All Episodes
April 5, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
48:23
Fatherhood Under Attack with First Class Fatherhood's Alec Lace | The TRUTH Podcast #6
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
All right, Alec.
Good to see you.
I wanted you to, you know, I had a chance to meet you through your podcast.
You're now in mine.
But, you know, we were just starting to chat.
I didn't actually have much knowledge about what your other background was outside of the podcast, other than knowing your dad of four.
And that's what we ended up talking most about was fatherhood.
But tell me a little bit about your career, and then we'll get into the topic of self-confidence in America, which is what I wanted to talk to you about today.
Absolutely.
Well, Vivek, I'm honored to be here with you.
It's great to meet you in person.
Thank you for coming.
So it was an honor to have you on the podcast and now to be here.
So I'm a railroad mechanic.
I'm a diesel engine mechanic on the locomotives.
I've been doing that for 23 years, and it's been like the main gig for my family.
I'm married 18 years now, four kids, 16, 15, 12, and eight, three boys and a girl.
We got the girl on the fourth try.
If we didn't get her on four, we'd have five by now, but we got her.
And she runs the show at our house.
So she is now eight.
Eight.
Okay, good.
And I've done a lot of hustles throughout the years.
I've driven about 21,000 trips for Uber and Lyft.
I've done that as a side hustle for a long time.
Before that, drove a regular metered cab in the city for quite a while.
I had a vending machine business.
You had your medallion and everything?
I'm sorry.
No, no, I don't have a medallion.
No, no, no.
I drove for somebody.
Drove for somebody, I see.
Got it.
And so I had a little vending machine business that I was operating for a while, and I did a lot of side work as a regular auto mechanic.
So anything I could to help support the family along the way.
My wife stayed home with the kids for the first 13 years.
And that's one of the things too, Vivek, is it's looked down upon by a lot of people, especially like even my wife's friends.
I would hear it from mine when the wife stays home to raise the kids.
There's like a bad stigma that comes with that and she would face that too.
Like, oh, what do you do?
Yeah, when did that start?
I don't know.
I think you're totally right about it.
I don't remember that existing in the 90s.
I guess I don't remember when that changed, but I guess it just did.
Right, and it's just like now if you're a mother that's – now they stay home as if that's something abnormal, then it's like, well, that's all you do, you know?
So that's – In fact, if you're – it's actually an interesting topic.
If anything, like I kind of remember, and maybe it was unique to my experience, but tell me if you feel differently.
You know, in the 90s, it almost was the other way.
Like there was a stigma if you were like a mom with kids, but you were like a, you know, working woman or early 90s.
I just remember because my mom, I felt like ran into some of that.
Maybe it was in our, more of our cultural norms in our, you know, community, but maybe it was more general.
But either way, that was the direction that if there was a stigma, it ran in the other direction.
Now it's, now it's in the direction of, I'm just wondering what's going on in the culture.
I don't know, but I think it's definitely one of the prime movers in the fact that so many of our family units in this country are broken apart.
I mean, you have both—even the families that are intact, you have both—on the average, you have the mother and the father working full-time jobs.
And so a lot of times, neither one of them are home, and the kids are being raised a lot of times by the school system, which is atrocious right now.
So if you're a family that can't afford to get your kids into the Catholic school or private school and they're subject to this public school system— You're in a lot of trouble with that.
So we're seeing that more and more.
And I think it's responsible for so much of the chaos we're seeing.
But number one being the fact that there's so many fathers not in the lives of their kids.
We got a fatherless crisis.
I talk about it all the time because even I was down at CPAC there with you over the weekend or last weekend, wherever it was.
And everyone talks about policies and changes.
But if we don't solve the problem of the fatherless crisis in this country, none of the other stuff that we're going to try to fix is going to matter.
It's like trying to fill the Fix the top of the building without strengthening the foundation.
It makes no sense.
You're building on sand and not on the rock.
We got to strengthen our nuclear family units in this country or we're lost.
How do we do that, actually?
Well, get to how we do that, but can you actually quantify for me the fatherlessness crisis in the US? I'm sure if anybody knows about this, it's you.
I have a rough sense of observing it particularly.
I've familiarized myself with that being one of the issues in the black community, but let's talk about it more generally in America.
Can you educate me on this a little bit?
It's in every community, Vivek, and yes, the African-American community.
Actually, Barack Obama gave a great Father's Day speech.
This was before he became president.
He won the nomination, but this was in 2008. It was a Father's Day speech.
And it was all focused on fatherlessness in the African American community.
And he said, you know, we have it in every community, but nowhere is it more rampant than in the African American community.
And he never spoke about it ever again.
That was the only time he ever heard about it because he faced a lot of backlash from the Democratic Party.
Oh, he did?
Yes.
I know Jesse Jackson was caught on a hot mic saying he wanted to cut off his genitals and he was like, we're never going to, you know, they came at him hard after he made that speech, but it was an important one to have.
As far as the fatherless crisis goes, We lead the world in fatherless households, right?
Pew Research had a study that was done in 2019 where America is leading the world in single-parent households and the majority, overwhelming majority of our single-parent households are single-mom households.
So it goes, and you know what, the impact of this, there's over 20 million kids that are living in this country right now with no father in the home, and it impacts every aspect of our society.
So if you want to have the poverty conversation or the homeless conversation, 90% of all homeless and runaway kids are coming from fatherless households.
If you want to start having the crime conversation, 85% of all the youths that are sitting right now in a penitentiary or in a facility, a disciplined facility, they're all coming from fatherless households.
It's the same thing when you look at the drug abuse, when you look at teenage suicide, teenage pregnancy.
Every category statistically at the root of it, you're going to find the fatherless crisis aligning with that.
And this goes to – if you look at the four – It's interesting because I think that I spent a lot of time talking to – I mean running for president, educating myself on different facets of how to address the cultural cancer in America.
And I'll hear – I believe and I'm persuaded by accounts of the role of social media, accounts of the role of toxic ideologies taught in our schools, but you would actually pin a lot of those to be just symptoms of a deeper crisis of – Fatherlessness.
A hundred percent.
Very interesting.
A hundred percent.
So do you have like stats on that or, you know, just in terms of like how many – how do you define fatherlessness and then what does that – well, what does that mean actually?
What you call – does it mean dad is in the family but it's just not present or do you just literally mean dad's out of the house?
Dad's out of the picture.
Dad's out of the picture.
So you're not talking about the dad's – Working too much and comes home too late before the kids go to bed.
I'm talking about dad not being in the picture.
That's still the zone of being pretty good.
You're talking about dad out of the picture.
How many families?
What percentage of families have a dad out of the picture?
26-27%.
Really?
Yeah.
I probably should have known that.
A quarter of families in America?
Yep.
One quarter have no dad in the home.
That's correct.
Now, also, too, if you look at prior to the civil rights movement in this country and prior to the feminism movement in this country, the two-parent household was intact.
You had only 9% in the 1950s.
It was at only 9%.
This is why, Vivek, when they start talking about the shootings that are going on and they right away have the gun conversation— The percentage of gun owners in this country hasn't changed since 1972. 44%, 45%.
It's the same percentage.
That's a good point.
So it's about 45% since 1972. Yes.
But the amount of kids that have no father in the home has tripled.
Now, believe it or not, the African- It's tripled.
Tripled.
So it used to be 8%.
It used to be 8-9%.
In 1972. Yes.
Great facts, man.
The African American community was some of the strongest.
I think they were at like 13% back in the 50s.
They had some of the strongest nuclear families in our country since the civil rights movement.
And when you had the no man at home started to come in and you started to have moms become married to the government or co-parent with the government, co-parent with the taxpayer in a sense, all of a sudden you saw the shift happen in the African American community.
And that's why President Obama addressed it.
And that's why it needs to be talked about.
So also, too, if you look at this, Vivek, if you look at – it has the other effect, too, the positive effect.
If you look at the top four demographics – Let's get those facts on black Americans for a second.
So – That number was as low as 12% in the 50s?
Yes.
Yeah, 12-13% in the 50s.
For fatherlessness?
Yes.
And what is it now?
I'm like bracing myself to hear this.
Right now, it's almost 70%.
No way.
Born out of wedlock, yes.
Born out of wedlock in the African-American...
You know, I did...
Michael Irvin, who's in the hot seat right now for some nonsense that they dropped him from the NFL Network in the whole bit over something he's suing them about.
Okay, whatever.
Okay.
Right.
But anyway, I spoke to him at the Super Bowl, and he was so passionate about it.
He was talking about- So greater than 70% of black kids are born.
70% born out of wedlock.
But just to go apples to apples here, what's the fatherlessness?
Because if some of those dads are sticking around, okay, fine.
They're not married, but they're there.
Right.
So you have to get more accuracy on the numbers.
Born out of wedlock, it's 70%, 73%.
Barack Obama, when he gave the speech in 2008, put the number of dads not in the home at 50%.
That's what he gave it as.
It's grown since then.
That was in 2008. It's a majority.
Right.
It's gotten dramatically worse since then.
Okay.
But that's what he put it at.
Born out of wedlock is 70-73%.
Okay, guys.
Somewhere between maybe 50-70%.
In the Hispanic community, it's 50-53%, 55%.
Somewhere around that mark.
In the Caucasian...
Fatherlessness in Hispanic.
Yes.
That surprises me.
In the Caucasian community, it's 33%, 35%, somewhere around that mark.
Those numbers are all way higher than I expected.
And what about the Asian American community?
Very small.
I don't know the number, but it's less than 10%.
It might be single digits.
Yeah, it's less than 10%.
And if you look, who's the top earners in the country?
And who's the top scholastic achievers?
Right.
And if you look at all of those things, how much homelessness do you see in the Asian community?
How much crime do you see in the Asian community?
And if you look at it, the top earners, they go Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic, African American.
It goes right down the line.
That holds true with teenage pregnancy.
At the top, African American, Hispanic, Caucasian, Asian.
All of these numbers all coincide, and there's one...
We are filling up the prison systems in this country, Vivek, with one particular type of character, and that is a young man who grew up with no father in the home.
I've talked to wardens of prisons.
I've talked to the prisoners themselves.
They're all saying the same thing.
These kids are coming in because they didn't find that positive male role model in their life.
Now, you have guys that grew up without a dad, and I've interviewed a lot of them, that found the father figure through a coach.
They found it through a teacher.
They found it in the military.
It's the ones that are finding it on the street is the reason why we are filling up these prisons with fatherless kids.
I love that clarity, actually.
I mean, it's a sad reality, but there are certain problems I work on that are very complicated.
The facts are complicated.
They're blurry.
What you're talking about is not blurry.
That's black and white.
What's causing it?
Why has father...
I mean, your point is since 1972. Now, it's really interesting.
I know what the last guy who was sitting here in this chair would say.
He was talking to about monetary policy and he pins it to...
I don't know.
Put that to one side.
That's an outside of the box theory.
What's your perspective on what's driving this?
Okay.
Well, you have to look at a number of factors here.
And like I said, it goes back to the civil rights movement.
It goes back to the feminist movement that happened in the 60s and 70s when you started to have the no man at home laws that started to come in where women, mothers were getting farther reimbursements For not having a man.
They would even have people do the no man at home check.
They'd go to the house to make sure there's no man living in the home.
So that kind of was the beginning where we saw this happen.
You also have- So you're saying we subsidized it?
Yes.
Right.
So we gave moms the economic incentive to not keep the dad around.
100%.
They were incentivized to not have the father in the home.
And so also too, here's the other big one that's happening, Vivek, and it's the family court system.
The family court system in this country is heavily slanted against men.
I get one email more than I get from any other dad in this country.
It's dads that reach out to me and tell me their horror story about how they got humiliated, how they went broke, trying to get custody or some type of time with their kids through a custody battle.
And it is a nightmare for so many dads.
The entire family court system is corrupt.
It needs to be revamped because, you know, we talk about equality in this country quite a bit, but in family court, there's no such thing.
We don't hear the words toxic masculinity in the family court system.
There it's, oh no, he's the breadwinner.
We can't live without his salary.
We need him.
He's the guy that we can't survive without him.
You don't hear that rhetoric anywhere else but inside the family court system.
So many good dads who have been removed from their kids' lives because lies have been made up about them and they are trying to fight these cases.
They don't have the money.
That's in a case where there's a marriage that's gone awry.
Yes.
But in the divorce, there's too much of a custody.
Favoritism.
Bias in favor of the woman.
There's no doubt about that.
Because of this toxic masculinity mythology.
Right.
They try to fight back against that and say, oh no, everything is fair and square.
Any guy that's been true to family court system knows that's not the truth.
It is not the case.
So you have that as a major issue as well.
Also, prison.
When you have prisoners being sentenced...
Men are sentenced 50-60% longer for the same crime than women are.
So judges will always take into account- 50-60% more?
Yes, than the same crime.
How does that compare to the- because there's a lot of this sort of hand-wringing about the difference between black Americans and white Americans.
For the same crime being sentenced more.
It's much more heavily between men and women.
Between men and women.
56% longer sentences.
Right.
The average federal crime sentence for a man is 49 months.
For a woman, it's 29. So, it's a...
For the same...
For the same crime.
Okay, okay, got it.
Yes.
So you're seeing a big – and judges will take into account whether the mother is – if the woman is a mom and has kids or not.
They don't consider that as – and I'm not talking about violent offenders here.
I'm talking about low-level criminals.
And what you're doing is when you're sentencing that man who has kids, you're sentencing the whole family.
You're sentencing his kids as well because now you're just feeding into this cycle.
So the war on men is almost a war on the family and the children.
100%.
The families have been deliberately destroyed in this country.
If you want to destroy any country in this world, you only got to do two things.
Remove God from the society and take the father out of the home.
You don't have to fire a bullet.
The whole society will fall apart.
All throughout history, there's never been a successful civilization that has thrived when the nuclear family fell apart.
And you're seeing one happen right here in America today.
So back to what caused this.
So you think part of this story talking about civil rights, the rise of 60s style feminism, that was an incentive structure?
That said, I can get more money if you're not around.
That part of the court system or the government, yes.
But also that feminism movement, a Marxist movement, which you have a number of known feminists outright against the male.
It was the whole I am woman movement.
I don't need a man in my home.
Okay, okay, yeah, yeah.
That whole thing.
So that, you think, it was a combination of kind of the economic incentives and the culture that was created for it to be cool, for there not to be a man around.
Also, too, you started to see entertainment change and start to glorify that kind of stuff, right?
And even a man's conception of himself was that, too.
Men have been emasculated in this country.
You know that.
I mean, they have been just beaten down.
It's almost bad to be a man today.
It's like you feel ashamed that you're a man.
You're supposed to apologize for it.
Particularly if you are a white, Christian, heterosexual male, you're the lowest guy on the rung right now.
You know what I mean?
You have no say in the matter whatsoever.
The intersectional ladder.
Yeah.
The hierarchy.
Yeah.
So what do you...
Get to the solution orientation part of this.
What do you think we should do about it?
Well, the solution set is going to be multifaceted.
It's going to take a lot of effort to do this.
And it's not so much to try to fix what's happened right now.
It's to try to prevent it from coming through the pipeline again as the younger generations are coming up.
Because where we are now, it's almost impossible to try to fix it.
I mean, as the guy who's given this as much thought as you have, right?
And you're so passionate about it.
We'll get to the future part in a second, but take our best crack.
I mean, what could we actually do about this?
Well, you know, I had Governor Ron DeSantis on my podcast when he passed the Fatherhood Initiative Bill down in Florida, which is something I hope many more states are going to follow through with.
Because even like he said, like, you can't legislate fatherhood.
There's only so much you can do from a political podium.
I agree with that.
But what he did do was pass this initiative where it gave these organizations access to resources to fund these programs that are trying to educate fathers, that are trying to help fathers and mend these families.
So they have a resource to go to now to help build the father back up in the family.
So that's one part of it that is something that I wish every state should have.
You know, we see a lot of resources for moms all over the place.
You don't see anywhere near as many as that for dads.
So there has to be a part of that.
But one of the things, what I try to do on my show, and which I hope is important and has been making an impact as far as I know, is that I bring out all these guys that are known for other things.
Super Bowl MVPs, Academy Award winners, Navy SEALs, whatever they accomplish great things in life.
But when they come on the show, they'll testify that the only thing that's given them any real fulfillment in life Is being a father.
That's the message that needs to get out there from these guys.
They're influencers, Vivek.
They call them that for a reason.
They have a heavy influence.
They need to start talking about this stuff.
All of our major ones.
What kind of figures would you put on that list?
Beyond presidential candidates.
Like Matthew McConaughey was one who came on my show.
Athletes.
Instead of getting up on the podium at the Academy Awards and saying, oh, climate change is coming, guys.
Get an umbrella.
Maybe get up there and talk about the importance of raising a family and telling them the truth about how it's given you the most fulfillment in your life.
You have that platform and that podium.
Shoot for it there, especially the African American actors.
Get up there and talk about the importance of fatherhood.
It could do so much for the community.
It could do so much more because their voice, it carries so much farther and it means something.
Barack Obama, again, never talked about it again.
Look at what he could have done to help heal the families in the African American community had he gave that speech every six months.
I mean, what a difference it would make.
What an impact.
Totally.
Never heard it again.
You think he's browbeaten?
Yeah, 100%.
And even just now, you know, Vivek, I just- I'm trying to think about how we can actually encourage more of these guys to do this.
You think, I mean, there's different kinds of fear I could imagine, right?
There's the fear of the political backlash.
I think Barack Obama is more likely to have encountered that because of where the left is and was than a guy like Matthew McConaughey or, you know, Peyton Manning or whatever.
I'm just thinking about cultural icons.
I think for them, what do you think is stopping them?
Or is it just that they're not thinking about it or do you think that it's a little bit of that cultural fear or is it that they're going to be caught being hypocritical and someone will bring something up in their own life?
I think they're more willing to talk about their own fatherhood but not to talk about the issue of fatherlessness.
Right.
Because then you know what happens is it makes – and I run into this.
Every time you talk about the fatherless problem – It's looked at as a slight on single moms, like you're attacking single moms.
So I get that a lot.
I get a lot of single moms that reach out and they'll state to me, hey, Alec, I raised two boys by myself with no man and they turned out to be this and they turned out to be that and they're successful.
And so you're wrong.
And I'll say, well, you know, my grandfather smoked till he was 87 years old and never had a health problem.
Does that mean that that's the right thing to do?
Yeah.
No.
There are outliers here, yes.
But, you know, not every kid that grows up without a father is going to end up in prison.
But 85% of the kids in prison had no father in the home, and there's something to that.
So I think that may be the reason why they don't speak.
85% of the kids in prison.
In juvenile detention or correctional facility are from fatherless homes.
How many of them are from motherless homes?
I don't know the stats on that, but you know...
Mostly single mother homes.
It's mostly single mom homes, yeah.
And so just getting back to like...
Interesting.
I just went to the Super Bowl to interview the players again about fatherhood.
So I talked to Patrick Mahomes, asked him about his...
You're a legend in the NFL. You're building a legacy in the NFL, but what kind of legacy are you building as a father?
And he spoke about how that's the only thing that's going to matter.
That's what he's going to leave behind, and that's what's going to be really remembered about him.
So he talked about his own fatherhood journey, and it's important.
The NFL tried it, and you heard an analysis from the NFL try to say, we have two black quarterbacks in the Super Bowl for the first time playing against each other, and they both had a father in their life.
This dispels the myth about black fatherhood.
It doesn't dispel anything.
It's almost the exception that proves the rule.
Exactly.
Right.
Exactly.
So they try to play that off.
But again, going back to the point, I think the reason why they won't speak about the issue is I think it looks as if it's an attack on single moms, which it's not.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So your answer is more kind of cultural, making it cool to be a dad in the household again, both from the standpoint of the dads but also in the standpoint of even women and the culture to say that this is – this isn't some sort of weird antiquated idea.
It's kind of a progressive thing.
Well, that's why I even started the show.
Like I said, I'm a railroad mechanic but drive a lot of Uber.
And when I was driving Uber, I was listening to all these young guys that would come into the cab.
I would tell them I have four kids.
They looked at me like I had four heads.
And they'd be like, four kids?
What are you crazy?
I could never imagine this.
And I'd be like, it's not the end of the world.
To get married and start a family.
Who would have ever thought?
They have a warped vision of what it is to start a family.
They look at it like it's going to ruin their life.
That's it.
If I have a kid, my life's over.
And it's the wrong mentality.
So the whole idea is what I'm trying to do is change that narrative around.
I'm just trying to change that mindset around for these young guys that are coming up now and saying, hey, listen, this is the only thing there is.
This is what you need to shoot for in life.
It's not something to avoid.
This is something you got to embrace.
Yeah, I love that.
I mean, I think the...
You saying it is probably one of the more impactful things that somebody's doing in America about it because I think a politician, you can't legislate that into existence.
You can lead by example.
I think people running for president of the United States have some cultural attention they get or whatever, media attention, etc.
But I think everybody talking openly about that I think sounds like a simple enough place to start.
Yeah.
We're talking a lot of stats at the high level, but let's go into the family.
One of the themes of this podcast, by the way, is rebuilding self-confidence in America.
I just think America has lost as a nation our sense of self-confidence.
But I think a nation loses its self-confidence when the people who live in that nation individually don't have confidence in themselves anymore.
And I think that – I think reading between the lines of what you're saying, a big part of that starts with fatherless homes where kids lack the kind of grounding, the kind of certainty in themselves, the kind of self-assuredness, that self-confidence that you get from growing up in a two-parent that self-confidence that you get from growing up in a two-parent Talk to me in your thoughts.
I'm a father, but you're a father, but the difference is you've also made this your, you know, an important part of your life's work.
Talk to me about what you think it is about the nature of that connection, not the statistics, but actually what is it about having a dad in the home?
What impact does that have on a kid's ability to believe in himself and what he's able to achieve in life?
It has got a major impact on self-confidence.
There's no doubt about it.
What fathers do is so much more important than what they say, right?
Living by the example.
And it even goes, you know, if you say Proverbs 22.6, raise up a child the way he should go and when he gets old, he'll never depart from it.
The father not only is the leader in the household, but he's also the spiritual leader for the family.
When you look at just the spiritual journey of kids in this country, if the father takes the kid to church, they're three times or four times more likely to go to church when they're adults.
Far more than they are if just the mom takes them to church.
The father has such an impact on what the children are doing.
That applies to even if it's a daughter, not just father-son.
Yes.
Father and daughter.
Yes.
So what they do, it's important.
Nothing builds self-confidence more than having that male role model in your house to look up to and to respect.
And we're missing that in this country.
We don't have that right now.
When you don't have it to model for you, then who are you getting your modeling?
You're going to learn from somebody.
You're going to be influenced by somebody.
That's a fact.
They say you become the average of the five people you hang around with the most.
So if you're hanging around with the wrong crowd and you don't have somebody to pull you back and say, hey, that's the wrong crowd, you shouldn't be hanging out with that crowd.
I wouldn't hang out with that crowd.
Then you have no confidence.
Steve Harvey, when he came on the show, he said a boy, especially a boy without a father, is like an explorer without a map.
How do you know where to go?
You don't have that guidance.
And we have so many young men trying to figure it out on their own.
And what do they do?
They get with the local guy that's in a similar situation.
Now he feels like he's a part of something.
He feels like he has someone to look up to, a male role model to look up to.
That's why I say to single moms, the most important thing you could do, especially for your young man, is to find a father figure for him to get around.
He's going to find a male role model.
You may as well make it a positive one, right?
Yeah, I like that.
I mean, I think that – I think there's the self-confidence in the kids component.
I think that's totally right.
I've got two things – two questions, actually.
Both of them are hard.
I think they're both important.
For the kids who didn't – I mean, it sounds like in the black community, even in the Hispanic community, the majority of kids growing up in these fatherless households – Yeah, we've got to fix that problem for the future.
But for those kids, based on what we know of what they're missing, what can we do to help them?
Yeah.
Well, what you can do- We can't make up a father when one doesn't exist, but what can we at least do to fill the void?
You can give back to your community.
You can become a coach, become a spiritual leader.
You can become a mentor in your own community.
You don't have to go very far.
In your own community, you can become a father figure to these kids.
And we need more men to step up in those roles and in those positions.
And a lot of guys are.
Like, I know I had Buster Douglas on the podcast who knocked out Mike Tyson 30 years ago.
And he's one that now has a boxing gym.
And he says a lot of the people that are coming in are single moms that are bringing their young men in to the boxing facility so they can learn some discipline, learn some self-defense, but also have positive male role models around them.
So Teddy Atlas is another guy that's done a ton of this work.
He's a Hall of Fame boxing trainer.
Another guy that's done it.
But a lot of guys have been able to open the door up for these kids that have no father in the home.
And we need more of that from the local guys, not just the guys that have the ability to open businesses, but the ones that can help steer the kids.
There's a lot of programs that are involved.
I know Dads of Great Students is one down in the South that does that, where dads in the school will come into the school and be that father presence for kids that don't have it.
So there's a lot of good work being done.
We just need to maximize it and highlight it more Yeah, I like that a lot.
I mean, I think that that allows the people who are already doing a good job of that to double down on it.
Maybe even men who had veered at different parts of their life, they don't have to just wallow in their guilt.
They can in some ways make up for it.
We didn't actually cover a lot of the ground here on – The responsibility of the men who choose to leave, right?
You talked about the cultural factors.
You talked about the government.
I agree with all those things, but I mean I think it's a self-confidence problem in a lot of men who are fathers who just decide to engage in reckless abandon instead.
The deadbeat dad part of this.
Yeah, the deadbeat dad.
Yes, there's a portion of that too.
How much of this crisis of fatherlessness, if you had to divvy it up between people who would have – who's – Hearts and intentions were in the right place, but due to custody disputes or otherwise were taken out of the picture versus the deadbeat dads.
Yeah, I don't know the exact portion.
What's your gut instinct?
I mean, you've been around this.
The deadbeat dad problem is real.
It's a big problem.
It's a massive problem.
It's a big part of the problem.
And part of that problem is, too, is our culture has made it acceptable now.
Especially when men see other men do it, it makes them feel like, well, that guy did it.
I can do it.
Especially when they're higher profile guys.
Yeah, I mean, what do you say to those guys?
You're a toxin in our society.
You're a poison in our society.
I'm trying to hold myself back from saying what I feel like I want to say.
Yeah, you're killing or you're crippling our country by not sticking around for your responsibility.
That's what you're doing.
I mean, just like, isn't there a component of this?
I mean, I know you're this way.
I'm this way.
I want to.
I'm not doing it.
In the first instance, I spend time with my kids equally, not just because I know they need me there.
I don't want to miss out on that experience, right?
I mean, life gives you that experience once you relish it for every ounce of it you get.
Don't these guys feel this way?
I can't get in the mindset because I can never put myself there.
I just don't understand it.
I don't understand it either.
I do know that it exists and it's a poison in our country.
It exists big time.
And I think a lot of it too, like I said, I think because, you know, back in the day, if there was a girl that was pregnant out of wedlock, It would be like, oh my god, it was a big deal.
Today you have TV shows dedicated to it.
Teen mom, and we glorify these things.
And more men feel...
How we got to the point where men feel like it's okay to abandon their responsibility as a father is beyond me.
I don't know how we got to that point where men feel like it's okay.
It's a self-confidence crisis too, right?
You're hiding from your own...
It's a selfish kind of...
It's a selfish kind of loss of self-confidence, right?
It's just like you're self-indulgent.
But you don't actually respect yourself enough to do what you're supposed to do, right?
It's a loss of self-respect in a certain sense, right?
Because I think anybody who respects themselves will respect the responsibilities that come with having that sense of self.
That's what you miss.
But I mean other than just wanting to give a little spank to get people in line when they're like teenagers and think that this is cool.
You know, men in their 20s, 30s, whatever, father these, you know, not really father, but, you know, whatever, have these children, get a woman pregnant, get out of the picture.
Like, how do we deal with that?
Yeah, I don't know how you get those guys back.
The only thing you can do is try to have somebody get to them.
You know, you got to start from the beginning.
You got to get this into the kids that this is not okay.
You know, that behavior is not right.
That's not what you do.
But we got it to the point where we make a joke out of it, like, oh, you are not the father.
And we make jokes out of it.
There's a whole show, Maury.
Oh, we're going to open the envelope and see which guy this girl slept with.
We're glorifying it.
We're making it sound like, oh, you know, and so now that's a common thing to say.
You are not the father.
Like, it's a joke.
And you know what's interesting, too, is we look at dads like the joke, right?
Even in entertainment, the dad is the butt of the joke all the time.
You don't see mom as the butt of the joke in entertainment.
You see the father as the butt of the joke.
That all shifted.
You used to have like that little house on the prairie dad, like that Brady Bunch father who was never the butt of the joke.
He was a responsible guy.
Even the girls that weren't his kids, they were in a blended family in the Brady Bunch.
They could come to Mike Brady because he was going to be able to help them responsibly and know what to do.
Now you have the dad who's always the butt of the joke.
He sits on the couch.
He's a load.
He's not dependable.
And we've seen that shift.
And we've got to get away from that in entertainment as well.
If you put in on TikTok, hashtag dad jokes, you're going to get 13 billion hits.
If you put in mom jokes, you're going to get less than a million.
Because it's not funny.
But it's funny, and I'll tell you what's not funny, is when a kid grows up without a father in the home.
There's nothing funny about it.
Yeah, so you're saying the culture just reinforces that expectation.
Yeah, make it seem like it's okay.
Like, it's okay if you abandon your responsibility as a dad.
Can I ask you, it seems like a random question, I'll tell you where I'm going with that.
I mean, do you mind if I ask you, what's your position on abortion?
Pro-life, pro-choice, do you have a strong view?
I'm pro-life, yeah.
I do believe that that's another component of this.
Now, I had Father Frank Pavone on the show.
We talked about this in depth.
I met him.
Yeah, great guy.
I think he was down there, too.
Yeah, I talked to him down there.
But there's nobody bigger in the pro-life movement, really, than him.
I mean, he's been at it for a long time.
Maybe we should have him here, yeah.
You should.
He'd be a great guest.
Do you mind connecting us, actually?
Yeah, no problem.
Yeah, we met in passing, but I didn't.
Yeah, I'll hook you up with that.
But in saying that, this is part of the same thing where, let's face it, the high percentage of abortions in this country are not the ones that they point out where they'll say, oh, what about rape?
What about the mom's going to die on the operating table?
What if it's...
It's your brother that knocked you up.
Those are the small, minute things.
That's right.
The majority of the abortions, 90% of them, I would say, or more, is girls that got pregnant with a guy at the bar, or they want to be able to have the sex without the responsibility.
That's the abortion issue.
It's, can I have sex and not have to be responsible?
That's the issue.
Where I was going to go with this, because we were just talking about the deadbeat dad who needs to just be shaken up a little bit and just say, get in the picture, dude.
Get back with the program.
So I was having a conversation with another friend of mine who's also pro-life.
We share the same views.
But I think we would bring a lot more people along with us, right?
Because I think most human beings have a basic intuition that the unborn life is worthy of basic dignity and respect.
I just think they do, right?
If you think about the argument that Clarence Thomas made, right?
If a woman's assaulted – And the baby dies, should there be an added level, or the unborn fetus dies, should there be an added level of criminal liability?
Almost everybody says yes, right?
When does life end?
Well, when you have brainwaves and you kill somebody who still has brainwaves late in life, That's a moral affront.
It's the same way, well, your brainwaves at six weeks.
Why is it any different?
So I think most people's intuitions are there, but I think the reason they don't is because of this imbalance between the treatment of men and women.
So where I'm going with this is just related to the conversation we were having, an idea from a friend of mine, and I'm still wrapping my head around it, but I thought it was pretty interesting, was like, what if you had state-level laws that That said, you know what, if you're, you know, hard pro-life protections ban abortions,
but you give the woman an equalizing vote at the end, where if the child's born, you get to opt for the father to raise the child at his age.
And with genetic tests, et cetera, we can establish exactly who it is.
Does that – on the men side of this, does something like that – because I'm also pro-life, but I also deal with struggling with these issues of male abandonment.
What's your reaction to that?
I was just thinking through it.
Somebody mentioned it to me yesterday, so it's on my mind.
Well, what's interesting about that is that's something that's never considered during these cases too.
The man's aspect is not considered.
He has no say.
It's always like, you know, he has no choice.
So he ought to have more say, and he ought to have more responsibility, both.
Right, right.
Say and responsibility.
100%.
And, you know, the thing that bothers me, and believe me, I'm not somebody that doesn't show compassion to these issues.
I know that they're very delicate issues.
I think you do.
I think you do.
Here's the thing.
What troubles me is when you see these pro-choice movements where they are holding up plastic baby dolls covered in blood and spiking them like it's a football and talking about...
And you see the Freedom Tower in New York get light up pink in celebration of the late-term abortion laws.
I think we are losing sight and losing our moral compass in the country when you see things like that.
This is not something to be celebrated at any level.
There's no winning and losing here when you're talking about Ending the life of the unborn.
And how do you think that our societal attitudes towards unborn life relate to the fatherlessness crisis?
It feels to me like there's a linkage there.
At a moment we live in that says it's okay for the right model for relationships is guy knocks girl up.
Girl decides she gets to have the sole say on whether or not to abort the unborn fetus.
Guy also has no responsibility.
I guess the absence of responsibility component in the abortion discussion, which just favors abort the fetus as the right answer...
I'm just talking through this and thinking through this myself, but it sort of feels like it creates the conditions for, okay, well, if it's an unborn fetus, no responsibility.
If it's a born child, great!
I still have no responsibility.
Like, it feels to me like that's the...
That's the linkage here.
Is this like a popular topic in the world you're in to think about the linkage between these things, or is this a sort of out-of-the-box idea?
I think they do go together, but I would put it this way.
How could you continue to press this heavy sexual presence on our culture without the abortion and without the fatherlessness?
Mm-hmm.
You have to have that if you're going to keep pushing pornography down everybody's throat.
TikToks with young girls dancing with no clothes on.
Everything is geared sexually in this country.
So if you're going to continue that to go, you have to have free abortions.
You have to have fatherless homes.
You can't have that exist without it.
A big part of this too is the pornography industry.
Let's face it.
My kids now have access to stuff.
When we were a kid, if somebody had a Playboy magazine, they were like the man in school.
Everyone got to take a look at a picture of a naked woman.
It was like, Holy cow!
Yeah, I went all-boys school.
I remember that culture.
All my son has to do is put in Google naked woman and he's going to get 50,000 hits and he's going to see images that he shouldn't see until he's well into a much older individual.
He's going to see them at a young age.
So we are exposing these kids to all this sexual stuff.
Now, obviously, we know that they're pushing sexual orientation, sexual identity onto kids' kindergarten.
First, second, they're exposing to it.
So you can't keep pressing sex on the culture and then not have abortion be a good thing and fatherlessness be a good thing because it's going to be a byproduct of that.
So what would you do to the – I mean, let's put you in a conversation.
Have you ever been on the podcast, by the way, in conversation with one of the deadbeat dads?
No.
We've got to get one.
We've got to get – I mean, it's not on the podcast.
Maybe it's all fair.
It would be a great idea because we can learn from them.
Yeah, exactly.
And you've got to understand a problem if you're going to solve it.
And we're talking about us together here.
What do you tell that guy, right?
The guy who's just, all right, nah, I mean, you know, it's not my job.
Yeah, my baby mama, she's got a handle on it.
She's good.
She wasn't for me.
They're not for me.
Being a dad isn't for me, but she's got a handle on it, and I'll write her a check.
You know, I do my part, pay her two grand a month, whatever it is.
What do you say to him?
You know, unfortunately, what I say wouldn't mean anything.
It would have to be somebody who's close to him, a buddy of his, a relative, an uncle, a brother, a friend, somebody that he cares about.
To talk to him and say, hey, your life may be better if you get involved in your kids' lives.
And that's the thing, too, is a lot of the selfishness will come from, well, what am I getting out of this?
And the important thing to ask, the important question to ask about fatherhood, about family life, about marriage is not, what are you getting out of it?
It's, who are you becoming from it?
And that's the important question to ask.
And it will make you a much better man.
It will make you a much stronger individual by going through and fulfilling your responsibility as a father, as a husband, as a family man.
I know politicians aren't going to solve this for sure.
That much is certain.
But from a policy perspective, nonetheless, like if you had one wish list, I'm running for president of the United States now, right?
If you had one wish list for what the next president could do to help address this fatherlessness crisis we have in our country, what would it be?
I'm all ears.
Well, I would think, number one, talk about it more.
I would think- Oh yeah, I'm doing that.
Definitely talk about it.
But I would say, I would try to do something with the family courts because I know that the family court, and I learned this through dads that have been screwed over in the process, is that the state gets money from the federal government almost on a dollar per dollar portion of the child custody.
So there's dads that are paying into this and the states are getting reimbursed for On a dollar-for-dollar basis.
So there's a lot that goes into...
I just talked with Sean Parnell about this.
Sean Parnell was running for senator in Pennsylvania.
Donald Trump endorsed him.
He was favored to win that seat.
And then all of a sudden, they unsealed his court documents in a divorce case where the mom, his ex-wife, was lying about him mistreating her, mistreating the kids, and threw all shade on him.
And it forced Sean to have to withdraw his campaign for Senate.
It was false.
It was all false, yes.
Do we know that now?
Yes.
Okay.
But they forced him in a situation where now he was going for custody, and then what it came to was they said, well, if you're running for senator, you can't be there for your kids, so therefore either run for senator or not.
And that's what ended up having him withdraw, because you make him choose between being senator or being a father.
Right.
So I would just say family court has – if there's anything politicians can do, it has to be in the family court system because you can't legislate a deadbeat dad.
What would you do?
Basically, don't create a presumption that the dad is supposed to be the one that isn't around.
Right.
100%.
Yeah.
And you got to look – here's the thing.
I doubt.
I doubt if that were a woman running for Senate, that would have been used against her.
You're also talking about, Vivek, a multi-billion dollar industry that you're going against.
The family court system is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it's been set up and run for years.
So to come in there and try to upset the apple cart, you're going to tick off a lot of people by doing that, because a lot of people are making money off it.
Yeah, that's my specialty, though.
Well, that's what needs to happen.
It sounds like a place to do it.
Yeah, because if you could do this one thing and get dads back in the home, if you put dad back in the home and God back in society, 90% of all these things we're trying to solve would take care of themselves.
Totally.
Culture, economic productivity.
100%.
That's where it lies.
That's the answer to everything.
I'm actually pretty sold on this, man.
It's not a hard sell.
Doing it's a little bit harder.
Wouldn't be worth it if it wasn't though.
I mean, of course it's going to be hard, but what's easy to do is easy not to do, right?
So, I mean, something has to be done and anything is better than nothing.
We can't keep letting it go like this because the whole society is going to crumble because of it.
So you've got three boys.
I've got three boys and a girl.
Yeah, but for your three boys, right?
Your oldest one's what?
16. Junior in high school, yep.
You talked about this stuff?
I talked about all of it, yeah.
We eat dinner together every night at 6 o'clock.
We pray together, we eat together, we talk together.
They're my biggest fans.
They love what I'm doing.
How much do you think...
We've tiptoed around a little bit, but how much do you think...
Belief in God makes a difference here.
It's everything.
I mean, I guess I believe that if you believe in God, you believe in your obligation to live out your duty as a father more than if you...
Don't believe in God.
I don't have the stats to back that up, but that's got to be right.
100%.
But the problem is, too, it's not cool to believe in God anymore.
I think it is cool to believe in God.
I'm Catholic, right?
And 17% of practicing Catholics or Catholics attend Mass on Sunday.
Only 17%.
So no one's going to church anymore.
Nowhere near the way that they used to back in the day.
So if you're not going, the chances of your kids going is forget about it.
So you have to try to have a relationship with God or say, hi, I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict as well.
So one of the things when you're going through the program...
Higher power, right?
And that's one of the things.
So whether that be God for you or whatever it is, it's an important step in that program because you can't go to the next step without it.
And it's the most – your relationship with God or your relationship with whatever you want to call your higher power, for me it's God, for me it's Jesus Christ.
Without that, you don't have a compass, you know, you're lost.
And I think it's imperative for kids to have that.
Yeah, I'm religious too, and it almost brings me back to that earlier conversation to – You know, the kids who didn't, I mean, who didn't grow up in a father-anchored household.
We talked a little bit about others like you and I stepping up in our community to fill that void.
But I think God can play a role there too.
I mean, it's the last best hope we'll have to fill the void that those kids have.
Are left with because of the decision their father made.
I mean, you could say our father in the heavenly sense, I think, is always going to be there anyway.
And I think the revival of that, I think, might be our last best chance.
Gotta have it.
To at least undo the damage that's been done.
Yeah.
Also, to the culturally, look at the music industry and the movies that are being pumped out.
Number one, just going back to the whole thing with, say, guns, Hollywood is so against gun, anti-gun.
Every actor tells you, oh, we should take your guns away.
No, your point about 1972, the gun ownership remains the same.
What else has actually changed?
But yet, Hollywood can't make a movie without a gun in it.
Why doesn't Hollywood say, hey, you know what?
We're never going to make a movie with another gun in it.
No, because you make too much money.
They make more money off gun violence than the gun distributors do.
And then in the same sense, you look at like the music.
In the African-American community, like 50 years ago, in 1955, the number one song by a black artist was Earth Angel, right?
Last year, it was Wet Ass Pee, right?
Wow.
Look at that.
I mean, look at what's happened.
I mean, the whole thing has changed.
It's rotted out.
And how do you try to get something good out of that?
You know what?
I think it is good.
I think it is cool to be a dad.
I think it is cool to believe in God.
And you know what?
I don't think we need to apologize for that.
And you know what?
I think people – what's culturally cool is what people don't apologize for.
And I think the more we just embrace that without having to feel like we apologize for it, it's probably the biggest cultural contribution we can make.
And you're doing that every day, man.
I appreciate you.
I do.
I think that – You're going to probably drive more change in the family in America if more people are hearing from you than any politician ever will.
And all I can say is keep doing what you're doing.
I'm grateful for it, man.
Thank you for coming out.
It's good to meet you in person and we'll keep this going.
Thank you, Vivek.
Yeah, it's been an honor to be here.
And you know what?
Every day is Father's Day on First Class Fatherhood.
So come check it out.
I love that.
We'll come back on there.
Thank you, man.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
Export Selection