¶ Do Americans hate children?
Tim Carney, thank you for joining me on Commitment to Reality.
Thank you man.
Yeah, right before we started, I was telling you how much I love your book Family Unfriendly, And I really think that you put your finger on the pulse of a problem that we're experiencing as a society, but we don't know it. I don't. We might know that we're experiencing problem, but we don't know what it is or why. And I want to start by telling a story. So a couple of years ago, my wife was pregnant, about seven eight months pregnant, and we had a two year old.
We still have him, he's just older now. And we were looking for somewhere to go on vacation. And so you know, I'm a big travel I've traveled a lot in my life. Thinking where do you want to go with a two year old and a backpack and a pregnant wife? And I start doing some research and I a country kept coming up, Portugal, Portugal, Portugal, And I thought, okay, what it says Portugal they love children? And I thought, well what country hates children?
Yeah?
Right, long story short. We go to Portugal and it was illuminating. I mean, it's similar to some of the stories of countries that you tell in your book. I mean, the squares are built for a society, for families, for everybody. But you bring our kids into the restaurant, and you know in America, sometimes your guard goes up, you start clinching. You're like, oh, they're getting a little wild there. We're going to be judged and we're not going to be welcome.
And you know, the waiter would take our kid and just disappear. Or we're standing at the bar, you know, eating something and having a drink and the bartender grabs our son and brings him back there and he's pouring a drink while holding our kid, and we're like, Okay, now I'm starting to see what they meant when they said Portuguese people love children. It's not just that they tolerate them. It's that they find joy in them, that they incorporate them in their day to day lives. And
then so that's one thing. The other that really was illuminating for us is anytime, whether you're in line for a museum, to get groceries, anything in line, whether there's a sign or not, it's just it's part of the cultural stream. Pregnant women elderly, are disabled, or people with kids go to the front of the line, and there's
no grumbling like I've been waiting. It's like we knew that after a couple of days being in the country, but we still kind of felt uncomfortable jumping the line, and people would look at us like, what are you doing? Get to the front, you kids, your wife is pregnant, Come on. And so I tell you that as a story to say, I didn't understand how family unfriendly America and much of the West wasn't is until I saw a different example. Right, it's the straight and crooked stick.
And I came home thinking, we've got work to do.
And I mean, all the specifics you're talking about really matter, but if you think about it, what's underlying this is a philosophy. Not a philosophy, just a moral view of the human person. So one of the things that makes America great is our individualism. Right. I was once in Germany, like twenty years ago, and there's this cabinet minister who told me Europe historically was populated with two kinds of people.
There were the go getters and the resk takers, and there were the people who were sort of reliable rule followers. But the first kind of people all got on a boat and went to America. And so our individualism is a great trait. If you've read like Alexis to Tokville Democracy in America, you know that individualism has always traditionally been in the context of tightly nick communities. We have a lot less of that now. We should talk about that. But I think our individualism has sort of without us
realizing it has taken over. So why does that matter? Because let's say, what you're asking, if you're asking people to let you cut to the front of the line, or what people are doing, they are saying that is not just a group of four or five people there, that that is a family unit. They're thinking of you
as a family unit that has special needs. We think that we try to be sort of very neutral and treat everybody equally here, and that's a good extent, but at a certain point, your two year old is not equal. Your two year old's legs are short, his understanding of the environment, his ability, his patience is shorter. And appreciating that and then what it goes to step further in a family friendly culture, they're not saying, oh, well, you know what, you made the decision to have kids, you
got to live with them. Kids are understood in some cultures to be a natural part of life. You finish school, get a job, you get married, and you have kids. Not that everybody had to do that, not that everybody got to do not that life always went smoothly for everybody. But if that's the expected course of action, then you say, the people who are raising kids are doing something extraordinary, and they're doing it for a greater good. A. It's natural and B we need it.
Yeah, it's the foundational building block of a civil society is get married, have kids. And now, I mean, you give a lot of reasons why, but that's a lifestyle choice. Now, to get married, have kids. Tim Writing a book isn't easy,
¶ Why America becoming less family focused is the biggest story of the next 30 years
you know that, Yes, So you have to really care about something or feel like it's really worthwhile to do it. Why this book, I mean, what was it? I mean because you also, I guess, have the audacity to think that writing this book might actually change some.
So I'd written a prior book called Alienated America last decade, and it was about the collapse of community, about how we're less likely to know our neighbors about how we go to church. Last, you know, people are less involved
in their local libraries. So if you've read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone that he wrote in two thousand and that was more true in twenty fifteen when I was writing Alienated America, and I came at it from a more religious perspective, because the most important institution of civil society and in America has always been the church. And so I wrote that book. And when I was saying about the most important consequences of the collapse of community, I
realized it was a collapse in marriage and family formation. Because, as a wise woman wants put it takes a village to raise a child, right, we really do need and whatever politicians mean when they say that, anybody who's raised kids knows you need like Little League coaches, you need teachers, You need neighbor, the neighbor family with three girls who will babysit your kid. You need all all of that. Right now, my next door neighbor is on vacation. We
used to feed their fish. Their fish died. I don't think that was our fault. But now there's another neighbor family that just I see is kind of exploring their backyard and like bouncing on their trampoline. I'm just saying, only one person on our block needs to get a trampoline because everybody all the kids can use it. But like, we're also money. No, you're right.
My wife wanted us to get a trampoline. I was like, hey, our neighbors have one. They use it all the time.
It's okay, everybody's wealthier because all this stuff that's nice when you're like a regular adult without kids is absolutely crucial the community. Then, looking ahead, I think how we're becoming less family focused is the biggest story of the next thirty years and it shows up in declining marriage rates, declining birth rates, pandemic of childhood and adolescent anxiety, all of those things. I think that's the biggest story of the next thirty years. And you're supposed to write what
you know, right. I don't know everything about democrat demography
sometimes confuses me. I don't know everything about parenting. My wife and I have raised six kids and our oldest is in college, and so I figure I have changed more diapers than ninety nine percent of American males, So I know something about those and that I think a lot of really well meaning people just because of again what's sort of the underlying worldview and our culture think of family as just another, as you said, another lifestyle choice,
and if they have a family, they think they're imposing. Because I've had that feeling too, where you're like, I'm sorry, I'm bringing my kids, and so trying to change that mindset. And there's this book, this children's book, illustrated children's book called Babies Everywhere. I don't even have this book, but every once in a while I tweet out the cover of it, like that would be my view of like
a healthier society. If I'm in the coffee stop writing and somebody brings in a baby, I don't get upset. In fact, if I wanted to be quiet, it's my obligation to like put in my nose noise canceling headphones. But I probably wouldn't do that. I'd probably turn away from the article I'm writing and start like making faces at the baby and talking to the.
Mom being present. I mean, you allude to it, and I agree with you. I mean, I love kids. I love kids. I mean, if you ask me what I wanted to do when I grow up, I more often than not. Didn't know if you're talking about profession. But I always knew that I wanted a family. I always knew that I wanted to and I see the face of God in children. I mean. Somebody asked me the
other day, somebody from our church. He texted me. He said, how do I balance my love for God with loving my family and my newborn child and my responsibilities there? How do I balance the two? And I thought to myself, well, it's an interesting question. But the more I pondered, I thought, I think it's a false dichotomy. I think you love God through your children, Well, isn't.
I mean, so when Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment? And somebody's looking for one of the tank commandments, and he comes in and he quotes the shame of the prayer juice say every day of love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. I remember the first time I read that, because I grew up secular, and so I first read the Bible in college and before I came into the Catholic Church shortly
after college. But the first time I read that, and they said, what is the greatest I was like, it's fine for him to throw back to, you know, outside of the tank commandments. But he gave two, right, he said love God and love your neighbor. And it was only while writing Family and Friendly that I realized exactly what you're saying. If Jesus says that's one thing, that's
one thing. And so much of my understanding of the cosmos is that while it's infinitely complex, I think the way God sees it is actually more simple than we see it. We like break things, and I mean just think I'm sorry to get weird and nerdy, but like heat and life, heat and light are both solar magnetic radiation, right, They're both just radiation. They're like just different frequencies. We
experience it totally differently. So we experience loving God and loving our neighbor as two different things, and we can't exclude one of them. We have to do both of them. If we're going to do either of them. That's of exactly what you just said. And so now Family and Friendly,
¶ When kids are around, people are better
if you read it, you know I'm writing I'm I begin with sort of a Christian anthropology, but I try to make the case for it with like sociology and stuff. It's just proven that when kids are around, people are better. And it's tough to say this sometimes because it can sound like I'm saying dads are better than people without kids, which is and I'm notxious saying to say, you know, if you're somebody who wants to have kids and doesn't have them or just isn't called for, that to the
vocation of fatherhood. But so I'm not saying dads are better than non dads. I'm saying when kids are around, when we have obligations to care for people who start off totally helpless and then need lots of our guidance, it makes us better. Like the first selfless things I did was when I got married.
That's the key word selfless. I mean you begin to see somebody else is more. I mean that's marriage, that's parenthood, that's a good healthy society, and it trickles out.
I think that's that married parents learn the skill of putting another person first from being married parents. We should. You know, you'd like to think that at age sixteen, you're like, Okay, now I'm gonna put everybody first, But it's really hard, and then it becomes natural when you have a family, and then ideally then you spread beyond just your family in that in that skill and.
Like I said, you know, the getting back to the false dichotomy of loving God versus loving your family or your child and their responsibilities. And nothing has made me understand God's love for us and in consequence help me develop a greater love for God than being a father. Now, once again we get into tricky territory when we start saying that because it's oh, well I don't have a child, does that mean that I don't know God? No, But
you understand that that it's just wow. I mean I didn't think that I could love something this much, this unconditionally, which then gets into you know, theology and doctrine all that if you want to get into it, but go ahead.
Well, so, I mean a sort of salvation history. A lot of the big beats are children. It's like Abraham, You're gonna have children, the Nativity, like these these are very big moments, and these are the in some ways the founding of our religion as a Catholic. We always say the Annunciation when Mary says, be it done to me according to that will, that that was the most important decision in human history, like I, I will carry a child, And another way I put it is, I
¶ Reintroducing virtue to our society
don't know if you're gen X, you're probably a little younger than I am, a little bit younger. Video game a my age will and I might get it wrong, but I think it was left left, right, right, abab select start. It's a Konami code. It was a cheat code for Nintendo video games and the I sometimes joke that parenthood is a cheat code for virtue. Anybody can and should and has an obligation to be a virtuous person, to follow God's commandments, to be a good person, to
grow in virtue throughout their life. Not everybody, I believe, is called to marriage and parenthood, but those of a and not everybody can attain it. Those of us who can attain it a lot of family and friendly I argue, like we should make raising kids easier than it is. But then, if you're honest, it's the hardest thing you're ever going to do, but it's the easiest path if where you're trying to go is a high enough peak.
In other words, like sainthood being a man or I'm in a virtue that's a hard place to get to, and I think the path of parenthood is like kind of not the short cup, but the gentler path that And I think this is someone what Saint Paul was talking about in his epistles, that it can be a harder thing. Maybe it's a higher calling or something to go a different route, but parenthood the Bible says to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. You and I wake up there are hungry naked people in our house.
So far, No, and you even went so far as to say that, you know, it's a cheat code for sainthood. Now we've talked a lot about that on this podcast. To a degree, sainthood, what does it mean? I mean it feels like unattainable and almost feels like something that you shouldn't aspire to, like, well, saints are separate, they're better, like you know it almost I can't. I can't aspire to be a saint. But that's what we're called to.
Do, all of us, every one of us, yep.
And we have to recover that. I think I think a lot of it. I mean, you talk about civilizational sadness, I would equate that to a soul sickness that as a civilization, we suffer from a sickness of the soul, and a lot of that has to do with a lack of meaning. But even those of us who who subscribe to a faith but you're Catholic, I'm an Orthodox Christian,
saints are very important in our faith traditions. Yeah, we kind of ignore it as something that we can attain, and I think we kind of need to get back to bringing virtues to the forefront. That's something that you can critique, right, because one of the core emphasis on this podcast is a commitment to reality that truth exists. That yeah, you can have your opinion, but there is a truth that we can aspire to understand and that
only you know. And along with that comes the virtues that they Hey, you are not living a virtuous life something that we can talk about as a society. But because we don't, I think that our soul sickness only grows.
I think that's right. I think virtues is sometimes I think that that would be an easier concept to sort of reintroduce because it's really close to something that a lot of secular especially sort of secular elites, college educated people who are career focused. They'll talk about acquiring skills and best practices and those that's pretty close to virtue.
It's not as loaded of a term, but it is like, if you're an excellent, you know whatever, a banker, and you're really good at it, you've understood that you need to develop good habits and that Aristotle's explanation of virtues, I fully subscribe to virtue is a habit that you're
so I don't think we're very very far. I think we can reintroduce that idea, but I think the vocabulary matters to make it be something that's about a deeper human excellence and not just sort of success in these measurable ways, not just success in your career or your own you know, personal finance or whatever. And so virtue,
I really think does need to be reintroduced. And it is connected to the sadness because because we're fallen creatures, we constantly fail in ways that can be super depressing, and then we realize a developing good habits can make us less likely to fail, but be still going to fail, and every time we fail, we're still made in the image of God. So I think a lot of the sadness is people who think that through their own effort, they can overcome their fallen nature failing to do so.
And I mean, I remember, as I was writing this book, I was on social media and somebody said something like, why the heck would I want to have kids and pass on all my messed upness? Somebody who was very professionally successful, so to some degree had their self together. This person wasn't a person who had, you know, was born with an addiction to crack or something like that. They just had had a rough childhood or felt bad about herself. And I said, well, you know, however rough
your life is, you're you're a good person. And people shot back and said, you don't know me. Don't go saying a person you have no idea. I obviously was coming from a perspective of a Christian anthropology. I'd think of humans as being good but fallen. That idea makes it easier to sort of keep your head up in this world where we're constantly confronted with our own failures and the sort of the difficult of dealing with other people.
¶ Why we need to depend more on others
Well, yeah, and you talk about other people in an interesting way because on one hand, you say that we need to do the most Unamerican thing possible, which is depend more on others. But and I want you to kind of help me figure this out. You say we need to depend more on others, but we also need others to leave us alone. How do we square that circle? Because a lot of the problems And I feel this in my core because my wife and I are both pretty convinced that we're doing the right thing by kind
of being more free range with our parenting. But man, people who are not free range parents really don't like that.
I have heard stories of these problems in my neighborhood. It hasn't it hasn't happened. But we let our lucky man Tim Well, we let our kids roam around and yeah, we haven't gotten a you know, what are you doing? You have to keep track of that. I wouldn't say we need people to leave us alone, because again, that's returning to sort of the individualism we need kids to. Raising a kid is like your your child is in a walled garden. This is a bad metaphor because it
doesn't quite make sense. But slowly you make the walls wider and lower. So I have an college freshman right now, so she has tons of freedom. She's nineteen, she's legally an adult. So like, if we just follow the lall to say, I have no say over her except that you know, we're paying her room and board a college. But then when she she's having a semester in Europe, she wants to go to a Formula one race, which, by the way, it's like ridiculous to me. I've never
watched a Formula one race in my life. I raised my kids, so like, you're American, it's baseball, basketball, football, and hockey during the Worlds. And so she wants you're going to travel from one city in Italy to another city, Like I have a little bit of control over her, and I was like, I don't think this, and we talk about it, and in the end, I let her do the thing that I don't think is a good idea.
With a one year old, you're probably not gonna let them do the thing that they think is a good idea. They're going to try to shove they see a dog poop on the ground and they want to shove it in their mouth, and you stop them so slowly from like you have no freedom you live in North Korea because you're one to like age nineteen, age twenty whatever. When they get married, there's a steady increase of freedom
that you have to give them. Why that that just basic framework I don't think is obvious to a lot of popular culture, and a lot of it is that the people, a lot of people don't have kids or haven't had kids in a long time. And then within that framework, how much freedom a six year older an eight year old can handle is not agreed upon. But then the final factor is is the culture and the built environment providing the right walls for that garden or
enough a safeguarden. So do you have neighbors who will when they see the kids like chasing after a copperhead snake? Be like, no, not that snake. Do you have neighbors who how many, especially guys my age, would say we were allowed to wander free. My parents let us do that. But one time one guy told me that he and his friend were chucking gravel at a dog and some neighbor woman. It's like, what the heck are you doing? And they realized that this neighbor woman was probably about
two phone calls away from calling their mom. So they hop back on their bikes, go back to their separate home to try to get to their mom to explain it before the so is there a mom on a
front porch? Is there? And then my old neighborhood in Maryland, there was some great stuff right next to us, but we were surrounded by these roads that were three lanes in each direction, and so our kids couldn't go to the grocery store that they could see because just it was too dangerous for them to cross that road until they were teenagers, basically. And so the built environment, the culture need to accommodate free rangeness. And part of it,
as you're saying, is like, are they gonna call? My
¶ Helicopter parents vs free range parents
wife said, I'm not afraid of kidnappers, I'm afraid of child protective servant CPS.
Like, well, and that's I didn't mean leave leave us alone. That might have been too strong the verbiage, but it's just especially with the helicopter parents right where if you're a helicopter parent and somebody else is not helicopter parenting, they typically say something and that's that's kind of what I meant, tongue in cheek about leave me alone. You know, it's not as though we're actively being irresponsible. This is by design.
But the reason I was sensitive to that phrase by the way. A lot of what we're talking about is leaving kids alone, and that's important. We can talk about that. But there was a story I forget where it took place. It might have been near DC because they were talking about on our local radio station, and the cops got called because this kid came home from school and you know, his parents were still at work. He was like twelve,
so he was supposed to just let himself in. The doors were locked and the key wasn't where it was supposed to be, so he's just shooting hoops in his driveway. But it was super sunny, and it was June or something, it was pretty hot, and eventually he's sweating and he's sitting in the shade of the tree. In two hours he's out there. Some neighbor woman calls the police and says,
these parents have a bandoned their kid. And the callers into the radio show all disapproved of what the neighbor woman did, but half of them said she should mind her own business. And I thought, no, Yeah, go out there with some gatorade and I ball stop ice and say hey, do you need this? And then if she knows her neighbors be like, hey, buddy, come on in. And when I suggested that once on social media, people like you sound like an abductor the complete collapse in
social trust and the norm of help. Like that bartender taking your kid, a helicopter dad might freak out. Some bartender who doesn't even speak English is grabbing me. So that our duty to care for kids is is worn away by our hyper individualism mindset that other people's kids are not our problem. That mindset that leads to the helicopter parent.
Well, yeah, it's a lack of trust in others, and it's a lack of civilizational responsibility, so you know, they're My wife started reading your book and she loves it, and it was partially due to, you know, her feeling the pressure of helicopter parents disliking our free range parent And it's really hard because you want to keep the peace. But as you say in the book, I mean, there are long term consequences when you don't give your children
¶ The abandonment of social responsibility
certain amounts of risk and independence and responsibility. And I want to talk about that, but about the kind of cultural responsibility. There's an expert that you quote in the book and she says, oh, I remember that I listened to a podcast with this person, and I think the person was advocating that kindergarteners should be able to walk to school by themselves, and I thought, huh, well, I wouldn't trust my six year old, Like, okay, so you go down there, turn left once you get to the dog,
you know, at the red house, then you'll turn right. Now, you model it for them, you teach them how to do it, and then I think I would probably trust him to do it. But there's the other component, which is what you're talking about, that you would like to hope that society wouldn't see him and go, oh, that kid shouldn't be alone. If there's an issue, help him with it, guide him. Oh you're going to school, here's the way to school, or oh you need help, what's
your address? I mean, you try and teach your kids where they live. I mean, that's the big one. But we've addicated that responsibility as a society because we don't think that it's ours that's right.
And so this is why the central chapter of my book is about Israel. So I did a religious pilgrimage to Israel. It was great. It's all the holy sites. It changes how you know, how you read the Bible. When you've been there, it's real. There's those and mountains they were going up with steeper than I expected. But so then I suck around for an extra two days to try to interview just random people in the streets. And I told my wife at first, I said, I'm
not sure two days is long enough. But let me tell you as a New Yorker, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv rival New Yorkers and their willingness to share their opinions with a stranger. So everywhere, and so there's this one guy who he had two kids, who's like, I want to have nine. It's like, okay, that's great, and he's rushing to like a photo shoot with their new baby.
And he tells me, he says, you want to understand why in Israel so many people have kids, including the birth rate among secular Jews in Israel is two point zero, to give you an idea, US is below one point six. The rest of Europe is below one point five. So this is people who are not religiou like the kind of people I talk to, eating like bacon cheeseburgers on the Sabbath at a burger jorn in Tel Aviv. They
have two kids. So this guy who has two and once nine told me, he said, you want to understand Jerusalem. Look around on a school day in the morning, and I had seen six year olds walking to school like they've got their little door, the explorer backpack that's too big, and they're they're out. Went through the street and says, when you get to a street that's like an actual street, you will see them waiting on the corner because they have all been told you are not allowed to cross
these big streets by yourself. But if their parents aren't there, who are they waiting for. They're waiting for the next adult or middle school or high school kid to come by and take their hands and cross the street with them. So on so many levels, that's foreign here, right, Like I I would feel a little uncomfortable if I saw a kid I didn't know and being like, hey, let me hold your hand into it. Somebody would think I
was a kidnapper. Right, But so the whole cultural foundation there is not only are you're not weird for doing that, you would be inconsidered if you didn't help that kid across. And then but then so that duty, as you're talking about sort of civilizational responsibility that duty. To some extent, it's obvious, right, Like to us a disabled person, you owe them opening the door for them. Nobody would think like, well, it's your fault you're disabled, I'm not going to open the door for you.
Elderly, you say it's obvious, Tim, But I I can just hear somebody calling you an able list. You don't think that they're able to do it. But that's that's where we've gotten, where everything is an offense, everything is is controversial, everything is well yeah, but yeah, lost common sense are not always obvious.
But so then, but we should talk about what you said,
¶ We owe our children freedom-otherwise we are harming them
which is definitely true. We owe our children freedom, and when we don't give them enough freedom, it harms them. And so I cite pediatricians writing in medical journals saying there is an epidemic of childhood anxiety and adolescent anxiety, and the root cause is a lack of unstructured, unsupervised play. And so the root of that we've talked about helicopter parenting, but we haven't talked enough about the other root of that,
which is overscheduling and overplanning. So I focus on travel sports replacing like the Little League that I would ride my bike to But even more than Little League, like pickup stickball or kids inventing their own game so that they're like they're that they're bored. I mean, boredom is amuse. Boredom is it spurs creativity. But also like figuring out what to do when you're kind of in a situation,
is how you deal with adulthood. And that starting with the parents and millennials where they're like, well, we're going to make sure that our kid has the best of everything. So after school there's piano, then there's tutors, after dinner there's taekwon do any one of those things is good. Like I'm I wish we had given all six of our kids piano lessons. We gave like two and a half of them piano lessons, and I think that's great. Well, what we have given all kids that.
Fourth one would have been a prodigy.
What we have given our kids that's good is a bunch of siblings and a bunch of freedom. And so that trade off between the freedom and the good things. And then some of the good things become so intensive that they become bad. And that's my view on travel sports, but that that lack of freedom comes from not just helicoptering, but the belief that we need to do maximum effort
intensive parenting. I mean, I just remember these books I was reading, and we were expecting our first that you should play classical music for the baby, like I like classical music, you should play classical music for yourself. Playing classical music for the in utero baby.
Yeah, we played my wife got pregnant when we were living in Colombia and South America, so it was a lot of like bachata. And maybe that's why it's crazy.
Or just so experiment one two children who are exposed to but chata in.
But I mean, I think what you're hitting on is
¶ The problem with life hacks is they often avoid real life
that we view everything in economic terms. And what you were saying earlier about kind of hacking, right, like virtue hacking in a sense. You didn't use those words, but I'm gonna put them in your mouth. But that's oh the virtues that it's a it's a life hack, and more often than not, I see a lot of these life hacks the missing element is a wife and kids. So it's really you sit there like, yeah, you could do the cold bloge and this and that, but like when it's my aunts I'm like ow, or like what.
How much is the morning routine where there's no other human being in there? I told my daughter it was from college. We need to make my morning routine where I got up, I make coffee for my wife, I wake up the kids, my wife like you know. Now, we don't even pack lunches anymore because the all this is not like our morning routine is entirely person to person. There's no ice bath, there's no like facial evaluation, peels.
It's filled with humanity. It's real. And that's the thing I mean, Okay, with all these life hacks, I watch it great, you might live to one hundred and thirty, but what are you living for? And that I mean to you and me that seems obvious, but I feel like people will laugh at us. You're the ones you know you're going to die of a heart attack as your kid or what.
Well.
I just feel like we've lost the meaning of life now.
And so that's the thing that's part of the reason I use the idea of a chie code or different paths to the same thing. We're obligated to serve our families, but we're obligated all humans are obligated to serve other people, and that you can live for other people even if
you never get married and never have kids. It's just a little more obvious when they're literally not going to have food if you don't you know, feed them, and so but that I think you're right, that we're lost, that we're that idea of not living for other people. You will read all these op eds in places like the New York Times about how you need to set up boundaries and social media is worse. Set up boundaries,
get toxic people out of your life. The word autonomy, all of these things that point at things that are important. Family that you choose with, chosen, real family. All of these things can be good, but when they become the centerpiece of someone's worldview, they become it basically becomes I am not going to accept anything unchosen. And so this is part of the interesting thing about Israel again too.
It was after I wrote the book, I was doing a podcast with Jewish editor who has lived in Israel, and he sort of guided me towards It was one of those those things where I the guy read my book and he saw things I didn't see. I'm like, yes, I definitely intended that theme that you pulled out, But it was the idea that for Jews, the idea of an inheritance that brings both goods, benefits and burdens. That that is how they understand themselves. Somebody who has inherited something.
Our hyper individualistic, transactional, materialistic culture is different. Like if you inherit a ton of money, like in today's culture, like you didn't earn that, Like that's not yours. And then if you inherit a burden like a a property, a pet of something else, you're like, I didn't ask
for that, So I have no obligation to that. That individualistic taken over, and so we we've lost the idea that there can be burdens placed on you that you did not choose and you still have an obligation to them. That says, I mean, that's I don't that's not even a microaggression. That's a system of oppression or something in today's society.
¶ The myth of "chosen families"
No, you're right, And I mean when you talk about inheritance, my dad brings that up all the time and says, a good man leaves an inheritance. And I always you know, my second son I named after my grandfather to my dad's death. And for me, the inheritance is the belief structure. I mean you it's it's the I don't know if you would agree, but I feel like the focal point of your book is belief matters. It will make you happier, healthier,
it will give you purpose in life. And every single one of my grandfather's children and then stream their children's children, for the most part, are you know, I say, for the most part, I can't think of anybody that isn't involved in church, that doesn't have a church life, and that is rare.
I have.
This is almost un unthinkable. That's an inheritance. That is an inheritance, and it is because it was never nominal. It was always something that mattered. And I think that that's a huge issue, even for religious people, is that we've imbibed a secular concept ourselves, where faith is something that you can park when you go into the secular world, as though there's a I really firmly believe there's no
such thing as neutrality in the public square. You're always bringing your world view in and yeah, but you're right, it's rare. It's rare, and it's because it always mattered, and it was always impacting. You talk about a burden for me, that felt like a burden. Is that something that I did not want? It was a macro aggression. I don't want your faith keep it away, and I did keep it away for a long time. But I mean, you know, as a parent, kids come back if you
give them healthy boundaries. I'm not saying they always will. I mean their free will is real. And you have six, I have two. I'm trying to get on your level. You don't do much different. And they're so different.
That's especially with a girl and a boy. I can see the differences. But then we had a boy again, and they're back to back rates right now, they're eleventh and tenth grade. They are so different, like they're they were both had the same Latin teacher and the Latin teachers, like do they live in the same house because they personalities are different. But I think you're You're very right.
One of the stories I tell about when my oldest was born, we had like we'd picked out her name speaking of inheritance, because it was my mom's name, it was my grandma's name. Is my great grandma's name, Like going back almost to like the mayflower. When the wasps of my family came over and we knew that was going to be your name. I'd even joke that in addition to a name, I was going to give you
to them a number like in sports. I said, we were giving to lose some Jackie Robinson's number because and she's like, why why give her that? Well, because you can't give it to a boy because it's been retired from Major League Baseball, so they can't carry it when they when they make the bigs. My daughter thought that was a little absurd, my wife. But so anyway, so we had, you know, decorated her nursery, and then she's born and I look at her, I'm like, I've never
met you before. You're a stranger. And so one of the quotes I have in the book is every child is unchosen. Like maybe one day genetic modification and in vitro will get to the point where this isn't true, but it's still true even if you do it that way, that there's infinite question mark and mystery in we try it. That is again part of that, like you don't get to pick to some extent, you pick your friends, you pick your spouse. You don't get to pick your children.
You don't get to pick your siblings too, which is another part of why that like autonomy focused world doesn't like it. And so then there's another idea related to that picking of the siblings, which is so there's a concept that psychiatrists started worrying about long ago and they
gave it the name parentification. And this was if you grew up, imagine your dad is a non functional alcoholic, and so the oldest daughter suddenly has to take on all these duties and has to try to like make sure dad makes it to work on time, and at age ten is feeding all that like a really dysfunctional, abusive household. This often falls on an oldest child or
an oldest daughter. That concept have been expanded and now there was a recent article on parentification a few years ago that described the twelve year old having to make lunch for her younger siblings. It's like what or you know, the eight year old having to change diapers. That's called
being part of a family. Absolutely, but the child didn't choose that, and so you are giving them a job and it's not going to be equal, right if you care about equality, the youngest might never change diapers, and so how how is that equal if they get different assignments based on their age order, YadA YadA, Especially if you're given the girls different responsibility than the boys. Oh gosh,
that's all sorts of awful. And so part of the push towards a one or two kids is to make sure that each of your kids can be a free agent. And so now tell the pursuit of virtue. If your kid is training to be, you know, an excellent pitcher, that's going to have all sorts of great things. He I love baseball, though I hated it when my son pitched, I would get as far away as I could. I still want it. But he's going to learn how persistence pays off. He's going to have to learn, I mean,
especially pitching, how to deal with adversity. YadA, YadA. There will be lots of good things. But then he's like, and now I have to watch my diet. That's a good thing. And now I have to lift weights, that's a good thing. And now I can't, you know, have a catch with my little brother because I have to rest my arm. And now I'm not going to eat what you're serving for dinner because that's not in my diet. And now I'm going to miss my you know, my
sister's birthday because we're doing an extra training session. And you realize that that individual pursuit of virtue taken too far from other family obligations. That's one of the hardest things for well meaning parents in our modern world.
I think, yeah, no, I completely agree that it's I think you put it to have lower ambitions for your kids,
¶ Have lower expectations for your kids (and high ambitions)
which I mean, there are a lot of things that you say in this book that like when you if you just read the sentence without any context, it's like, huh, it's have lower ambitions, but teach them to aim higher. I mean, there's there's there's a perception of paradox, but it's it's.
My son who's a baseball player. I think his ambitions were like major leagues as recently as like seventh grade, right, I just thought, I hope he can make the varsity team. And now he's like yesterday and the day before he started in left field and was batting ninth I was like that, that makes me proud. That was me, and
so that's great. Another son whose sport now is climbing, he once came up to me and Charlie the old his older brother, at the beginning of the summer, and he said, I want to learn how to catch a football just well enough that if one we're playing gym football and I'm open and they pass it to me, I don't drop it. Because what had happened is a quarterback had been like, don't throw to Carney, He's gonna
drop it. And so Charlie just work with Brendan on that all summer, and then there's a new kid in school. He didn't know not to pass it to Brennan. Throws it to Brennan, who's uncovered because the defense is like Carney KG, it catches and he runs for TuS. That was my height of like my aspiration for you be the guy. If you're open, the quarterback will still pass you the ball. So those are my low ambitions. My high ambition we already talked about it, sainthood. There's no
higher ambition. And your son getting into a D one school is great, it's something he should be proud of. You should be proud of. But if what you had to do to get there took away the ass, then that was a mistake.
Yeah, No, completely agree that you once again, you have to maintain your humanity at every juncture, you know, and that these things sports in and of themselves are not bad. You know, sometimes people get hyper religious and they try and leave the world behind in every way. I can already tell you're a sports fan, and I sit there, Okay, oh this league or that league is demonic. We could sit here and talk about my problems with pro sports
all day long. You know, I think that, you know, I've thought that there should be a book written on this where you just talk about how professional sports can you talk about culture? Professional sports lead a lot of culture, way more than we realize.
You know.
I just I got to take care of me and my family. I got to do what's right for me and my family. That is the promotion on a lot of levels of selfishness, of greed of but it's been turned into a cultural norm where no, that's the way things should be. Now, that's not an order of loves. I've got to take care because especially when we're talking about professional sports and the money and everything like that.
But I digress. Some of the best moments that I've had with my six year old are is there a Hornets game tonight, and just sitting there and watching sports together and seeing him develop a love for sports like that. I mean, it's it's not all bad.
I didn't think I would get into watching football. I've never been. If the weather's nice, I don't spend Sunday watching football. But when it's horrible weather, it's like, what can I do with my kids? It's watch football and just putting the things in their place. It's all you have to do. But football, football on Saturdays and Sundays can become all consumed. It becomes a command performance. And if a guy has a nine to five job Monday through Friday, well then there's not a lot of time
outside of his obligations. If one of them is Nebraska football.
Yeah, this the Saturday and the Sunday, depending on which side you follow. And then if you have both and
¶ Cultural institutions need to step
help us, whose responsibility is it to raise kids? Because in a lot of you know, I was talking to my wife and she said, well, what's the big takeaway? What's the big takeaway from the book? And I could ask you and I will ask you, But you know, you talk about how money matters. You know, sometimes just giving cash is actually helpful. No strings attached. It's not cat because I'll tell you a story real quick. Just it's it's a symptom of the sickness. So your HSA
FSA whatever where you can spend it on childcare. But it got rejected because the childcare receipt that I sent in said something about school and oh no, we won't pay. So if they're learning, you won't pay for it. It just has to be pure, like makeing sure that they're not dying or like that's a sign of the sickness. You talk about how money matters. Okay, I think that's true, but I think you're more important. Kind of solution is
that cultural institutions matter that government and economics. While they may be helpful, you're not really going to solve the problem unless the cultural institutions step up in a way that they've become dormant, whether it's by the state not allowing them to do it, like with certain Catholic charities or Christian charities. I know the state sometimes comes in and undercuts them, but I really do agree with you. If you agree with me that culture institutions have to step up, that's right.
And the subtitle of Family and Friendly is how our culture made raising children harder than it needs to be. When I posted the cover on Facebook, one of my high school friends says, I will buy this to see why you say coldulture and not economy, and another one said a government. They thought that should have been the subtimee. I think the economy and the government matter, but to the degree that they shaped the culture. And so you
talked about neutrality earlier. It took me a while to realize what I'm saying is, well, I believe in a lot of neutrality. The government should not establish a religion. We shouldn't. You know, there's lots of discrimination that we shouldn't do. We can't be neutral on kids. Like kids and parents are good, We're going to be pro them, and so you know that means an employer might be I think I tell this story in the book of when I was an editor of a small opinion page
about nine people, and we would debate policy. But then it trickled into like company policy. It was about like pregnancy discrimination, and some guy was like, well, if you're getting pregnant and you're going to take time off, that hurts the company, so you should be allowed to discriminate against them. And I said, I understand what you're saying, but we should be four people having families. And he said, well, it's interesting, Tim, because you I take off the end
of Holy Week at least Thursday and Friday, if not Wednesday. Says, you take off for that and the te ball league I talk about in the book that I founded. I had to be there, you know, early on Friday, and I would leave work when I was the editor, regularly at five o'clock to make sure that I was home
for family dinner. And then he pointed to the editor of the magazine, who was observant to it, said the deadline for the magazine is Thursday, so that he doesn't have to put the mag to bed on Friday and worry about being ready for the start of the Sabbath. He said, you guys get these accommodations for your family and your religion. I don't get any special accommodation. This guy at the time was secular. He didn't have a family. And I started to say, well, no, you get and
then I said, yeah, you're right. We value faith and family above other things. That guy got a day off when his soccer team is like Arsenal or whatever, some British soccer team had a game because they play at like ten am. I was like, He's like, I gotta be honest, I'm gonna be at a pub at ten am. You don't want me working this day. And it was a Friday, which is a busier day. And I was like, yeah, okay,
you get that Friday off. So your soccer game gets you one day all season my kids, and his religion gets a lot more because we're not being neutral, because we're saying that these things matter, and so we should be Our laws should say that. Not there's some levels of neutrality we want to preserve, but our laws should say that because the laws form the soul. Both Augustine
and Aquinas say that, but really are broader culture. That thing about in Israel about like crossing the street with the little kids, nobody's going to establish that by law. Minneapolis passing a law saying you have to help six year olds across the street is not going to established culture. The culture has to be pro family and pro kid. So just think about schooling. Our schools are, especially like the elite public schools are like, what is your career
going to be? Are you going to get into an ivy, are you going to do this? There's just recently that I was teaching a class through AI where I'm a fellow these college kids, and two different people made a point about made a joke about women going to college for an mrs degree, you know that, JA and I sort of chuckled that, and I had heard it and
thought it was funny. And somebody just said, if part of what I want out of college is forming lasting friendships and one of those lasting friendships is a marriage, is that really inferior? Why should you mock that part of what I And it just instantly changed my life. I had gone four years of my life thinking that college, not even that college was about preparation for career. Because I got a liberal arts degree, we're reading Plato and Aristotle,
which ironically I get to use my job. And then I thought, one of the reasons I'm always glad I went to college was because of this group of like six or seven guys that were just permanently bonded together and we're close friends intellectually spiritually. One of them was just his sponsor when he came into the church recently, and I realized that that interpersonal connection and so in education, are we teaching people about building lifelong friends, about finding
a spouse, about building a family. All of those things seem like that's weird religious judges stuff. We're neutral, Let's keep that out. No, it should be front and center and every part of education because it's more important than your career. And why are we not supposed to help people think about it?
Yeah? Well, so the reason I brought it up in
¶ You win culture wars by building culture-Friday Night on the Field
terms of you know, yes, government economics matters, I still go back. I mean, I started reading your book, and when I read the introduction, I don't know if you've gotten this before. I could have run through a brick wall. I want what you have. I think what you have and what you built is the solution to what ails America and what ails the West. You built a cultural you built meaning and you know, of course it may sound like we're preaching to the choir, but I think
we all need to preach a little bit more. I think that we should be advocates for our religious perspectives a lot of the time, because we've clearly built our life around it and we shouldn't be ashamed of it. Not in a culture war, which once again I think sometimes culture wars are fought too much in terms of government win culture wars by building culture, and you build culture by doing the hard work, and so you talk
about cultural institutions. I want to unpack that a little bit because sometimes it sounds like you're passing the buck, like Ah, the pope and then all of the people beneath him need to start making these changes in these declarations. It sounds a lot like government, it sounds like bureaucracy. And what you built, I'm sure it took work, but it feels organic. It felt like you were building culture. Could you talk about the Friday night on the field,
because that's what got me hooked. And that's the main reason that I want to talk to you, because I want you to help me build the same thing. Because I immediately I don't even think I finished your book. I went to our priests and I said, I want to do this at our church. Well, my wife said, you still haven't done it, but hey, it hasn't been that long, and I was there's a.
Lot of ways I can tell the story. One it starts out Friday night fish fry and I was in sort of an abstract conversation with the younger priests in our parish talking about how various things had been that parishes used to do have been replaced, like feeding the Hungary Montgomery County, Maryland massive government system for that youth sports CYO used to be the thing. I mean, there are guys my age who described they're like, oh, I
remember Saint Andrews. That's where I hit the home run that put us ahead in the top of the six And they always hated me for that anyway. So I said, the parishes used to do all these things and they don't. And so is Christianity going to move away from the idea of the local congregation as being a real source of identity into something else for the internet? And the priest said, we don't need to return to doing what we used to do, in part because we don't. We're
a nonprofit. We shouldn't be competing against these others share if it's not our central mission. The central mission of the church is the salvation of souls. But as we're talking about, there needs to be what we call corporal works of mercy. So what he said, what are the unmet needs of the people in this room? And I looked around fry this is a pretty diverse parish. We had you know Eritrean immigrants, we had fourth generation you
know Salvadorans. We had you know, lobbyists, we had former congressmen, YadA, YadA, And I thought, what do they all have in common? Basically everyone who was there was married and had kids. And I said, I thought about the suburban culture, and I said, we all need places, a place to bring our kids and ignore them while we hang out with
our adults. And then I realized what I had been involved with was in neighboring parishes Friday night on the field, and what it was was a t ball league and the games were one and the the dads were involved, but it was set up on the backfield of a Catholic parish that had multiple jungle gyms that had places for kids to wander, so you bring the whole family.
And also there's food. They sold burgers and hot dogs from a snackshack, and I said, we need to do that at Saint Andrew's and almost just because I didn't want to have to like count change, I said, we're gonna run it on donations, like throw in the basket whatever you can. My kids brought like a little Venmo Scan and it more than paid for the costco runs.
And so every Friday night we had this tea ball thing and the parents would show up and the first time they would think they were supposed to watch the tea ball. It's like, no, you're supposed to go hang out with somebody else. And we would grill. We would order pizza before Lent and then we would grill burgers after that. I tried to be sort of old fashioned. I tried giving away salmon burgers because I was like, even though it's it's Easter season, it's Friday, right. I
was the only one whoever ate the salmon burger. It was like dune not but the kids are on the playground, and then slowly the parents become more free range. I still remember when I was I was not coaching the baseball I was. I called myself the grill coach. One year and I'm flipping the burgers and there's this woman and her husband who are talking to me. The woman like goes to the playground and then stops and realizes that her four year old is surrounded by twenty other kids,
including some teenagers, and it's gonna be fine. And she turns back over and she's like, where'd you get that Miller Lite? And they were like semi legal beers, and I had to like reach on there, like you know, you weren't allowed to advertise it, but you could have this set. And I just thought, like, I am so proud of this woman. My Friday night thing has just accomplished. It's thing that she is now entrusting her children to the community and for me and people are getting to
know each other. They were school parents, they were parish parents, and it was a place where we could bring our kids and ignore them because it had the built environment, the grass field that had a bunch of other parents who were involved in the same undertaking, and the t ball was almost an excuse. I don't know that any of those kids besides my oldest boy, are still playing baseball. But the point of it was you're going to get your neighbors, You're going to build up the social trust.
You're going to have excuses to just stop by the parish like I would come by and have breake the field, and all of a sudden you realize this is what it used to be. You'd like be at the parish just sort of randomly, not like just set school drop off or pickup or just church time. Building that So it took work, but also what it took was a term I don't use a lot because it's confusing, but it was social capital. We were involved in that parish in all sorts of ways. Later on I became a
Sunday school teacher. My wife was on the advisory board. One old lady once told me the most important thing we ever did, which is put butts in the pews, like we showed up on Sunday. We put our kids in the school. You know, we didn't pay for tuition, so we were probably a net loss because of the financial aid. But when I wanted to form this, after talking to other dads and talking to the priests, what
did I do? I emailed the principle. I said, I want a list of every kindergartener in first grader's parents so I can email. I talked to the pastor. He was like, look, cyo sports half of it. They're just wearing our name. These kids never show up to church. It's just going to be something like that. I said, no, this is going to be the opposite. He said, okay.
Favor to a guy who was a parishioner who was a grounds keeper at University of Maryland and says, can you come till our infield because it's overgrown and throw down dirt? Guy does it at costs, And then we get grills from the Knights of Columbus and they're pro pain. So the social capitalist we had become part of a community almost just by showing up, but also by volunteering, and so then we had this massive lever that we
could then pull to make this thing happen. So what did we Obama used to say, you didn't build that, someone else made that help. That was absolutely true. I didn't build the parish, I didn't build school. I didn't build the email list. I didn't turn a grass field into a dart infield. But being plugged into a institution of civil society made it possible for us to make it so that if it was Friday night in the spring, you didn't mom didn't have to meal plan unless you
have going on. Even if you didn't have a t ball player, we said, come on down and just eat, eat for free.
Oh, I'd take it one step further. I mean not to undercut Friday nights on the field. I don't think you need the t ball call me an anarchist, but you know, I just like, I'm so consumed by this concept because I think that we also fall into the trap of and maybe you could weigh in on this, and it's one of the reasons that I've kind of not initiated what I want to and I'm going to follow it and I'm to send you pictures of it,
And Tim, you did it. You made this happen one because culture starts upstream, and it just starts with one person at a time, not an institution. Even though we say cultural institutions, what that means is the people who are members, lay people stepping up, people like you, people like me doing this and then kind of initiating a
contagion of like, hey, I really belong here. And I think sometimes we get so bogged down with what's the label on this, what do I call this, who's in charge, who's running it, that we lose the organic nature of just being together without an agenda and doing life together. And so that's where that's my goal for whatever happens.
But doing life together. There's a French verb and then there's a Greek verb that Tokeville and Aristotle separately use and I remember seeing like living together in Aristotle's politics when you're talking about friends, and I was like, what does he mean? Does he mean like residing to it? But it wasn't residing together, it was like going through life together. And then French the word convivial same sort
of thing. And I was talking to somebody said that she had just become obsessed with the notion of conviviality and this you joked about the sort of the chosen families, and you look at these modern efforts to sort of do that and like, you know, group housing, let's build the housing so that it's social. And some of these might work, some of them might not, but all of it is just this natural sense we know God imprints on our soul that is not good for man to
be alone. The message is that a lot of conservatives, and a lot of religious conservatives need a nuclear family. While it's the most important thing. It's like a cell in the body. It is a fundamental building block of society. A cell in the body can't survive without the rest of the systems. So it is not good for man to be alone. And it's not good for man and wife and children to be alone. I mean, we need
lots of alone time. Family dan a, YadA YadA. Why I think I should reread the Little House on the Prairie books and write about that work because they didn't thrive When he was like I'm going to build this house with my own acts, all of that stuff was like awesome, dude, Like if you could have put that on Instagram, that would have been a great real But they don't thrive until they're embedded in a community with neighbors. Mm hmm.
Now that's the key, Tim. I want to ask you a couple more questions. One, this podcast is called a commitment to reality. How is building a family friendly subculture
¶ The reality is that families need cultural support
related to a commitment to reality?
What we were just talking about the reality is that a couple can't just raise their children without cultural support, and that cultural support can't be like the city passes a bill and now you have universal childcare. That's not going to do the tray. Cultural support is the breath of what we were talking about earlier. It's the one guy said in Jerusalem, the bus drivers have a real affection for the kids. Like that's part of it. Another part of it is, again, the way our souls are
made for most of us. Marriage and parenthood are going to be the things that are going to steer us towards happiness and towards virtue and towards sainthood. Like that is the way we are built. You can't change the way we are built. And so both of those things. It's possible for somebody to tons of people go through life and live for others without marriage or parenthood, but the reality is that it's a lot harder to do that without living without a spouse and kids.
Well, I mean, Derek Thompson just tweeted out something this morning and you quote him in your book about workism being the you know, the main religion in America, and it was about his skepticism about these resurgence what I'm sure people in your world, in the Catholic world they're talking about, they're talking about in the Orthodox world as well,
we're just getting a surge of converts. And he was claiming a skepticism and I just don't I can't believe that numbers tell the full story, because you can't tell me that my eyes aren't seeing what they're seeing. People are coming in and they're not just coming in young people are coming in, they're getting married, they're having kids, kids plural, like I mean, it's just I can't believe how many of these women are having back to back to back. It's like it's like the old times are
new again, and that you cannot measure that statistically. I don't, well, not not as quickly as they're trying. Would you agree with that?
You you've got to You've got to see things on the ground. And when people ask me about collapsing birth rate or marriage rates, a lot of times they think there's one answer, there's a million answers, and there's forces that move in different directions. Frankly, religiosity is the most important and the most consistent predictor of likelihood to get married and have children, But there are different forces moving
in different directions. And I think and so there's a really good religion scholar named Ryan Burge.
That's who it was with Okay that he was quoting. I think he had a podcast with Brian Burge.
I don't always agree with Burge, but I think if we said in the Catholic church, because it's so easy to still identify as a Catholic without really practicing in the Catholic Church. People still identify as a Catholic if they're not practicing, and maybe they more of them are stopping to identify, ceasing to identify.
But then.
That number who already weren't attending disaffiliating. If that's larger than the number of people who come into the church, that wouldn't surprise me. But what we're seeing with our own eyes on every Eastern vigil is this massive influx of very serious Catholics, and the people who we haven't seen in mass for three years are disaffiliating. I'd still rather have, you know, a growing number, that would be better.
But considering that we're rapidly secularizing, it is a great consolation that we're getting this flood of new converts.
Amen, Where are we most eager to ignore reality?
¶ Where are we most eager to ignore reality?
Where are we most eager to ignore reality? I think part of it is for me. I think I'm capable of doing more single handedly than I actually am capable of. I don't think I need help from you know, other people, and I don't think I need help from God as much as I do. And it's a good thing about lent or about you know, reading scripture that it reminds you, or just occasional suffering that it's like, no, this is
not you do not have this all under control. So I might just be speaking for myself, but I think for a lot of men, we think we are more capable of doing things on our own than we actually are. So for me, that's a big difference between reality and what I think through.
Okay, and in a world that feels increasingly unreal, what
¶ In a world that feels increasingly unreal-what feels most real?
feels most real to you, what.
Feels most real to me? I don't know. I was just in my backyard laying sod with my sons, and we're trying to lay it on a hill, and so we have to you can't really stand that's part of why we want to sod there. And so I'm like sliding down the hill and my son is hauling me a roll of sod. I don't know how much this same way. It's fifty pounds, and my other son is reaching over to hand me like a ground staple to drive it in. And in just earlier, I was trying to get them to do work, and they were all
either goofing off or like telling stories. At one point they were arguing about about hiding Jews from Nazis and and can you outright lie like having ethical debates and I'm like, just grab the rake, and then I finally calmed down. So my kids at one moment being totally inefficient at the job we desperately need to do before all the sod dies, and at the next moment it being like an action movie and we're like a well
oiled machine. So that total variance in life where what's flat is they're being kids and I'm a grumpy dad who wants to get this sodding done. The variation and the chaos from well oiled machine to like what are you doing? Why are you spraying the hose into your mouth instead of watering the sod? That feels very real to me.
Well, Tim, I loved your book. I truly did. Like I said, if it was just an essay that was the introduction, I think it's worth the price of admission because I really do believe that the answer isn't government programs this that it's it's getting involved. And so you inspired me to do my own variation of Fridays on the field. And I can't wait to tell you that that I finally did it, and I'll send you a picture. Yes, So, Tim, Carney,
thank you for joining me on commitment to reality. I really appreciate you.
Pleasure is mine, Dave