Ending your bloodline because you hate the opposite sex is a weird flex.

Sometimes it feels like your therapist views each session’s primary objective as selling you the next session. If you want to avoid that, ask one question up front: “What would success look like, and how would we know when we’re done?” A therapist who has an answer is working toward resolution. A therapist who doesn’t is working toward getting you to buy him a new boat.

Agency is a stack of learned frames. Miss one, and what people call “low agency” emerges automatically. There are six minimum frames required for a lifelong capacity to generate agency: 1. Impulse Modulation Ability to feel impulse without obeying it. 2. Emotional Modulation Ability to feel emotion without distortion, flooding, or hijack. 3. Epistemic Updating Ability to revise beliefs and strategies when predictions fail. 4. Reality Correspondence Ability to perceive incentives, constraints, and causality as they are, not as wished. 5. Constraint Subordination Acceptance of reality’s authority over preference, narrative, or grievance. 6. Responsibility Internalization Treating outcomes as feedback about your choices rather than external blame. Developmentally, this usually splits: Impulse + emotional modulation are primarily trained early (often by mothers). The latter four are primarily trained through consequence enforcement and reality arbitration (often by fathers). Both parents can train all six, but someone must train each frame, or it simply doesn’t form. Each missing frame produces a predictable agency failure mode: - Poor impulse control → self-sabotage - Emotional hijack → reactive decision-making - No epistemic updating → repeating failed strategies - Weak reality correspondence → fantasy planning - Refusal of constraint → entitlement conflict - Externalized responsibility → chronic blame People experience these failures subjectively as “loss of agency,” the cognitive machinery is incomplete. I have a book coming out on this planned for 2027.

Here's your bedtime routine game-changer: spray magnesium oil on your child's feet and legs right before bed. Gently massage it in while you read their bedtime story. Try it for 5 nights straight and watch what happens. Most parents tell me their kids fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Costs less than melatonin gummies and actually works.

When a conflict with your spouse shifts from cooperative to competitive, or even hostile, do you know how to de escalate, restore cooperation, and return the relationship to peace?

Spiritual Americans There is a very small, almost negligible number of people in the world whom I would call spiritual Americans. These are people who, if they moved to the United States, would look right, act right, and fit naturally into American culture, norms, and demographics in every meaningful way. That pool is extremely small. There is no vast reservoir of Americans scattered around the world waiting to be imported in order to boost population numbers. When large numbers of people are imported, what is being imported is not Americans. It is people who bring their own cultures, their own habits, their own ways of organizing society, and their own ideas about governance and morality. Those ideas inevitably shape how they live, how they organize, and how they vote. That outcome is entirely predictable and obvious. There is only one way to make more Americans. Americans have to have more children.

My calendar has two types of entries: fixed appointments and flexible appointments. Flexible appointments are tasks that must be solved that day. They usually take about fifteen minutes. They cannot be pushed to tomorrow, but they can be done at any point during the day. I place them in the first available slot in the morning so they get cleared off my radar early. Fixed appointments are different. If I have an appointment with someone, there are only two things that will stop me from attending: an act of God or illness. Because of that, fixed appointments almost never move. Flexible tasks move often. Sometimes I start a flexible task and realize it cannot be done at that moment, so I reschedule it. The point is that it stays on the calendar. It does not disappear. And because of that, it gets done.

My friend posted the following the other day. The tone was playful, but the tactic it describes is real. Credit goes to Joshua Lisec, and I am quoting him verbatim: “Persuasion tip for the ladies: Win any argument with a man by placing ‘I feel like’ in front of whatever you want to be true or want him to do. If he disagrees or disobeys, your high ground is, ‘You are invalidating my feelings’ — a counterattack with few defenses!” I think it is healthy that both husbands and wives develop tactics for persuasion. Marriage is a long game. Influence exists whether people acknowledge it or not. The problem is not persuasion itself. The problem is persuasion that erodes agency, clarity, or responsibility over time. I replied to his post with the following. This is my response, reproduced largely as I wrote it at the time. “The counter is simple. You say, ‘Thank you for sharing that you feel that way,’ and then you leave it there. If she keeps coming back as if she wants you to do something about it, you let her know that she is entitled to feel however she feels. She is allowed to feel that way. The key point is that you are neither validating nor invalidating her feelings. You are acknowledging them. It is not your job to manage her emotions. You are leaving that responsibility with her. You are allowing her to retain agency over them. The warmer you are when you do this, the more effective it is. Sometimes a woman will pick a fight simply because there has not been enough drama lately and she needs some stimulation. By responding this way, you are signaling that you are not going to provide negative drama. When I recognize that kind of drama seeking, I prefer to create positive drama instead. I will grab my wife’s butt and say, ‘How do you feel about that?’ Or I will push her against the wall, kiss her, and say the same thing. It is playful. It is flirty. It gives her the drama she wants without turning it into conflict. I have found that this way of responding (calm, turning negatives into positives) works well with both my wife and my children. It is de escalating. They do not always like it, because it requires them to carry their own emotional and conversational load. If they persist, I ask a simple question: is there something you would like me to do for you, or a problem you would like me to solve for you? This framing is key. You need me for something, and I need you to be clear about what you need, and to keep it bounded. Often the response is vague. When that happens, I say, ‘I am not sure what that means.’ This can be frustrating, especially at first, because you are teaching them how to be precise in the way they ask things of you. They will usually try again. I will then ask, ‘What does that mean?’ or ‘What do you mean by that specific part?’ What you are looking for is an operational, objective description of the problem. Sometimes the answer turns out to be, ‘I just feel bad about this, and there is nothing for you to do.’ That is fine.”

The Current System Fails to Attract the People We Want in Power We have a persistent misunderstanding about political leadership that is actively worsening our problems: we imagine that competent, honest people will seek power out of moral duty, and that low pay is a virtue that keeps politics “clean.” In reality, the opposite is true. Positions of rulership carry extraordinary responsibility, risk, scrutiny, and opportunity cost. Anyone competent enough to govern a complex modern society is, almost by definition, capable of earning vastly more money, with less exposure and less reputational risk, in the private sector. When we deliberately underpay such positions, we are not signaling virtue, we are signaling that we do not value competence. It is true that a very small number of people will pursue power out of moral obligation alone. But this is a statistical anomaly, not a governing strategy. Even in a country the size of the United States, the number of individuals willing to bear immense personal cost purely out of duty is vanishingly small, a handful per generation at best. That is not enough to staff a legislature, an executive, a judiciary, regulatory bodies, and oversight institutions. And even among those few, not all will succeed, remain healthy, or avoid bad luck. Civilizations cannot be run on moral miracles. What happens under low-pay regimes is entirely predictable: Competent, honest people self-select out. Those who remain are either: - ideologues who value power over outcomes, or - opportunists who expect to be compensated indirectly through corruption, influence, or post-office rewards. Low official pay does not reduce corruption. It filters for people who plan to corrupt. Why Punishment and Transparency Alone Cannot Fix This Many people respond by saying: “Fine, then we’ll just impose stricter transparency and harsher punishments.” This sounds serious, but it misunderstands how institutions form and sustain themselves. Punishment without prior attraction creates a perverse outcome: 1) It further deters competent people, who already have better options. 2) It leaves enforcement in the hands of the incompetent, the ideological, or the corrupt. It turns transparency into a weapon rather than a tool, selectively applied, politicized, or performative. This leads to the exact failure mode we see today: rules that exist on paper but are enforced arbitrarily, by people who lack either the skill or the incentive to enforce them fairly. A crucial question is almost never asked: Who is supposed to design, implement, and enforce transparency and accountability if we have not first attracted competent people into the system? You cannot build high-quality enforcement institutions with low-quality personnel. You cannot punish corruption out of a system that has selected for corruption. Why the Order Matters The sequence of the solution is not optional. First, you must make rulership positions sufficiently rewarding to attract people who: - have real alternatives, - have reputations to protect, - and have something substantial to lose. Then, once competent people are present in sufficient numbers, you can: - build real transparency, - create auditability, - and establish credible enforcement mechanisms. Only then does punishment become effective, because it is: - competently administered, - evenly applied, - and backed by institutions that function. Reversing this order guarantees failure. Punishment-first approaches do not purify systems; they hollow them out. The Core Correction The uncomfortable truth is this: If public office does not pay enough to attract capable people, the system will be run either by fools or by criminals, and often by criminals who pretend to be fools. Compensation is not about rewarding virtue. It is about correcting selection pressure. Transparency and punishment are not substitutes for this, they are downstream tools that only work once the right people are present to wield them. None of this is easy. If it were easy, history would look very different. But difficulty does not excuse getting the order wrong. And right now, we are getting the order wrong in a way that guarantees continued institutional decay.

I hate agreeing with someone whose argument for the right conclusion is so stupid and backwards that it makes me embarrassed to share the conclusion.

Write down a short list of the people whose opinions matter to you. Now rewrite that list from most important to least important. You may even want categories, because some people’s opinions matter on certain subjects and not on others. Once you have that list, treat it as definitive. Everyone who is not on it no longer gets a vote. Behave accordingly. Allocate your attention, effort, and concern only to those people. The opinions of everyone else are irrelevant, because functionally, they are.

Whenever I have something important to do that I cannot do immediately, I schedule a specific time to do it. I do not put it on a to do list. I put it on the calendar. To do lists are for things I would like to do, but may never get around to. If something is truly important, it goes on the schedule in a block of at least fifteen minutes. I tell myself a simple rule: if it is not on the calendar, it will not get done. Because it will not. If I do not write it down, I will forget. The advantage of this rule is that it also creates the inverse belief. If I write it down, it will get done. First benefit, when the time arrives and the calendar says it is the next thing to do, I simply do it. Second benefit, it removes the mental load entirely. I no longer have to keep the task in my memory. I do not carry it in the background while I am doing other things during the day. I can forget about it completely until the scheduled time arrives. That means I am not stressing about what I need to remember. I know I have left myself the information I need to do the task tomorrow, next week, or whenever it is scheduled. This is how you build a low stress schedule.

Most people misunderstand power in government. There are only a few true positions of power. In the U.S., there are roughly 800–1,200 elite rulership positions that actually make binding decisions over law, enforcement, courts, budgets, and force. The President is only one of them, and over time, not the most powerful. Roughly 10–15% are elected, 45–55% are appointed, and 35–45% are career or institutional roles (judges, senior bureaucrats, regulators, military command). This means real power is mostly unelected, durable, and appointment-based. Elections shape legitimacy and direction, but institutions run the country. Elections alone do not change a country. Nations rise or fall based on the quality of their institutions, whether they are understood, invested in, defended from corruption, and capable of attracting competent people willing to take responsibility. If institutions decay, elections become symbolic. If institutions are healthy, elections matter. Ignore institutional competence long enough, and collapse becomes a question of when, not if.

Beware of people who say they are "highly empathetic". That sentence will offend some people, so let me be precise about what it means. Many people who describe themselves as highly empathetic are not especially skilled at understanding other people. They are emotionally permeable. Other people’s emotions flood into them, overwhelm them, and destabilize them. They then interpret that overwhelm as empathy. That experience has a name. It is emotional contagion. Empathy and emotional contagion are different capacities. Empathy is the ability to accurately perceive another person’s emotional state while remaining internally regulated. You can feel what is relevant, understand what is happening, and still think, choose, and act with clarity. Emotional contagion is the loss of that boundary. Another person’s emotional state becomes your emotional state. Agency drops. Judgment narrows. The interaction becomes about managing your own discomfort rather than helping the other person. This does not make someone bad or malicious. In most cases, it reflects a failure of training. Very few people are taught emotional containment. Very few people are taught how to regulate their nervous system under emotional load. Popular culture praises emotional openness while ignoring emotional discipline. Sensitivity is encouraged. Containment is neglected. Both are required. You can train empathy. You can train emotional regulation. You must train both if you want to be useful to others in emotionally charged situations. Unregulated sensitivity creates burnout, confusion, and manipulation risk. Regulated empathy creates clarity, proportion, and real help. So do not reject empathy. Learn to discriminate. Look for people whose presence stabilizes situations rather than amplifying them. Look for those who can understand emotion without being ruled by it. That is productive empathy.

I took my sons up into the Serra de Sintra today. We went because the land was alive after weeks of rain, and because the day was cold and crisp, and the air was fresh. We went because it felt good to move in a place like that, to feel the wind, to walk, to be awake inside our bodies. The Atlantic wind was moving fast, shouldering the clouds across the ridge, breaking light open and sealing it again. Everything was green in that deep, saturated way that only comes after weeks of rain. The stone was dark. The air was sharp. It demanded attention. Everywhere along the path, small transient streams were forming, draining away the rain from the weeks before. Water ran quickly over stone, clear and cold, cutting narrow channels before disappearing downslope. Despite all that rain, the ground was not muddy. We were high enough that the water never sat. It moved on, as it should. We climbed toward the Ermida de São Saturnino, above the Santuário da Peninha, with the weather changing minute by minute. Cold enough to feel in the fingers. Clean enough to wake the lungs. The kind of day that reminds a boy, without words, that the world is bigger than comfort. Along the way we passed trees that had been taken down by the wind. Some were so large it would have taken four of me, arm to arm, to circle the trunk. They lay where they fell, roots torn from the ground. It was good for the boys to see the force that had done that, and the aftermath it leaves behind. Not far off the path, two small wild horses grazed on the mountainside. We watched them for a while and wondered aloud what it would have been like to live that way, exposed to the wind and rain, needing to find shelter and food through attentiveness and cunning. Survival was no longer an idea. It was standing in front of us. At the top we entered the Ermida de São Saturnino, a small mountain church close to a thousand years old by local reckoning. We walked through it slowly. Its condition had worsened since the last time I had been there. What had once shown traces of plaster and painted walls had peeled away, leaving stone and decay behind. I spoke with my sons about the care required to preserve beautiful things, and about what is lost when a people forget where they came from and allow their inheritance to crumble. When we stepped back outside, the views opened wide in every direction. Massive rounded boulders lay scattered across the mountainside, some the size of a car, others as large as a small house. I pointed them out and explained how they had been carried and shaped tens of thousands of years ago by enormous ice sheets that once pushed across Europe, grinding stone smooth and depositing it here near the edge of their advance. I asked my oldest to imagine a wall of ice thirty or forty meters high, moving slowly but relentlessly toward us. To imagine standing in front of it as a Stone Age human, watching the world you knew disappear under cold and silence. For the people who lived through that time, it would have felt like the end of the world. In many ways, it nearly was. Most life was wiped away. Much of Europe was emptied. And yet we survived. Humanity endured generations of winter, ice, and scarcity. Standing there, above the forests and stone, that fact carried weight. If our ancestors could endure that, we can endure the ordinary difficulties that meet us in our own lives. That matters. Why places like this matter to children Children do not primarily learn from what we explain. They learn from what we show them. Before a principle can be understood, it has to be lived. A child needs to feel the wind, the distance, the effort, the weight of the world pressing back. Only after that does the mind open to the deeper questions of why things are the way they are. You demonstrate first. You let them experience it. Then, later, words can land. A dramatic landscape teaches proportion. Wind teaches resistance. Cold teaches presence. Distance teaches effort. None of this is abstract to a child. It enters through the body first, and only afterward settles into understanding. A principle offered without experience has nothing to attach to. It remains hollow. We are not built to understand what we have not encountered. When a boy walks uphill in weather that does not bend for him, something aligns. He learns that the world is real, that his father is competent inside it, and that effort has meaning. You do not need a lecture for that. You need to go. Fatherhood is lived out in the world Modern fatherhood has become dangerously compressed. Too much time inside. Too much talking. Too much management of feelings detached from reality. Men sense that something is missing, but often cannot put their finger on it. What is missing is shared exposure to the real world, terrain that cannot be negotiated, weather that cannot be reasoned with, paths that must simply be walked. When a father takes his children into real places, he is doing more than spending time with them. He is saying, without announcing it: “This is the world. I am at home in it. You will be too. ” That message lands deeper than reassurance ever could. Why I build memory, not entertainment I am not trying to entertain my sons. I am trying to form them into men. Years from now, they will not remember every conversation we had, but they will remember days like this. They hiked the entire way, up and down, across loose, fist-sized rock, without complaint. They sang. They smiled. They enjoyed the cold air and the wide views. Halfway up we stopped briefly for a simple snack: bread, butter, and water. Food meant to answer hunger on a long walk, nothing more. They will remember who they were when they were with me. Cold hands. Fast clouds. Stone walls. A steady pace. A father who knew where he was going. Those memories become internal landmarks. They are recalled later, often unconsciously, when life becomes uncertain. A man who has been led well through real terrain carries that map inside himself. This is where 52 Letters to My Son comes from Experiences like this are not separate from my work. They are the source of it. 52 Letters to My Son exists because fatherhood deserves structure, not improvisation. Most men love their children deeply. Few men have been given a clear framework for translating that love into long-term formation. The program does not replace moments like this. It anchors them. Each week, fathers slow down long enough to ask: What did this mean? What did my child see in me? What do I want them to understand later, when I am no longer beside them on the path? Then they write. One letter at a time. Calm. Deliberate. Grounded in lived experience, not theory. Over time, those letters become something powerful: a written map of a father’s mind, values, and steady presence. An invitation You do not need to hike in Sintra. You do not need ancient stone or Atlantic wind. What matters is leaving the house and living with your children. Life is not formed by sitting indoors all day. Children do not grow strong, capable, or grounded through screens and simulated worlds. They grow by moving, by going somewhere real, by sharing experience with a father who is present and engaged. Your children are forming whether you are deliberate or not. The only question is whether you are willing to father on purpose. That is what 52 Letters to My Son is for. Not to make you perfect or a uniform clone of some ideal of fatherhood. But to help you become the kind of father whose presence your children will carry with them, long after the walk is over. Find 52 Letters to My Son at http://themetafather.com