was going to say, as we're introducing these ideas of, you know, why is there even a conversation about surrogacy, perhaps we should pause and talk about no-fault divorce, which is the legal change and the social change.
[00:06:25]  We must talk about no-fault divorce.
[00:06:26]  Yeah, and then, you know, surrogacy is very much a technological advance.
[00:06:31]  Were it not possible to do IVF, we wouldn't even be talking about it.
[00:06:35]  That's right.
[00:06:36]  But before we even get into the science of how society is changing, I think no-fault divorce, we've talked about it quite a bit, I think this is a cause of a massive amount of problems and contention today.
[00:06:46]  Yeah.
[00:06:46]  So the way that we talk about it then before us is functionally what children are right now is accessories to be cut and pasted into any and every adult relationship, right?
[00:06:55]  We have an understanding of parental rights to their children, but we don't have an idea of children's rights to their own parents.
[00:07:01]  And those actually go together, right?
[00:07:03]  People care which baby they take home from the hospital.
[00:07:05]  They don't want just any kid in the nursery.
[00:07:07]  They actually want their baby.
[00:07:08]  There's something precious and special about taking your own child home.
[00:07:11]  There is something distinct and wonderful about your own progeny.
[00:07:16]  And we can get into adoption later, but we all, I mean, there was that ridiculous article like last week that was like, wanting your own biological children is what, what, what was it called?
[00:07:25]  It was a, it was a racist or I know she, she acquitted.
[00:07:28]  It was white supremacy or whatever it was.
[00:07:30]  And that is like all of these arguments.
[00:07:32]  And I think where we're going with your argument, Jeff, is this idea that you're going to be able to overhaul human nature.
[00:07:38]  No matter how technology changes, no matter how law changes, no matter how culture changes, you cannot overhaul child nature.
[00:07:45]  And children have a natural right to be known and loved by both of their biological parents.
[00:07:50]  Those two adults grant children statistically the safest home that they're going to experience.
[00:07:55]  Like if your wife remarries, the man that joins her life will never be as statistically connected to, invested in, and protective of your sons as you are.
[00:08:05]  They'll be one of the greatest threats to them.
[00:08:07]  That's correct.
[00:08:08]  This is right.
[00:08:09]  Not only will he not be as connected and invested, he will statistically be one of the most dangerous people in their life.
[00:08:14]  Okay, so we have to get very clear about children having a right to their own mother and father.
[00:08:19]  The threats that have Disconnected children from that are cultural, legal, and technological.
[00:08:25]  So we'll be talking about one of the technological shifts that have commodified children and turned them into functional accessories.
[00:08:32]  But the legal shifts have also been at play since the late 60s, and it began with no-fault divorce.
[00:08:39]  No Fault Divorce was the first, in essence, redefinition of the family.
[00:08:43]  It transformed what used to be the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known, marriage, into just another vehicle of adult fulfillment.
[00:08:51]  It said, we used to have this idea that marriage was going to be permanent, and the only time you would break it up is if one spouse was found to be at fault of abuse, adultery, abandonment, addiction.
[00:09:01]  But we turned to No Fault Divorce.
[00:09:04]  And since women have sort of higher rates of Emotional expectation, they tend to be dissatisfied more quickly in the marriage.
[00:09:13]  And when you can get out of it for no fault, they get out of it sooner.
[00:09:17]  So that was the original redefinition of marriage and legally what put all of this in place when it comes to treating children as accessories.
[00:09:25]  No, no fault divorce is just the end of marriage.
[00:09:27]  Marriage does not exist.
[00:09:29]  That's right.
[00:09:30]  There's, uh, people have mentioned covenant marriage, I think it's called, in like Alabama.
[00:09:34]  I'm not sure what other states have it.
[00:09:35]  And this is them trying to recodify what actual marriage is.
[00:09:38]  Yeah.
[00:09:39]  But there is, you know, quite literally, if you enter into a spiritual, moral, and legal contract till death do us part, But the legal has been completely removed and the moral foundations of society have become dissociative or fractured, then you quite literally are just dating.
[00:09:56]  We've seen these fling marriages for a year or two.
[00:09:59]  You see all these celebrities, they're married for five years and then they're broken up.
[00:10:04]  That's not marriage.
[00:10:05]  It is not marriage.
[00:10:06]  And this gives me the opportunity.
[00:10:08]  I really think productive discussions start from what the Greeks used to call stasis, where people agree.
[00:10:13]  For real.
[00:10:14]  Because then we can reason out from where we agree and try to achieve clarity where we disagree and maybe even overcome those disagreements.
[00:10:20]  Jeff and I agree on a lot I think.
[00:10:22]  Oh yeah!
[00:10:22]  I don't disagree actually with anything she said.
[00:10:24]  That may surprise you.
[00:10:25]  I think the intact nuclear family with one mother and one father is the best thing for children, objectively the best thing.
[00:10:35]  It's also the most enduring institution in human history.
[00:10:38]  It actually predates history.
[00:10:39]  Correct.
[00:10:39]  It goes back before written history.
[00:10:41]  This is right.
[00:10:42]  It's the most enduring institution, the most successful institution ever.
[00:10:46]  So I'm all in favor of that.
[00:10:48]  I am concerned with notions of children's rights.
[00:10:51]  We can talk about why that is.
[00:10:53]  We can.
[00:10:55]  But one of the fundamental things that we lost, and I think we lost it with the Enlightenment, but it really showed up in the American conception of rights, People have come to think of rights as floating abstractions, right?
[00:11:09]  But all rights come with concomitant duties.
[00:11:11]  That's right.
[00:11:13]  To me, children's rights are the prudent exercise of parental rights, right?
[00:11:19]  We have to be careful with the child's best interest, too, because courts have misused that, as you know.
[00:11:25]  That's right.
[00:11:26]  And there's no real objective Child's best interest for everything there are are some objective things like for example having a mother a father I Am on the other hand not an idealist I am dealing with the world as it actually is today with the political situation as it actually is today where over half of children are being raised in single-mother homes and In that world men have to be very serious about protecting themselves before they have children before they get married
[00:11:55]  This is interesting because you mentioned someone going to Argentina.
[00:12:00]  Yes.
[00:12:00]  Fresh and Fit talked about something called passport bros.
[00:12:03]  Yeah.
[00:12:04]  These are guys who know they can't or who believe they cannot find a wife in the United States because of the culture, the moral frameworks this country has.
[00:12:13]  So they go to other countries with traditional values.
[00:12:16]  But also a lower standard of living.
[00:12:19]  So they're viewed more favorably.
[00:12:21]  Like they mentioned going to the Philippines, where the standard of living is low.
[00:12:25]  So you have these young women who see an American come here, they're wealthy, they have access, and that is attractive to them.
[00:12:32]  So you're going to end up with a wife who is more committed and actually more worried about the relationship breaking apart.
[00:12:37]  Whereas in America, you have the feminist, more woke vision where women can have it all, do what they want and leave whenever they want, and courts will favor them if they do.
[00:12:46]  Yeah, so there's a lot of work to be done, but the answer cannot be.
[00:12:51]  Whatever work needs to be done in culture, in law, and in technology, and there is a lot to be done, the answer cannot be, a kid is going to sacrifice for me.
[00:12:57]  I understand the system is broken.
[00:12:59]  I understand the technology is advancing way beyond our ethical conversations, but the solution can never be, this kid sacrifices so I can have what they want.
[00:13:07]  And ultimately, that's what surrogacy does in 100% of cases.
[00:13:10]  I don't actually believe the sacrifice of a single father home is equivalent to the sacrifice of a single mother home.
[00:13:18]  Single father homes have outcomes which are much better than single mother homes.
[00:13:23]  And it's substantially close to parent homes, so they're not as good.
[00:13:27]  I'd like to see that.
[00:13:29]  Is that in the brief that you gave me?
[00:13:32]  It's not in these two, but I can get you one.
[00:13:34]  I can get you two, actually.
[00:13:35]  So I know that there's a few studies, but what studies do you have that show outcomes for children who were motherless at birth?
[00:13:43]  So there's two studies.
[00:13:46]  One of them has a subpopulation study.
[00:13:47]  So for example, it does find that there's less criminality, higher college attainment, less suicidality.
[00:13:54]  Equivalent to the two parent married biological parents?
[00:13:57]  No, no.
[00:13:57]  Between single mother homes and single father homes.
[00:14:00]  Versus single father.
[00:14:01]  Sure.
[00:14:01]  OK.
[00:14:01]  And then the subpopulation study here, which I have to be honest, subpopulation studies are less conclusive.
[00:14:07]  But the subpopulation studies, they say, well, of these single father homes, which ones were from illness?
[00:14:12]  Right?
[00:14:12]  Deaths like that.
[00:14:13]  Accidental deaths.
[00:14:15]  And they find the same effects.
[00:14:16]  The effects are similar.
[00:14:17]  Although, it's not conclusive.
[00:14:18]  You're saying similar between the child whose mother died versus the child whose mother left through divorce.
[00:14:23]  Yes.
[00:14:24]  And single father homes.
[00:14:25]  Now this echoes, actually, I'm Orthodox.
[00:14:27]  The Greek Orthodox Church did a longitudinal study of church attendance.
[00:14:32]  for children who go to college into these sort of atheist communist factories, and how many continue to attend church.
[00:14:41]  And the only thing that correlated with church attendance was whether the father brought them. - Oh, that's why men need to be the head of the home and the head of the church.
[00:14:47]  - Well, so this is an interesting point.
[00:14:50]  You say that the study... I guess what you're saying is that single parent with a father have better outcomes, but I wonder if it's just... Than single mother parented homes.
[00:15:01]  Not better outcomes than married mother father.
[00:15:03]  Of course.
[00:15:03]  But I'm wondering if we're not tracking the detriments of not having a mom.
[00:15:07]  So here's the thing, people will say to me, because I fight surrogacy at every front, in every way, traditional, gestational, altruistic, commercial, I don't care.
[00:15:16]  It is always the intentional loss of a child's mother on the day that they are born.

=== Why Mother Loss Matters (15:15) ===

[00:15:19]  And we can, I'll give you the children's rights framework if you want.
[00:15:22]  But, you know, people will say, well, we have lots of data.
[00:15:25]  Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin had this conversation, you know, where they said, oh, there's so much data about the harms of father loss.
[00:15:31]  But There's not a lot about mother loss.
[00:15:34]  There's not a lot of studies about what happens when a child grows up motherless.
[00:15:37]  And the question is why?
[00:15:39]  Why do you think that is, Tim?
[00:15:40]  Well, I want to just clarify the point.
[00:15:43]  When you're looking at a study and you say, let's look at drug abuse, college attainment, crime, and you're like, hey, look, if a child has just a dad, they tend to do better than if they have just a mom.
[00:15:53]  But what aren't we tracking?
[00:15:55]  Between a child who has both parents and a child who doesn't have a mom.
[00:16:01]  And I would say, why is it even harder to find the kids raised only by a single dad?
[00:16:05]  Because those households are harder to find.
[00:16:07]  And when you're talking about good studies, you can't just be like, hey, single dads, come volunteer for this.
[00:16:12]  You have to find them at random.
[00:16:13]  They are hard to find at random because there's not a lot of them.
[00:16:15]  And my question is why?
[00:16:16]  Well, there's another weakness too, I'll tell you.
[00:16:18]  But there's another weakness in those studies, in my studies I'm talking about.
[00:16:21]  But just my immediate assumption is And I mean, there's no disrespect.
[00:16:27]  I mean, if we're looking at children who grew up without fathers, they have a higher rate of criminality, lower rate of finishing school.
[00:16:34]  I'd imagine that a child who grew up without a mother probably has emotional issues we're not tracking.
[00:16:38]  So correct.
[00:16:39]  Could be.
[00:16:40]  Yeah, and we don't look at the statistics of, you know, is someone more prone to anger or more detached or callous?
[00:16:48]  We have no reason to look into these things.
[00:16:50]  Or relationship formation.
[00:16:52]  Attachment, bonding, trust, levels of sensitivity to one another, ability to form formations.
[00:16:57]  I mean, I'm parenting a child who did not have any parents, had no mother for the first two years of his life.
[00:17:05]  It is very, very difficult for kids.
[00:17:07]  Well, we can talk about the distinctiveness of mothering if you want, but I want to get back to this question of why is it that we have endless studies on the impact of father loss in children and fatherlessness, but we have very, very few on mother loss.
[00:17:20]  Patriarchy!
[00:17:21]  Oh, it's the patriarchy.
[00:17:22]  It's the patriarchy!
[00:17:23]  And I'm only half kidding.
[00:17:25]  Okay.
[00:17:25]  Our perspective on society, these studies, is quite literally the, like, detriment in the immediate.
[00:17:33]  Crime is something we have to deal with and solve.
[00:17:36]  But if someone's got emotional issues, we just say, oh, that dude's got an ego problem.
[00:17:40]  And it's hard to measure.
[00:17:41]  Let's be honest, it's hard to measure.
[00:17:41]  That's right.
[00:17:42]  So, I'm going to give you the answer.
[00:17:44]  The reason why we don't have studies Longitudinal done, where you can find the kids at random, database populations, adequate control groups.
[00:17:53]  Why don't we have those?
[00:17:54]  Because mother loss is so foreign to our species.
[00:17:57]  What happens when a child is created?
[00:18:00]  Both the man and woman have to be there at the moment of conception.
[00:18:04]  Biology requires about an average three to five minute contribution from the guy, okay?
[00:18:09]  What does it require of the woman?
[00:18:10]  Is that really the average?
[00:18:11]  It's the average.
[00:18:12]  I hope not.
[00:18:13]  It's the average.
[00:18:15]  What does it require of the woman?
[00:18:16]  It insists that she's there for the first nine and a half months.
[00:18:20]  Yeah.
[00:18:20]  She can't leave.
[00:18:21]  The baby can't leave.
[00:18:22]  And then afterwards... Hold on.
[00:18:23]  Hold on.
[00:18:24]  Yes.
[00:18:24]  Just interject.
[00:18:25]  Okay.
[00:18:26]  Removing technology from the equation, the mother is required to be there for a substantially longer amount of time after the nine months.
[00:18:31]  Right!
[00:18:32]  And you know what?
[00:18:32]  So, not only is she literally connected to the child, there's no other person in our existence, unless you become a mother yourself, where you are connected by a literal cord.
[00:18:43]  That's how connected mother and baby are.
[00:18:45]  Now, before we had technology, before we had bottles, or if you didn't have a wet nurse, the mom died, the baby died.
[00:18:51]  Our species does not have a lot of experience with motherless babies because babies cannot live without mothers.
[00:18:57]  I don't agree with this.
[00:18:57]  Well, so perhaps now the answer is inducing lactation in men so the men can... Well, Tim, that does solve everything, doesn't it?
[00:19:05]  But I'll continue.
[00:19:06]  No, prior to modern medical technology, female death rates in birthing were very high.
[00:19:15]  Right.
[00:19:16]  Actually, our species is well adapted to mother loss, and it has been with us for a long time.
[00:19:21]  That doesn't mean however, I'm not stretching this to mean that the problems that we're talking about of motherless not being well studied, I think the real reason is that motherlessness is just comparatively much more rare in modern society.
[00:19:35]  And you have a hard time even getting study groups to do it.
[00:19:38]  Our main social problem is father loss and that's why.
[00:19:41]  Because biology, again, women are working within a chemical system.
[00:19:47]  Once the baby is born, during pregnancy and childbirth especially, and then especially once you start breastfeeding, there is oxytocin spikes in the woman that literally will chemically bond her to the baby.
[00:19:58]  The baby is bonded to her.
[00:20:00]  And that happens on the regular for the first couple years of a child's life.
[00:20:04]  It's even deeper than that.
[00:20:05]  I'll give you an example from my own children's birth.
[00:20:07]  So you know that I used IVF.
[00:20:09]  I do.
[00:20:09]  Right?
[00:20:10]  So my children are not genetically related to my ex-wife, okay?
[00:20:15]  So they're only genetically related to me.
[00:20:16]  And this is the son that you were having?
[00:20:18]  Both of them.
[00:20:20]  Interesting.
[00:20:21]  So when Jude was born, he would have died without modern medical intervention, and he came out very traumatized.
[00:20:30]  And, um, you know, I was the first one to hold him.
[00:20:33]  Um, and he went straight to the Neku and he was dying, um, straight up dying.
[00:20:40]  Um, so they, they have this thing where they often have the mother come into the Neko and Neku and touch the child and the mere touch of the mother Can cause a healing response in the child.
[00:20:51]  So not knowing that we had used IVF, they asked my ex-wife to go in and do this and it had no effect.
[00:20:57]  Wow.
[00:20:58]  And then when they found out IVF was used, they called me in there and I just put my hand on my, and I'll never forget, I'll never forget this.
[00:21:08]  My son was dying and I touched his back and I put my hand on his back and in five minutes he went to normal.
[00:21:18]  Wow.
[00:21:21]  He needed you then, he needs you now.
[00:21:22]  And it's a crime.
[00:21:23]  It's a crime that he's not with you.
[00:21:25]  Well, so this brings up the question about surrogacy and IVF.
[00:21:28]  I mean, there's... See, I don't dispute any of this.
[00:21:31]  This is not what I'm talking about with surrogacy.
[00:21:34]  So you can, I think your argument is probably going to be very effective from a men's rights position.
[00:21:39]  It's not going to be effective from a children's rights.
[00:21:41]  Yeah.
[00:21:41]  I don't even take the men's rights position.
[00:21:45]  Um, what, what I, what I claim is that I'm, I'm actually just claiming this on a basic social level that we are going to destroy the lives of half the men that get married and the children.
[00:21:57]  In those marriages, right?
[00:22:00]  And I think we will have far less social damage if we have a nation of single fathers than single mothers.
[00:22:05]  And what I'm doing is not comparing against the ideal, which we agree on.
[00:22:10]  And I love you for promoting this ideal, right?
[00:22:15]  I mean, I firmly agree with you on it.
[00:22:17]  I'm saying in the real world where we exist today, in the legal framework, this horrifying legal framework that governs marriage, The way we reduce damage the most is to prevent fathers' lives from being destroyed so that they can be with their kids.
[00:22:31]  My view is, you know, I can certainly agree with a lot of what you're saying.
[00:22:34]  It's really not a men's rights issue.
[00:22:36]  We need to make sure there's a balance between, you know, Fathers and mothers and the rights of the children.
[00:22:45]  We want to keep the families together.
[00:22:47]  But I don't necessarily agree.
[00:22:49]  I understand that the data we have so far shows that in the immediate, the things we care about the most, without a father, crime, et cetera.
[00:22:58]  But I have to say, I think if you have a society where there is a disproportionate amount of motherless children, you are going to have a dysfunctional society in some other way.
[00:23:09]  Well, I think it's only necessary for my argument that it be no worse than the current society.
[00:23:13]  Right.
[00:23:14]  We can avoid destroying half of the men who get married, and so my argument only requires that it be no worse, and I claim that it is no worse.
[00:23:21]  So let me break down what surrogacy is from the children's rights perspective.
[00:23:25]  What surrogacy is at its core is the trifurcation of the mother.
[00:23:31]  Okay, there are three different components of the mother that surrogacy in essence splices and gives you purchasable and optional choices about the woman involved.
[00:23:40]  So the three different women that you're splitting up in surrogacy is The genetic mother, that's the woman who contributes the egg, and that is the one that grants children their biological identity.
[00:23:50]  When kids go to bed at night and try to figure out like, who am I?
[00:23:54]  Where did I get my hair?
[00:23:55]  What's my ethnicity?
[00:23:57]  Does my mother know who I am?
[00:23:58]  Does she think about me?
[00:23:59]  Do I have half siblings?
[00:24:01]  They're thinking about their genetic mother, the woman who the big fertility World will say, oh, she's just a donor.
[00:24:06]  You can go right now and Google egg donor catalog and you can filter the results for your child's genetic mother based on hair color, Ivy League education, all of that.
[00:24:14]  I mean, you're shopping for your child's mother.
[00:24:16]  Sperm donors too.
[00:24:17]  Same with sperm donation, right?
[00:24:19]  And so the egg donor is the first mother.
[00:24:22]  And then the second mother is the birth mother.
[00:24:24]  Okay.
[00:24:25]  And The big surrogacy people will just pitch this as, well, she's not a mother, right?
[00:24:30]  She's just an oven for somebody else's bun.
[00:24:33]  But the reality is that that is the only relationship that the child has at the moment they are born.
[00:24:38]  They don't know that they're not genetically related to the person giving birth to them.
[00:24:42]  Your kids didn't know that your wife was not their genetic mother, but that's her body, her voice, her smell, her milk.
[00:24:48]  That's who they wanted, right?
[00:24:52]  That is the foundation for trust and attachment in a child's life.
[00:24:55]  So, for example, we have almost 60 years of experience with infant adoption, and largely children who have been adopted as infants are adopted into homes that have more stable marriages, where the people are more wealthy, more highly educated, and statistically even spend more time with kids than the average biological parent.
[00:25:15]  And yet, Adoptees do not fare as well.
[00:25:18]  They struggle more in school.
[00:25:20]  They have more challenges with trust and attachment, identity issues.
[00:25:24]  And adoptees call that a primal wound.
[00:25:28]  They were wounded at the most primal stages of their development because they were cut off from the first and only relationship that they had, and they had to start over.
[00:25:36]  Okay, so that's the birth mother.
[00:25:38]  And then the social mother is the woman that provides that female specific love for the kid.
[00:25:44]  And men cannot do that.
[00:25:46]  Men do not do that.
[00:25:48]  And here's a few examples.
[00:25:49]  You know, women have a lower tolerance for children's cries, right?
[00:25:53]  We hear a baby crying.
[00:25:54]  This happened to me at the airport.
[00:25:55]  There was a baby crying and I was like, get the baby.
[00:25:58]  Well, I was letting the baby cry and I just wanted to get up and be like, give me the baby!
[00:26:02]  Men are like, she'll be okay, here's a few Cheerios.
[00:26:05]  And it's okay to have those different styles.
[00:26:07]  But when babies are in distress, they're wet, they're tired, they're hungry, their cortisol levels rise.
[00:26:14]  They cannot drop their own cortisol levels.
[00:26:16]  They are literally incapable.
[00:26:18]  Erika Komisar would say they don't have a central nervous system at this point.
[00:26:22]  The only way for their stress levels to drop is for their oxytocin to increase.
[00:26:28]  They can't express their own oxytocin.
[00:26:30]  Only skin-to-skin contact will do that, and only mothers have the level of responsiveness that will constantly bring down their cortisol levels Dozens and dozens of times every day and thereby establish that ability to emotionally regulate.
[00:26:44]  So here's the thing, surrogacy breaks women up into genetic mother, birth mother, and social mother.
[00:26:50]  None of these women are optional in the life of the child.
[00:26:53]  And if they are not found in one woman, that kid is going to experience loss.
[00:26:57]  I just want to highlight one thing.
[00:26:58]  I agree with all that.
[00:26:59]  I agree with all the negatives that she said about surrogacy.
[00:27:01]  I just want to highlight one thing real quick because this is something I had read about quite a bit throughout my life.
[00:27:05]  I just did a quick Google search.
[00:27:07]  The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources says babies who are deprived of touch can fail to thrive, lose weight, and even die.
[00:27:14]  And what I've been told What I've read, you know, and that's not something I follow, but, you know, 10 years ago, I'm reading articles on this stuff, that if a baby is without touch from the mother, it literally just dies.
[00:27:26]  That's right.
[00:27:27]  That's crazy.
[00:27:28]  I mean, and the story you told, Jeff, there's something, I don't know if you'd call it spiritual or divine or something.
[00:27:33]  I agree with everything you're saying.
[00:27:35]  We don't really dispute the facts here.
[00:27:37]  We're not disputing facts.
[00:27:38]  Well, it sounds like then if we recognize it is a detriment that we go through IVF and surrogacy because of what the legal system is doing, then it seems like the solution should be to change the culture in the legal system.
[00:27:51]  Yes.
[00:27:51]  That's correct.
[00:27:52]  But here's where we get into the sticky area of policy, right?
[00:27:57]  I never speak about social problems in terms of solutions, right?
[00:28:02]  These problems have been with us, look, infanticide and giving babies away were existing.
[00:28:09]  How do you find, you know how you find Roman brothels, when archaeologists find Roman brothels?
[00:28:12]  The bones of the dead children.
[00:28:13]  The bones of dead boys.
[00:28:15]  Boys, that's right, that's right.
[00:28:16]  They find dead, because they kill all the male babies, they're of no economic use.
[00:28:19]  They raise girl children up to be prostitutes in these brothels.
[00:28:22]  So that's how they find them, okay?
[00:28:24]  So like, this is an ancient problem.
[00:28:26]  It's never going away from us.
[00:28:27]  But we should think in terms of mitigating these problems and minimizing them.
[00:28:31]  And that's a better way of thinking about them, I think.
[00:28:33]  So I don't ever talk in terms of solutions.
[00:28:36]  The solution is, I believe, ending no-fault divorce, right?
[00:28:40]  Completely ending no-fault divorce.
[00:28:42]  And I would be even willing to compromise, because we live in a world, a democracy, where we have to compromise.
[00:28:47]  I would compromise and say, you may have no-fault divorce if there are no children in the marriage.
[00:28:52]  If there are children in the marriage, it converts to a no-fault divorce.
[00:28:55]  I like that.
[00:28:56]  And now we have created a way for people to... You mean it converts off of no-fault divorce?
[00:29:00]  You would have to go to an at-fault model at that point.
[00:29:02]  Yeah, you go to an at-fault model when you have children.
[00:29:04]  Okay.
[00:29:05]  Yeah?
[00:29:05]  Yeah.
[00:29:06]  And I'm willing to compromise with people who want these sort of what I call emotional marriages.
[00:29:11]  I'm willing, okay, fine.
[00:29:12]  Let's do that.
[00:29:13]  I think we have to do some other things with...
[00:29:17]  You know, correcting the legal system around domestic violence and some other stuff.
[00:29:20]  There are legal ways to do this.
[00:29:22]  I'm just telling you that you're fighting because of Title IV-D reimbursements to the states, which are heavily invested in divorce and only exist when fathers are out of the home, just like the welfare system destroyed the black families in this country.
[00:29:36]  When these systems are so big, I mean, you're talking about trillions of dollars.
[00:29:39]  These are bigger than some of the largest defense programs.
[00:29:41]  Jeff is the first one that educated me on this reality.
[00:29:43]  He really knows this.
[00:29:44]  Yeah, they're larger than some of the largest defense programs, and we can't get rid of these defense programs.
[00:29:51]  The Marine Corps and the Army have been trying to get rid of the heavy division concept since the 1980s when I was in the military, and they can't get rid of it.
[00:29:57]  So my problem is, it's going to take five generations.
[00:30:02]  To alter these laws.
[00:30:03]  What do we do about men in the meantime?
[00:30:04]  Here's the issue with converting to an at-fault divorce upon, first it would have to be upon conception.
[00:30:10]  Yes.
[00:30:11]  But then you run into the problem of people who aren't married, who conceive.
[00:30:14]  Yes.
[00:30:15]  Do we then say the moment there's a conception between a man and a woman, you are now in an at-fault marriage, or an at-fault divorce system.

=== Presumption of Parenthood Controversy (08:56) ===

[00:30:22]  You are married now.
[00:30:23]  The other issue is, Yes.
[00:30:26]  But how do you prove the baby is the man's?
[00:30:29]  Genetic testing.
[00:30:30]  But if the woman is only a few weeks pregnant, she's not far along enough to actually do the genetic testing.
[00:30:34]  Amniocentesis can do that.
[00:30:36]  At any time?
[00:30:36]  Yes.
[00:30:37]  Well, there you go, I guess.
[00:30:38]  But it does seem kind of brutal and invasive that To be fair, I mean, if a dude impregnates a woman, he should not be a biological father.
[00:30:46]  When we get into the details of laws, we could, again, I would compromise and say, okay, you become a prospective no-fault marriage partner until the birth of the child when it's genetically tested.
[00:30:58]  We could do that.
[00:30:58]  I'm fine with that.
[00:30:59]  Well, but the problem there is... My point is... The testing would have to be... We have seen stories, there was one story, I think it was out of Wisconsin, where a woman got pregnant.
[00:31:08]  When she gave birth, she listed some random guy she knew as the father.
[00:31:12]  I think it was Wisconsin.
[00:31:13]  And then the guy was like, what?
[00:31:14]  I'm not the father.
[00:31:15]  Got a genetic test, proved that he wasn't, and the judge said, don't know, don't care, the baby needs a dad, so you are now on the hook for it.
[00:31:21]  Well, that is not... That's an aberration.
[00:31:23]  Oh, actually, I'm sorry.
[00:31:24]  Y'all need to look up Carnell West.
[00:31:27]  Who started the movement against this but until I can tell you this in Texas until 2014 All children in the marriage were presumed to be the husband's.
[00:31:38]  And that's actually how it should be.
[00:31:40]  That's actually why.
[00:31:41]  What about when the woman has an affair?
[00:31:42]  It's called a presumption of parenthood.
[00:31:44]  What about when she has an affair?
[00:31:45]  Well, so then you can, you need to presume the presumption is correct.
[00:31:49]  You should presume that the children born to a marriage are the genetic offspring.
[00:31:54]  If there's a problem, that's the exception.
[00:31:55]  Deal with the exception.
[00:31:56]  I don't think that he should be responsible for a child, but the presumption is correct.
[00:32:00]  The problem is that when we used to do that, like for all of, almost all of Western law, we presumed this, right?
[00:32:08]  But the issue comes when, you know, what are the conditions under which you can demonstrate that the child isn't yours and be relieved of your obligations, right?
[00:32:17]  Most states did not have a way to do that until just the last six years.
[00:32:22]  You know, Carnell, for example, I've talked to him at length about this.
[00:32:27]  I mean, he paid child support for 15 years.
[00:32:30]  For a child that wasn't his, and they just wouldn't stop, even though he had genetic tests.
[00:32:33]  Wow.
[00:32:34]  Texas never allowed genetic tests until, I think it was 2014.
[00:32:37]  That's too bad.
[00:32:38]  California says that fathers may never genetically test their children without the consent of the mother, so they're allowed to hide it.
[00:32:46]  Wow.
[00:32:46]  So I agree that we have got to overhaul the system so that there are advantages.
[00:32:54]  Financially, socially, for men to commit to the women that they're making babies with.
[00:32:58]  And yeah, it's good for men and women, but it's non-negotiable for the babies.
[00:33:04]  From a children's rights perspective, we have got to start changing culture, law, and technology so kids have both.
[00:33:10]  This is where it comes down to.
[00:33:11]  Look, I'm with you.
[00:33:12]  I'll tell you how much I'm with you.
[00:33:14]  Even after my ex-wife tried to transition my son, for five years I still told her I'd remarry her and raise our kids.
[00:33:21]  Can we just pause?
[00:33:22]  Even though I have a total disagreement with her about that.
[00:33:24]  But it's that important, I believe it, right?
[00:33:26]  Yeah.
[00:33:27]  My point is that, are we going to compare what men should do against an ideal that doesn't exist and won't exist for decades?
[00:33:36]  What do we tell men in the meantime?
[00:33:38]  Culture, law, and technology don't reflect the ideal.
[00:33:42]  That is true.
[00:33:44]  The answer is not to remake children in your own technological image.
[00:33:47]  That is not the solution.
[00:33:48]  It's go to Argentina.
[00:33:49]  You can go to Argentina.
[00:33:50]  You can marry a woman.
[00:33:51]  Just make sure that you raise your kids with a woman that is their mother.
[00:33:53]  Well, there's actually a Christian way to actually do surrogacy in a way.
[00:33:57]  No, there's not.
[00:33:57]  So you have legal surrogacy, but you don't actually use somebody else's egg.
[00:34:01]  So for example, I've checked in three states, and there's nothing that prevents a married woman from entering a surrogacy contract.
[00:34:09]  So, you could get married, you have your wife sign a surrogacy contract, and then you have conjugal relations in a biblical way, and then the children belong to the father and the mother has the legal relation of a step-mom.
[00:34:23]  Interesting, but she's still the biological mother in every way.
[00:34:26]  That's horrifying.
[00:34:27]  Wait a minute, why do you find it horrifying?
[00:34:31]  Because every woman I've talked to says this.
[00:34:34]  Because the biological mother, the birth mother, the social mother, should all also be the legal mother.
[00:34:39]  You do not splice woman into three different parts, the social, the legal, and the genetic.
[00:34:45]  From a children's rights perspective, all of those women need to be found in one place.
[00:34:48]  And just like it was an injustice to strip you of your rights to your children, even though you're the biological father, it's an injustice to strip children of their mothers.
[00:34:57]  Would you marry under such a condition?
[00:35:00]  Would you marry under those conditions?
[00:35:01]  If a man said, hey, I want you to sign a surrogacy contract so the children are mine in a patriarchal and biblical sense, they belong to me.
[00:35:08]  Would you marry and have a child under those conditions?
[00:35:10]  I married and had a child with a man who 100% gets 100% claim to my children.
[00:35:15]  And I don't need surrogacy to do it.
[00:35:17]  Not legally.
[00:35:17]  You have the claim to the children.
[00:35:18]  No, we both have a claim to the children.
[00:35:20]  If I were to divorce him, there's a possibility the courts would side with me, but no, right now... Hold on, Tim, I'm going somewhere with this.
[00:35:25]  Do you think most women would do that?
[00:35:28]  I think precisely zero women would sign something like that.
[00:35:30]  I agree.
[00:35:31]  What this tells me is that when we put women in the same conditions that fathers are in today, they choose not to have children and not to marry, which proves my point that under the current conditions, surrogacy is a legitimate option.
[00:35:41]  I was gonna say that your statement about legal surrogacy to the biological mother is very logically sound and very emotionally horrifying.
[00:35:50]  Yes it is.
[00:35:51]  And so imagine how fathers feel when they are, no offense, but trad women are constantly telling young men To just suck it up, take the risk, and marry when we all admit that precisely zero women would do that under the same conditions.
[00:36:06]  Because the stepmother in this scenario, being a constant caregiver to the child, would have the same visitation rights as fathers have today.
[00:36:14]  They would have continuous visitation, continuous relationship, the courts would respect that.
[00:36:17]  I understand, I understand that... Women won't do it, why should men?
[00:36:20]  I understand that it's risky, and the deck is stacked against them.
[00:36:26]  I'm not seeing any man who is living a happier, better life than the men who are married stably to the women and the mothers of their children.
[00:36:34]  No, I agree.
[00:36:35]  And that is something to strive for and is ideal, but...
[00:36:39]  Like, I think Jeff is correct, the risks are there for men.
[00:36:41]  And we end up seeing this reflected in a lot of online communities.
[00:36:46]  A lot of men are outright saying, I mean, with MGTOW, MGTOW's not absolutely about any one thing, there's a bunch of different issues, but a lot of these men are saying, the risks are too great.
[00:36:57]  And Jeff makes a great point, just like a woman would say, I'm not going to enter into that agreement, men literally are saying that.
[00:37:01]  I know.
[00:37:02]  I've read them.
[00:37:02]  I've talked to them.
[00:37:03]  What's disturbing is, you know, you find it horrifying.
[00:37:06]  I find it horrifying.
[00:37:08]  I mean, it's a thought experiment.
[00:37:09]  I'm not something... A lot of the stuff I'm talking about, people think I'm proposing.
[00:37:12]  They're thought experiments.
[00:37:13]  Right.
[00:37:13]  It's a thought experiment.
[00:37:14]  And it's effective to point out the problems.
[00:37:17]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:37:17]  Thank you.
[00:37:19]  I'm here for you.
[00:37:20]  No, no, it's like, it's very hard.
[00:37:22]  Well, no, women are rightly upset about me even proposing that, but that is the exact position every father is in legally.
[00:37:30]  Not necessarily socially, but legally in before when they have children with a woman in a normal marriage under this horrifying legal regime.
[00:37:38]  And if women won't, again, I ask, if women won't do it, how can we ethically tell young men to do it?
[00:37:43]  I don't think we can.
[00:37:44]  Okay.
[00:37:44]  Can I ask a question that I wanted to ask the very second that Jeff walked in?
[00:37:49]  I want to know how you're doing.
[00:37:51]  Oh, wow.
[00:37:52]  So, um, so, you know, I asked that for two reasons.
[00:37:56]  Number one, it's so nice.
[00:37:58]  That's why I love her.
[00:37:59]  I have mourned with you.
[00:38:01]  I've prayed for you, especially leading up to this conversation, but I actually think that it would be helpful for everybody listening to understand How this has impacted you and the depths of pain that you've experienced.
[00:38:18]  So I just want to hear if you're willing to share, how are you doing?
[00:38:21]  And I'll try to do it in terms of women can understand, right?
[00:38:23]  So, um, cause I think men understand it intuitively.
[00:38:27]  It's hard for women to understand what men feel in these scenarios.
[00:38:30]  That's why I'm asking.
[00:38:31]  And you care about that stuff, which makes you special.
[00:38:34]  Um, so I've, I've described it this way.
[00:38:37]  Um, during the trial, I was being hyper-scrutinized for violent behavior or any, you know, in court, I would have judges bring bailiffs in if I moved too aggressively to grab a pen or something.
[00:38:53]  What the hell?
[00:38:53]  Right?
[00:38:54]  Well, no, they've completely pathologized all masculine behaviors.
[00:38:58]  And I'm kind of big, and they know I'm a boxer and all that stuff, so they're on edge about it.

=== Texas Supreme Court Ruling (09:54) ===

[00:39:03]  So I had to sit there calmly, and be totally calm, and have no emotional, response as I'm literally watching my son be sexually abused right in front of me.
[00:39:13]  That's what was required of me to save my sons.
[00:39:15]  I accomplished that, so in 2019 I got 50-50 custody, no child support.
[00:39:20]  Right on?
[00:39:21]  So they recused my judge, the Dallas County Democrat judges, in a corrupt proceeding, got rid of my judge, put me in a non-random judge assignment, put me in the 301st District Court with Judge Bloody Mary Brown, I name names for people, And Judge Bloody Mary Brown systematically stripped me of all my parental rights.
[00:39:39]  She was an activist.
[00:39:40]  Yeah.
[00:39:41]  And she let my ex-wife move my son to California right after they passed the transgender kidnapping laws.
[00:39:49]  So now I have to remain super calm because California has draconian domestic violence laws.
[00:39:55]  Because the previous agreement said she cannot do anything medically to him without your consent.
[00:39:59]  But now that she's in California, she can do whatever she wants.
[00:40:01]  And that was a jury verdict that was nullified by a judge.
[00:40:04]  So have you seen them?
[00:40:06]  Do you talk to them?
[00:40:07]  So I did two supervised visits with them.
[00:40:12]  And, you know, as soon as I sat down on the couch, they just like laid on me and just jumped.
[00:40:17]  It's that touch.
[00:40:18]  And when was that?
[00:40:20]  That was about three months ago.
[00:40:21]  Oh, I'm glad.
[00:40:22]  That's the only contact I've had in two years.
[00:40:25]  So now I've had to move to California.
[00:40:27]  I went all the way up to the Texas Supreme Court and the Texas Supreme Court, listen to this, said that my sons were no more at risk of being chemically castrated in California under the transgender kidnapping laws than they were in Texas where it's illegal.
[00:40:40]  What the hell?
[00:40:40]  Wow.
[00:40:41]  Yeah, so what we have is a politicized, what's happening is the state courts are beginning to collude to allow children to migrate to trans-friendly states.
[00:40:49]  So I've established a residence in California and I've officially moved there.
[00:40:53]  I'm preparing my house in Texas to rent out and I've moved, you have to be careful, I've moved about 30 minutes away from my boys and I'm going to fight in the California courts To have visitation, and I also intend to go into the federal courts and challenge the laws, the kidnapping law, plus the law that strips parents of their rights if they don't affirm their child.
[00:41:14]  I want to just say one thing, because I think some people don't understand.
[00:41:17]  MGTOW means Men Going Their Own Way.
[00:41:20]  Online communities where men talk about, you know, they'll post memes of like a guy sitting on a cliffside with his dog and it'll say something like Serenity or whatever.
[00:41:28]  Yeah.
[00:41:28]  But I will also add, you moving to California, sir, is the political equivalent of running into a burning building.
[00:41:34]  You are correct.
[00:41:35]  So we have to talk about getting away from cities and getting away from these jurisdictions if you can, and that we understand some people may want to stay in these places because of their kids.
[00:41:45]  Yeah.
[00:41:46]  And a lot of people have said, I can't move out of the city, you know, I got divorced, my kids are still here, what am I supposed to do?
[00:41:50]  And I'm like, that I view as your house is on fire and you refuse to leave until you know your children are safe.
[00:41:55]  100% agree.
[00:41:56]  I also want to point out that what Jeff is doing is the essence of true manhood and the best kind of father, the best that fathers can be, which is utter protectiveness and everything you can in terms of provision despite everything being against you.
[00:42:11]  And there really is something distinct.
[00:42:14]  I would say that it is a genetic, biological drive that good men have.
[00:42:22]  Every child should have a father like this.
[00:42:24]  This is the pain men feel.
[00:42:26]  So, you know, feminists have often said men don't participate in child rearing, all this.
[00:42:31]  That's not true.
[00:42:32]  That's not true.
[00:42:33]  Really, until the 1950s, nobody was rich enough to do that, right?
[00:42:36]  Throughout all of human history, women raised young children, in most civilizations, the age of nine, The reputation that the Italians had for being mama's boys because it was still 12.
[00:42:47]  You know, that's where that comes from.
[00:42:48]  They stayed with their mother and then the boys went with the fathers.
[00:42:52]  And so girls and young children stayed with the mothers.
[00:42:54]  Men have always equally participated in child rearing.
[00:42:58]  And what men feel particularly is this horrifying thing where Your offspring are going to be raised in values contrary to your ancestors and to your own values.
[00:43:11]  And your children will be turned against your own values.
[00:43:15]  I have a friend in Houston whose wife divorced him and converted his children to Islam, and he's a devout Christian.
[00:43:22]  His children have been turned against his values, you know?
[00:43:25]  This is what men fear, tremendously.
[00:43:27]  It's not just physical precision.
[00:43:28]  This is what divorce enables.
[00:43:30]  You know, there was a study done by a researcher named Elizabeth Marget, her study was called Between Two Worlds, and it studied the impact that divorce had on children.
[00:43:39]  And in close to 50% of cases, the child developed two different personalities because they had like, mom had one political persuasion, you know, mom's a Republican, dad's a Democrat, mom's a Buddhist, dad's a Republican or, you know, a Christian, you know, the screen limits over here are like one hour a day.
[00:43:57]  There's unlimited screens over here.
[00:43:58]  Dessert like this, diet like this, you know.
[00:44:00]  My son was a classic example.
[00:44:03]  Yes, and kids have to transform to be a different person between dad's house and mom's house.
[00:44:08]  And actually, your situation was almost archetypal, where your child had to literally become a different person at mom's house and dad's house.
[00:44:16]  Girl at mom's house, boy at dad's house.
[00:44:18]  That's exactly right.
[00:44:18]  Yeah, he never presented as a girl to me.
[00:44:20]  He never presented as a girl to me.
[00:44:22]  Yeah, I remember seeing the videos.
[00:44:24]  You know, you're asking your son and he's like, no, I don't want to do that.
[00:44:26]  Yeah, you cannot split your child into two different homes.
[00:44:29]  They develop two different lives and two different personalities.
[00:44:31]  Wow.
[00:44:32]  That's why I'm cool.
[00:44:33]  I agree with you.
[00:44:34]  I mean, I'm fine with forcing parents simply to stay together and raise their kids till they're 18.
[00:44:38]  I'm sorry.
[00:44:38]  You just got to do what you got to do.
[00:44:40]  Yeah, and I agree, and I think that... That's the laws I would like to see.
[00:44:43]  The old Roman laws around marriage.
[00:44:46]  This is the interesting thing about the rights of the child.
[00:44:48]  If the parents are fighting, and it's bad, not to the point of abuse, but screaming, I think they should be reprimanded by the court saying, like, you are obligated to stop, and you have to tone it down because this is for the kids.
[00:45:01]  So we don't want children growing up in an environment where parents are just screaming at each other 24-7.
[00:45:06]  But you punish the parents for that, not the kids.
[00:45:09]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:45:10]  You're hired, dude.
[00:45:11]  You're totally hired.
[00:45:12]  Here's an interesting thing about the rights of children, right?
[00:45:15]  We often hear from the modern day left establishment narratives that children have a right to just insert and you name it.
[00:45:24]  Yeah, to having their transgender identity hidden from their parents.
[00:45:27]  They have a right to testosterone from Planned Parenthood.
[00:45:30]  My view is it's more so a right to your parents acting responsibly to protect you.
[00:45:37]  Bingo.
[00:45:37]  That's where I agree.
[00:45:37]  Meaning the child can't decide he wants to eat ice cream.
[00:45:40]  It is a violation of the rights of the child for a parent to just give them three gallons of ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
[00:45:45]  Yes, it is.
[00:45:46]  So here's the thing.
[00:45:47]  I have a children's rights non-profit, and that is the right word for it.
[00:45:52]  The reality is that children's right to their own mother and father, it actually might be too weak of a term.
[00:45:58]  They have such a claim to their own parents that there really is very little language we could use to describe the strength of that claim.
[00:46:04]  So I understand that rights is disputed.
[00:46:06]  It's the most fundamental human thing.
[00:46:07]  It is literally one of the most universal human longings.
[00:46:09]  All human law and all human civilization is based on that one thing.
[00:46:12]  That's right.
[00:46:13]  And so children have a right to be known and loved by their mother and father.
[00:46:17]  They have a right to life.
[00:46:18]  They have a right to an intact body, an unmedicalized body.
[00:46:21]  They have a right to innocence.
[00:46:23]  It is the duty of parents to protect those rights.
[00:46:26]  I love that you're talking about duties.
[00:46:27]  Well, they go together.
[00:46:28]  In natural law theory, rights and duties are two sides of the same coin.
[00:46:32]  That's correct.
[00:46:33]  So you're exactly right, Tim, that there's a lot of momentum on the right when it comes to parental rights, and that's good.
[00:46:40]  But parental rights has limits.
[00:46:42]  You do not have a right to chemically sterilize your child just because you think, I'm the parent, I can do what I want.
[00:46:48]  So I think parental rights are important, but insufficient when it comes to child protection.
[00:46:52]  That is why I use the language of children's rights.
[00:46:55]  Because just because an adult wants to do something like take their kid to Drag Queen Story Hour, you don't have a parental right to corrupt your child's mind through these sexualizing programs.
[00:47:04]  I just want to point out, what really bothers me is that It is a crime in, I don't know if I can say most, but I can tell you that in many jurisdictions, because I've actually looked at the laws, it is outright illegal to bring a child to a drag show.
[00:47:18]  Yes.
[00:47:19]  And the police just don't do anything about it.
[00:47:21]  They just don't do anything about it.
[00:47:22]  Yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:47:23]  And the DAs don't do anything about it.
[00:47:26]  The DAs could also get involved.
[00:47:27]  Sheriffs could get involved.
[00:47:30]  We have sheriffs that just tolerate this stuff.
[00:47:31]  In my county, in Texas, where I used to live, was definitely not the case.
[00:47:35]  The sheriff would not allow it and just shut it down.
[00:47:38]  But here's the danger.
[00:47:40]  Everything has pluses and minuses, right?
[00:47:41]  The world's not black and white.
[00:47:45]  The danger of children's rights is what we see in the family courts today.
[00:47:51]  Where, unfortunately, we live in a decadent society.
[00:47:54]  And I mean that in the Latin sense, decadenced, out of step with one another.
[00:47:59]  There's no general agreement on what constitutes what's good for a child in many circumstances.
[00:48:07]  So, the notion of children's rights could be used in such a way as to force parents in California to transition their children.
[00:48:16]  It is actually being used that way.
[00:48:18]  Well, properly defining rights is important.
[00:48:20]  It's very much like the Incredibles.
[00:48:21]  If everything is a right, nothing is a right.
[00:48:23]  You do have to properly define what children's rights are.
[00:48:26]  And you want to give the widest scope to parenting, because we recognize that geographical and cultural conditions even in America are not-- Even just personality differences with kids.
[00:48:36]  Yeah, you literally couldn't, well yeah, like my two sons, you know, did I ever tell you the story about how I figured out their personality differences?

=== Character Choices Reveal Players (03:42) ===

[00:48:41]  No, but I want to hear it because I love this kind of thing.
[00:48:43]  So I was, I was, um, I couldn't understand modern cartoons, like I just don't even get them.
[00:48:47]  I can't even follow the plot.
[00:48:49]  So I got the old Johnny Quest cartoons, you know, because like they have real guns and people don't get up when you shoot them and stuff.
[00:48:55]  You know?
[00:48:55]  And so we were watching The Invisible Monster, which I guess is one of the more popular ones for the cartoon aficionados, and James was saying, you know, look at that monster, he's huge, he's gonna outrun Bandit, and Bandit, you know, Bandit can't get away, but Johnny's gonna try, you know.
[00:49:10]  And Jude was going, bandit scared.
[00:49:12]  Why is that monster so angry?
[00:49:14]  So I just realized, it just hit me, Jude was living the inner life of these characters, and James was living the outer life.
[00:49:20]  And at that moment, I raised them completely different ways.
[00:49:24]  My way of motivating them and disciplining them was never the same after that.
[00:49:28]  Well, this is why God did not say, do this with every single kid.
[00:49:32]  God gave every kid a mother and a father who studies them, knows them, and is ultimately invested in them, and can tailor make their parenting approach based on what the child needs.
[00:49:40]  Here's the test.
[00:49:41]  When they're old enough, you have them play Fallout 3, or maybe Skyrim.
[00:49:47]  I need a bingo card, like how many times are we going to get to the video game references?
[00:49:51]  He's not gonna give me Fallout 4.
[00:49:53]  Not Fallout 4.
[00:49:55]  But because the reason I bring these games up is that in these games, you have a list of abilities that your character can improve upon every time you level up.
[00:50:06]  When I first played Fallout 3, I was introduced to it from a friend who was a Marine.
[00:50:10]  Okay.
[00:50:11]  His character was all about strength and big guns.
[00:50:15]  Right.
[00:50:15]  And I would watch him go into, you know, the bad guy area and he would have a mini gun and just run and go and just mow everyone down.
[00:50:22]  Right.
[00:50:22]  And then I was like, this game looks crazy.
[00:50:24]  Like, I don't know if I want to play it.
[00:50:25]  You know, it's not really.
[00:50:26]  He's like, well, just try it.
[00:50:27]  I'm going to work.
[00:50:28]  I played it.
[00:50:29]  My character was a sniper who snuck around and had lock picking and computer hacking.
[00:50:35]  You play like I do.
[00:50:36]  So my view of the game was, I don't want any conflict.
[00:50:41]  Anything that would be conflict, I will win before it occurs, and I will avoid it.
[00:50:45]  And my buddy, who's quite literally like the Hurrah mindset, built a character around charging in headfirst and using pure strength to shut down the conflict.
[00:50:56]  Yeah.
[00:50:56]  Sure.
[00:50:56]  - I thought that was really interesting to see because I knew that between our personalities, that mine was more strategic and staying back and his was more head on.
[00:51:06]  You could see the personalities of the individual in how they choose their character to be.
[00:51:10]  So does it literally need to be a video game like Fallout?
[00:51:12]  No, no.
[00:51:13]  I've even seen it in my own sons with board games.
[00:51:15]  So Jude never loses board games, ever.
[00:51:18]  He beats me and everybody else all the time.
[00:51:20]  And the reason is very simple.
[00:51:22]  My son James and Jude, they learned how to play chess before first grade.
[00:51:26]  Good dad.
[00:51:28]  James could solve three-move problems.
[00:51:31]  Jude could solve one-move problems.
[00:51:34]  But Jude doesn't play the rules.
[00:51:36]  Jude plays the person.
[00:51:39]  And he's like, oh, he's very comfortable in these kinds of positions and he would put you in positions where you were uncomfortable and beat the crap out of you.
[00:51:46]  You got to teach him poker.
[00:51:47]  He plays Monopoly the same way.
[00:51:49]  He's like, I know dad always goes for the expensive properties, right?
[00:51:53]  So I'm gonna lay traps for him by buying properties in little areas where, because Jude actually found out the dice probabilities and said, okay, if he wants to land on those spots, where would he be likely to be able to land on the move before that?
[00:52:06]  Good for him, good for him.

=== Parental Rights Debate (03:46) ===

[00:52:08]  You know, he plays the person, right?
[00:52:09]  That's clever.
[00:52:10]  And I think that's why James had trouble with Jude as a boxer.
[00:52:13]  I mean, James is more athletic than Jude, but Jude would play with James' psychology and get him into positions where Jude could whack him in boxing.
[00:52:20]  I love it.
[00:52:21]  You know, so this is really important.
[00:52:23]  So we grant that parents need this latitude, right?
[00:52:28]  So I think absent abuse and neglect, which are really just two spectrums of the same thing, right?
[00:52:33]  Abuse and neglect.
[00:52:34]  Absent abuse and neglect, what we should be talking about is parental rights.
[00:52:38]  Do you agree with that?
[00:52:39]  Once you've clearly defined what abuse and neglect is, right?
[00:52:43]  I mean, so it's abusive.
[00:52:45]  There's no general agreement in our society.
[00:52:47]  It's one of the problems that we have, right?
[00:52:49]  And that's what I'm going to do.
[00:52:50]  California.
[00:52:51]  I'm going to tell everybody what children's rights are.
[00:52:53]  California has a totally different idea of what child abuse is than Texas.
[00:52:56]  Yes, they're wrong and they need to adopt my definition.
[00:52:59]  I agree.
[00:53:00]  Thanks.
[00:53:01]  I don't know if this is too hard of a segue.
[00:53:02]  I'm moving there, I'll help you.
[00:53:04]  But one thing we've discussed quite a bit on Tim Cast IRL is abortion.
[00:53:09]  Colorado has no limit.
[00:53:10]  Oklahoma has a pure ban.
[00:53:13]  How can we as a country function when the view of human rights is spattered and different across all the different states, right?
[00:53:22]  Typically, we have a general view of your rights.
[00:53:24]  We have the Constitution at the federal level which supersedes all the states.
[00:53:28]  It's the law of the land.
[00:53:29]  But now we're running into this issue where The argument from the political left is it doesn't matter if you've gestated nine months and can survive on your own.
[00:53:38]  If you are in the womb, you have no rights at all and can be terminated if the woman desires.
[00:53:45]  And then you have other states that say, like, actually, from the point of conception, you are a human with human rights.
[00:53:50]  I mean, this is a bifurcation in the view of rights.
[00:53:53]  I don't know how we navigate.
[00:53:54]  So ultimately, all the culture war issues that we're coming up with today have at their root the same question, and that is, what does it mean to be human?
[00:54:02]  Yes.
[00:54:02]  Okay, these are ultimately philosophical questions, and hey, I'm going to look at the camera for the first time.
[00:54:07]  Hey, Christian theologian, you need to get to work on this.
[00:54:11]  Because we need a robust defense of the human person.
[00:54:14]  Because we cannot fight back, made in Canada, like medical assistance in dying.
[00:54:21]  We're not going to be able to talk about proper understanding of children's rights to their mother and father.
[00:54:26]  We're not going to be able to look at reproductive technologies the way we should.
[00:54:29]  Transhumanism, pornography, the redefinition of marriage, transing the kids.
[00:54:33]  Every single thing that we are talking about today comes down to the question, what does it mean to be human?
[00:54:38]  Christian, theologian, you are the only person with a worldview who is able to answer that.
[00:54:42]  You're the only person with the scaffolding to be able to give a human dignifying response to that.
[00:54:48]  So that is what we need.
[00:54:49]  That is the urgency here.
[00:54:50]  Okay.
[00:54:51]  And the problem with abortion, well, there's so many problems with abortion, but I will say that...
[00:54:56]  The reason why we have children being manufactured through big fertility, using somebody else's sperm, somebody else's eggs, somebody else's womb, is because we have said children exist for us.
[00:55:07]  We don't exist for them.
[00:55:09]  And that began with abortion.
[00:55:10]  That actually probably began with birth control.
[00:55:13]  I'm gonna control this situation.
[00:55:15]  They only come if I welcome them and if I decide.
[00:55:17]  Instead of saying, you know what, sex leads to parenting.
[00:55:20]  If I have sex, I am consenting to welcoming a child into my life.
[00:55:23]  So we have always been controlling reproduction.
[00:55:25]  Birth control was the first step.
[00:55:27]  Abortion is the second step.
[00:55:28]  We've now taken that into reproductive technologies.
[00:55:30]  I think I have a cultural solution for you, Jeff.
[00:55:32]  Okay.
[00:55:32]  Instead of surrogacy or changing all the laws, the men out there who are trying to find a life partner and a wife just need to go to meetings that Katie set up for her nonprofit.

=== Why We Fast From Heterosexuality (05:14) ===

[00:55:42]  And then you'll meet women who are going to be as passionate about it.
[00:55:44]  I have thought about setting up a matchmaking service, because I know so many good men and women who are like, I can't find the people that I want.
[00:55:53]  But I'm like, I don't know.
[00:55:54]  Well, sadly, you know, and again, the Greek Orthodox Church also looked into this in all of the Orthodox churches in America.
[00:56:02]  The divorce rates in and out of the churches are no different than the wider society.
[00:56:06]  That's not necessarily true.
[00:56:08]  It's not necessarily true, but nothing in statistics is necessarily true.
[00:56:11]  Well, what's true is how you identify, but when you actually look at church attendance, regular church attendance, that is the lowest divorce rate.
[00:56:19]  Well, it's not in evangelical churches.
[00:56:21]  Actually, the lowest is in communities like the Amish, the Beechy Amish, the Mennonites, people who've essentially withdrawn from this society.
[00:56:28]  Yeah.
[00:56:28]  Secular society is what causes this.
[00:56:30]  And they have the best food.
[00:56:32]  Nancy Piercy did write about this in her War on Manhood, and she's got the receipts for the fact that evangelical, not evangelical, men who attend church regularly with their families have the lowest rates of abuse and the lowest rates of divorce.
[00:56:46]  They are the most highly invested, and they have the happiest wives.
[00:56:48]  That's true, if the father attends.
[00:56:50]  That's absolutely true.
[00:56:51]  That's right.
[00:56:51]  Yes, that's right.
[00:56:51]  And I think... Oh, I just wanted to address her issues about human anthropology, because it is actually the central question of our time.
[00:56:57]  Yeah.
[00:56:59]  But I want to point out a difference between where I as an Orthodox versus a Protestant might think about what a theologian is.
[00:57:06]  For the Orthodox, a theologian is not a philosopher.
[00:57:09]  I think that's something that Protestants actually inherited from Roman Catholics.
[00:57:12]  Perhaps.
[00:57:12]  Where theology, you know, I went to a Roman Catholic university.
[00:57:16]  You know, I didn't go to university when I was 35, but I went to a Roman Catholic university, and if you went to one of the theology professors and said, let's go do some theology, they would take you to a library and they would apply philosophical categories to religion.
[00:57:29]  Orthodox theologians just means one who prays.
[00:57:33]  People who pray a lot.
[00:57:34]  Monks.
[00:57:36]  Saints.
[00:57:37]  Those are who we consider theologians, not people who apply philosophical categories to religion.
[00:57:42]  But the problem of our time is a philosophical redefinition of the human person.
[00:57:49]  And it's something I call expressive individualism.
[00:57:53]  Do you call it that, or does Carl Truman call it that?
[00:57:55]  Truman calls it that, but that predates him.
[00:57:58]  It actually predates him.
[00:57:59]  You're right.
[00:58:00]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:58:02]  And this concept is deeper even than I think Truman talks about, where he kind of gives a genealogy of how this idea came about, right?
[00:58:12]  Um, but it actually goes back actually much further.
[00:58:15]  You, you said, you know, uh, this idea of abortion, uh, happened with birth control perhaps, or... The idea that you can control children and when they come to be began with, uh... Actually, you can go back to the Roman Empire and see this stuff, right?
[00:58:29]  Through, like, exposure and that kind of thing.
[00:58:30]  And they, they even had, uh, forms of abortion prior to birth, right?
[00:58:34]  This is not, I mean, this, it's actually a pagan worldview.
[00:58:38]  It was the advent of Christianity brought the idea that the individual has dignity.
[00:58:43]  That's one thing Truman doesn't address.
[00:58:45]  And created the category of child.
[00:58:46]  Yeah, that's one thing Truman actually doesn't address.
[00:58:50]  And so one of the things that I pointed out to a lot of Christians who are trying to get their head around the California mentality is with this expressive individualism, and now I'm using it as Truman uses it, You know, your identity is your sexual identity.
[00:59:04]  Right.
[00:59:05]  It is your sexual identity.
[00:59:06]  So when they see children who don't have sexual identities, they actually think they're helping kids by giving them a social identity.
[00:59:12]  That's a good way to put it.
[00:59:13]  By sexualizing children.
[00:59:13]  That's a very good way to put it.
[00:59:14]  So it really is a fundamental philosophical difference about what a human being is.
[00:59:20]  I'll tell you an anecdotal story, because I think examples persuade more than arguments.
[00:59:24]  I had an NBC producer during my trial who was trying to get me one-on-one.
[00:59:28]  I think he was secretly recording me, actually.
[00:59:29]  He finally got me one-on-one.
[00:59:31]  And, um, he said, well, Jeff, um, you know, you're going to church on Sunday.
[00:59:34]  I'm like, yeah, I'm going to church.
[00:59:36]  And this was on a Saturday night.
[00:59:38]  And he said, can I come to church with you?
[00:59:40]  And I'm like, yeah, man, come to church.
[00:59:41]  You know, I'll pick you up.
[00:59:42]  Well, you know, we start at nine o'clock.
[00:59:43]  I got, I said, it's an Orthodox service.
[00:59:45]  So I warned you, you're going to be standing up for two hours.
[00:59:47]  So he's like, yeah, but I'm gay.
[00:59:51]  I'm pretty sure he was recording me.
[00:59:53]  And I said, OK, well, the first half of the service is for people who are outside the church.
[00:59:58]  We call it the Liturgy of the Catechumens.
[01:00:00]  And that whole first half of the service, the first hour, is for you.
[01:00:04]  Said, my advice is don't be gay until we get to church and try not to be gay until we leave church.
[01:00:10]  Just fast from being gay.
[01:00:12]  I'm fasting from being heterosexual.
[01:00:14]  I don't do any heterosexual sex prior to going in.
[01:00:16]  So you don't be gay until you get in and we'll pray for you.
[01:00:19]  And then he said to me, and this was when I realized what was going on, he said, but then I couldn't be who I really am.
[01:00:27]  And I said, well, that's it.
[01:00:28]  You think you're a biological computer.
[01:00:31]  Largely programmed to satisfy unconscious desires.
[01:00:34]  I think you're something much more important that should be accorded more dignity than that.
[01:00:37]  And you should be come to church and find out why that's the case.

=== Disagreements on Personhood (15:28) ===

[01:00:40]  And he literally started crying.
[01:00:42]  Wow.
[01:00:43]  Okay.
[01:00:44]  So the fundamental problem is we don't agree on what a person is.
[01:00:47]  That's right.
[01:00:49]  There's no general agreement in our society anymore about this.
[01:00:52]  Yeah.
[01:00:52]  Even in the law, there's no agreement.
[01:00:55]  Well, I just, I differ with you a little bit on how to deal with it politically.
[01:01:01]  Because, you know, America has historically solved its problems by partition, Europe by expulsion.
[01:01:07]  And I think what you'll end up with is bleeding Kansas.
[01:01:12]  So, if you have a fractured view of human rights, You end up in a certain amount of time with, you know, uh, this is 18, what is it, 18, um, uh, 44, was it?
[01:01:27]  Yeah.
[01:01:28]  Bleeding Kansas.
[01:01:29]  Yes.
[01:01:29]  This is the, when, when, uh, we're admitting a new state, there was two factions, parent factions, many different factions.
[01:01:36]  This is before Texas, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:01:37]  Right, and the idea was, we cannot allow the concept of slavery to be allowed to take foot in Kansas.
[01:01:46]  Yeah, in the new territory, yep.
[01:01:47]  Right, and many new territories.
[01:01:48]  That was what it was about.
[01:01:49]  That's what the Lincoln-Douglas debates were about.
[01:01:51]  And this resulted in people going around killing each other.
[01:01:53]  Yep.
[01:01:54]  And you saw Lincoln's arguments, if you recall, were purely legal.
[01:01:58]  Yeah.
[01:01:59]  He just said, for us it comes down to, does a black man have the status of a hog?
[01:02:04]  Even the slavers didn't believe that.
[01:02:06]  And so there's no intermediate status in US law.
[01:02:09]  So they have full rights as citizens.
[01:02:12]  But here's the thing.
[01:02:13]  The war was occasioned.
[01:02:18]  By the desire to impose that on the South, even though probably the institution would have gone away in 10 years anyway.
[01:02:25]  But either way, what I'm saying is, that's what led to the violence.
[01:02:30]  I said, and my assumption was, if you want peace, if you want a peaceful union, you're going to have to realize people in New York are not going to live the kind of lives that they live in Dallas, Texas.
[01:02:39]  They're just not.
[01:02:42]  I think it's important to say, you know, everyone always says, like, what was the cause of the Civil War?
[01:02:46]  Oh yeah, there's not a cause, no.
[01:02:47]  Yeah, and the... I agree with you.
[01:02:50]  The argument is the cause for the political conflict was rooted in economics, predominantly around slavery, which led to a lot of debate, a lot of...
[01:02:58]  Come on now, the northern industrialists were very upset at the fact that the southerners enacted tariffs and hurt their industries.
[01:03:05]  There's a lot of different issues that economically emerge, and everyone's going to try and pinpoint what was the inflection point that led to this.
[01:03:17]  You know, I've read quite a bit about it.
[01:03:19]  Many have argued.
[01:03:19]  I think mostly from the Confederate perspective, it's that when Lincoln called for conscription to go and quell the rebellion or whatever, that was what made everyone want to fight.
[01:03:29]  And I'm like, well, states were already seceding.
[01:03:31]  They were already seceding, yeah.
[01:03:32]  But secession is, I think, the natural conclusion of the ultimate Federalist argument of the states can do their own thing.
[01:03:39]  Why would Texas not then say, We will not pay taxes to a federal system that allows the execution of human beings who are innocent.
[01:03:49]  In which case, Texas then says... Radical federalism never contemplated that the federal government would take from one state and give to another.
[01:04:00]  It's not even so much that.
[01:04:01]  I mean, if you look at what happened in 2020 with Texas v. Pennsylvania, the argument Texas had was Pennsylvania, as well as many other states, were holding their elections outside of the Constitution.
[01:04:11]  And thus, it was impacting their participation in the union.
[01:04:15]  And the Supreme Court told them to screw off.
[01:04:18]  My fear is that if we try to take the approach of, let Colorado just determine that, maybe at nine months, The baby is crowning.
[01:04:27]  Doesn't matter.
[01:04:27]  State says you can kill it on the spot.
[01:04:30]  I'm like... If it's got a toe in the womb.
[01:04:32]  I mean, that's just absolutely insane.
[01:04:34]  It is insane.
[01:04:35]  And eventually what happens is states like Oklahoma say, we will not participate in federal requests, requirements, taxes, laws, or otherwise, because you are a slave state.
[01:04:48]  Which I must point out is exactly what California did with its transgender kidnapping law.
[01:04:53]  It said that it would never return my son to Texas, even on court order.
[01:04:56]  It would never obey a subpoena from a Texas court about my son.
[01:05:00]  It would never allow any public servant to give me any information about my son, including the schools.
[01:05:06]  That's nuts.
[01:05:07]  That is already happening.
[01:05:09]  But I'm just saying, if you want peace, and you want to maintain the union, You're just gonna have, we're all gonna have to accept that we won't have the same ways of life.
[01:05:20]  I'm, I just... Now you can say that's unlikely.
[01:05:23]  No, I agree, but there's limitations.
[01:05:25]  It has limitations.
[01:05:27]  I don't see how we can have a constitution which seeks to protect the rights, the God-given rights of its citizenry, and of all people, even people who are not citizens, have.
[01:05:38]  these rights because the Constitution does not grant them.
[01:05:40]  This is what a lot of people don't understand too.
[01:05:42]  They'll say, illegal immigrants or whatever don't have these rights.
[01:05:46]  They're like, no, no, no, the rights came from God. - Yeah, they have the same rights. - Let me tie this back, if you don't mind, between slavery and the current discussion.
[01:05:52]  And I think that you are right that we might have, like we had free states and slave states, we'll have life states and death states.
[01:06:02]  We do already.
[01:06:03]  Right, we do already.
[01:06:04]  But it's so interesting to me because reproductive technologies are actually feeding into this.
[01:06:08]  So when Virginia passed its commercial surrogacy bill in 2019, for the very first time since slavery, they deemed a class of people property.
[01:06:16]  Yeah.
[01:06:16]  And that was embryos, right?
[01:06:18]  Reproductive technologies have allowed us to commodify people in a way that we have not done since we had an industry and economy built on the backs of people that were deemed less than human.
[01:06:29]  And so I just think like when you are starting to create technologies that parallel slavery in terms of the laws that we have to use to govern it, you really need to start taking a look at, are we heading in the wrong direction technologically?
[01:06:43]  You're not gonna stop it, though.
[01:06:45]  There's no evidence that these technological movements have ever been stopped.
[01:06:49]  Like, ever.
[01:06:50]  On anything.
[01:06:51]  It can't be?
[01:06:52]  It can't be stopped, yeah.
[01:06:53]  And into the question of AI right now?
[01:06:55]  I'm gonna stop it.
[01:06:56]  Not to deviate too far from the conversation, but just to mention AI.
[01:06:59]  We've got numerous prominent, high-profile individuals saying, AI will be our end.
[01:07:04]  And then people saying, why don't you stop doing it?
[01:07:06]  They say, you can't, because if I don't, someone else is already working on it.
[01:07:09]  Too many people are building a machine they know will destroy us, and they won't stop.
[01:07:13]  People will kill their children.
[01:07:14]  You cannot stop abortion from happening, but you can take legal steps to massively limit it, and that's what I'm gonna do for all third-party reproduction.
[01:07:23]  I gotta tell you, I mean, the reason I bring up Colorado, Oklahoma, and this conflict is that There is, I am horrified, infuriated, and angered at the thought.
[01:07:33]  When I saw that video out of Virginia, where that, I think she was a state senator or a rep or something, was talking to a judge, and he asked her, like, clarify for me the limitations.
[01:07:43]  The baby is crowning, and you can abort it, and she goes, there are no limitations.
[01:07:47]  And the response from Governor Northam, which I think cost him severely, was, Well, you know, in these situations the baby would be delivered, it would be resuscitated.
[01:07:56]  Make it comfortable.
[01:07:56]  Make it comfortable, bring it to another room and then have a discussion about it.
[01:08:00]  I'm like, there is a... What a chilling phrase, make it comfortable.
[01:08:05]  But you know what?
[01:08:06]  I'm just... That is, he is being logically consistent.
[01:08:09]  Yes, he is.
[01:08:10]  That is the logically consistent position.
[01:08:12]  It cannot be disposable like 20 hours before and then post, no, dignity, full human rights, no.
[01:08:19]  The idea that infanticide should be able to take place post-birth is consistent with an abortion mindset.
[01:08:24]  That's the consistent position.
[01:08:25]  So I've presented this argument to many left-leaning individuals.
[01:08:29]  I love how they say they're pro-choice.
[01:08:30]  I'm like, no, no, you're pro-abortion.
[01:08:31]  You're pro-abortion.
[01:08:32]  Because, you know, me personally, I have the traditional pro-choice position, which still seeks to balance, it seeks to balance the rights of the mother and the child and find that it's really, really difficult, if not impossible, but we're trying as hard as we can.
[01:08:45]  They just say, I've asked them this.
[01:08:48]  You have two women.
[01:08:50]  They both, they're identical twins.
[01:08:52]  And they conceived with identical twin brothers.
[01:08:55]  At the exact same time, the baby's eight months on.
[01:08:59]  One baby is prematurely being born.
[01:09:02]  It is born.
[01:09:03]  The women are sitting next to each other.
[01:09:05]  Can the doctor come in and kill the baby that was just born?
[01:09:08]  And they all say, well no, that's killing a baby.
[01:09:10]  I say, okay, the baby...
[01:09:12]  Of the identical genetics and gestation in the womb.
[01:09:15]  Can the doctor kill it?
[01:09:16]  Yes, it's the woman's choice.
[01:09:17]  And I'm like, why not just deliver it and let it live?
[01:09:22]  They don't care.
[01:09:23]  They just say, it's the woman's choice.
[01:09:25]  She can kill it if she wants.
[01:09:26]  That is a moral line that I feel is absolutely untenable.
[01:09:29]  I reject it outright.
[01:09:31]  I do not feel that we are a sound society.
[01:09:33]  It's a shocking proposition.
[01:09:36]  It's a psychotic proposition.
[01:09:37]  Yep.
[01:09:39]  Well, so that is why you're scared.
[01:09:41]  That's why you're a conservative, because I mean, like conservatism is just living in reality.
[01:09:45]  And the thing about progressives is.
[01:09:48]  Their feelings are their God, their self is their God, their own sexual identity is their God, because feelings and identity can change, their priorities can change depending on what the situation is, and so they are going to be logically inconsistent because they are not anchored to an ultimate reality.
[01:10:03]  No, I think it's deeper and worse than that.
[01:10:07]  Worse?
[01:10:07]  Yes.
[01:10:08]  Relying on Truman's analysis of expressive individualism, it's not so much that it's just feelings.
[01:10:14]  They have, you know, firm beliefs and actually their system is consistent.
[01:10:18]  I disagree.
[01:10:19]  It's internally consistent.
[01:10:21]  It's not consistent with observed facts.
[01:10:23]  It's internally consistent.
[01:10:25]  It's what philosophers call coherentism, right?
[01:10:27]  It doesn't actually meet reality in a consistent way, but internally, it's all consistent, right?
[01:10:32]  Okay, I agree with that.
[01:10:33]  That's why it's actually often hard to argue with.
[01:10:35]  That's why I don't waste my time making arguments.
[01:10:37]  I use examples from facts.
[01:10:38]  Because that's where the problem with their point of view actually lies.
[01:10:43]  So they believe, really, that identity is something that is constructed.
[01:10:49]  Yeah.
[01:10:49]  This is wrong.
[01:10:50]  And this constructed identity, it's actually a duty of people to construct their identity.
[01:10:56]  And within that kind of mindset, it's totally incompatible.
[01:11:00]  And I don't even call myself a conservative anymore because I actually don't think we live under the Constitution anymore.
[01:11:04]  I think it's probably happened around FDR's time.
[01:11:09]  The government is not constrained by the Constitution in any way.
[01:11:12]  I would love to restore it.
[01:11:14]  I would love to restore it, and I would love to do the case.
[01:11:18]  So I call myself a right-winger now.
[01:11:20]  I just have a right-wing perspective on things, because I don't know what I would conserve at this point.
[01:11:25]  And I guess I could go into reactionary politics, which I think is what you're about, trying to reestablish a kind of lost social order.
[01:11:33]  And I respect that.
[01:11:35]  Those reactionary movements have no history of success in the past.
[01:11:38]  I actually disagree.
[01:11:39]  I think the left is reactionary.
[01:11:42]  If you look at Derrick Bell, one of the forefathers of critical race theory, he regrets the end of segregation.
[01:11:49]  He wants it back.
[01:11:51]  So actually, if you look to the history of the world, the classically liberal framework that we have today in terms of individual rights is new and has only been around for a very, very, very short amount of time.
[01:12:03]  And these people want to restore what once was.
[01:12:06]  You look at the eugenicists of the early 1900s, and you look at the critical race theorists, and they're arguing for a return to a segregated separate society where we can go back to the way things used to be.
[01:12:17]  I reject that.
[01:12:18]  I say no.
[01:12:19]  And what they'll do is the Alinsky tactic of accuse your opponent that is, you know, what you are doing.
[01:12:25]  No, in fact, you mentioned in ancient, was it ancient Rome, or where the babies are, the corpses?
[01:12:30]  Oh yes, it's been the way of the world to sacrifice children on the altar.
[01:12:35]  We put a stop to that, and it's only in recent history we have taken the strong moral positions.
[01:12:40]  I want to point out though, because I'm an opponent of all forms of liberalism, including classical liberalism, neoliberalism, Left liberalism.
[01:12:47]  I'm even opposed to free market liberalism.
[01:12:48]  I'm opposed to all forms of liberalism.
[01:12:50]  I'm very unusual You probably won't meet many people like me But like I all of that stuff about human dignity and all that stuff about ending infanticide happened before the Enlightenment It happened with the conversion of Europe to Christianity, prior to the Enlightenment.
[01:13:05]  Under regimes today, we would consider unintolerably authoritarian.
[01:13:09]  Yeah.
[01:13:09]  Right?
[01:13:10]  Which is why I consider myself a right-winger.
[01:13:12]  Like, I would be Hamiltonian.
[01:13:13]  If I were back at the Continental Congress, I would be like Hamilton.
[01:13:17]  I would want an elected monarch who could take long-term vision, these kinds of things.
[01:13:20]  But I'm more comfortable with that.
[01:13:24]  Is the government constrained by the Constitution in any way?
[01:13:26]  It is.
[01:13:27]  If you look at, I love bringing this up, we've talked about it, gun rights.
[01:13:31]  I know, it's your thing, it's your thing.
[01:13:32]  Yeah, gun rights, huge, and actually free speech has expanded.
[01:13:35]  We used to have obscenity laws, and now people can speak more freely.
[01:13:39]  By the way, we should give credit to our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters who maintained the anti-porn and the Hollywood production code all the way to 1959.
[01:13:48]  Wow.
[01:13:50]  Until it was finally overturned, and then we got the explosion of pornography.
[01:13:53]  But thank you, Roman Catholics, even though I'm not Roman Catholic, but they did the hard work there.
[01:13:57]  But the question is, I suppose, is the government constrained enough?
[01:14:00]  No.
[01:14:01]  Is it constrained?
[01:14:02]  Yeah.
[01:14:02]  And we can make an argument as to how constrained it is, but it is.
[01:14:06]  I mean, you look at what happened in New Mexico, the governor says, I hereby decree, no guns.
[01:14:10]  And across the board, everyone said, you can't do that.
[01:14:13]  And so the Constitution is simply an artifact of our minds.
[01:14:18]  Let me give you an example of why I don't think it's constrained.
[01:14:21]  So Title VII, we had the Title VII case, right?
[01:14:25]  Where in the 1960s, they banned discrimination on the basis of sex.
[01:14:30]  The Supreme Court just redefined the word to include transgenderism.
[01:14:34]  That's right.
[01:14:35]  Which was never intended or meant by the people in the night.
[01:14:38]  They didn't include crossdressers in the word sex back then, right?
[01:14:41]  Right.
[01:14:43]  And this ability of the court to do that very thing, Happened.
[01:14:48]  It was, it was not, it's not granted to it in the constitution.
[01:14:50]  It's only allowed to decide in particular cases.
[01:14:53]  Yes.
[01:14:53]  Not to determine what, you know, not to impose a view of the constitution on the other branches of government.
[01:14:58]  But that was irrigated by the court in the very first court case, Marbury v. Madison.
[01:15:02]  Like the constitution didn't survive contact with reality in the very first court case.
[01:15:06]  So when, when you have a, uh, an institution that can simply redefine any term to achieve any social outcome at once, how is it limited?
[01:15:14]  How about the agencies?
[01:15:16]  We're supposed to have separations of powers, right?
[01:15:19]  So look at the IRS.
[01:15:20]  So we have IRS special agents.
[01:15:23]  Special agent just means they can carry a gun, right?
[01:15:26]  You have our special agents that can charge you with a crime.
[01:15:28]  They charge you with a crime not under laws, but under regulations written by the IRS.
[01:15:33]  You're denied a jury trial and you'll be tried by an IRS judge.
[01:15:37]  They have all three powers to the branches of government.
[01:15:39]  They force you to testify against yourself.
[01:15:42]  That's correct.
[01:15:43]  And people really need to get this.
[01:15:44]  Libertarians are right.
[01:15:46]  If you do not provide evidence against yourself to the government as to your income every year, they will come and they'll shoot your dog.

=== Authority's Instrumental View (12:01) ===

[01:15:54]  They will lock you up.
[01:15:55]  100%.
[01:15:55]  But my point is, we're governed by agencies these days.
[01:15:58]  I don't even think elected officials even control it.
[01:16:00]  I mean, Trump ordered the military out of Syria and they said no.
[01:16:03]  Yep.
[01:16:05]  So we know the president's not in control of the military.
[01:16:07]  But I would say corruption of the systems is not an absolute statement that they're... So my point is... You think there's still some remnant of limitation?
[01:16:18]  Well, I think if you go back in time to the First Amendment, you couldn't carry signs saying certain things.
[01:16:27]  People would not allow it.
[01:16:28]  Yes.
[01:16:29]  George Carlin famously got arrested for his, you know, seven words you can't say on TV.
[01:16:33]  Well, originally the Bill of Rights applied, you know, these restrictions on government power applied to the federal government, not to the states.
[01:16:40]  It was only later through the 14th Amendment that they were actually extended to the states, right?
[01:16:44]  But I just mean that, um, I guess I'll just step back and say simply there are instances where the government does what the Constitution prescribes and instances where it doesn't.
[01:16:54]  Yeah.
[01:16:54]  So you can make the argument that the Constitution is just like a smiley face sticker on the wall and it's really just our morals that are deciding it.
[01:17:02]  Yes.
[01:17:03]  So you forced me to clarify my views.
[01:17:05]  And even as I'm thinking about it, you've helped me help me do that, actually.
[01:17:08]  Thank you.
[01:17:09]  So look, I think the Supreme Court, for example, looks out and says, you know, that the temperament around abortion is getting to the point where it might lead to violence.
[01:17:20]  So we need to outlaw it again, or at least allow the states to control it.
[01:17:23]  Like, I really think those are how the decisions are made.
[01:17:26]  I agree.
[01:17:26]  They're not made on whether the Constitution limits them.
[01:17:28]  I believe that if you were going to have an actual constitutional scholar judge and not a politician, when Texas sued Pennsylvania over the 2020 election, you had Thomas and Alito who said, it is our duty to hear this case.
[01:17:42]  This is how our Constitution works.
[01:17:44]  And the other judges were just like, Nah. - No, we don't need to. - Because it's not what is prescribed in the rules, it is what we as humans ultimately decide makes the most sense.
[01:17:55]  - Correct. - There is a balance that must exist in that worldview.
[01:17:59]  For instance, I think judges should be good people and actually use their judiciary discretion to protect those who are more or less, protect or punish those, depending on if they're more or less deserving.
[01:18:12]  If you have a man, and they mostly do, but not enough.
[01:18:16]  There are too many instances where a judge goes, well, I don't think it's reasonable, but life in prison, you know, because you jaywalked or something.
[01:18:23]  Right.
[01:18:24]  I think we need to see more discretion and leniency for those and too many people are just thrown into the system and mistreated.
[01:18:32]  Well, the thing is, and this goes back to some of the surrogacy issues that we talked about, because there are massive Um, government's economic incentives to put people in prison.
[01:18:46]  So let me give you an example.
[01:18:47]  I have this thing where I just, every once in a while I get so pissed off that I'll hire a lawyer for eight hours.
[01:18:53]  We'll go down to the Title IV-D court in Dallas, Texas, where, the child support court, Title IV-D.
[01:18:59]  They're actually called Title IV-D courts.
[01:19:01]  We have a statute in Texas, I printed it out somewhere, which basically says the courts are always to rule so as to maximize Title IV-D reimbursements.
[01:19:11]  It doesn't say in the child's best interest.
[01:19:12]  It's to reimburse Title IV-D.
[01:19:15]  So they'll have black men lined up in the hallway going out to the street And they're just putting them in jail.
[01:19:20]  All of them are just going to jail.
[01:19:21]  So I'll just hire, sometimes I just get so pissed off about this that, you know, I just hire a lawyer and they, he signs a contract for $1 with these guys and he just stands there all day and just represents these people and keeps them out of jail.
[01:19:32]  It just pisses me off.
[01:19:34]  But here's the deal, they go off the Title IV-D reimbursement program, and when they put them in jail, they go into the prison reimbursement program, which is $93 a day.
[01:19:42]  So the government just looks at these people as, you know, fathers, as just like economic transactions, right?
[01:19:48]  Yeah.
[01:19:49]  So let me ask your perspectives on this stuff.
[01:19:53]  If you were a judge, and you were presented with a court case, That if you were to rule correctly based on the law of the land, the constitution, and your duty, it would result in mass rioting and widespread violence.
[01:20:08]  Would you choose to incorrectly rule?
[01:20:11]  Preserving peace.
[01:20:12]  Okay, so weren't there protesters, death threats, murder plots against some of the justices when the Dobbs decision was leaked?
[01:20:20]  Yeah.
[01:20:20]  And they didn't bend.
[01:20:22]  So I'm a little skeptical about this idea that everything is going to be done because of ideological persuasion.
[01:20:27]  I mean, those justices ruled in that case, despite the fact that they didn't have a lot to gain personally or politically from it.
[01:20:35]  Yes.
[01:20:36]  I'm just, I'm wondering your moral position on, is it better to be correct for, as to the law of the land, or is it better just to, it's sort of the, you know, to look at Texas v. Pennsylvania.
[01:20:51]  I'm sure the Supreme Court justices thought, hey, look, if we take this case up, Texas is probably right.
[01:20:57]  The election is subverted.
[01:20:58]  It goes to the House of Delegates.
[01:21:00]  There's going to be mass chaos.
[01:21:02]  They were writing in the Boston Globe that the Democrats would persuade Western states to secede from the union in the event of a Trump victory if Trump didn't concede some demands of theirs.
[01:21:11]  So I'm imagining that many of these justices were just like, the law doesn't matter.
[01:21:16]  We should just do what minimizes harm.
[01:21:18]  I'm wondering if you think a move like that is the right thing or the wrong thing.
[01:21:21]  Should the judges have been like Thomas and Alito saying, it doesn't matter what you think is right or it doesn't matter what happens tomorrow.
[01:21:27]  It happens that we uphold our rules as they are constructed and written for the preservation of the system.
[01:21:33]  I believe judges are empowered only to rule in specific cases.
[01:21:37]  That is all the Constitution allows them to do.
[01:21:39]  And don't forget, the appellate courts are actually not part of the Supreme Court's judicial branch.
[01:21:45]  Those are Congress's courts.
[01:21:46]  Yeah.
[01:21:47]  Congress sets their appellate jurisdiction and everything else.
[01:21:49]  In fact, Congress should use that.
[01:21:51]  They should say, you can't have environmental lawsuits for nuclear plants.
[01:21:53]  They can just stop federal lawsuits on that.
[01:21:55]  It's easy to do.
[01:21:56]  Yeah.
[01:21:57]  Pipe dream.
[01:21:58]  So if you think about it, a judge only ruling in a specific case, he must accept the riots.
[01:22:05]  He must accept the rivalries.
[01:22:07]  The law is a teacher.
[01:22:08]  The law is a teacher.
[01:22:10]  It tells us something true about humans.
[01:22:12]  It tells us something true about human behavior.
[01:22:14]  You get the law wrong, you're going to get human behavior wrong.
[01:22:16]  I mean, I see that especially with the decriminalization of marijuana, for example, in our area.
[01:22:21]  Like, when I was a kid and I was in high school in the 90s, there were a few people smoking a little bit of pot, definitely a lot of drinking.
[01:22:28]  But generally, we weren't doing that.
[01:22:29]  We were like, pot?
[01:22:30]  No, that's illegal.
[01:22:31]  It's not just illegal.
[01:22:32]  It's hard to get, all of that.
[01:22:33]  No, it just wasn't really a part of our world.
[01:22:35]  Today, my kids will sit in the nurse's office with friends who are tripping out because they got a bad hit or too much content.
[01:22:42]  They're hallucinating, whatever it is.
[01:22:44]  And my kids are some of the only kids around that are not doing any levels of pot.
[01:22:50]  The psychosis, you know, the lethargy, the lack of interest in schoolwork.
[01:22:57]  We taught kids something when we decriminalized marijuana.
[01:23:01]  We taught them this is no big deal.
[01:23:03]  And so it does matter what the law says.
[01:23:06]  We do want laws that are grounded in natural law and what it means to be human, that has a proper understanding of human dignity and the rights of children.
[01:23:15]  And then you need courage.
[01:23:17]  I mean, probably courage is the thing that is lacking the most across society, probably with judges, but certainly with the ordinary man too.
[01:23:23]  It is time for ordinary people, with whatever position of power you have, or if you're just a mom and dad, it is time for courage.
[01:23:30]  Nothing changes in this country without courage.
[01:23:33]  Well, I have a, this is why I call myself a right winger these days.
[01:23:36]  I don't call myself a conservative anymore.
[01:23:39]  I am not, and I'm going to use this word, but I'm not pointing to anybody here.
[01:23:44]  I'm not naive enough to believe that there can be a government that is a nation of laws and not of men.
[01:23:53]  Governments are always of men.
[01:23:56]  And the question is only the moral status of the men in authority, because that constitutes what the law will ultimately actually be, regardless of what's written.
[01:24:05]  Let me put it this way.
[01:24:07]  If you have an immoral man in power, it doesn't matter how good the laws are, he'll still use them against you.
[01:24:13]  He will still use them against you.
[01:24:14]  If you have terrible laws, but you have a moral man in power, he will never use them against you.
[01:24:20]  The only thing that matters is the moral status of the people in authority.
[01:24:24]  And that's what I think we don't talk about a lot.
[01:24:26]  We pretend like the piece of paper laws constrain people from doing things, and they don't.
[01:24:32]  The only thing that constrains people is their conscience.
[01:24:35]  Well, you can definitely see some of that with the two-tiered justice system that's going on right now.
[01:24:39]  But I wouldn't say that laws are inconsequential.
[01:24:41]  I think that they do hem us in in some way still.
[01:24:43]  They do, but the authorities think of them instrumentally.
[01:24:48]  We don't think of them instrumentally.
[01:24:49]  The laws are a tool for them to achieve their purposes, right?
[01:24:53]  So we want to stop Trump from running, we can use the laws, right?
[01:24:57]  We want the Texas Attorney General out because he's instituting a Pfizer investigation in Texas, we can use the laws.
[01:25:03]  They think the laws as tools, whereas we think of them as having some moral status.
[01:25:07]  And I think we need to start thinking of the laws as tools and instrumentally the way they do.
[01:25:11]  The question is, is Is the moral status of the authority someone that we can trust?
[01:25:19]  And that's ultimately all it comes down to.
[01:25:21]  So in this sense, you can see that that's a very illiberal way of thinking about government.
[01:25:27]  But I actually think it's a more liberating and a freer way of living.
[01:25:30]  For example, I do believe that people were freer under monarchies.
[01:25:33]  than they were ever under democracies, and for this very simple reason... It depends on the monarchy.
[01:25:37]  Are you talking about English common law?
[01:25:38]  Are you talking about their tradition?
[01:25:40]  Even on the French monarchy.
[01:25:41]  Even on the Bourbons.
[01:25:41]  No, no, no, no, never.
[01:25:42]  Not the French.
[01:25:43]  I think so.
[01:25:44]  I think... No, a French king could walk in and take whatever little hamlet he wanted, but a British king could not, because they had common law that almost predated the monarchy.
[01:25:51]  The English kings actually did do that all the time, but look at the confiscation of church property, and you will see that that's the case.
[01:25:56]  To be fair, though, I mean, any system, no matter what system, the powerful people do whatever they want.
[01:26:01]  You're right.
[01:26:01]  And I think Hans Hermann Hoppe, which ironically is a classical liberal libertarian economist, has done a pretty good analysis of this, right?
[01:26:12]  In democracies, you have to care what other people think and do because they vote and they can affect your life.
[01:26:17]  In a monarchy, you don't really have to care what they think.
[01:26:20]  They're not really affecting the laws that much.
[01:26:23]  And so people socially are much freer under monarchies.
[01:26:26]  And one of the reasons I think Christianity arose in the Roman Empire period, and it was more difficult during the Republic period, was precisely for that reason.
[01:26:35]  Right?
[01:26:36]  You were just freer.
[01:26:36]  You could just have a Christian religion.
[01:26:37]  Nobody cared because you weren't going to influence the Roman monarch.
[01:26:41]  You weren't going to influence them that much.
[01:26:44]  So this is why I consider myself a right winger on these issues, right?
[01:26:47]  The moral status of the authority is what's controlling, I think.
[01:26:52]  I'd say if you want to dive into this, you should have Yoram Hazony on your show, because I think he is the absolute expert, mapped this out historically, looked at all the systems and understands common law and the British tradition.
[01:27:02]  I agree with that.
[01:27:02]  I've written a pretty serious critique of his book.
[01:27:06]  I would love to talk to him.
[01:27:07]  Let's move on to envisioning the dystopian nightmare that is before us.
[01:27:11]  So one thing that terrifies me, AI.
[01:27:17]  A year ago, I was making these goofy pictures of Nancy Pelosi using stable diffusion, and they don't look like a human.
[01:27:24]  They look like grotesque paintings.
[01:27:26]  Today, they look real.
[01:27:29]  One year later, people have now begun to AI-generate videos of characters.
[01:27:35]  We're getting to the point where we're a few years out.
[01:27:37]  Last time I was on, we did the voices.

=== Artificial Wombs: Transplant and Test (08:08) ===

[01:27:39]  We AI-generated voices of you name it.
[01:27:41]  You did Joe Rogan, I think, yeah.
[01:27:42]  Yeah, and some voices are harder to do than others.
[01:27:45]  Joe was- They couldn't do your voice, right?
[01:27:47]  Yeah, it struggled with me.
[01:27:49]  It struggles with a few other people.
[01:27:51]  Luke, Seamus, and I, it didn't get very well.
[01:27:54]  But for some reason, it just nails people like Mitch McConnell or Joe Rogan.
[01:28:00]  Well, they're large language models, so there's probably more material to pull from for the people that are on the mic more often.
[01:28:05]  Well, no, no, no, this AI, You upload a 30-second audio file, and then it will take that sound.
[01:28:14]  Just from that one clip?
[01:28:15]  Yep.
[01:28:15]  It's not an LLM, in other words.
[01:28:18]  Right.
[01:28:21]  I'm just making a general point about technological advancement.
[01:28:24]  The big thing now that everyone's talking about artificial wombs, and I believe, for the time being, let me pause.
[01:28:32]  Through science, we can probably do anything within the confines of the physical world, right?
[01:28:37]  Obviously, I don't think we're going to alter physics using technology.
[01:28:41]  I don't think it's possible.
[01:28:42]  But for the time being, the idea that a man, a biological male, could be given a womb and then give birth is not possible.
[01:28:50]  But there is a possibility in implanting a womb in a man and then having a C-section.
[01:28:55]  And so this is what's actually one of the big debates now with womb transplants for Logical reasons, right?
[01:29:03]  They start this because there are women who have damaged or injured their uterus and receive a donor uterus so that they can carry a child.
[01:29:12]  And now the discussion is, okay, well we did that for an obvious and logical reason, to help someone who is injured.
[01:29:17]  Now we can put a womb in anyone for any reason.
[01:29:20]  This is how it always starts with a very sympathetic, understandable case, and it ends up with purchasing, buying, selling, discarding, and shipping children.
[01:29:27]  That's what it's going to end up at.
[01:29:28]  And actually, I don't know if children will survive.
[01:29:31]  So they have had some live births from uterus transplant from woman to woman.
[01:29:36]  They've had about a dozen or so across the world where kids have been born to this.
[01:29:40]  It's a very difficult surgery.
[01:29:42]  The UK just announced a month ago that they did it for the first time successfully in women.
[01:29:47]  It was a sister donating to her sister or whatever, right?
[01:29:50]  So it begins with this sympathetic case.
[01:29:52]  And we don't yet have the technology to transplant a womb into a man.
[01:29:56]  I was talking to somebody yesterday who was like, I don't know I don't know if you could survive.
[01:30:02]  I mean, like, it's not just a bag.
[01:30:05]  Like, women's brains, their bodies, their hormone levels, right?
[01:30:09]  All of that goes into sustaining a child.
[01:30:11]  It's like it has to connect from something into something else, and those somethings don't exist in men.
[01:30:15]  So really, it would just be a bag in a cavity that would be sitting there in the man.
[01:30:19]  You would still have to create the baby in a laboratory, gestate them probably for a certain amount of time, and then transition it to the bag.
[01:30:27]  Yes, it's been doing.
[01:30:28]  Transition it to the bag and then c-section it out because there's no exit.
[01:30:31]  Their pelvis literally cannot support an exit at that point.
[01:30:35]  So I don't know if babies will be able to survive in a male transplant, but I actually think that that's not the greatest threat.
[01:30:43]  I think artificial wombs are The more likely scenario that it's going to threaten children sooner, because you do have, you know, the prototype that was developed.
[01:30:53]  They had a lamb that was gestated, right, to virtual maturity.
[01:30:58]  And lambs are somewhat similar gestationally to babies.
[01:31:01]  It is intended to be a prototype.
[01:31:03]  And of course, pro-lifers are like, well, this is awesome.
[01:31:06]  Now, if you have a premature baby, then you can transfer them to the bio bag and then gestate them until You know, they are a full term.
[01:31:13]  But the reality is that's maybe that'll happen occasionally.
[01:31:16]  But what's really going to happen is when you talk about the baby assembly process, which requires sperm, egg and womb, sperm is very easy to access, right?
[01:31:27]  All those Japanese men that you were talking about last night, they could They could give while they're at work, right?
[01:31:33]  Eggs, female eggs are harder to access but we figured out a way to do it if a woman pumps herself full of enough hormones and then you laparoscopically extract them.
[01:31:42]  Wombs are the hardest and most expensive part of the baby assembly process to procure and that is why 25% of surrogates today that are renting their womb are in Ukraine.
[01:31:52]  Right?
[01:31:52]  Because these are economically desperate women that will rent their bodies out because their husband is at the front lines or he's been killed and they have to support their three kids.
[01:32:00]  Right?
[01:32:00]  This is why you've got countries across the world where brown bodies are giving birth to white babies because those brown wombs are cheaper than the white wombs here in the United States.
[01:32:09]  And it would be so much easier for big fertility to just cut out the female altogether in the womb process.
[01:32:17]  There's a movie that I just watched, poorly executed by the way, unfortunately.
[01:32:22]  You may have seen it, I forgot what it was called, but it's about, in the future, they create pods where you can put the baby in it, and so career women, instead of actually having the baby, they go to work and there's a closet where they put the fake womb in the closet and close the door.
[01:32:38]  Have you seen this?
[01:32:39]  No, but there was that video that made the rounds late last year called like ectolife.
[01:32:42]  All those pods.
[01:32:43]  Right.
[01:32:43]  All the pods.
[01:32:44]  Right.
[01:32:44]  And people are like, is this real?
[01:32:45]  Is it happening?
[01:32:46]  And the answer is no, not yet.
[01:32:48]  But China is working on artificial womb technology.
[01:32:51]  And here's where AI comes into the picture.
[01:32:53]  They are working on AI nannies, robot nannies that are going to adjust the oxygen levels, the nutrition levels.
[01:33:01]  They will be able to increase development or terminate development of the babies.
[01:33:05]  And so this is really where the concern needs to be, is right now, very often, if a child is created through a surrogate and defective, maybe there's too many of them, maybe there's a developmental disability, oftentimes the actual real-life woman is the only one, even though she's not genetically related, standing in the way between life and death for that kid.
[01:33:25]  And we saw this with the situation, Brittany, I forget her last name, but the woman that was pregnant with a surrogate's baby, the two men, right, who she found out at week 23 that she had an aggressive cancer and she needed to start treatment immediately.
[01:33:40]  And the two men said, terminate that baby.
[01:33:43]  And she said, But it's unlikely, but I could deliver the baby.
[01:33:47]  The baby could survive.
[01:33:48]  And they said, we don't want a premature baby with all the medical conditions.
[01:33:52]  And she said, OK, I will find people to adopt the baby so the baby doesn't have to die.
[01:33:56]  And they said, we don't want our genetics out there.
[01:33:59]  Kill the baby and the baby is dead.
[01:34:02]  They did kill it.
[01:34:03]  The baby is dead.
[01:34:05]  She was opaque about whether or not it was an abortion or a delivery.
[01:34:09]  She won't say.
[01:34:10]  But that baby is dead.
[01:34:10]  I think we know.
[01:34:11]  I think that we know.
[01:34:12]  So what I'm saying is, do you understand what happens when you cut out the woman in the gestation process?
[01:34:19]  It will be unlimited free-for-all in terms of manufacturing, producing children.
[01:34:24]  Oh, that's not even the half of it.
[01:34:25]  That's not the half of it.
[01:34:26]  CRISPR technology?
[01:34:27]  They're gonna, you're gonna go to a designer baby factory as a single person and be like, I'd like a child who's strong, tall, with perfect teeth, and then they're gonna give you a list of genetic options, be like, how about this eye color?
[01:34:40]  How about this eye color?
[01:34:41]  So that's already happening.
[01:34:42]  You can already choose eye color, hair color of your children.
[01:34:44]  Wait, what?
[01:34:45]  How?
[01:34:45]  Where?
[01:34:46]  Because you can do genetic testing, right?
[01:34:48]  At the moment that you conceive, you let the babies develop a little bit, and then you can test.
[01:34:51]  And then you grade the embryos.
[01:34:53]  You discard the ones you don't want.
[01:34:55]  You choose male, female, it's very easy.
[01:34:56]  Very, very easily, right?
[01:34:58]  And so what's going on right now, really?
[01:34:59]  Female embryos weigh a little bit more.
[01:35:01]  It's a eugenics process.
[01:35:02]  And that's why when you're talking about IVF, whether surrogacy or not, only 7% of babies created in a lab will be born alive.
[01:35:09]  7%.
[01:35:11]  Because this is not about babies.
[01:35:12]  This is about on-demand designer baby ship worldwide.
[01:35:15]  So here's the other problem with artificial wombs.
[01:35:17]  And Jeff's told enough stories.
[01:35:19]  I get to tell a story now.
[01:35:21]  Okay, so the story is I used to work for a Chinese adoption agency before I had kids.
[01:35:25]  And I would accompany every now and then parents that were going to adopt their children.
[01:35:29]  And so on my very, very first trip there, I went to a Chinese orphanage a couple different times, same orphanage.

=== Silent Babies (03:09) ===

[01:35:34]  And I speak Chinese, and I had been translating the medical reports and the schedules for these kids for a couple years.
[01:35:40]  So I kind of thought that I knew how an orphanage ran.
[01:35:43]  So I go into this room, And it's probably a hundred kids.
[01:35:47]  It was the three to six month room.
[01:35:48]  And so it was all the babies, you know, two to three per crib, head to toe, head to toe, swaddled really tight.
[01:35:54]  And I go into this room of a hundred children, infants at that point, and nobody was crying.
[01:36:00]  And I was like, wow, what an impressive orphanage.
[01:36:03]  They've got these babies on the schedule.
[01:36:05]  They're all sleeping at the same time.
[01:36:07]  This is amazing.
[01:36:08]  Yeah.
[01:36:08]  Right.
[01:36:09]  But then as I started to sort of wander the rows, I looked and the babies were awake and they were looking around, but they weren't making any noise.
[01:36:16]  So I was like, well, interesting.
[01:36:17]  So I scooped one up and this is before I had children.
[01:36:20]  Uh, but immediately there's something about women.
[01:36:23]  You start to rock, you start to sway.
[01:36:25]  I suddenly was like, oh my gosh, I'm singing.
[01:36:27]  I didn't even realize I had started singing, but I'm singing to this baby.
[01:36:30]  And you know, at first she was just listless.
[01:36:36]  Not looking at all.
[01:36:37]  But after a little while, what women do instinctively with babies is we look at them, they make a noise, we make the noise back, right?
[01:36:44]  We simplify our language to their level.
[01:36:46]  That's instinctually kind of how women communicate with babies.
[01:36:49]  And within like three or four minutes, she was responding to me, like the eye contact, she was making facial expressions, right?
[01:36:57]  She was lighting up, she was going, oh, babies at that age do this thing where they go, oh, oh, and you say, oh, oh, back to them.
[01:37:02]  And you literally teach them how to talk.
[01:37:05]  And it was just the sweetest thing.
[01:37:07]  So after five minutes, I went, I'm going to put the baby down.
[01:37:09]  I'm going to pick up another baby.
[01:37:11]  And I set the baby down and the baby lost it.
[01:37:15]  Starts crying.
[01:37:15]  Just loses it, shrieking.
[01:37:17]  And I grabbed that kid and I picked him up and I went, oh shit.
[01:37:22]  These babies aren't crying because they've been trained to never cry.
[01:37:26]  Wow.
[01:37:28]  Right?
[01:37:28]  It's not because they're on a schedule.
[01:37:30]  It's because they have lost hope that anybody is ever going to respond to their cries.
[01:37:36]  And so I held that baby for two hours.
[01:37:38]  I didn't pick up another baby because I couldn't handle the thought of putting that baby down and listening to her cry.
[01:37:43]  So that is a level of human deprivation.
[01:37:47]  So the only touch that those babies had was a bottle propped up in their mouth, regular diaper changes.
[01:37:53]  I mean, they were changed.
[01:37:54]  They were clothed.
[01:37:55]  They were fed.
[01:37:56]  They had a nail trim once a week, but nobody touched them.
[01:37:59]  Nobody looked at them.
[01:37:59]  Nobody made eye contact with them.
[01:38:02]  Now I've adopted one of those children.
[01:38:04]  You know, my son was in an institution until he was almost two and the emotional Short-circuiting that takes place because they did not have human touch very often will make it difficult for them to function emotionally throughout the rest of their life.
[01:38:23]  Deprivation of human touch is a level of starvation, human starvation, that is, you know, cruel.

=== Babies and Artificial Wombs (11:14) ===

[01:38:30]  Like we punish people with solitary confinement.
[01:38:33]  Correct.
[01:38:34]  And it's considered one of the most cruel forms of punishment.
[01:38:36]  Yes.
[01:38:38]  People go insane.
[01:38:38]  They do.
[01:38:40]  That's what happened to those babies.
[01:38:41]  Now, at least they had nine and a half months of touch from their mother enveloped in her smell, her movement, her dietary changes, the light and the dark of her moving by a window, the sounds, her language, all of that.
[01:38:56]  I actually don't know if babies in artificial wombs will survive.
[01:39:00]  I don't know if they will, but if they do, they are going to be so horribly damaged.
[01:39:04]  And, you know, if your audience can Google Romanian orphanages for what happens to children who are deprived of human contact up to age five.
[01:39:15]  And they're essentially, they have to be institutionalized.
[01:39:18]  They can't function.
[01:39:22]  But I never underestimate the transhumanist globalist movement to commodify human touch as well.
[01:39:29]  I think they'll commodify everything.
[01:39:31]  And I want to point out because I like to have a sense of proportion about things.
[01:39:36]  Women's body, sexual body parts, for example, their breasts, have been commodified throughout all of human history.
[01:39:41]  Wet nurses, for example.
[01:39:43]  And rich women used to hire wet nurses so that their breasts could go back to normal size.
[01:39:49]  And children became very close to their wet nurses.
[01:39:51]  And there's whole books in the South about it.
[01:39:54]  It was very popular in the South, for example.
[01:39:55]  But we've rented out women's breasts for almost all of human history.
[01:39:59]  We've done this.
[01:40:00]  And their sexual organs, and now their eggs, and now their wombs.
[01:40:02]  Every female-specific body part is in demand.
[01:40:06]  You are correct.
[01:40:07]  Right.
[01:40:07]  I think it's fairly obvious.
[01:40:10]  And we're not stopping it.
[01:40:11]  I don't think we're stopping it.
[01:40:11]  I'm assuming everybody would agree with us that Pregnant women get instructions from their babies to do certain things.
[01:40:19]  Not just instructions, but there's actually a cell exchange between women and the children they're gestating.
[01:40:25]  It's a kind of chimerism where their cells literally meld into one.
[01:40:29]  And they discovered this because they found male cells in women's brains.
[01:40:34]  And they're like, what on earth?
[01:40:36]  And it was from the male babies that they had carried.
[01:40:38]  They become one.
[01:40:40]  And so this is why, you know, this idea that, oh, she's not really the mother, right?
[01:40:44]  She's just the oven for somebody else's bun, is a lie.
[01:40:48]  Everything going on chemically between the mother and baby- So there's an epigenetic pathway as well.
[01:40:52]  That's correct.
[01:40:52]  But so the, you know, even the dietary choices of the mother- That's right.
[01:40:57]  Reflect in real genetic changes in the baby.
[01:40:59]  So imagine, we know that babies are releasing, there's chemicals released, there's hormones exchanged, there's blood exchange.
[01:41:05]  So You know, pregnant women having cravings for specific things.
[01:41:10]  A lot of it obviously has to do with the pregnancy hormones and what the baby needs.
[01:41:12]  Yes.
[01:41:13]  Put a baby in an artificial womb.
[01:41:14]  Yes.
[01:41:14]  The baby sends out signals saying we require, you know, this particular vitamin or nutrient and the machine does nothing.
[01:41:21]  Right.
[01:41:21]  That's right.
[01:41:21]  And not only that, but the woman is going to respond to the pathogens, the viruses in her world and start making antibodies for the baby.
[01:41:28]  Like, you cannot replace the human aspect of this.
[01:41:30]  I don't believe that.
[01:41:31]  I think that AI systems will be able to analyze pregnancies in real time, and they'll use similar to like generative AI methods.
[01:41:40]  They'll try.
[01:41:41]  They'll look at all of these variables, or many of them, and learn them and recreate them largely.
[01:41:47]  And remember, Remember for the people that are doing this, it's only, it's only, it needs to be good enough.
[01:41:55]  It doesn't have to be like the, what we want for them.
[01:41:57]  It only has to be good enough.
[01:41:59]  Yeah.
[01:41:59]  To get your child product.
[01:42:00]  So you don't have to quit your job or wreck your body.
[01:42:02]  Yeah.
[01:42:02]  And in fact, uh, you know, socially isolated people may be a desirable trait for some of these people that are doing this.
[01:42:10]  Right.
[01:42:11]  So I think it's a very powerful people want this to happen.
[01:42:14]  And a transhumanist agenda is real.
[01:42:18]  And I don't think it's, it's not just about mind machine.
[01:42:22]  It's not just about artificial births.
[01:42:24]  It's a program to take control of human evolution, totally control, total control of it.
[01:42:28]  And, um, you know, I think one of the fears that Elon Musk has talked about, for example, about some of the threats from AI, he subtly hints at this as the major threat.
[01:42:38]  It's the control of human evolution.
[01:42:40]  And I think they're going to be able to do it.
[01:42:42]  So it is absolutely happening.
[01:42:44]  You have eugenics concerns already among kids created through these technologies.
[01:42:49]  We've got kids that are saying, this is a eugenics process.
[01:42:51]  I am a product that was designed, conceived by two specific specifications.
[01:42:57]  Every single step that we take away from children being created in the marital embrace has only resulted in damage to kids.
[01:43:04]  I mean, even now with surrogacy, we already have cases where you've got like the baby factory dad in Japan, like a single guy, Japanese guy who created dozens of children through surrogates in India and Cambodia and Thailand.
[01:43:18]  Single guy, rich guy.
[01:43:19]  He just made all these genetic children, I believe, with the egg of a white woman.
[01:43:23]  He's raising them, you know, in a big apartment.
[01:43:26]  You already have kids.
[01:43:27]  Here's the other thing about Big Fertility.
[01:43:30]  We talked last night about adoption being a just society's response to children who have lost their parents.
[01:43:34]  In those situations, the child is the client.
[01:43:37]  Adults have to go through all kinds of screenings and vettings and background checks, home studies.
[01:43:41]  That is not how it works in Big Fertility.
[01:43:43]  In Big Fertility, if the bank can clear your check, you get the baby.
[01:43:48]  So we already have situations of pedophiles creating children Through surrogacy, who would never have passed an adoption background check.
[01:43:55]  Right?
[01:43:56]  That's true.
[01:43:56]  This is baby buying and selling.
[01:43:58]  And I will tell you, there might be a few nice couples that are like, this is the solution to my infertility.
[01:44:03]  But this is going to be, you want to talk about child exploitation and trafficking?
[01:44:07]  Artificial wombs are going to give it to you.
[01:44:08]  I actually think it will always be far less than the abuses in the current system.
[01:44:12]  What will be far less?
[01:44:16]  The abuse of children is going to be far less than the current system.
[01:44:22]  Here's why, let me explain.
[01:44:24]  The current system puts half of children without fathers with well-known effects.
[01:44:30]  Often this is being done because the children are effectively being bought by welfare programs.
[01:44:36]  So you cannot get welfare in many states if there's a father in the house, a father who's working in the house.
[01:44:42]  So I agree with that.
[01:44:43]  And women optimize their highest payout relative to the cost at three children.
[01:44:50]  So we're already buying children in the current system.
[01:44:53]  We just don't talk about it like that, but that's exactly what we're doing.
[01:44:56]  We're paying women to have children from three different fathers to maximize the payouts.
[01:45:00]  Okay, so based on international law, because I was responsible for compliance with adoption law, federal, state, and international.
[01:45:08]  Um, you purchase children by direct payments to the birth parents, right?
[01:45:12]  To relinquish their parental rights.
[01:45:13]  That is by baby buying and selling.
[01:45:15]  So that is prohibited in adoption.
[01:45:17]  So I don't know what you mean by the current system, but the current system of adoption... We pay women to have children without fathers.
[01:45:23]  That's what I mean.
[01:45:24]  It's very simple.
[01:45:25]  Well, that's not technically the definition of trafficking.
[01:45:28]  What's happening in big fertility is technically the definition of trafficking.
[01:45:31]  I'm not worried about legal definitions.
[01:45:32]  What I'm worried about is the fact that we give money and have an economic incentive for women to have children without fathers, and it is the biggest social problem in America, far larger than surrogacy will ever be.
[01:45:43]  It is the biggest problem in America.
[01:45:45]  Fatherlessness is the biggest problem in America.
[01:45:47]  When you're talking about the commodification of children and the danger to trafficking, surrogacy, and artificial wombs are going to blow that away.
[01:45:55]  Yes, so what we will see- It's going to be too expensive.
[01:45:57]  It'll never be as big as the current system.
[01:45:59]  It's not going to be.
[01:46:00]  You're going to get cheaper and cheaper, just like high HDTVs.
[01:46:03]  Right.
[01:46:03]  The technology is going to advance rapidly.
[01:46:05]  And if we get to the point, cost doesn't matter.
[01:46:09]  You already have people who make a billion dollars.
[01:46:12]  It's a massive industry trafficking.
[01:46:14]  And if the traffickers can put an artificial womb in the jungle... Oh, artificial wombs you're talking about are surrogacy.
[01:46:20]  No, no, I'm talking about artificial wombs.
[01:46:21]  I'm talking about surrogacy.
[01:46:22]  If we get to the point of artificial wombs, you will have these traffickers growing human beings for the purpose of being sold.
[01:46:28]  They won't exist in any system.
[01:46:30]  They won't be trackable.
[01:46:31]  No one will know they're missing.
[01:46:33]  These children will never learn.
[01:46:34]  And then, you know what the worst part is?
[01:46:36]  The traffickers will dispose of them when they are no longer a viable product.
[01:46:40]  So surrogacy is paving the way for that.
[01:46:43]  Right now, with surrogate-born children, we don't know where they're going.
[01:46:47]  In adoption, there's post-placement reports.
[01:46:49]  There's follow-up.
[01:46:50]  There's supervision.
[01:46:52]  You have things like the Uniform Parentage Act that was passed in Washington state.
[01:46:56]  By the way, it's coming to your state too.
[01:46:57]  So if you're in touch with your state legislators, look for the overhaul of parenthood through this dystopic bills called Uniform Parentage Act.
[01:47:03]  It simply means children are going to be awarded to whatever adults have the money and means to acquire them.
[01:47:08]  Surrogacy is doing this.
[01:47:09]  There's no tracking of these kids.
[01:47:12]  We don't know where they go.
[01:47:13]  They are taken cross borders and they disappear forever and nobody is monitoring it.
[01:47:17]  And they should.
[01:47:18]  I completely agree that surrogacy should be tightly regulated like adoption.
[01:47:22]  I agree with that.
[01:47:22]  It should be banned.
[01:47:23]  Yeah.
[01:47:25]  It should be banned.
[01:47:28]  I agree that it should be banned.
[01:47:29]  This is the thing.
[01:47:30]  But my thing is, when I compare it to the current system, it's better than the current system.
[01:47:35]  It's not.
[01:47:36]  It produces outcomes that are objectively better.
[01:47:38]  They're not.
[01:47:42]  The single father home and the outcomes for people who can afford surrogacy are better than the single mother homes that exist in the current system.
[01:47:50]  The solution to your boys losing a relationship with their father is not to have children lose a relationship with their mother.
[01:47:56]  That's strawmanning.
[01:47:57]  That's not what I'm saying.
[01:47:58]  What I'm saying is... Children have lost their father in the current situation.
[01:48:01]  The solution is not to insist that children lose a relationship with their mother.
[01:48:03]  There is no solution.
[01:48:04]  It's mitigation, first of all.
[01:48:05]  But should we compare against an ideal that probably we can't attain, given the reproductive technologies that are coming?
[01:48:11]  Or should we look at, particularly men, look at the current system and the risks in the current system and decide what to do to achieve the best outcome?
[01:48:18]  The current system is awful.
[01:48:21]  The future proposed mitigation is awful.
[01:48:24]  I agree with all that.
[01:48:25]  I think you have to be... I propose that we not be starry-eyed idealists and instead what we should do is be realists and try to achieve the best outcomes we can in the broken system that we have as we, you and I, work together to change that system.
[01:48:41]  I propose that we recognize the realities of the child, that they come from a man and woman, get their biological identity from a man and woman, are maximized with their development by that man and woman, are statistically the safest, most loved in the home of that man and woman, and that all law, culture, and technology bend to the reality of the child instead of Forcing kids to fit the mold of whatever's going on.
[01:49:03]  I think I just need to say it is beautiful and laughably naive because the horrors of technological advancement are beyond your comprehension.
[01:49:11]  They are.
[01:49:12]  And they're nearly unstoppable.
[01:49:13]  Right.
[01:49:14]  And so as we sit here today, I imagine it's going to be like 30 years and someone's going to pull up the archive and they're going to be like, look how stupid they were.
[01:49:21]  They had no idea what was coming.
[01:49:23]  And there's going to be like the weirdest cloning.

=== Seek Compatible Communities (10:52) ===

[01:49:26]  There's going to be people who are half dumb.
[01:49:29]  This is the thing, like, when I read the two most commonly read dystopias, right, that everyone reads in college, right, it's Brave New World in 1984.
[01:49:37]  Brave New World was far more accurate.
[01:49:39]  I agree, yeah.
[01:49:40]  Far more accurate.
[01:49:40]  To be fair, Luke Rutkowski of We Are Change has a shirt which is a big chart of all of the dystopians, and then overlapping the middle, you are here.
[01:49:49]  Yes.
[01:49:50]  Because there's elements of all of it.
[01:49:51]  You're right.
[01:49:52]  From Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984.
[01:49:54]  I still would like to know what should young men do in this current system until it changes.
[01:50:00]  Well, you cannot overhaul or forsake the ideal.
[01:50:02]  That's the one thing.
[01:50:03]  There's no other option for this that is going to mean that men are going to be happier.
[01:50:07]  I'm sorry, they're not.
[01:50:08]  There is a practical, cultural, behavioral solution.
[01:50:11]  As we've already mentioned, the Amish seem to have done very, very well.
[01:50:15]  And there are Amish families nearby here, and they've got the best food.
[01:50:19]  They've got the best food.
[01:50:20]  They really do.
[01:50:21]  They have fresh, organic farm food.
[01:50:22]  Fresh food.
[01:50:23]  Clean.
[01:50:23]  And when we had Fresh and Fit on the show- They don't vaccinate their cattle.
[01:50:28]  Fresh and Fit's- They do not?
[01:50:30]  Well, it's all just like organic, raw, the earth.
[01:50:32]  But Fresh and Fit's position was, this is the reality of the world, so we must have men learn and adapt to it.
[01:50:37]  And, you know, they said, you know, look at how these women behave, what their expectations are.
[01:50:42]  No matter who the woman is you meet, she's on Instagram.
[01:50:45]  And so there's gonna be some famous guy or some guy with 300,000, 500,000 followers in the blue verification.
[01:50:52]  It's gonna send her a DM and it's gonna be, oh wow, look at this, you can move up.
[01:50:56]  And I said, and the likelihood of that happening if you meet your wife at church is very low.
[01:51:02]  So that's the other thing is like, I heard them.
[01:51:04]  I know that that world exists.
[01:51:06]  There also are other worlds that exist.
[01:51:08]  There's my world that exists.
[01:51:10]  My world, where we've got people that are living by a shared set of values, raising our kids a certain way, to believe certain things, right, to recognize human dignity, to live according to that human dignity, to not define themselves based on their sexual feelings.
[01:51:21]  It's like Waterworld.
[01:51:23]  You ever see that movie?
[01:51:24]  Yes, I do.
[01:51:24]  Waterworld.
[01:51:25]  Kevin Costner?
[01:51:26]  Kevin Costner.
[01:51:27]  I remember The Smokers, which was the funniest part of the movie.
[01:51:29]  And so what we have are people who have just resigned themselves to this, the world was, they said, the world was created in a deluge.
[01:51:36]  Right.
[01:51:36]  Kevin Costner, because he was like a mutant or whatever, could go underwater and he knew that the world was destroyed by one.
[01:51:40]  Right.
[01:51:41]  But you had people seeking out dry land and it was a myth.
[01:51:44]  They said, dry land doesn't exist.
[01:51:45]  But they found it and there were like horses running and there's flowers and food and trees.
[01:51:49]  And so my view is, you can choose to sit on that boat and just float in the ocean and say, this is life and I'm resigned to it.
[01:51:56]  Or you can seek out that dry land like they did in Waterworld and they found it.
[01:51:59]  My point, in reality, is it may be very, very difficult, but I think there are a lot of political, social arguments to be made about what we should do, where we're going, how it should be.
[01:52:11]  But first and foremost, for the individual, what they can do is, yeah, you need to be away from these things.
[01:52:16]  Like I was saying to Fresh and Fit, If you are concerned, man or woman, that you're going to get a dopey guy who's going to leave you with the baby and run off, or you're a guy who's worried the wife is going to bring you to divorce court and take everything from you.
[01:52:27]  Which statistically happens more often than not.
[01:52:28]  It does.
[01:52:29]  But, I would argue, move to a small town, very small, with responsible, hard-working people, seek it out, find it, and meet the people who are like-minded through community and who have social obligations.
[01:52:44]  If you're going to church regularly, and I am not a Christian.
[01:52:47]  I do believe in God, but I know a lot of people might be like, I just don't feel right going to, you know, I don't believe.
[01:52:52]  Find a place where there's community gathering and social expectation, and then you find a person who says, maybe in time we grow to not get along, but we recognize our duties and responsibilities.
[01:53:05]  So while we may not be having fun, we are being responsible.
[01:53:09]  You find someone who can recognize that Maybe you're not going on date night anymore.
[01:53:14]  Maybe you're not watching movies together.
[01:53:15]  You actually don't like the sounds or smells or whatever, but you also recognize you have a responsibility to your kids and to your family, and you learn to work together, not for yourselves, but for the children you've created.
[01:53:26]  Okay, so all of this has to do with what does it mean to be human?
[01:53:28]  Are you going to recognize the biological realities that, for example, men and women make babies?
[01:53:33]  But I will also say, you know, Fresh and Fit, they were talking about their 50, 60 women that, you know, the body count they need to get.
[01:53:38]  Like, how many babies have you fathered?
[01:53:40]  Yeah.
[01:53:41]  How many babies have you fathered?
[01:53:42]  Yeah, I know.
[01:53:42]  That you do or do not know about, and you think that that is the solution to this?
[01:53:47]  Right?
[01:53:47]  You're talking about all these women and how, oh, well, they're just so needy and they're so lost because they didn't have dads.
[01:53:51]  Mitigation, is what you said, yeah.
[01:53:53]  Right?
[01:53:53]  But they're like, well, I don't want those women.
[01:53:54]  They didn't grow up with fathers.
[01:53:55]  I'm like, you are creating the fatherless children.
[01:53:58]  So like, to me, they are living so inconsistently with the natural world, and they're not going to be able to survive through that.
[01:54:03]  So they think that they're adapting.
[01:54:05]  They're not adapting.
[01:54:06]  They're perpetuating.
[01:54:07]  So I'm sorry, opt out, create a new culture, go to the place where people have a robust understanding of human dignity and live according to it.
[01:54:15]  There is, you know, I do respect this kind of idealism and I agree with the ideal.
[01:54:23]  Um, but you know, I get this a lot from women.
[01:54:26]  They'll say, uh, Jeff, you just chose poorly, you know, and, and the, a lot of women say, well, just choose better, choose a spouse better.
[01:54:34]  Well, first of all, women fall for most divorces.
[01:54:36]  They're the ones choosing poorly.
[01:54:38]  College-educated women, it's like 90% of the filers are women.
[01:54:42]  They're choosing very poorly.
[01:54:43]  That says something about our education system.
[01:54:46]  But I don't believe that choosing wisely can overcome the massive economic and social incentives that cause women to, or not cause, but incentivize women to divorce.
[01:54:58]  It won't solve everything.
[01:54:59]  Yeah, and so while I think, yeah, I admit it, I'm the one who brought it up.
[01:55:04]  The Amish communities, and I think even the Mennonite communities that have withdrawn from society, you can have this.
[01:55:09]  Hold on, it won't scale.
[01:55:12]  And if you want something that scales, that can help our wider society, you must change the incentives.
[01:55:21]  Do you understand what I'm saying?
[01:55:22]  Yeah, I want to add though, they haven't withdrawn from society.
[01:55:24]  I mean... No, I know, but... They've created an alternative society.
[01:55:28]  That's what I mean.
[01:55:28]  But not even!
[01:55:30]  If you drive a minute down the road, you can go to a Mennonite farm and walk in and hang out with them and play checkers and buy food.
[01:55:38]  When I used to live in Texas, I used to hang out with the Mennonites.
[01:55:40]  It's just a community.
[01:55:43]  That's all it is.
[01:55:43]  I mean, if I start talking about skateboarding, I will be speaking a foreign language to you guys describing all of these things.
[01:55:50]  I know, it's its own society.
[01:55:52]  And so they have their social norms and expectations.
[01:55:55]  I say, while we're dealing with these problems, you simply seek out those who hold those views and live in that community.
[01:56:02]  Okay, so this has been a mandate for Christians since the Sermon on the Mount.
[01:56:05]  That's what church means.
[01:56:06]  Right, that is literally what church means.
[01:56:07]  Ecclesia means those who are called out.
[01:56:08]  That's exactly right.
[01:56:09]  And Jesus said, what do you need to do?
[01:56:12]  You need to, you know, Christians talk about being in the world, but not of the world.
[01:56:16]  We have been doing this for two millennia.
[01:56:18]  When Jesus said, you need to seek the city on the hill, do you know what he's saying?
[01:56:22]  He's saying there's a city within your city, right?
[01:56:25]  My church, my church community is in Seattle.
[01:56:28]  But we don't live like Seattle.
[01:56:30]  We have a different set of laws that govern us.
[01:56:32]  We use our body differently, our words differently, our money differently.
[01:56:36]  We have different priorities.
[01:56:37]  We raise our children differently.
[01:56:39]  So that is what church is.
[01:56:41]  It is a parallel society within a city.
[01:56:44]  And that's actually the mandate for all Christians.
[01:56:46]  So you do not have to be conformed to the culture.
[01:56:50]  Christ tells us you are not supposed to be conformed to the pattern of this world.
[01:56:54]  And Fresh and Fit are being conformed to the pattern We are supposed to be transformed.
[01:57:01]  By what?
[01:57:02]  By the renewing of our mind, what we think first, the values that we have, is going to dictate our behavior.
[01:57:09]  So get out of the culture that is speaking a certain kind of values.
[01:57:12]  Get into the place that has higher values, higher laws, and actually the authentic God.
[01:57:18]  Find your women there.
[01:57:19]  It's not going to perfect everything.
[01:57:21]  We're fallen people, but that is where you're going to opt into a situation.
[01:57:25]  Don't try to find your wife in Sodom or Gomorrah.
[01:57:28]  Yes, obviously not.
[01:57:29]  All I'm saying is that large-scale economic and social incentives matter a lot.
[01:57:35]  Yes, they do.
[01:57:35]  And they probably matter more than anything else.
[01:57:38]  Not more than anything else, but they matter.
[01:57:39]  In aggregate effects, they observably do.
[01:57:43]  Did you say social?
[01:57:44]  Social and economic.
[01:57:45]  I agree with social.
[01:57:46]  I think the social is the most powerful.
[01:57:48]  Oh no, I think if you pay, look, we know if we pay women to have babies out of wedlock, they'll just have babies out of wedlock like crazy.
[01:57:54]  Even in very religious black churches.
[01:57:57]  What you incentivize, you get more of.
[01:57:58]  That's right.
[01:57:58]  And we've been incentivizing fatherless homes for a long time.
[01:58:02]  And the incentives for divorce are mainly for women to take sole control of the children.
[01:58:06]  That's what the evidence shows, right?
[01:58:09]  And if as someone who has ardently tried to change these laws in several states, I can tell you there are entrenched interests that are going to prevent that.
[01:58:17]  You're not going to change those incentives anytime soon.
[01:58:20]  So the idea of, you know, go be Amish, go be Mennonite, find a church.
[01:58:25]  It's pretty obvious that there are a lot of men that want to do this.
[01:58:29]  They want to find wives like this.
[01:58:30]  They can't find it in America.
[01:58:32]  They're going to the Philippines to do it.
[01:58:34]  Right?
[01:58:34]  In order to find it, it's a way of kind of stepping out of society as well.
[01:58:38]  But the vast majority of men are not going to do it and are not able to do it.
[01:58:41]  So we have to be real about this.
[01:58:43]  We're just, it's just about that time.
[01:58:45]  If, uh, if you want to offer some final thoughts, Jeff just spoke.
[01:58:48]  So Katie, if you want to just give your final thoughts.
[01:58:50]  My final thoughts are you've got all kinds of challenges, adults.
[01:58:54]  You're unwanted singleness.
[01:58:55]  You're in a struggling marriage.
[01:58:56]  You're post-divorce.
[01:58:58]  You're dealing with infertility.
[01:58:59]  You have same-sex attraction.
[01:59:00]  You want to be parents.
[01:59:02]  You have a lot of struggles.
[01:59:03]  Those struggles are very, very real.
[01:59:04]  The solution is never to make a kid bend and sacrifice for you.
[01:59:08]  Someone is going to do the hard thing in those situations.
[01:59:10]  It needs to be you, the adult.
[01:59:12]  You are the one that sacrifices.
[01:59:13]  We don't make kids sacrifice for us.
[01:59:15]  And I'm sorry, but this culture is telling you you can do anything that you want and the kids are going to be fine.
[01:59:19]  That is a lie.
[01:59:21]  You are not allowed to harm the rights of your children, their right to life, their right to their mother and father, their right to be born free and not bought and sold.
[01:59:27]  No, you adult have to sacrifice for children because the only alternative is for kids to sacrifice for you.
[01:59:33]  And that is an injustice.
[01:59:34]  So that's my pitch.
[01:59:35]  Right on.
[01:59:35]  Any final thoughts, Jeff?
[01:59:37]  I think I'm a realist.
[01:59:38]  I'm not an idealist.
[01:59:39]  I think people should look at the world as it really is.
[01:59:42]  That I've talked to young men who are actually doing this.
[01:59:45]  I'm more describing a phenomena than advocating for it.
[01:59:48]  If we don't fix the system of incentives that exist in the United States, and particularly around family law and the family, Surrogacy will only grow.
[01:59:57]  And I think it's a rational decision by men to protect themselves, even as it is an unfortunate one.

=== Thanks For Watching! (00:25) ===

[02:00:05]  So we should really focus our efforts on fixing this incentive system.
[02:00:09]  Right on.
[02:00:09]  This has been a blast.
[02:00:10]  It was a really great conversation.
[02:00:11]  I appreciate both of you coming and hanging out.
[02:00:13]  Thanks for daring to do it.
[02:00:14]  Oh yeah, and more to come.
[02:00:15]  It was a great conversation.
[02:00:16]  Yeah.
[02:00:16]  It's good to see you again.
[02:00:18]  It's very good to see you.
[02:00:19]  Awesome.
[02:00:20]  And now we're gonna go hang out.
[02:00:21]  So for everybody who's watching, thanks so much for hanging out.
[02:00:24]  It's been a blast.
[02:00:24]  You can become a member at TimCast.com.
[02:00:27]  The next show will be tonight at 8 p.m.