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April 6, 2023 - Stew Peters Show
01:14:57
CrossTalk: Discussion with Steve Franssen: Is Physical Discipline Biblical?
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Crosstalk News, and it is my distinct pleasure to welcome in the man, the legend, Steve Franson.
Welcome to Crosstalk News, sir.
You're a really good singer, by the way.
This was actually very entertaining listening to that.
Oh, thank you, sir.
Yeah, it's a bop.
I'm a songwriter, first and foremost.
I like the song crafting.
That's what I'm about, man.
It's something I'm hoping comes with this new generation of Christians, you know, guys our age and younger.
It's not just rehashing the old hymns of the past.
You know, we do a Bible study in the morning.
We try to sing, like, non-Hillsong stuff or go back and try to find, like, put your shoulder to the wheel and stuff like that.
But I got to think the other day that we should be writing hymns, right?
We should be writing hymns.
I'm not a songwriter, though.
I write copy, but I don't know.
Maybe you can give us some insight in that.
But it's probably going to be terrible, actually.
But hey, trial and error, right?
Trial and error?
I mean, how many times did it take for you to write a good song?
How many times?
My first song was pretty good.
I still remember it, but I just always had an act for it.
I had classical piano lessons for nine years and my teacher was always getting after me because I was always writing my own, you know, I would go off script and just like make this song my own.
And that was a really great way of practicing, you know, all the rudiments and all the fundamentals of songwriting.
So when it came time to write my first one, because I realized, you know, you could just do this on guitar and then you can get in a band and you can have friends and you can get girls and you can play shows and it's a lot of fun.
You know, I was good for the road.
And so, you know, our band like played the first song that I wrote for like a few years.
So, you know, it's just always something I've had, you know, a real passion for anyway.
Well, it's very cool, and it's a good transition into what we're going to talk about today.
I know for a lot of people my age and younger, we're trying to start families.
Some have already done it.
I've got a friend of mine right now.
I'm not going to put his name out there, of course.
He's a big fan of YouTube, by the way.
He's definitely like, this is pretty cool.
So he had kids before he was a Christian, before he was married.
So he's got a couple of them.
And he's now become a pretty good parent.
I've hung out with him with his kids.
They're not completely unruly.
They're not just running out in the street and punching random strangers and that kind of stuff.
That's a good guide for if they've been raised somewhat properly.
But he would be someone I look at for something like this.
A lot of people are trying to figure out a better way of doing things.
But also, not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, too.
We want to raise our kids in a biblical way.
We want to raise them up in the way they must go.
I think it's the Gospel of Matthew that tells us this.
But that's kind of what we wanted to talk about today.
Peaceful parenting is a very attractive subject.
I think we'd all like to be peaceful, especially as being raised in a generation of war.
I don't know if you know this about me, but I was a soldier before.
And I probably, I think if I were to self-analyze, the most traumatic experiences I've had have been as a soldier.
And maybe where my parents might have some culpability was not raising me in a manner which I would have thought it would be abhorrent to go over to the Middle East and beat up people, steal their things, kill people for money.
I never had to kill anybody, thank God, but people did.
So I want to talk about peaceful parenting.
And of course, you are the author of a very good book on this.
We've binged through it in about two days.
Yeah, he's got it too.
We actually made a nice graphic.
We're going to go and show the graphic.
See, it's a nice graphic.
If you'd like to buy it, we can put the link in the chat.
You should.
Every single one of you guys watching should buy this book.
It was very informative.
We cross-revisited with the catechism.
We were kind of having a healthy internal debate in the office about it, too.
I'm very confident, Steve, that we're going to leave today better prepared for that next chapter.
And you've started this with even saying this.
We actually have a guy in the office who is expecting, as in like his wife is pregnant.
He's not like Arnold Schwarzenegger or something.
He's listening.
The big question maybe you were addressing in writing this, I'd like to hear your takes on this, because when it comes to peaceful parenting, we can start with a premise that parenting has not been peaceful throughout history.
There's been a lot of trauma passed on from the last generation to the current.
And there's a lot of people that they're saying, what do I do when my kids act out?
What do I do when my kids challenge me or spit in some stranger's face or run out in the street?
What say you, Francis?
Well, yes, a variety of scenarios.
Peaceful Parenting is kind of an extension of writing that I've done.
I've been publishing books now for like 10 years.
All self-published.
It's fun.
And it's an extension of self-knowledge.
So I wrote a book called Make Self-Knowledge Great Again.
And it was a wide-spanning survey On self-knowledge, what is this?
What was handed down to us by the Greeks, by the Romans, by people in the Middle Ages, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, even into the Enlightenment?
What is this like?
You know, let me distill this into a form that is easily digestible.
And so I had this, I think it was like a hundred chapters and they're like two pages, three pages each.
And it was just bam, bam, bam, all these lessons on self-knowledge and some of it hard-won experience, some of it, you know, what have people said before.
A real synthesis that I offered people.
Peaceful Parenting is sort of the same thing.
It's like a continuation of previous writings.
It's a piece and an ongoing dialogue that I'm having with my audience.
And so, you know, when it comes to these sort of flashpoints with children, parents do well always to look at themselves first.
You are the leader in your family, and so if there's something that you don't think is up to snuff, or you think is problematic, or, you know, then you just look at yourself and see what am I teaching to my kids, or like what, you know, it's not always what is being imparted to the children, but How am I neglecting a certain something?
You know, a lot of kids lose control because they're just not very well held.
They don't have sort of good structure to fall back on in these moments.
So, you know, that's kind of the first two pieces.
First, it's the appeal to self-knowledge and then it's like, you know, what could be better?
That makes it less personal about the kid and controlling the kid and it makes it a collaborative sort of process that involves a lot of humility.
So that's sort of the first place to go with these issues.
Well, I think there's a lot of people in our movement that are trying to get involved in some form of self-improvement.
Self-improvement itself, I think I've listened to quite a few of your streams, and you might have addressed this in this matter.
People think they're self-improving, but they're actually probably going further into a psychosis or falling down a bad rabbit hole.
I think some of the people in our movement are getting in shape.
And again, the premise of this whole thing was I see a lot of people having kids.
Previously had kids and trying to do it better or having kids now, getting married and having kids and trying to raise them properly.
And peaceful parenting, I really liked your definition that you kind of gave in chapter two.
Chapter two, you said that peaceful parenting is the commitment to reasoning with children through all stages of their development.
Now you want to say that it is the methodology for raising children free of trauma and with full respect to the child's personhood, livelihood and moral development.
I can see what you mean with starts with a parent because each of these words, moral development, livelihood, personhood, this means different things to people, especially living in a degenerate lifestyle.
There's a lot of people our age, a lot of millennials that are addicted to pornography, for example.
A lot of them that don't communicate well with their wives.
I was reading in your chapter, this is something, personally, I'm having a lot of fun working through in my marriage.
I became saved.
I was saved in a Protestant church.
Forgive me.
I'm going through RCIA now.
Back to the one true church.
But I'll tell you this.
Through this process that I've been in, I've become both stricter and I've taken a more assertive role in my marriage.
Because a lot of it was, I started to realize, I was like, okay, the way I was taught to handle my marriage and my relationship, this is not going to be good for a kid to be around.
Because my wife, she's, as you kind of put out in chapter one, during the pandemic, we had this kind of extenuated worse, like women don't do chores at home anymore.
They work now.
They're career women, right?
And then they start trying to think for us.
They try to imprint themselves in our lives in a bad manner, not in a way that extenuates your enterprise and extenuates your vision, casting, your own work product, what you're doing to provide for your family.
So this has been a journey for me for about two years now, fixing that.
And then reading through your book, I realized that this is something that is more of, I won't call it like a men-empowering book, but I felt empowered.
I felt empowered reading through it.
Was this something you were trying to accomplish?
Was this kind of like in the flow of writing this?
Well, you know, I have this extensive treatment on problems that crop up between, you know, the husband and wife.
And so in terms of empowering the man, like, you know, women don't know their role.
They just haven't, like, sussed it out that wasn't taught to them in public schools.
And public schools is where, like, all thought germinates nowadays.
And I got sort of hit to this with the unschooling, the de-schooling stuff with John Taylor Gatto.
I started reading him in like 2005 or something like this, and Neil Postman as well.
And they were just critiquing the public school system.
You know, John Taylor Gatto famously was like the 1990 New York State Teacher of the Year for the entire state.
And then he famously quit just very briefly after that.
And that sort of shocked the world.
And then he made this huge book, like a 400-500 page book.
It was a textbook.
I have a copy of it somewhere.
And, you know, he just went on and on about like, you know, what people are not getting in school.
And so I was influenced by him, you know, reaching far back like that to just say, like, here are some of the things that people need to know.
Now, I didn't go quite so basic as maybe I should have, but, you know, I have other books in me.
I have many more things to write.
But a lot of the problems that That men run into, if we're talking about men being empowered through the course of reading this book, is that women, they're never taught how to support and what actually comes naturally to them and delineating those boundaries, delineating the separation.
I just say it flatly at one point in the book.
I say something like, Women are just not as good earners as men.
Oh, it's true.
And I came back to this recently in a stream.
But they lack the negotiation.
They lack the testosterone to be able to mitigate and deal with risk in order to enter into difficult negotiations.
And so this is why men are sort of Well equipped to face the external world.
This should be taught to people in second grade.
So this book does have some of that.
It is the first take on peaceful parenting.
I think of many more to come.
Well, I think that what you're saying there is very true.
I've seen it in practice, both as a child and in business.
I think that while women can be, they can at times be very creative in business in ways that maybe we wouldn't be.
I would also say that They use their charisma, maybe, to manipulate.
And I've seen that.
I had the opportunity as a child to go to an all-men's school.
It was like a prep school.
So we didn't have any girls in our classes and that kind of stuff.
It was kind of good.
It was in the 90s, so we had a couple of gay kids that we used to beat the crap out of.
I mean, that's probably not good that we were causing trauma.
We were kids.
I mean, that's what it is.
You had kids and it wasn't accepted, at least back when I was in the 90s.
But with respect to the trauma, I think that depending on what setting you speak to people, If you talk to your buddies at the bar, they might all tell you how much trauma they've had in their lives.
But specific to childhood, there seem to be several things which are causing trauma to kids.
And I think no parent would answer the question like, hey, do you want your kids to be raised among trauma?
They're like, no, I don't want my kid around trauma.
It is a lot of stuff we're doing that's subconscious.
I think that you've written on the subject of video game addiction.
You've spoken, obviously in this book, about the physical discipline and how that can have an impact on kids.
If someone were to come to your book After reading through the Catechism or reading through the Bible, of course, you probably have heard this verse.
The verse that came up in our debate internally was Proverbs 23, 14.
Are you familiar with that verse?
Yeah, I think that's the main one that people...
Will you tell it to me just so I... Yeah, yeah, I'll read it to you from the Dewey Rames.
It's, What have you said to respond to that?
Yeah, yeah.
So, a couple things with that.
So, it's not a prescription.
It's not an exact prescription.
So, it does correlate to correction and beating with a rod and then it depicts this scenario essentially of like, A person being saved from hell by being corrected with the rod and beating him.
So like beating, the old use of the word was like to beat about, to beat out of the bushes and to, you know, because people came from this agrarian usage of the language.
And so when you beat about, it's like, it's sort of like guiding.
And that's the shepherd's rod that is referred to in the Bible over and over again.
So I don't really see it as this like, whack!
You know, this is kind of like a really punitive thing.
It's like, you know, I own sheep.
You don't hit sheep.
Hitting sheep, you know, I've seen people do it.
It's like, I grew up raising sheep as well.
It's like really stupid.
And sheep are like smooth-brained.
You'll hit them and they don't even move.
They look at you like...
Yeah, they, well, and then they get, they become like really fear-based and you don't need that from your flock because you need your flock to listen to you.
And so when you're, you know, when you're beating about and stuff like this, and then also it's a scenario where like you're delivering this person from hell itself.
You know, and I would take a few hits to be delivered from hell, but gosh, you'd have to be pretty far gone to be at that point.
So that's just generally what I make of that.
It's an interesting debate.
I've talked with many people about it.
That's generally what I've come to on that.
It's a good picture you paint.
We want to be shepherds.
Our priests and our leaders are shepherds of flocks, of Christian communities, and we submit to leadership in that respect.
When it comes to our households, I believe one of the themes your book was addressing was How to get your house in order, too.
As a father, as a man, playing the role of a proper leader.
It's a problematic thing now, because no one taught me that growing up.
There wasn't a class in the public school education I got in America that taught me about this either.
I kind of had to come to these realizations somewhat on my own, but also through self-study, through the internet.
The internet was good in this respect.
It was probably also bad.
I think it's taught a lot of men to be docile.
It's not a lot of men to be like the women should be in a relationship.
And I know that you keep your family kind of private.
And personally, I don't have kids yet.
So I approach this subject more to hear what the trial and error has been like for someone who has kids.
You have kids, correct?
I remember hearing a thing in a stream before.
You were talking about having kids.
Yeah, I'm a father.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, yeah.
Keeping the kids out.
I was just saying, it's like, okay.
So let me present a scenario.
Because I know this.
I was talking to quite a few people.
Have you struck your kid?
No one said that they took their fist and punched him in the face.
No one's done that.
They did say they've spanked.
They've spanked their kids.
They've said they've grabbed them harshly.
In one situation, a Catholic family, the kid was running out in the street.
And just kept doing it.
And it actually almost got hit by a car.
And the car had to screech to a hole.
It almost killed the kid.
And then they basically grabbed the kid and they spanked the kid.
It was before this had happened that they told him multiple times not to run out on the street.
And they spanked him.
The kid has never run back out on the street again.
I don't want to speak for you, but based on what I read in the book, I'd like to hear your position on it.
This would be that they also probably re-traumatize their kid, from your perspective.
You want to speak to that scenario?
How would you handle that scenario?
Let's say it's not a car, because you're more on a farm in Montana.
Let's say it's cattle.
They're running out on cattle.
That does happen, actually.
cows run on my road sometimes.
Well, okay, so we have to just slow everything down.
And I know that can be hard for parents that feel they're hard pressed for time.
It is like a very hard prescription for people that are dual income.
Those are like the most stressed out families and they have no time and it can be a little tough with With families with multiple children, but it's really not that tough to just slow everything down.
So if I were caught in that scenario, like a kid keeps running out.
I mean, I can't even imagine that.
Frankly, I can't even.
Knowing my children, like, I can't even imagine that.
It's so far gone at that point.
If your kids are running out in the street over and over again, there's just so much framework that's not even in place.
There's just so many conversations and there's so much insight and leadership that is already missing.
I hate to bag on the person, but there's a lot of leadership that's not loaded in at that point.
Like, you're so low credibility that you can't say it once and then it's like the deal.
But this happens.
This happens.
I'm not trying to personalize this against this person.
But the whole point of reasoning through things is to do it proactively, is to do it well in anticipation.
And you can, of course, anticipate every single thing.
But I mean, come on.
Running in the street is a pretty common one.
I'll definitely acknowledge that.
So, the way you want to help a child through that, and I touch upon it a bit in this book, is through this idea of articulation.
You want to talk with them about how the way the world works.
You want to talk to them about metaphysical consequences.
If you run in the street, a car will hit you.
Not this fear-based thing, but really in this dispassionate set-aside time, proactive time.
And then the other thing too is this lack of parental credibility.
That's why I can't even imagine it with my kids, because I have just so much credibility.
That is really the best way.
I wouldn't say I'm looked upon as a god, but it's pretty close to that.
That comes out of wisdom from authority.
That doesn't come from me barking orders and doing scare stories and stuff like this.
It comes from demonstrating a really high level of competence.
And sagacity, you know, this like sage streak and being knowledgeable and demonstrating that.
And so when something, when it's just so, it's so surprising to me the extents that people go to in order to correct their kids, because for me, it's like a look, it's like this sort of thing.
But that's because there's been so many conversations.
There's been so much focus one-on-one time.
My family isn't dying to get one-on-one time with me like they get it every day and each one gets it every day and it's conversation-based and that's the kind of relationship you want to aspire to.
That's the best kind of relationship as an adult anyways, a conversation-based relationship.
Where you just talk and talk and talk and talk.
And people think they can't have this, oh, my kid's pre-verbal and stuff like this.
But kids understand.
I've been around so many kids that are pre-verbal, but they understand.
It takes them a little bit longer than verbal kids.
So when I'm hearing about this scenario, it's like it's just so far gone already.
There needs to be so much more credibility built in.
There needs to be so much more leadership shown.
There needs to be so many more conversations had.
And so that really all it is, it's like a look.
It's like, we talked about that.
Like we have got a good 45 minutes of talking about that under our belt.
People think this is outlandish.
It's unreasonable to ask from a parent.
But then the other thing too, I hate to go on and on, but it's like the other thing too is that you really want to work things out with yourself and with your wife, and I'll just say your wife, I could say your spouse or whatever.
You really want to have this worked out before you have children because a lot of people's problems, Then they're like under this crunch.
They have kids and suddenly there's this expectation on them.
They got addictions that they're nursing and they got like workaholism that they're trying to work out and they have all these problems.
Well, you know, that's the whole point of the previous book was make self-knowledge ready and it was about parenting yourself.
So that's an anticipation of parenting.
But this book touches upon this, what I just went off on, in terms of articulation.
Articulation is a superpower.
There should be systems of thought in place.
You would be surprised.
Kids can have systems of thought at three years old.
You want to have things really well spelled out.
You want to look at things from different angles.
You want to talk about scenarios.
You want to talk about the nature of the world to some extent.
And you want to talk about metaphysical consequences.
You know, so that it's not this, like, free-for-all, whatever, where a kid is just like, ah, and running out into traffic.
I mean, that's, like, so low cognition.
I hate, I just really don't like seeing it that way.
Well, we didn't share his name.
We didn't share his name, because, you know, he's not going to feel like you're bagging on him.
I bring it up as an example, because, you know, there's probably going to be a lot of parents watching this.
I know some people already, you know, they comment on this, like, okay, well, There's like 15 scenarios that were right.
It didn't just come to the kid running in the street.
That kid just won't listen to me.
But something you said I'd like to hear a little bit more on is this credibility aspect.
I've seen and I've heard you talk and I've seen the pictures.
I mean, you're a lifter.
You take care of farm animals.
I mean, you're a guy's guy.
I can imagine if you have sons, your sons probably look up to you.
There's a lot of city folk now, man.
Not everyone's living down in Montana.
That's not a cope, and that's not an excuse.
There are definitely things you can do, I think, here, even in the rural cities.
I live in Florida.
We're not like cattle country, but there's a lot of cattle around in Vero Beach where I'm at.
The credibility aspect.
I'm not asking you to fix a foregone situation, but maybe people, as they're getting to this point now, what have you done, personally, to build up that credibility?
Did it start with your faith?
You built from there.
And you spent a lot of time one-on-one with these kids.
That means that, first of all, parents have to put aside time.
They can't be having 50 different commitments aside from the kids, because I think that's a lot of problems, right?
The parents are spending all this time working away from the kids and spending all this time with frivolous things, entertainment things, maybe hanging out with other people and not hanging out with their kids.
But he speaks of the credibility.
But how do you build that with kids?
Yeah, well, giving them a lot of time is absolutely critical and it is, especially in the first five years of life, that's when the personality is formed.
And so if you're like these parents, I mean, parents will be like, we're going to go on a date with each other and then they hire a babysitter or something like this.
You know, you didn't get enough dates when you were younger.
Like, there's a lot of needs people need.
As parents, like, it's really just immaturity.
We need a vacation.
You didn't travel around after high school a bit.
Like, you didn't go see the world, you know?
So a lot of this is when you really...
I was pretty blunt of me, but a lot of it boils down to immaturity and unmet needs.
You know, you want to handle your business well in advance of having children.
And so a lot of the credibility comes out of that.
It's just being like a well-formed...
There's this wonderful book I love, The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West.
And she is like, creme de la creme, very smart, like Harvard educated.
Her mentor was Lionel Trilling, who was like this famous Harvard lecturer.
And her father was an anti-communist screenwriter who was essentially blacklisted.
You know, by Hollywood.
She's been on this great anti-communist kick for, you know, 50, 40 years or whatever.
And she talked about the death of the grown-up.
And she essentially said that, like, people don't have conversation-based relationships anymore.
People are prone to idle distraction.
People are, you know, caught up in this consumer credit society.
People have lost their manners.
People have lost their, these, you know, moments of respect with each other.
They become wrapped up in romance culture and all these things that are being sold.
To aspire to maturity as an adult, you could strip away all the farm stuff, you could strip away all the lifting, whatever it is.
Whatever it is that guys look to me and go, oh yeah, that's a man's man.
You could put me in a Hong Kong apartment, you know, and I would still have dignity, I would still have poise, I would be a man of letters, and I would be looking to influence people toward virtue, and essentially my character would be the same.
I'd still be hardworking and these things, and that's what's transmitted to the children.
So you can be allowed.
You can be given over to distraction.
You can be prone to fighting with your significant other because really, you know, again, a pound of an ounce of cure is worth a pound of, you know, you know how it goes.
I'm getting mixed up on my words here, but, you know, An ounce of prevention is worth- You might have started a new axiom.
That works, actually.
That might work a little bit.
Yeah, maybe it works that way, too.
But you want to load that up with the woman as well.
And then you just skip a lot of this stuff.
And then it is really just values transmission to the child.
Really fast maturation process.
People are like surprised by this.
You know, oh, kids are supposed to be on tablets.
Like, no, they're not.
They're supposed to be challenging their minds.
They're supposed to be involved in the rudiments of thinking and playing and being involved in society and in the tactile world.
And then those things with the tablets would have come along later.
So there's just like all these considerations that people don't make because they really don't give a damn much about themselves.
They don't really care all that much about themselves.
And so they're not really willing to tend to these things and come into parenting as like a full-fledged adult.
And so that's my challenge.
That's what I challenge young people to do.
Do all this.
Do it in an expedient manner.
I've done it so, you know, I can point to some efficiencies and you'll be on your way and it'll be a lot more peaceful.
So it is, yeah, it is like mature parenting in a way.
It's not just peaceful parenting.
The emphasis maybe isn't even on peaceful parenting.
It's like mature parenting.
I think I like that right now.
Well, Mature Parenting, that would be the follow-up book.
I think in a lot of ways you're facing a generation that's not a clean slate.
A lot of them have a bunch of baggage.
They've gone through the Prussian-formed education system, which was not really meant to educate.
It was meant to prepare you for drafting into war.
And that doesn't even work anymore in this country.
Half the kids are not happily, I'm actually very happy about this.
Happy and sad because it makes them also a little bit destitute and since they can't do a lot of physical jobs and stuff.
A lot of kids are not qualified to join the military and also that kind of weakens the empire a little bit.
So that's good.
It means we can't wage as many wars, right?
But the fact that we don't have a clean slate, that's the part that I'm kind of coming at.
I think a lot of people in the 30s, that's my people.
I mean, you're my people.
A lot of people in the 30s, especially in AF, you know, kind of thinking, like, what do we do with our time?
I've been to a lot of people that have gotten married in the past year, a lot of people having kids, their first kid, and they're trying to read to them, they're trying to reason with them.
It's tough sometimes because I think due to even our overexposure to electronics, we don't have as much patience with even one another and especially not children.
This book, when you wrote this, you were addressing a lot of things that we are experiencing now.
So it's not that the book is dated by any means.
You spoke about the percentage of division of work between the woman and man.
And I think a lot of men, they find themselves in situations they won't appease their wife.
And all these things, and maybe this is true, maybe it's not true, maybe you can speak to this.
The kid, the kid is absorbing everything, right?
That's not just a stereotype that is passed around that's not true.
That's true, right?
The kid is seeing every way the husband is talking to the wife, wife talking to the husband.
And that's how they're forming, I guess, maybe their respect of their father, even the respect of the mother, right?
Like, it can't be just they respect the father and don't respect the mother.
Would that mess the kid up also?
Well, yeah, the mother is in charge while the father is working.
And so if you have some like willful, rebellious child that doesn't understand, and really that's what it is, doesn't understand, you know, because people are like, if the child is willful, rebellious, hammer it!
You know, like people have this primitive, but it's just a lack of understanding.
And that's why illumination is important.
That's why reason and thinking through things is so important.
So if there's a child that doesn't understand mother's Authority in the moments that Father's gone or in the times that Father's gone, then there's friction there.
So a conversation has to be had with the Father present.
You know, the Father is connected to God.
He is sort of like the priest of his family.
He is the spiritual authority, and so the authority has to be established from the Father to the Mother.
People think that, like, Mother has authority in and of herself or because she worked a job before or something and she learned some job skills or something like this.
That's not how it works.
It is symbolical and it is derived from the father.
And so in these times where the father does come back around, you know, at the end of the day or whatever, like these things have to be reestablished.
And then the other thing too is that children are powerful and children must be respected.
Children can wreck the day, you know, children can wreck the order of the home.
And so children have to be negotiated with as well.
It doesn't mean you get everything you want, but it does mean like this curiosity, this component of curiosity.
Like say a child is acting out, mother is like frazzled, whatever.
She needs to remember and it's good when she has a husband, like me, who's like, hey, remember the value of curiosity.
You know, a husband that's like very fatherly actually in some ways and I'm very connected to the virtues.
Remember the value of curiosity.
A kid, at some point, let's say a four-year-old boy, he can hit his mother and then that's going to hurt the mother and she's going to lose control.
That's like a little warrior right there.
That's like a tough kid or whatever.
How do you work with a person like that?
You don't come down on them with commandments.
And with shrill, you know, controlling, get him a distraction, get him the television, that just perverts the kid's soul, that just corrupts the kid and teaches them that you just knock people around, get what you want, and to get placated.
But if the mother can remember, because she has a strong husband, To remember the value of curiosity and to have positive regard for this child at all times.
This kid is showing good willfulness right now.
I wonder why.
They just hit me.
It's not personal.
It's a kid.
This isn't like some psychodrama.
This isn't some repetition of my history.
They're expressing something here.
They're communicating.
Let's use that power of articulation that I mention in the book so strongly.
What's going on here?
How does this child need to express their inner life more?
How do they need to be understood?
How do they need to be seen?
What is going on that needs to be communicated through?
Man, that is golden and that saves you so much of this rebellion and so much of this You know, stressy heartache that goes on from others.
And that's how you rig it as a father and as a husband.
Like, you oversee that.
You know, you have to have some executive command in your family.
You can't be just some buddy.
You know, you can't be some, do no harm.
Guy, you've got to get in there and you've got to get involved.
You've got to be directive at the same time.
These are the people and they're going to be smarter than you one day and they're going to have more money than you and you need to respect that line as well.
You can't cross that line.
I think that's the most long-term oriented solution for these moments where things sort of want to fly out of control, fly out of the pan.
Going to the current situation, we're kind of playing catch up.
We have several realities we're fighting against.
One is a demographic cliff in this country, especially for Caucasians and especially Christians.
We have to start families.
We have to be getting involved in this, having at least two or three.
You have to have three to replace.
And I think we've been, in a lot of ways, kind of cheated out of some of the best years of our life.
But we're playing catch-up, so let's not kill ourselves in this sense.
I think a lot of people are developing very quickly, especially with the use of electronics in the sense of Internet communities.
I know Gab, for example, there's some very healthy Communities inside Gab, like groups, even Facebook too.
Groups where parents are spending a lot of time talking out things prior to becoming parents.
And parents who are currently parents, they're finding out ways to deal with situations.
You addressed the negotiation, by the way, and I know this came up in part of my research into this.
All right, so how does a negotiation not turn into like you bribing the kid?
Negotiation.
Of course, the kid, you're going to have to offer them something, right?
Or is that the wrong approach already?
How does that negotiation work with a three- to five-year-old?
Yeah.
We give them respect.
Kids want respect.
People want respect.
It's a huge need people have.
Take candy off the...
I don't have candy in my house.
What?
You think I'm crazy?
You know, I'm not going to keep candy in my house.
You're not sugar-filled, by the way?
Okay.
There's some thought about sugar, but it's a separate...
No, we got a guy here.
He's the director of diet.
So he eats like 300 grams of sugar a day.
He's probably really hyperactive based on his stereotype.
He's really buff.
You might have seen it.
Nick Stumpfhauser.
Good guy.
Good guy.
Solid guy.
Kids can't handle sugar.
This is like overstimulation or whatever.
But what they can handle is respect.
You know, you want to talk about, like kids want to grow up.
Kids want to be strong.
Kids want to be like their parents.
Kids want to be authoritative.
They want to be managerial.
They want to be custodial.
They want to work things out.
They want to have responsibilities.
That's what they aspire to.
Especially the more mature the parents are.
So bribes aren't even an option.
There's no bribing going on here.
It's no sugar, no treats.
What is that?
That's a shortcut.
That's no shortcuts.
So in terms of negotiation, You may not have leverage, the kid may be very upset, but there's no upset that you can't just sit patiently through and offer some kind words.
And then if you're at odds, it's like, well, this person is looking to express themselves.
And if you're not pumping them full of junk, and if you're not giving them satanic influence, then naturally and inevitably, their self-expression is going to be tied to virtue.
And since you practice virtue, then you see what virtue they want to aspire to, what they want to demonstrate.
And then you give them respect and you give them consideration and you help them to be seen and you understand them and you empower them.
That's your way through negotiation.
And fundamentally, a lot of the problems in the world with leftists and stuff like this, they just want validation.
And it's under these layers of Marxist bullshit.
I've converted a lot of people, just not directly, even directly, but through my content or whatever.
Because I validate some of these fears and concerns.
Some people say I'm like a Renaissance man or a Universalist or stuff like this.
A lot of liberals are very concerned about the environment and they want a clean environment.
Well, I'm concerned about that too.
And in fact, I've brought back fields.
I've put organic matter into fields and brought fields back to life and stuff like this.
I've practiced this.
I've helped the environment heal.
Now, it's kind of a funny way to say it.
It's not how a rancher would say it, but it's how a liberal would hear it.
I'm very high intellectual curiosity, very high openness.
A lot of hippies have that.
So I cover these like Connor and Brittany, this couple that's just totally outlandish, this millennial couple, and they're super high on agreeableness and especially on openness.
They're like super high on this, and they've gotten themselves into all sorts of trouble doing this.
And so I just point out, well, there's a lack of moral framework here.
But generally, like, yeah, it's fun to have a spirit of experimentation.
And so like a lot of liberals have come over to my side on this and been like, Steve, because of you, I've received many emails.
I was despondent, I was suicidal, I was caught up on all these hippie things, and then I saw your videos, and this saved my life.
I've received several emails like this.
At the core of every conflict, and really it's an insecurity for a very young person, It's this need for validation, need for being seen.
And then giving language to that.
There's a virtue that can go with that.
There's something good that can come out of this.
And if you see kids like that, it's just so different than like, how do I get this kid off my back?
Oh, I'm so stressed.
Oh, this is another to-do.
That's not a relationship at all.
So you don't want to treat people like that.
You really want to ennoble them as much as possible.
Well, I feel like a lot of parents are in a constant state of emergency.
And this, partially, is, I think, intentional.
We're kept on edge.
Not that we're going to be the peasants in this scenario, but let's say we're the peasants.
We're not the feudal lords, at least not yet.
There is an initiative, I think, to keep us distracted and busy.
This has led to this emergency, this urgency.
You'll take the shortcuts, as you noted.
And a lot of parents, they say they resorted to spanking because they didn't have the time.
I'll say that.
I don't have the time to deal with this kid.
I'm just going to spank him and hopefully this will stick.
I think maybe the first thing you kind of lay down, I think many people will ponder this, Steve.
They will.
Man, maybe I should be spending more time with my child and real time.
Like, this sounds like this came from, I mean, your dad must have did a pretty good job, right?
Like, was this how your upbringing was?
Or did you have like an enlightenment moment where you realize, hey, this wasn't how it was for me, but I want to make it different for my kids?
Oh, I see.
So compared to most of my parents, my parents were pretty good.
So they never demeaned me.
They were not verbal abusers.
They were physical abusers.
And that to a point, like, You know, there was some recognition of the futility of it.
Because, you know, me, I'm a highly willful person, and you ain't getting the best of me.
Like, I'm gonna wear you out, you know?
And so it kind of came to that, essentially, with the physical punishment, abuse.
And so there was this, like, sort of cooling off period, or this backing off that happened.
Oh, this doesn't work.
In their own primitive way, they had to back off.
And then, you know, then came some more negotiative things and then came some trust-based things.
But generally what I came to was, I came to the moral recognition as a very young man that hitting is not right.
Might makes right is not correct.
And you don't own your children.
You're a custodian.
You're a shepherd.
You don't own them.
They aren't your little slaves.
And so I did the math, essentially, morally, and I figured out, well, some of the ways that I was raised was really bad.
I've seen other people, they weren't spanked at all, but then they were made fun of, they were demeaned.
I never went through that.
So I came out real confident, but with a real fighting streak, whereas they came out low confidence and with no fighting streak in them.
So destructive.
So there's different flavors of ways parents fail.
And when I really started getting into conversational relationships as a young man and really like being interested in my friends and talking to them for hours and hours or having a girlfriend and talking to her for hours and hours and just sort of comparing notes, I just saw there were inconsistencies and I I was getting into philosophy and stuff, and I just figured out a bunch of things.
But I was raised better in some ways, and I do grant my parents that respect and that gratitude.
Some of the things they did, like they raised me Catholic.
Oh my gosh, am I so glad that I had that from the cradle.
A lot of people missed out, didn't have that.
I wish they had.
They have this sting of regret in not having that.
So they did some really great things.
But yeah, this was more just something I figured out as a young man.
Well, and you mentioned, you know, Dinah West.
I was going to ask, you confirmed, it's the Dinah West who's like, you know, rabidly against China now.
And of course, you know, it's spoken pretty...
Pretty against communism, which I get it.
I'm able to weigh both.
I'm not like a lug head.
I'm like, Diane West.
Nicks say China we respect.
That means Diana West is enemy.
I'm not like a lug head.
I'm like, okay, I can weigh this.
I understand where Nick's coming from.
Macron, for example, I think was his dream last week.
He made the argument that When we do take power, we're going to speak with authority and vision.
When we do take power, we're going to want the government to follow our instruction, carry out our rules.
But Dana West and communists, and I think to this cultural Marxist idea that it takes a community to raise a kid.
Interestingly enough, your book made me think about the concept of how we lack that now.
I just dealt with this in my own neighborhood.
I went around during the pandemic, Steve, and instead of sitting in my house, I got to know all my neighbors, the Mexicans across the street, the very nosy lady to my left, the hermit to my rear.
I got to know them because I didn't know them before.
And it was weird.
I was like, you know, we're getting isolated, but that's on me.
That's on me for not getting to know my community.
And I know at the end of your book, you give some application.
Okay, how can we apply this?
Maybe you can speak to this now.
Maybe there's an update to this, at least, I took from it.
We have to have a strong community to lean on if we get overwhelmed.
I know growing up, my neighbors, my parents, my parents were friends with them.
They took care of me when my parents had to go out.
And they weren't jerks.
They also believed the same thing my parents believed.
They didn't beat me.
They didn't rough me up.
They didn't just throw me in front of a TV either.
They would play soccer with me, football.
They call it football in England, of course.
We had things we were physically doing.
And I just don't see that anymore in a lot of communities here.
Maybe it's something I've been watching Ye and some of the things he's talking about, you know, engineering and innovation and theology.
And I think one of the things he kind of put out there for his 2020 race was like re- Reimagining the communities that people live in.
And in Orlando, we have Disney.
Disney, the guy was like a Freemason, so you can only take so much with what he said, but he did say this.
Epcot was supposed to be this model Of communities of the future.
Communities where you would live around other people.
Everything would be your schools, your grocery stores.
We have a lot of those communities now in Florida.
There's actually one, a Catholic community actually, in the west side of Florida.
Ave Maria, I think is the name of it.
I went to a wedding there about three years ago.
And I'm seeing the fruits of that.
I've got some friends out there and they tell me the kids feel secure.
And the generation of security, I think, is big now, Steve.
I know you pay attention to what you need to pay attention to.
You're not obsessed with news, but you pay attention enough to know not just if you need to bring the cattle in the barn, but more of like, hey, is nuclear war about to kick off or something like that?
Or is there a food shortage and these other things?
How do we find that balance as soon-to-be parents?
I've got to speak with Vision on that too.
My wife, she can't have kids due to Crohn's disease.
God willing, maybe the Lord will heal her up.
But we're in the process of adopting or fostering.
Those are the two options we're looking at right now.
But when we do have kids, how do we find the balance between Providing security without instilling fear and like edicts and also just being good watchmen, being discernful, good leaders, you know, biblically of our families.
Yeah.
Well, you don't want anyone in your life that doesn't love your kids.
I mean, that just seems like...
I mean, like having a relationship.
It's people that you know and people that you interact with and people that you work with and stuff, but people that you choose, your family of choice is essentially people who won't rat you out to the government, won't turn you over when, oh, this sentence is not inoculated or whatever.
No rats.
No assholes, no rats, okay?
Exactly.
The way people respond to children, it just tells you a lot about them.
I personally would never want anyone around my family that didn't love children.
I think that's a good standard to have.
People are very lonely, but the thing is, people don't really talk to themselves.
People don't have conversation-based relationships that are sort of depth-oriented, where there's curiosity and there's questions, and tell me about your history, and tell me about your outlook.
What do you think of this?
What's your impression of that?
What's your taste here?
What's your preference here?
People don't have depth-based relationships.
But then they go around, they're like, well, if I had community, then I wouldn't feel so lonely anymore.
And then they go around people that wear the same hats or whatever, and then they're like, oh, I feel just as alienated as before.
What's wrong with me?
Why isn't this working?
Well, it's a personal project.
Your relationships are a reflection of the health of your conversation with yourself.
And so the extent that your conversation with yourself is fleshed out, healthy, there will be people in your life that reflect this back to you.
And so that's the easiest way to find community.
People want to reverse, they want to sort of engineer it from the outside in and go, well, what community is best for me?
This one, they wear the yellow hats with the red fringe and I like that.
That's good flavor.
And so they go and they chase that, and you just can't have it that way.
When you're a real human being, then people will find their way to you, and it takes time, and you have to be patient, and people get discouraged, but it does take about 10 years.
To have a community.
And that's if you're like an adult that is working in the world.
And now for me, that started at age 16.
So yeah, I fairly well was on my way by age 26.
A lot of people were stunted in their development and they're holding off on this.
They're not working in the world and they're not setting down their roots.
And so they're entering their late 20s and even into the 30s going, where's my community?
Where's my community?
Well, you have to build it.
And it's up to you to be a leader.
And so you'll accrue people.
You'll accrue people along this wonderful way if you are engaged and if you give a damn.
But if you're just looking for people that wear the same hat or whatever, you're in for a lot of disappointment.
And I really don't recommend that to people.
Well, I think people are going to take that advice.
They're not looking for people that's wearing the same hat.
They want a community.
And I see it.
I see it every day.
I interact with a lot of people.
And they are prodigally alone or depressed.
I mean, I'm not going to get in the news because I've got to do that later.
I've got to do an episode or show later.
I've got to talk about this issue.
Woman.
People talk weird now.
They're like, the guy.
I'm like, no, it was a girl.
The girl who shot up this school.
It's a terrible situation.
The thing that stuck out to me, Steve, in that situation, she, he, she, I'm getting mixed up now.
She, it's a woman, okay?
She was depressed and she sent her friend this pretty tragic Facebook message.
She's like, look, my life's over.
I got nothing.
This is after her transition, after dressing up like a guy.
It didn't fulfill her.
She didn't have a husband.
She didn't have a church.
She didn't have a community.
Something you said that kind of made me think about this.
Can we form these communities digitally?
Is it possible?
Because, you know, we're not living in the same state.
I mean, you're all the way up in Montana.
That's really far, okay?
But we're kind of, you know, I'd say we have some things in common.
We have some goals and a lot of our values I think we do share because of our faith and because of our aspirations.
And you're a very creative guy.
I'm creative at times, you know.
This is what I'm saying.
We met through the internet.
You and I don't live next to each other like people like us might have been able to meet each other maybe 100, maybe 200 years ago.
Can this forge, this community you're talking about, can it forge digitally?
And if it can forge digitally, I've read this, it's accelerated now because of the technology.
Can it happen quicker?
Can we form a community like this, a strong, bonded community within three years, five years?
This might be great for some people because they've already spent like two years in a digital community.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I think that, okay, so an interesting thing has happened in the world.
I think people should not be so black-pilled.
I sort of, I'd like drop some crazy black pills on the timeline, but it's never because I'm fully convinced of these things.
It's because I like the toughest challenge possible.
You know, I'm the guy that's like, put me out there without shoes and let's see how I stack up with the guys with the field cleats.
You know, like I'm just kind of built that way.
I have this streak in me.
So what's happened, to keep it brief, what's happening in the world is there's this like huge upcycling of money where basically money has been in these hands of these people and in these wars for about 250 years.
And they're waging an all-out war, and it's a covert war against more efficient currency, which is cryptocurrency.
And this has all been made possible through engineering and through technology and through foresight and philosophy.
There's a real philosophy to Bitcoin.
The diamond hands are essentially building the foundation of the future and everything else is falling away.
This is the same across many fields.
It's the same with IQ. People who are sticking to good selection through wisdom passed down through the ages and just knowing what good selection is.
They're actually building up incredible families.
People that are very, very conservative, who also tend to be very religious, are having lots and lots of children.
And they're showing up for the future.
And they're building the future.
And so, in a way, fertility is upcycling.
And there's a whole heck of a lot of people making a lot...
There's a much bigger underclass than there was 100 years ago.
So there's a lot more people making bad decisions than there ever was.
But then, like, there's these people that are making the best decisions ever so far.
And this has happened with knowledge as well.
Like, people have all the classical philosophers at their fingertips, and they're amassing these wonderful insights and huge knowledge.
Now, we have this, like, old system that's in the way that's in its dying throes, and it's threatening to take us all down with it.
But if we outlast that, Then essentially we have this highly selected, highly attuned, very case-selected population that comes out of the wreckage and writes the ticket for the rest of us, or for everybody else.
So when we're talking about picking people, we have this wonderful thing in the last 15 years of social media, and most people are abusing it really badly, and they're getting into trouble.
Let's just keep it at that, and they're nursing their addictions.
But then a small percentage of devoted people Are like actually using this as coherently as a really useful tool and they're clustering together.
And so right now we're in, maybe for you, I don't know, not for me.
I mean, you're in Florida and there's a lot of people in Florida.
But maybe you're out there, you're by yourself or whatever.
Just know that there are people that have used social media and are using the internet.
to cluster and to be near each other in proximity and that this is actually an efficient use of the means that we have and you can only expect more and more of this and this will intensify as time goes on just as much as the big mistakes that people are making will intensify but ultimately like God wins like the money up cycles I think we'll get to the next stage and you should be totally white-pilled and the devil will be defeated so Always.
I'm eternally white-pilled.
I tell you, if I was black-pilled, I probably wouldn't even be doing this.
I'd be working with some loser billionaire or millionaire, being some assistant in some form, not doing anything with my life.
I got to remain white-pilled.
I think it's a great message that you send here.
In regard to these communities that we're building, Would you try to be innovative?
For you, you're doing a bunch of really cool stuff that you're probably not going to do full-time here.
I've ridden a horse, but you've probably ridden a horse quite a bit.
You're farming.
I saw in your timeline you're feeding a lamb.
Is that right?
You just had a lamb's birth near you?
Yes.
I lost a ewe, so I have to bottle feed a lamb.
Oh, that's pretty cool.
It shows you how gentle of a guy you are.
You know, gentle but strong, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yes.
And look, I think this is very inspirational.
I would feel bad approaching a child with aggression.
But I think a lot of guys, they get themselves cornered because of the pregame not happening, right?
The mental preparation for the situation where they're not just a father, they're a leader.
And as you actually noted, it's very interesting.
Being a father in a sense, not physically, but being a father in a sense to even the wife.
Did you have to spend a lot of time mentoring your wife?
Did you meet her at church?
Did she come prepackaged?
Like she kind of had a good father herself?
Or did you have to kind of prep the battlefield in that sense?
Well, she had some good things.
She was raised gently, you know, but then there were other problems, and I think that's personal, and she wouldn't want to be saying that.
Of course.
But, you know, she was liberal.
She was liberal.
She had feminist friends.
She lives in Portland, Oregon.
I pulled her out of Portland, Oregon, man.
Good for you.
Yeah, I'm like a beast.
You know, I was fearless.
I show up to, like, lesbian birthday parties, and they'd be, like, calling out sex boys.
You know, and I'm like, dear Lord in heaven, you know, but I always...
Look, I'm steady, man.
I'm real steady.
And so that helped her.
So when...
Because, you know, you have to break down, like, philosophically, you have to understand how metaphysics works.
You have to understand...
What are the three basic metaphysical views of the world?
You have brain in a jar, which is, I think, Cartesian, and it's been a while since I've talked about this, but then you have heaven and hell, and then you have this other one that is just like, what you see is what you get.
And with the second two, basically what the leftoids posit is that we're kind of like, everything is relative, and so it is like the brain in the jar view.
Whereas when there's heaven and hell, there's a real consequence for what you live out in this life.
And then in this other one where reality is, well, you can still discern some useful principles from that.
And so I just went through that with her.
No one had ever talked to her about that.
And that's kind of how you break people out of leftism, because you give them like a coherent worldview, and you talk about principles, and you start red-pilling.
And I was so solid for her on that, that yeah, I think I did take on a lot of responsibility, and if I had messed around with our romantic arrangement, I think it would have been extremely inappropriate.
I had to see this commitment that I made through.
When you take responsibility for a person like that, in a sense, to help them, you do own the outcomes.
I was very invested in the outcomes.
What an outcome it's been so far.
Yeah, I think that's a very compassionate way of looking at women, and I think it's a more productive way of looking at women.
Rather than seeing them as adversaries, like, look, they're in this way because they're primitive.
They're in this leftoid thing because they're primitive and they don't have the light of knowledge.
Or they were given junk knowledge that can be worked through and disabled.
And you have to take that on.
If you just started like a person that derides and makes fun of and you think you're going to bully a person into respecting you or bully a person into the light of knowledge, it never works like that.
And so I'm not for that.
I've never been...
I had this big fight or conflict with Milo over Telegram like two, three years ago because he's like, you have to bully people.
And I'm like, no, you don't.
You just talk to them.
I don't know if you know this, but I used to work with Milo.
I used to work with Milo on True News, and I never cared for that.
I never cared for that attitude he'd had with these things.
Maybe you defaulted to this place too, but I was like, it's because he's been so abused.
Like, that's just how he thinks because of how people treated him.
This is an argument actually for peaceful parenting, right?
They'll pass on the sins of the last generation, but carry on.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, so just reason people.
People want to be good.
People want to be good.
And that's what a lot of leftoids are driven by, is they want to be good, and they want to be seen as good.
Now, if you really make good arguments for why being reasonable is good then suddenly that like knocks out Gaia or whatever it is whatever that takes that you know like I want to be with Lucifer whatever is the thing that's like they're nestled deep deep in through all this programming like if you well it's being reasonable um or being with Christ um yeah because Christ reasoned people through things um it's this great example you can sort of like knock that out um for people um then you And it's a personal thing.
You have to have skin in the game.
You have to be invested in people personally.
That is how trust is built.
So all these guys are like, I would never date a liberal girl.
I think that they just aren't very enterprising.
And I think that they're not willing to expose themselves.
Because there's some vulnerability in having to explain your world view all the way through.
You could just clam up and be a bully about things.
But to explain your worldview all the way through and to make good arguments for every little facet of your thought, that's the challenge.
I'm up to the challenge.
I always was.
And that's why I've had this wonderful marriage and this just life that has flourished.
And so if other people take up that, if they heed the call, they take up that cross, then I think they'll get the same results.
I think many men default to trying to seek out acceptance, which would mean that intellectually they kind of submit themselves.
Even if they don't understand something, if you don't understand it, you can't explain it.
They do this instead of having understanding.
Acceptance instead of understanding, I think, is something I've seen.
I know a lot of guys, they're trying to figure out a way to build a life.
I don't want to say they envy, but they look at maybe your situation, they look at my situation, they envy the situation.
Because they do want, I think it was in your book, you said something that really stuck to me.
A woman that will help you be better, a woman that will empower the things that you're doing, help you be creative.
I feel like I found that with my wife.
It's not perfect.
It's a good marriage, but it's not perfect, and it's a constant work.
But the concept of, I guess, And colonizing them.
Maybe that's probably a crude way of describing this, but maybe it's correct metaphorically.
Colonizing them because the ground before was a little bit weird.
For her, she grew up in Chicago.
My wife grew up in Chicago.
Not too much different than Portland, Oregon, by the way.
So she was raised to be very independent.
That's the thing I'm dealing with.
Like I'm dealing with how to break the independence, but I understand why that happened.
The independence happened because for her, there were not strong men around, or at least not if she wasn't told that there would be strong men even in the church.
But the part where I'd like to kind of end that, because I have in the back of my head, I got someone in mind.
I've heard this a couple of times, but this young man is specific.
I've got a man who works for me.
He's got a plan.
He wants to be married within three to five years.
He's having a hard time finding the wife.
He can't even begin.
He's a big fan of peaceful parenting, but he's not going to get to the actual parenting part until he finds a wife.
And that's the part, maybe he's approaching it wrong.
Maybe he's approaching it, maybe he's not even approaching it.
I don't know.
But he's right now studying how others approach it.
I don't think the way it worked for me is going to work for him.
It's very weird now.
Everything seems to be digital.
I never even downloaded Tinder and these other things.
Every time I read about frickin' Milo's timeline, I see Grindr pop up, right?
Tinder and digital dating.
You and I, we didn't use this stuff.
Or maybe you did.
I didn't use this.
What would you say to this young man who's searching out a wife to be able to pursue peaceful parenting with?
Well, you have to be involved.
Like effort is not always a guarantee of results, but it's the only way to get results.
And so maximum effort, maximum action is like, that's how I've always gotten what I wanted.
And it's the only way to get what you want.
So I think that's, you know, just like the cursory advice.
And then the other thing too is like, you know, as long as, you know, this vaccination stuff, I'm really not sure about in terms of fertility.
Some people say it's like, it kills fertility and they've dropped these videos and it's like so damning.
But then on the other hand, there are researchers that I respect that are on the other side saying, nope, it doesn't affect fertility.
But it's a chance that I wouldn't be willing to take.
And so there is this time pressure now because the clock is ticking.
A lot of these women took the vaccine and they've knocked themselves out of the dating pool for discerning men.
That means there's fewer available women in this regard.
And so you're not going to get there by being like, well, I got to put my career first.
I got to make my money first.
Or I need to make friends before I get a girlfriend.
I need to do this or that.
The thing you got to do is you got to find your wife.
You can go to Catholic Match.
A lot of guys lately have been having luck on Catholic Match.
I actually met my wife through Match.com.
Oh, good for you.
I was never afraid to date a liberal because you just know when a girl has a high body count and when she doesn't.
At least I do.
I can always sense that.
I could always sense when they had a low body count and then I would just pursue the ones with low body counts.
That's like a line in the sand.
A woman passed 12, body count.
And you need to know this early on.
Anything past 15 is like a 75% chance of divorce.
And divorce, people don't come back from.
It destroys you.
15?
Is that the norm now?
It's like a prostitute.
I was lucky.
My wife was a prostitute 20 years ago.
It's a zero.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you have effectively a zero percent chance of divorce.
So guys just need to get on and get going, get early.
They get all this bad advice from these like Manosphere gurus that are like, wait till your late 30s because your sexual market value will be at its peak and you can command the highest, babe.
But, you know, I'll tell you, like, don't underestimate how Diamond of a personality you can help a woman to have if you're there from the early 20s up through until those late 30s.
You can give me an 11 out of 10 and say, choose.
I'm going to choose my wife every single time because she's got the diamond personality.
Of course, I'm loyal, but it's like, erase everything else.
Give the personality or the babe.
It's like, well, give me the personality because this is a person you've worked through trial and tribulation.
You've seen them suffer.
You've seen their humanity.
That's the other thing too.
There's so much I want to say, Ed, and you ask really great questions.
When you punish people, you deny their humanity.
I would never punish my wife.
I would never punish a person for not agreeing with me or not understanding what I was saying.
But anyway, just don't underestimate the companionships.
The most important choice you can make in life is a person that you marry.
Do it early, but do it wise.
Don't play with that body count statistic and then don't underestimate how bonded you can be and just how rewarding a conversational depth relationship can be.
When it comes to your wealth, look, you have to get out of the things which are failing.
There's nowhere around it.
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Well, Steve, I'm going to have to invite you back on.
I greatly appreciated this conversation.
I think more than anything, you're giving not just solid but diamond advice to the next generation.
You and I, we're like the older guys, you know, older in the movement.
I've been since, we're like 34, 35.
I think I'm 30.
I'm 35, right?
I freaking got gray hair, man.
Okay.
We got some young guys out there.
We got some young guys out there.
Of course, Nick, 24.
They give me a lot of hope.
I know a lot of them, they're pondering this.
They're pondering this.
And many will watch this.
And I think you might have actually started some families.
Today, you might have started some families.
They're going to go down a route.
I would like them to read your book like I did.
I'm sure many of them have read through your content, of course.
But if you would like to order, it's Peaceful Parenting by Steve Franson.
It's available on Amazon.com.
It's got a very beautiful cover, by the way.
I don't want to ask who the person is that's on the back, but they did a pretty good job.
I think this is a very nice, very wholesome, very cozy, very cozy cover.
You can get a peaceful parenting.
Steve, if they send it to you, can they get it signed?
Can they get a Franzen signature?
How do they get a Franzen signature on this thing?
Do you have to catch me at AFPAC 4 or something?
You know, maybe I'll trip to the Montana State Fair or some of you catch me there.
You'll see me at some point.
I'm like an elk.
I'm a wild elk in the wild.
So you'll get it.
You get a sign.
You plan to come to AFPAC 4, by the way?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm planning on it, yeah.
Very cool.
I look forward to hopefully meet you in person there, okay?
And I would like to bring you back on if you want to talk about boring politics.
I would like to talk about central bank digital currencies and such, but maybe we keep on this streak about talking about things that many people like us are talking about, which is how to build the families we keep talking about.
Instead of talking about politics.
I mean, politicians, Steve, I'm reading through you, Tom, and I know that you've kind of expounded on this.
We've turned politics into an idol, and politicians are just so messed up.
We should be looking at these people for our guidance and not our fathers, man.
They're not statesmen anymore.
They're complete degenerates.
We should not be looking at them.
I think a lot of people are.
But hey, I appreciate you joining us, Steve.
I'll give you last words.
Anything you want to say?
Anything we can pray about?
If you wouldn't mind, keep my wife in prayer.
She's got a surgery thing coming up.
Any prayers from your end?
Any last words?
I hope the rest of Lent goes really well for you guys.
You have a wonderful Easter.
I'm so glad to be able to discuss this.
It's a fun challenge.
It's challenging material.
People can be very daunted.
I speak with so much certainty and so much experience.
But the fundamentals are very easy to grasp and they're very easy to play around with in your life.
So, you know, we went sort of on the deep end today.
But I would say just nobody get too intimidated.
Give the book a shot.
And there's a lot of like rudiments in there that you can just toy with.
And it doesn't even apply just to parenting.
It applies to relationships.
And I think that's a good place to start.
Well, thank you so much, Steve.
God bless you, and take care.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us.
I didn't ask at the beginning.
I should have been like, hey, send a super chat in for a question, but I kind of just wanted to talk to Steve.
You guys got to hang out, too.
So we had a good conversation, though.
I appreciate you joining us, Steve.
God bless you.
I'm sorry it's so cold up in Montana.
We'll send some 80-degree weather.
Maybe I can send the bomber jacket or something to keep you warm, okay?
God bless you.
Take care.
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