From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Q & A With The Duffys: You Can't Be Your Kids' Friend

Episode Date: August 12, 2023

Sean and Rachel share insights into their parenting style, stressing the importance of being a role model and teacher to your children rather than being their friend, as well as explaining why they don't like to "overschedule" their children during the Summer.  Later, they lay out what questions they would ask the Republican Presidential candidates during the first debate hosted by FOX News in Milwaukee, and discuss why the nation needs a leader that shares the public's values.  Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Landman, new series now streaming exclusively on Paramount+. Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy, along with my co-host for the podcast, my partner in life and my wife, Rachel Campos Duffy. It's great to be back, back at Q&A. We got some really great questions this week. Q&A Friday. Q&A Friday, yep.

It's one of our favorite days. It is. And our first question, Sean, is what is your best parenting advice? And that's a loaded question, but one we like to talk about because we always say that the best part about having nine kids over the span of 20 years is that you get a lot of do-overs. So we talked about this a little bit before. You do things wrong, you do things wrong you do things right and what you would have given as advice in year five of having kids is not the same as the advice you would have get you would give right now

after having a 23 year old so i'm not going to go into social media and kids i'm not going to go into when you give your child a phone because we those are sort of like things we've already talked about what what schools you send your kids to or what university options you give your kids? Classical, classical, classical. So I'm going to have a different answer for this. And I think the answer can change based on the pressures that your kids come into in the society in which they live. And so I look at all the gender confusion that society is trying to push toward my kids, whether it's not in our school, but in a lot of schools, but on social media, even on television shows, even kids shows. Disney tries to push. Oh, yeah. And so I think what we have to do is really let our boys be boys and our girls be girls so i mean whether boys are climbing trees and wrestling and playing with gi joes and they're fighting and and making swords out of branches and a hundred percent like there's

there is there is an element of boys especially in the summer when they have this freedom encourage those boys to actually lean into that little boyhood and be boys and girls, whether it's, you know, in our house, they still sword fight and they'll still be a little wrestling, climb trees. That's true. But don't be afraid to let them play dress up and play with their Barbies and their dolls. And, you know, don't be afraid to let your child lean into the gender that they are. And I think again, or actually encourage them to lean into their gender sean it's funny because the other day we so we live on a piece of property where you can walk from our backyard down to a creek or a little river down a steep hill yes so they can go down

there but they always have to tell me so i kind of have an idea of if they're not back in time i might go look for um so anyway margarita and patrick so patrick nine and seven yeah nine and seven um decide to go for a walk down to the creek together and they spent a lot of time down there uh and then they came back and as they came back kind of a little bit dirty uh both of them it was interesting to see what they naturally on their own no adults were with them they're just on their own exploring the woods in the back down towards the creek and patrick came back with sticks and things that look like weapons yes and margarita had taken with her apparently a little box, a little jewelry box, interestingly. And inside the box, she had collected a little mushroom, which, by the way, oddly had like some bugs growing around it,

and like a little flower, a rock. So, I mean, it was interesting just what naturally they gravitated towards. And this summer, you know, because one of the things and it's also one of the things we think that parents should do. This is going to be one of our other. So if you don't mind, I'm going to meld it a little bit into here is we believe in not overscheduling kids. Yes, we are firm believers, especially in the summer. We don't want to put them in anything. No camps, no anything we want

them to just you know really just have an unencumbered imaginative self-directed play right and one of the things that margarita again on her own no direction um nobody told her to do this she just on her own created she made a little book for herself and she started drawing like dresses. It's like a fashion design book. And people were not in the dresses. It was just the dress itself. Yeah, she's like, just like you would see a fashion designer

sketching their designs. She sketched party dresses, what outfits to wear to the pool, outfits to wear to a wedding. They included like little pictures of the shoes that you could put the jewelry, just like you would see a fashion designer do. And she,

she created these very elaborate books. And she's been asking me over the last, you know, year about sewing, which I don't know how to sew a button, which is terrible. Cause my mother is an amazing sewer and has always wanted me to know how to sew. And as an adult, I've really regretted not having learned how to sew.

And so I found out through a neighbor about a program to teach kids to sew. And actually now after she did this thing, I'm going to, you know, this fashion design book, I'm going to put her in a class on weekends to learn how to sew. But again, a lot of feminists would say, why aren't you putting Patrick in there too? And the truth is, Patrick doesn't want to learn to sell. It would be like Chinese torture to put Patrick in there. Who's a seven-year-old little boy. I mean, he doesn't want to do that.

He wants to play hockey. We talk about kind of what we do for the summer. And again, it's unadulterated, you know, child led play. And again, there's something great about America because there's this creativity that comes from this. We get innovators and creators in this country that think outside the box. And I think a lot of that comes back to how they were creative in their play when they were little.

I think there probably could be more structured things that we do because we probably fall on the other side of the extreme of going. They're they're not really in anything. And they are there. They're playing and they're making a play and finding neighbors and they're bored. Then they creatively find a way to entertain themselves. You create forts in the back. And I think they do a little horse camp in the beginning of the summer. They did do a horse camp. Because we wanted to introduce them to some horses. But when kids can only know how to play when parents are structuring their play, that's a problem.

Yeah. Kids need to learn how to find neighbors and be creative and figure out what's going to entertain them. And ours are definitely doing that. By the way, back in the 80s, I did that as well. I explored. You were on your bike all day, weren't you? I was hunting for squirrels on my bikes, cops and robbers like we did the whole thing and there was no parental um control over what we were doing before dark for dinner that's right or come home and get your lunch and then go back out

that's right and then i remember my parents saying my i remember my mom saying the house is clean get out all the kids outside of the house. And that was sort of how we were raised in the 70s and the 80s. And it was normal. So dirty. Like, I'd be so dirty. They'd throw me in the bathwater. Remember, the bathwater would get in so dirty because we played so hard and we were just filthy, which was great.

And that's how you know that you had fun that day is how dirty you were. Well, and that's how they are not just here, but when we take them to the cabin. And there really is nothing to do but play, be on the lake and play all day. I remember last year after Evita's wedding, you went for two weeks with the kids out to the cabin before I was able to get out there because I had to go to work. So the wedding happened, I think, two days after the wedding. You loaded up the car. I worked from the cabin. Rachel couldn't.

Just, you know, I was working myself. But yeah, not as much work as I was probably doing. But anyway, you went out to the cabin with the kids. And I came back two weeks after to the cabin. And I saw how, you know, kind of a little bit smelly Patrick's hair was. I mean, he didn't look dirty because he's also getting in the lake. Right. But anyway, I asked him, I said, because, you know, he's been with dad for two weeks. So when's the last time you took a bath? And he said, the wedding.

But they get in the water. And by the way, he gets really dark, the wedding. But they get in the water. And by the way, he gets really dark in the sun. So you can't tell whether it's dark or tan. You get that dark, beautiful, caramelly Mexican tan. What else? What are any other recommendations you have, Rachel? I would say lavish your kids with affection. I'm super affectionate with the kids.

And I'm always kissing and hugging them. But I think it's really important that they always know that they're loved. And I think there's no, you can tell your kids you love them, but you also have to show them you love them. And I think that's, that's really important. The other thing we talked about before this was we're not your child's friend.

Yeah. You know, I'm not. And so sometimes, especially as they get older and a little savvier, a little more manipulative, they will try to as you try and direct them or tell them they can't do something or correct them. It'll they'll try and manipulate it into your like, turn it back on you and like make try and make you feel guilty because you're not nice mom all the time. make you feel guilty because you're not nice mom all the time and for me it's like i'm not your friend i'm your mom i i want us to have a good relationship and like each other um but we're not equals we're not equals i'm your mom i'm your child yeah exactly and i think a lot of the problems

that we see in parenting and in cult and ends up bleeding into culture are parents who want to be friends with their kids so much so that other things fall by the wayside. But listen, that's hard because you do want to be friends with your child, right? And you do want to be their parent as well. I don't think the kids can blur those lines, either you're friends or you're a parent, but when you're one day or one moment a friend and the next day a parent, they have a hard time distinguishing between the two. And so I think either you got to pick one or the other, especially when they're those late teens, early 20 years. And it's hard. We've had this conversation ourselves. We are not their friends. They

might get angry at us. They might be annoyed at us. But the bottom line is it's our job to be their parents. And if they don't like us sometimes with some of the things we're telling them that's the role of being a parent it's not that they have to love me okay with that right you have to be okay with the fact that they don't they are not always going to love you and they will use that guilt to and by the way it's not always easy too it's hard no it's hard it's really hard and if you raise them right and not try to be their friend young, they'll turn into good people that you actually want to be friends with when they're adults. That's my theory on that. Sean and I, we're both big on chores. We think chores make kids better. better, but in a house like ours, it doesn't operate unless they have chores, right? So we're kind of forced into that one. But if you look at studies, kids who have chores are better workers, they're better roommates, they're better spouses.

They whine less. They've literally done whining studies and they've shown that children who are given consistent chores whine less. I mean, that alone should make you want to give your kids chores because there's nothing worse than a whining job. Sometimes it's like, listen, clean your room clean the bath clean bathrooms um clean the kitchen unload dishwashers load dishwashers up i mean it's not like they're out you know shoveling you know a ditch in the back of the house there are african children now because of our stupid ass climate policies who are in africa you know nine years old digging mines for cobalt um which should be should make all of us feel shame so that's that's child labor emptying the dishwasher cleaning

your room give me a break um all of us had to do that i remember when i was yeah clean the car like why do i have to take it to get detailed like you drive my car usually it's messed up because of them you're gonna clean the car go pick it up's right. And so, but I do think, and again, I talked about this earlier, but you had an experience a couple of weeks ago where you told Patrick at seven and Margarita at nine to unload the dishwasher. And I was kind of shocked by that. I'm like, they can't unload the dishwasher, but sure enough, of course they can. And they put some of the stuff in a way in the wrong places. So you have to correct them. That's how they learn is they actually have to start to do it. And again, a house our size with all these kids, you can't make it work unless everybody pitches in.

If I had to do everything, forget it. And the other thing related to that is at a certain age, you need to get a job. And so we had an experience this summer where our son was said he was out he had applied for jobs and he's kind of was sitting around the house waiting for these employers to call him and i was like what like you you haven't gone in just to meet he's like mom you don't know how it is you don't understand you're you're you're 50 that's not how it's done now that's not how it's done now. You do it online. The employers don't want you.

And we kind of had this debate back and forth over a couple of days where I'm seeing him sitting around and, you know, he's not working. And finally, I kicked him out of the house. I said, get out. I'm like, you can drive. Get in the car. Don't come back without a job. And then I called Sean because he was at work at that point.

And I said, I don't know if I did the right thing, but I got so frustrated with him sitting around here telling me he had applied online and telling me he can't find a job and nobody wants to hire him that I kicked him out of the house and told him not to come home to get a job. And then later that day, he came home. He actually was he left super mad at me, like really angry at me. And he came home really proud of himself. He had found a job. He had found a job at a pizza joint. The first place he went to said, no, we don't have a job. Then he got in his car and he called, which was his excuse to see mom, you had to call. He called them and they said, come on down.

And he was like two blocks away so he pulled right in and so now he works at a pizza place where he takes orders uh like makes the boxes for the pizzas fills up the the soda you know cooler that people come in and buy and then he delivers pizza um and what's interesting is he you know he's he's making money he makes what like a maybe 100 to 140 a day when he goes in and works with tips and um he is so proud of himself and his little bank account is growing and he's really kind of he's i shouldn't say cheap but he's really good with his money he doesn't waste his and he doesn't waste his about he doesn't that's right and so he starts to accumulate this money and he is wildly proud of himself of how much money over the course of, you know, what, uh,

before we went to the cabin, he started and then we went to the cabin. Two weeks, two weeks off to go to the cabin. And then he went back to work and yeah, he's accumulated this money. He's super proud of himself. He can say that he got the job on his own cause he certainly did. And I think all of that builds self-esteem in a meaningful way, as opposed to just like you're awesome and you know they're not doing anything awesome um he was sitting around the house and

he was so anyway i i was it was one of those moments where i did something i questioned whether i was too harsh and then i realized it was the right thing to do at that time and again i'm not his friend. If I was being his friend in that moment, I would have coddled him. So, you don't know this, but last night, I saw him last night and he came and was telling me about how I work. Sometimes it gets boring because there's no one calling in. All the boxes are made and, you know, it's not delivering pizza. So, I said, well, just wait there.

He started listening to a podcast. He listened to, you know. He's doing one on Japanese history, right? Japanese history, yes like yeah he told me about so excited about you know how they how they became such fierce warriors and samurais and the honor and they'd rather die than be captured and so he's like really into it but he's the time he spends there he's actually using well i'm proud of him yeah for picking the right kind of podcast to listen to. By the way, that brings me to another of my parenting tips. I know we said we weren't going to talk about phones, but

we never allowed our children to have gaming devices as kids in the house. So we never had a Nintendo in our house ever. An Xbox. An Xbox that has never existed in our house. And I think that that has been one of the best decisions that we made. And as a 50-year-old

young boy, sometimes I've actually been like, well, maybe we should get an Xbox and we might want to play some games. And JP has kind of asked a couple of times to do that. And you've been like, no, we're not going to do it. And neither JP or I have objected. But that's interesting because... I'm sure he plays when he goes to other people's houses houses and he does, but he's not consumed in time here. He's not a big gamer. No, and neither is Patrick. And I think that's why Patrick will go into the woods instead of sitting on a PlayStation. We'll have more of this conversation after this.

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Okay, this one was really one that you brought up when we were having this discussion about how we were going to answer this viewer or listener's questions. You said it's your job to civilize your kids. I totally agree. They do come into the world uncivilized. Let's be honest. Well, they do. And so sometimes you see you go to, you're on an airplane or you're in a restaurant and you see kids that are poorly behaved. And there's a lot of talk right now online. There's a lot of articles like

about people taking video of, you know, in a restaurant or on a plane of really misbehaved kids and then sort of putting it out there for the public to go. What do you think of this? What should happen? Should we ban children from restaurants? You know, should restaurants, you know, whatever you get. Which, by the way, shame on someone for filming a family that you have misbehaving kids. I'm sorry. That is that's cruel. Thataving kids. I'm sorry.

That's cruel. That's mean. They shouldn't do it, right? But you can't not train your kids to behave well at home and then go to a restaurant or go on a plane and think they're going to behave well. You've never trained them how to behave well. So to sit at a table, to put a napkin on their lap, to use their silverware, to say please and thank you. To pray before their meal before the

meal that's right i mean you show them how to behave in public by how they behave at home and um sometimes it wouldn't listen it can get it can get crazy and schedules and you know everyone might eat in shifts sometimes that can happen in our house and we try to sit around the table we try to sit on the table that's right and but also if kids aren't behaving well we let them know and correct them and so when we go out not always but normally they're pretty well behaved yeah or we'll say you know if they're around the table and sometimes patrick will try to bring toys and i'm like sorry we don't play with our toys at the table you need to go put your toy down and then come sit at the table or if he gets rambunctious i mean he's probably the one the at this stage of his life it's the hardest for him to kind of sit still and eat, but he has to do it.

And by the way, they also learn to sit still, and kids need to learn that in church. Church is this, you know, there's all kinds of spiritual benefits, but it also is a time to let children know that they can't, there's this, you know, we always talk about deferred gratification, like for example, JP working and saving. I mean, this is, and by the way, one of the keys to happiness when they do happiness studies, children and adults is learning deferred gratification. It's so important for happiness because people who can't learn and be disciplined in that way, because people who can't learn and be disciplined in that way never really get achievement because you have to defer gratification in order to achieve something. Which our 13-year-old has to work on. She gets $5 and it burns a hole in her pocket and she wants

to spend it right away. We're working on that with that one. But back to the table and back to church, part of that also is this understanding that there are points in time where you have to stay still. And then after church, you can run around, but you're going to stay still. And that's part of the discipline, almost like a physical discipline, that you have control over your body. Just because you're seven doesn't mean that you can just lay on the pew and not follow the instructions of what you have to do in church. So here's what's not discipline. If you say I've disciplined my child and so I give that discipline means I give them an iPad and I have them play games or watch movies on the iPad at dinner when we're out or on the airplane. The airplane's a little bit different, I think,

because they're traveling. Airplane's hard. Yeah. Or at church. You just got to do what you can to do that. But I'm a firm believer that, listen't there's times you might go yes we're going to give them an ipad we're going to give them a phone to play a game on it but but but the baseline should be they don't have an ipad at dinner they don't have it at when we go to eat at the restaurant at the restaurant they can sit there and be a little human being um they can they can they can talk they can engage might even play with you with their napkins and the salt packets, maybe some of that. But take the iPad away.

And I see too many parents relying on trying to just entertain them instead of train them. Yeah. I think, I mean, I'd say those are our top tips. I mean, we probably could elaborate more than that. We'll do this again some other time. We'll come up with a whole bunch of new tips. That's what we have right now. These were the ones we had coffee this morning and kind of talked over those. And by the way, some of these, as you can tell, are affected

by real life things we're dealing with now as parents. But I will say this. The beauty of having a big family and the beauty of having kids over the and the beauty of having, you know, kids over the span of 20 years is that you do get these do-overs and you get a chance to, to be a little better. And the one thing I was going to bring up to Sean, we've done it wrong.

Yeah. We've done it wrong for a hundred percent. We're correcting. There's a lot of things we do different. We've made lifestyle changes around things that we think we weren't doing right. And the, and, and lack of balance. Because by the way, unless you have your parents living with you, who knows how to rear a child?

You've never done it before. You make a ton of mistakes. You get better at it with time though. It's a little training, a little practice. That's such an interesting point you bring up because we actually get the benefit of having my parents live with us for chunks of time throughout the year. So they'll come in for a few months at a time parents live with us for chunks of time throughout um the year so they'll come in for a few months at a time and live with us and they get to observe what we do and i can they can compare it to what they did and and some things i i can tell they think i do better and some things i think they're like what the hell's going on here you know um one of the things that was really interesting when my mom one of the times that my mom first started coming, my mom and dad first started living with us is she noticed that when the kids would come home from school, I would have a snack ready for them. And then they would run off and start their homework.

And then I would, you know, I would maybe prep dinner already. And I was starting to finish off the dinner. And then I do dinner. And then we so to finish off the dinner and then I'd do dinner and then we so I'd clean up from the snack that I'd make the dinner then we'd have dinner clean from the snack and my mom was like what are you doing what is going on here this is not efficient she's like can't you tell that these kids are starving when they come home and so you're giving them a snack they're not satisfied and you're you're giving them the snack then you're cleaning up from the snack then you're gonna have to make dinner again he's like just

have dinner ready when they come home just feed them the second they come home their dinner and you're done for that if they need if the teenage boy is still a little bit hungry then he can make a little later and have something before he goes to bed if you're still hungry it changed our lives it changed our life it did it was it was like it went the night went smoother it was simpler they were happier like i i went to i got a master's and i couldn't figure that out like but you know what that is the wisdom that comes from intergenerational living and you know maybe your parents don't live with you all the time, but have them come and spend a stretch of time. It's interesting to have someone that you love, take a look at what you're doing and, and, and, and offer some honest observations. Now,

sometimes it's hard to hear those things, um, as a parent and I've been there before. And sometimes we disagree with the recommendations that were given. A hundred percent. You have that, you have that right have that right but but there's been there's a lot of good ones that come with it too so i i agree with that now here's a here's on the parenting question i'm not going to make you answer this one first because this one came in i didn't share it with you um but i thought about this answer somebody asked do you this is a really crazy question i can't believe someone asked it, but do you have a favorite child? So that's coming to me. You said you were going to answer it first.

But then you just did put me on the spot. So you can go first. Do you want to answer it first? Yes. Listen, the answer of course is no, I don't have a favorite child. Right. Um, I, I like little different things about all of them. Now, with saying that, if you ask all the kids in the family, they'll say our oldest daughter is my favorite. And I think that's. We all say that Evita is Sean's favorite. Yeah, I love I love them all. And listen, there's a special affinity that you have with your first one. But I listen, I love them all. And they unique and very special i think i navigate a beat that's sometimes better than you do when we yeah because we're probably so similar that we we can clash at times we actually have her and i have this um i mean when we're vibing it's like we are on the same same wavelength i think she's like a smarter prettier more interesting version of me.

And it couldn't make me prouder. Like I just am sometimes just in awe of the way she thinks through things, her work ethic. I think about where I was at her age. She works hard. I was playing, you know, I was on the real world, you know, doing of crazy stuff and and not not at all as centered and smart as she was and i'm always really impressed with with the way she works but some sometimes when we clash we clash hard because we're very similar um and then and then sean just and and and helps us to navigate that um she's also got that irish stubborn streaks there's an

there's a lot of Irish in that little Latina and it's hard sometimes for Latina moms like me she's actually she is more Irish than she is but what you will find they came from the same two people the same genetics

in the same home and are all wildly different and there's really wonderful things about all of them. And they're all, listen, they're all, as any parent would say, they're all very special and a lot of fun. So I'm going to answer the question, do you have a favorite child? So first of all, we've always had this onesie that says current family favorite. So usually the baby is the current family favorite. And when when margarita was the baby she was everyone's favorite when patrick was the baby he was the favorite valentina is like a

favorite right now for everybody i mean if you if you asked and pull took a poll among the nine eight children and shauna everyone probably vote for valina. She's an absolutely lovable, delightful, can never make you mad, amazing child or something. And this has been really the lesson for our family about special needs and about the fact that, by the way, 90% of all children diagnosed with Down syndrome, we should say, are exterminated. We have eugenics. It's alive and well in America. And probably the group most targeted are the disabled. And so that would be Valentina. And so it's been interesting to see what Joy, how she's changed the dynamics of our house, how everyone adjusts in some way, which I think is one of the most wonderful, I mean, there's no worse than, one of the worst traits a single child can have. And it's one of

the reasons why it's best not to have an only child is that people in bigger families have to learn to adjust and be flexible and care about other people's needs. To spare, to fight, to forgive, to do all those things. And once you have fight, to forgive, to do all those things. And once you have two, three kids, it's going to happen. But it happens on a different level when you have a child with special needs, whether it's autism or Down's or cerebral palsy. When a family is on a daily basis confronted with the limitations of somebody they love as much as themselves or more. It is absolutely family altering, beautiful thing. And we have literally exterminated from our population so many beautiful opportunities for our own country to grow in this in compassion and love

and service by doing that. Now, I'm going to answer the question for you, Sean. The answer is, I love them all alike. I love them all equally at different stages. If I'm really honest, I like some of them more at different stages than others. Right. So, you know, I love little kids. I'm obsessed with little kids. And so do I like being around the little kids at times more? I like them more. They're more fun. And in this way, then they go through these difficult phases where they can be mean and

very critical of me and very combative. And so do I like them as much at that? I love them all the same as much as I have ever loved them since the moment I held them. But do I like hanging out with, you know, emotionally hormonal, angry, feisty young girls, young girls? Sometimes. No, I don't.'t or boys so what i find interesting is rachel saying and then but what i have found is the older they get the that like comes around so what i have found sean is that the beauty of having nine children is that somebody always likes

me at some point they don't all like me at the same time. And I don't always like them, but there's always someone who I can gravitate towards. Does that make sense? That does make sense. Yes. I would just also say that you have a little running joke with them. You'll at almost the same time, tell each of them, you'll whisper to them, you're my favorite. Yeah. And don't tell anybody. And then they all tell each other, the mom said that I'm her favorite. They're like, no, she told me I was her favorite. I do say that.

I'm like, you don't tell me I was your favorite. But I do it to all of them. Then they all tell them, she said the same thing to me. Then they all will fight. We'll have more of this conversation after this. All right, do we have any more questions coming in? Because everyone's talking about the debate.

And we don't know yet if Donald Trump is going to be in the debate he's sort of as as normal you know as he you know as he normally does he's toying with everybody trolling everybody saying he might saying he won't saying he's gonna not do it but watch to see which one he might like for his vice president it's a vice presidential debate yeah he's turned it into the vice presidential debate on fog so he's turned it into the presidential debate on Fox. I mean, he's just so funny. But the question was, if you were a debate monitor,

and neither Sean or I have been chosen by Fox to do that, what would you be asking President Trump? So Sean, I mean, the candidates. Let's assume Trump is there and everybody's there. So I think if you're going to make your government work, you have to get rid of the deep state, right? And not just the deep state, whether it's the Department of Education and Homeland Security, you have to, I'm not saying eradicate them, but they're not working right now.

And I've always said we should get rid of the union so you can fire people who don't want to do the will of the elected president. But I think more specifically, what are you going to do about the FBI, the Department of Justice, the CIA, the intelligence apparatus, the law enforcement apparatus has been weaponized against conservatives or social conservatives. And I think that is the biggest question. You don't have a freedom democratic society if you have a law enforcement national that's going to use that force and power against one party in favor of another and that's what's happening right now and if we don't have

a president who's thinking through how they're going to fix it and by the way it will not be easy they will go kicking and screaming when you root them out they don't they'll they will leak and they will demonize and they will attack you. They will attack you. But they did in his first and Trump's first term. So it will be very hard. But I want to know what you're going to do. And I want to analyze whether they have the grit to actually get it done. Because we cannot continue like this.

So next week, we're going to have an amazing guest called, his name is Lee Smith, to comment on what a lot of people have been reading, have read this this Obama biography that came out, you know, years ago. But his sort of resurface and there's this new interest in it. And and I really encourage everyone next week to tune in to this interview. It's really a fascinating interview with with with Lee Smith. interview. It's really a fascinating interview with Lee Smith. But he would say that it's not the deep state so much as that we have since 2016 been living with a shadow government, that Obama never left town, and that maybe it's not like, I mean, it's not that you just get rid of the deep state, but that the deep state is being controlled by somebody.

And he makes the case. And I again encourage everyone to listen to him lay this out in depth. But that that deep state is being led by a shadow government, which infected and changed not just Trump's presidency, but obviously impacted the election. He controlled that information as well through the Hunter Biden laptop situation. And he's now continued because he's the only president who's never left Washington, D.C. He continues to control that deep state you're talking about. So is it that a new president comes in and simply has to, you know, root out all the corruption out of the FBI and the DOJ and the CIA and Department of Homeland Security? Or is it really about once and for all exposing, deposing Barack Obama? How much of what we're living through right now,

what we call the deep state, is really the machinations of Barack Obama, Sean? So Barack Obama has power because people in power will listen to him. People in the deep state will listen to him, take his advice, take his strategy. Well, if I take the people in government who love and listen to Barack Obama and I put new

people in that don't give a damn about Barack Obama, they're not going to listen to him. All of a sudden, Barack Obama doesn't have any power, has no business being in D.C. and maybe is going to go back to Hawaii or to one of his other homes on a beachfront somewhere or some billionaire's yacht. So yeah, this is not a problem if my solution actually is implemented because we won't have those people who are pathological, who have had their minds warped. They're gone. They found a job somewhere else.

And I brought in fresh new blood who, again, I don't want to do to them what they've done to us. I actually want to go back to the way it was. I want a fair and just system looking out for America and America's best interests. Partisanship comes into play nowhere. Sometimes we have guests on who say something that completely changes the way I think about the world. And we've had some of those guests on over the years. And Lee Smith is one who did that by explaining something that seems so logical, and yet we don't really talk about it enough or express it enough. But leaders matter and leaders end up mere like your country ends up mirroring the leader you have.

So in the case of Barack Obama, that book that we talked about was so it really exposes the pathologies that he had what an odd person he is this liberal biographer ends up coming out of studying Barack Obama's life for years and comes out saying this is not a normal person and so is it any surprise that our country doesn't look normal to us anymore when since basically 2008, it's been run by Barack Obama. To now, no wonder it's so dysfunctional because Barack Obama is so dysfunctional. And so the lesson to me is that we need leaders who have a vision for America that we also share and that we want to share, that we want our country to look like. And so that is an interesting addendum, I think, to your deep state question. I think you're right. It's the

deep state. And I think leadership matters. I think the question I would ask is to each of them what they would do to, I guess, break up the cartel that i now again through covet have come to see them as a cartel big big uh like big pharma big food big agriculture i feel like all of them work to poison american bodies adults. And so like you have big food making people fatter and sicker, and then you have big pharma coming in and, and, and providing all the, the profit making, you know, solutions to the health issues. And I think health really matters for our country. We spend, Sean, I mean, you would know better than I than i in congress um in the budgets that you've looked at how much money is spent on health care and and sort of providing you know medical remedies to things that could have been resolved if people had better food nutrition um

health uh lifestyles etc yeah we have have Medicare, Medicaid. We give grants for scientific study and then we have food stamps. So we pay for a lot of food and we pay for a lot of healthcare through the federal government. I guess, and when we finish this topic, I have one more kind of in line with where you're at, which is I think after COVID, I saw this as well, science has become so political. I don't think it used to be political. And if you look at all the changes that are being made, all the rules and regulations under the auspices of climate change, and as they'll say, the science is settled, the climate is Roman, and man has done it, and it's an existential threat, and we have to do

all these radical things. Well, I would go, you know what, if I'm the president, I want to make sure that if we are going to give $1 to anyone studying the climate, that the science is legit. There's no predetermined answer to the studies that you're going to do. Because today, if you come out with a study that says, maybe the climate isn't warming, maybe it's actually cooling since the 1990s, and maybe it's not made from man. If you come up with a study like that, you will never be funded again. If you propose that study, you're not going to get the funding. So there's a problem in science. And I go, listen, I actually want to know what's actually happening. And I want to believe the scientists that come out with the data. And today it's all, it's all political

because if they can convince us all that the climate is warming and it's manmade and the oceans are going to boil, then they can control me. They can impose rules and regulations on me. They can control my life, which is what they want to do based on what I very well think is a lie. You know, Sean, it's such a great point. And it's not just that, it's the studies that aren't done. Like just think about in COVID as we were masking little toddlers.

I mean, really talk about Chinese torture. I mean, this was like horrible what they were doing. And there was no study on whether it was effective. In the end, Dr. McCary, through private, you know, his own university at John Hopkins had to do the study that the NIH did not want to do, because they wanted everyone in masks, because then it would scare them because then they take the vaccine and they could push that that further i think what what i've learned through covid is that it's actually not new i look at what's all the studies that have been influenced by big food so like you know you

know you're here like oatmeal's good oatmeal's bad coffee's good coffee's a lot of this these studies that we see about even cholesterol and things like that, there are there are the research money is coming from pharmaceutical companies. So, of course, they're influencing all this. And then as people move from from being health bureaucrats right there in the health, you know, NIH or whatever, the CDC and our government, NIH or whatever, the CDC and our government, they want to make nice with these pharma companies and with these big ag and big and big food corporations, because they're going to transition from these government jobs to those jobs and make more money. And so I, I look at all this and I, I just think that we have we were way too trusting in the past about any of these studies. And it's to the point where when I hear something come out of the CDC or the NIH, I almost just want to do the opposite because I have no idea what their incentives are, who's funding what. There should be no corporate money

in government studies because these studies should be for the people. They should not be influenced by these outside sources. And so back to the original question, I want to know what they're going to do to take, as you said, the politics, but also the profit motives of corporations out of medicine and health. And I'm telling you, our food supply, our seeds, genetically modified food, all of this stuff is making people sicker and fatter. And we're not talking about getting back to, you know, sustainable food that actually makes us healthy. Listen, I want health care providers to make money. I want pharma to make money, but I want them to do it honestly. I want them to do to develop drugs that make people healthier, that actually work, not drugs that might work for to develop drugs that make people healthier, that actually work,

not drugs that might work for one thing, but make you really, really sick on 10 other things. And then they've all, by the way, set up a bunch of other drugs to deal with the side effects of the drugs they gave you. And again, I don't think that's necessarily happening now. And so what we've seen through COVID, what we've seen through the presidency of Joe Biden is the corruption and rot that we have inside of our government and how we're lied to consistently. And again, I do think it keeps coming back to they're trying to fundamentally change this country. There's a revolution upon us and they have to brainwash us and lie to us to get us to buy into that revolution. And I think the next president, going back to the debate, if you're not thinking about it and you can't answer that question on the stage, you don't deserve to be president. You deserve the vote because this is one of the most serious things that faces the American people. And if you're

not thinking about that, what the hell are you thinking about? You know, Sean, you're from Wisconsin. You grew up around little farms, little farms. I i mean i remember growing up hearing john cougar mellencamp and songs and and and and fundraisers for for farmers and how farmers were farmers have never been in small farms family farms um not factory farms uh corporate farms have never been in more danger of being annihilated uh bankrupted than they are right now. If you were in Congress now, how important would the issue of small, because by the way, Sean talks about wanting to buy a farm because he's worried about the food supply and about having access to food, healthier food. So I know this is kind of a little off subject, but it's just-

So farmers are like banks, right? If you have only a few big banks, those big banks become partners of the government and they work together- To control you. Well, the banks are going to make a lot of money and the government's able to get the banks to do what they want for the guarantee that they get this monopoly to make a lot of cash, right? If you have a lot of small little banks around the country,

you can't control all of them. I love small community banks. By the way, you're hearing the chairman of the, he was on financial services, and I couldn't agree with you more. I love small banks too. It is the heartbeat of every community having a small little bank there

that knows their community, that funds their community. Be careful how many times you say community because Kamala got in trouble for that. I know she did. Community banks- Are in the community. Are in the community. I know. But Sean is truly, you have been championing small banks before Kamala, many years before.

It's similar. The rules and regulations that our government has imposed on small banks have put many of them out of business or made a lot of them merge and consolidate to become bigger and more centralized. Same thing with farms. I want a whole bunch of little family farms because you can't then control them. You have a family, maybe you have 40 cows, 80 cows on your farm and you have 120 acres that you plant, that's what you want. If you consolidate all those small farms into just a few big corporate farms, way easier for the government to control those big corporate farms, get them to do what they want.

And the food's not as good, Sean. I'm sorry. I mean, if you've gotten food, we were once part of a farm co-op. CSA, whatever that was called. Yeah. Got a box of food in the summer, like every week. You just had to make whatever came in the box, and it was kind of forced you to live seasonally. Get dirt on it, just pick that morning, and it was great.

It was amazing. And clean it off like you were in your own garden. I know, we were such hippies. I know. I want to go back to that. We were crunchy conservatives. You always have been crunchy conservatives. So Sean, what can the government do to,

what are they doing right now that's accelerating this consolidation and what can they do to make sure we have small farms? So if you went through your oil and gas policy, make fertilizer more expensive. If you're going to force them to trade in their old tractor and go electric. If there's now issues with the cost of the seeds that have been genetically modified,

the cost of seed has gone up. So the cost of everything has gone up and it's pinching the small family farm. It's making it harder for them to make a profit to then stay in business. We're now seeing in European countries where they're asking farmers to kill their animals, 20% of their animals, under the auspices of meeting climate goals. You're seeing a real attack. In Ireland, that's happening right now. They're going to family farms and saying,

you have to kill 20% of your cows because you have too many cows and that's not good for the climate. You saw what's happening in the Netherlands, how they're basically forcing them off. I mean, there is a war on farmers and it's coming here. Do you think this is intentional? What this because what's interesting is what you're saying is inflation, the inflation that's happening mostly through energy. And I think you're right about that. Joe Biden, Joe Biden, inflation.

Joe Biden calls inflation. Yep, exactly. So the energy policies and other policies that are driving inflation are hurting small farmers in a way. As well as the rules and regulations. There's runoff regulations. There's all these regulations on what they can put in the fields. And some regulations are good. Some rules are really good.

They inundate these farmers with all these rules and regulations. I want them decentralized. I want my food supply diverse from a whole different group of farmers or farm communities that grow and make money off of their yearly work by planting or harvesting or raising sheep or cows. Besides a good economy, is there anything else government can do? Get out of the way. Leave them alone. They're regulating them out of business is the problem. And again, if you're a bigger bank or you're a bigger farm, you can navigate the rules and regulations. You can structure your way through government. If you're small, you don't have the resources to navigate government. Small banks, small farms, they can't navigate it. And so the small farm will sell out to the big farm. It's like, listen, we'll take the money. Let's go to... Yes, the farm's been in our family for four generations,

but let's trade it in because we can't farm anymore in this environment. It's too hard. It's too hard. It's too stressful. And by the way, the problem is there is an attack on our food supply. 100%. And if there's less food, all of a sudden, government's going to step in and control who gets food when. There could be rationing. Actually, under the auspices of climate change,

some liberals have said, maybe we should ration food. People should only have certain rations um that one of the things they want to do by the way sean is they want to somehow digitize like the food that in the like in freeze like if you go to get meat at the grocery store it's sort of like digit they're gonna start to digitize things so that they can keep track of how much meat did your, did you have this week? And so they're working on systems like that. They want us to eat bugs. You know, when we first, you and I wanted to, you know, very early on, we're talking about the bugs. This is a real thing. They are investing lots of money on how can we make bugs become part of the American diet.

Now, they've been doing experiments. I mean, imagine how cruel. I mean, like the Bill Gates Foundation hasn't done enough with their damn vaccines in Africa and using the world's most desperate poor people to experiment. And we know that that's happened. experiment and we know that that's happened um and now they took some you know small community of children you know and some in these villages and they're giving them bugs to eat and i'm like these kids aren't new aren't getting enough nutrition they need eggs and meat and milk and and whatever else they eat in their in their natural diet why are we allowing this weirdo bill gates to experiment on african kids with with with bugs. Then they

started introducing the bugs in in England on the public school menus now. So like there's just weird stuff happening. It's not a conspiracy theory. So it's not a conspiracy theory. So there's the World Economic Forum, the W.E.F. that really cares about climate change, which is why all these billionaires fly in their private jets to Davos to have this conference, and politicians, there's a program called the C40. And it's about basically woke cities that want to come together to address the threats of climate change.

That's what the C40 is. And it seems pretty benign. Oh, great cities. They want to fight climate change. Well, if you look at what they're agreeing to do by 2030, so seven years away from now, they're going to have zero meat consumption. Are there American companies that are in C40? I'm going to get to that.

So zero meat consumption, zero eggs, milk, butter, zero dairy, zero dairy. There goes Wisconsin. Everyone will have only three new clothing items per year. You'll only travel once every three years for 1,500 kilometers, right? So this is, oh, by the way, and you won't own a car, public transportation only. And you'll be happy. And so this is crazy, right? And as I tell you this, you're like, well, that'll never happen. Well, listen, 15 years ago, I would say you will never have a country say we should transition 13-year-old little girls to little boys or little boys to little girls. We'll never have men showering with women in high school and college. Those things would have never happened,

but they are happening. And so you have cities in the U.S. who have signed on from New York to Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Houston. The mayor of Miami signed on? Well, I don't know if it was, it might be the Miami-Dade. So it may not be the mayor. I got to find out. That would be at the top of your question.

Francis Suarez, if he signed on, big trouble. But then the liberal studies like Seattle and Portland and those have come on board for this. So they put these in this radical agenda that's going to take away your freedom. And if you can't have milk, eggs, butter, you can't have dairy and you can't have meat. Your point is they're going to leave you to eat bugs. And I mentioned I'm from Wisconsin. Wildly offensive.

I like milk i like butter i like cheese and i like a steak i like a hamburger so um country we love our they love their beef by the way sean they're also bill gates investing lots of money in this synthetic meat um so so another sign that this is the real deal um And one last point to make, Sean, as some of these farmers, as you say, try to, you know, are so stressed out and have to sell their property, these shadow entities will come through that look like American companies, and they end up buying all these little farms that are struggling. Turns out are um actually corporations that are owned by the chinese government so chinese buying many of our little farms up um and often these farmers don't

know that they're selling to the chinese i look in the 80s had the russians been trying to buy our land the reagan administration would have lost their mind the american people the american government was smart we had smart people in there that cared about their country. We had patriotic people. That's right. They were patriotic and they were smart. And today, they're just stupid. They're letting all of this stuff happen.

We hate America. And trading in our freedom with stupid policies for what purpose? Again, that the Chinese can come in and buy our land, our farmland, that the Chinese can steal our technology and we don't do anything about it. We just let them steal 200 to 400 billion dollars a year of technology from America. You can send a spy balloon over our country and spy on our on our missile bases. And have a spy doesn't do i uh uh thing in in in cuba set up a spy agency it's my base yeah it's called what it is this is let me just one last thing before we go sean when i first married you i was living out in uh in beverly hills and um i was auditioning

and working out in la lived in beverly hills with all my friends and then we goting and working out in LA, lived in Beverly Hills with all my friends. And then we got married and I moved to Wisconsin to your little town of 2000 people in Hayward, Wisconsin. Did you ever think that these words would come out of my mouth? Sean Duffy, buy me a farm. No. And if you say buy me a farm in Wisconsin, that's even better.

I was thinking about a farm in a slightly warmer place. I love my cabin there in the summer, but I want a warmer farm. But people see what's happening. I want a farm. I want a farm. There's a gut feeling that people have. Things are wrong, and they want to learn how to care for themselves, how to take care of themselves.

And that's why they're Bitcoin, they're gold, they're silver, they're getting a farm and a cow and some chickens. It's crazy, but a lot of people are doing it because something doesn't feel right. And I'm with you. Maybe we'll do a podcast from the farm table. Maybe it will be from the farm table. I'm down with that. I'm down with that down with that all right well it's been a good conversation thanks for the questions actually we had a couple more we didn't get because we up next week because we kind of we were kind of talking long here we talked long it was but it was a good conversation listen thank you guys all for joining us at the kitchen table if you like our podcast you can rate review subscribe wherever you get your podcast we would say please subscribe

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