 What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men, as patriarchs. There's nothing more natural than being a father. Welcome back to the 21 convention here in Orlando, Florida. This is the second Patriarch Edition in 2020. Our next speaker, I was just talking to him, asking him how he would like to be introduced. And in the humility that is often very typical of most men who have done a lot of things with their lives, he said, I'm a meat and potatoes kind of guy, that's about it. And I probe and I get a little bit deeper and it turns out he's spent 33 years serving in the armed forces, including some pretty high-level special teams stuff. He fought professionally for a little while. He's authored three books, two of which are fiction and one is a philosophy book. And having written a book myself, I can tell you that writing fiction and nonfiction are very different things. So that's an accomplishment in and of himself. He's got two daughters and is the patriarch and the head of his family, even though he's had to make this up as he's gone because he was raised without a father. So please welcome to the stage a man of many accomplishments, Mr. Terrence Popp. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I'm honored to be here. I'm going to be honest, when they asked me to speak to a bunch of fathers, I was like, holy smoke and Joe Frazier, how did I, how did I get here? Okay, how did I become somebody who is an example to other fathers out there? And it's been a long road and I'm going to go through some stuff here. I have a lot of stats, I'm going to tell some stories. But basically I am what I am. I do pretty much all of my stuff as a military briefing. I have briefed colonels, generals alike before and after battle. And it just is what it is. Alright, first of all, I already said, you know, did 33 years in the service. Now it wasn't all active duty because typically in the United States system, once you get to 30 years active duty, you're gone no matter what. 12 of that was Guard Reserve time, which ironically I did because I wanted to get married and have a family. Now if I knew then what I know now, I probably would have stayed on active duty and did even more, you know, cool high speed stuff since a lot of guys I served with back in the regiment went on to have very colorful careers in Delta Force and so forth. And, you know, I am, like I said, I'm a Green Beret. I served in 12th and 20th Group Special Forces. Those are National Guard branches of the Special Forces community. And Second Range Battalion, and I was with Company F-425, which was Lurse Airborne Infantry. Later on after I got wounded a couple of times and you start to slow down and that rucksack on your back just starts to get a little too heavy. They rotated me out, moved me over to Civil Affairs. I also worked as an intel analyst and also did Civil Affairs and I did Debel and Psyops. So I'm fully briefed on basically propaganda, which is going on today. Alright, now, so, like when I was in the Guard Reserve time, I worked as an investment banker, mortgage broker, real estate agent. I fought professionally as a kickboxer. I dabbled in boxing, which I did terribly. This was a lot of tricks of the trade I didn't get when I was young. But I managed to fight my way all the way up for a shot at the light heavyweight title of the world in the FFKA. It's a belt out of Pennsylvania. I was defeated in the 10th round with the TKO. I was cut too bad to continue over the left eye after he promptly shattered my ribs in the second round, but it didn't seem right to quit. And I'll get back to this point as we get along. Now I'm going to set the stage here of what we have going on in the real world. And the longer I start to talk, the scarier it's going to get. Alright, so first of all, we all know the stats, right? Now a lot of these stats are well-known, and some of them I did myself because I have friends of mine who work in the IT field and I have free access to a lot of Lexus Nexus and other legal softwares that allow you to do research in regards to cases and so forth. So 50% of first marriages are going to end in divorce. 63% of second marriages are going to end in divorce. And 73 to 75%, depending upon where you look, of third marriages are going to end in divorce. And 80% of those divorces will be filed by women. Alright, so just let that sink in for a little bit. If you sat down in front of an investment specialist and he said, hey, I got this great plan for you. Alright, if we sit down the first time, you might make it, you might not, but if you don't, you can lose half your stuff. And it falls through. If you go to the same person, he says, okay, same deal, but this time you lose half your stuff and there's a greater chance it's going to fail. Third time, okay, three out of four. Okay, everyone here knows how to do fractions, right? So what is half of a half of a half? That's an eighth. So by the time you get to the tail end of this third divorce, you're worth roughly one eighth of what you would have been if you had never gotten married. Now, I hate to be that guy to break it all down into dollars and cents, but I'm a logical person, I deal in reality, and those are the real numbers on the ground. Okay, now, if you get divorced and you have kids, 85% of the time, those kids are automatically going with the mother. And it doesn't matter if she's got convictions for prostitution, a rehab drug addict, I mean, I have seen all kinds of examples of the mothers getting custody of these children that should not get custody. All right, and that's just me being a rational person. Now, with my own stats, I backed out a little bit of... basically, I picked away at that number a few more times. Now, of that 15% of the time where men get custody of their kids, you're like, well, that's pretty good, right? Did you know 7% of that time is uncontested? So the mother doesn't even show up. So when you back that number out, it's like 93, 7, 92, 8. Whew, where do we have to go for somebody to go, wait a minute, wait a minute, this just isn't fair. It's 93, 7, but our media and our culture and society is silent to this fact. Despite the fact we have the Constitution of the United States, which in my opinion has been watered down to the point of being uselessness, especially in family court, but that's a whole other issue. All right, now, let's say due to circumstance you lose your job, get injured, get laid off of the economy tanks like it did in 2008, it's going to take you on average three to five times to plead your case in front of a judge to get your support payments lowered. And a lot of people don't know this, but the minute you get right around $5,000 in the hole, the prosecutor can hit you with a big boy felony. And if you're convicted, you're going to do big boy time with murderers, rapists, and all kinds of other individuals that may or may not deserve to be there. But you certainly, for losing your job, do not. All right, does this sound good yet? Are we enjoying it? All right, here's another one here. You're going to love this one. Did you know that if you get visitation rights with your children, and she decides that, no, I'm sorry, you're not seeing your kids, it's going to take you on average, go in front of that judge three to six times before they even give her a warning, and additional four to seven times before they even might give her contempt of court with maybe a $200 fine, or who knows, maybe she'll have to spend a weekend in jail. Now, in my instance when my ex-wife did that to me, I had my black belt in administrative violence, and I promptly called the cops. The cops showed up, and they said, there's nothing we can do, it's a civil matter. I said, you're right. But now there's a record of you coming to this property. So I would go to the police station, get the print out the next day, I'm at the courthouse, filling out the paperwork. So after two years of that craziness, I finally got called in to see the judge-judge, not the bullshit referee guy who doesn't really do anything. And basically this is the judge, he's like, okay, listen, this has been going on long enough. If I see you again, I'm throwing you in jail. Your Honor, I'm a green beret, I've done serious school, I have no fear of your jail. Do it. After that, we went back into the back room, and I wind up getting three weekends a month. All right? And I argued for Monday morning, which my ex-wife threw a fit over, and I said, Your Honor, why do I have to get robbed of the school experience? I got my three weekends a month. Even to this day, I'm still trying to fight for half the summer in additional two weeks. And if there's any attorneys out there who are willing to take Macomb County and Michigan into federal court for violating my constitutional rights, give me a call. We'll see if we can put something together. All right. Now here's another thing, and this is research that I've done on my own. Now, I run a nonprofit called secondclasscitizen.org, and the mission statement of that organization is to educate young men in the perils of marriage, divorce, and to keep people from killing themselves. Because in 2008 through 2010, every time I would hear a story about a veteran or a soldier who committed suicide, I would simply grab the article, copy it, paste it onto a Microsoft Word, do a find and replace, and I would look for simple words like divorce, a separation, estrangement, child support, I mean, stuff like that. 70% of the time, those words came up. So what is that telling me? That's telling me that the divorce court and family court are responsible or culpable in this rash of suicides that's taking place with your veterans and your soldiers out there. And this spills over into the male community in general. All right. Now, this number is going to blow your mind. Since 2002, since the start of hostilities, if you add all of the suicides up, there are more dead servicemen who died at their own hand, who died in Vietnam and Korea combined. All right. You go to any city. There will be monuments to the fall of World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, even Grenada. What about all these other men who committed suicide, who basically had their hopes stolen from the system as it exists today? Complete silence. Complete silence. I'm pretty much the only guy who's actually doing anything. I shouldn't say I'm the only guy. I'm one of the more vocal individuals out there. I made a video about this called Purple Heart's Final Beat. You can find it on YouTube. I won a couple of national awards. And that, you know, it hits home, at least to me it did. Now, if you have a smartphone in your possession, congratulations, you now have the equivalent of the Library of Congress at your fingertips. You can simply go into Bing or Brave or Google, dare I say, and search for the effects of fatherlessness. All right. And you will see it is nothing but a slow train wreck, a downward spiral for the youth of today. And this has been going on since the late 60s. It is packing our prisons, youth and teen suicides, skyrocketing, drugs, crime, failure to graduate, failure to thrive. And on top of all that, you have the crazy education system pumping into the youth of today. This Marxist American hating bullshit which needs to stop. That's another subject I'm going to move on. Okay. So can anyone say riots? I can, because that's what's going on. My takeaway from this statement here is simply this. Today, having a father figure in your life is of paramount importance. Okay. Because we are now in the fourth generation of men being raised by women. There's a lot of men out there who have seen their fathers, their grandfathers, and quite possibly their great-grandfathers get run through the ringer. Is it any surprise that the men of today are waking up and going, I'm not going to gamble in a casino that everything is rigged? The reproduction rates in the toilet. Marriage rates are in the toilet. And all I really can say is, thank God. Because when it happened to me, it was a horrible wake-up call which almost cost me my life. Because what most people don't know is that video Purple Heart's final beat. When I filmed that, that was going to be my suicide, because I'd had enough. Went away to war. I believed everything that this country had pumped into my brain pan. The Constitution. Everyone's equal. Everyone's fair. I get divorced. They take your kids. Made me homeless. I had had enough. Luckily, a former commander of mine went out into the Holly National Cemetery. Did the exact same thing I was going to do four days before I had planned it. So in essence, he took the bullet that was meant for me. Well, needless to say, I owe that man a debt. I can never repay him. And I try to repay it every single day that I do this. Perhaps one day I'll be successful. Who knows? All right, so we got here. All right, now we're going to get into some of my history. I had no father. My father left when I was four. Went back to New Jersey. And I hate to be the stereotypical guy, but he was an alcoholic and he was fairly abusive. At least he was to my older brother. And after he left, I only talked to him three other times in my life. And the last thing I heard about him when I was 37, he had died, broke his hip through a clot, had a brain aneurysm, and is currently smoking a turd of hell. But that's his inherent there. Now, I'm going to tell you right now, like the stats I just talked about, the fatherlessness, I was heading down that road, okay? I was doing bad shit. Now, I didn't get involved in drugs, but I was very, very creative, dare I say, criminal. I have a very high IQ. I had no supervision because my mother left at six in the morning and didn't come back until seven at night. And my older brother at the time was doing his own thing. So, I did things like, I don't know, assemble a Civil War cannon and fire it off in the middle of my backyard in the middle of the residential USA. And the cops all show up and throw a fit. And the only way I got out of it was, because it happened after five o'clock, I was like, oh, I was just saluting the flag. It was my salute at the end of the day. I got yelled at, harsh talking to. But then I built the tennis ball cannon, constructed an actual shoulder firing bazooka, which I made out of things I picked out of the trash, based on a schematic from the encyclopedias I had inside my house. I got caught right at the tail end of firing off the third round, right through the Kentucky-fied chicken barrel that I could see from my house. And needless to say, I received a harsh talking to from the police who promptly confiscated my additional ammunition, plus the whole platform. And they said, we're coming back here tonight to tell your mother, which they never did. Years later, when I went to that same police department to get a permit for a house I was working on, there was a display. And they show all the stuff they ever confiscated. And front row center is the bazooka I built when I was nine years old. So, you know, it is what it is. Now, I left that city, moved over to Berkeley, Michigan, and a horrific game of cat and mouse ensued with a man called Sergeant Penn, who was the head guy of the juvenile police department of that city. And I did horrible things to this man, like light off 10,000 bottle rockets in his backyard at 08.30 in the morning on a Sunday. Or I tied garbage cans to the back of his pickup truck and I tormented him several other ways. Now, I didn't know this was happening at the time, but this man was amassing quite the file on me. And I didn't really know until one day in the middle of 10th grade I got called down by the assistant principal to take the ASVAP, which is the Army entrance exam. Now, mind you, I'm in 10th grade. I blew that water out. I blew that test out of the water. And miraculously, I had an Army recruiter stocker for the rest of my career of high school. He knew which way I went home, where I hung out, where my buddies lived, which way I walked to and from practice. And finally, in my senior year, I was skipping school, playing video games. He stands over my shoulder and he's like, come on, Pop, how much longer are we going to play this game? Because there is no scholarship for a white boy with a 2.5 GPA. I was defeated. I said, I'll see you Friday. I showed up at 5 o'clock. By 7 o'clock, I was sworn in. After I was sworn in, he goes, I got to show you something, Pop. He pulls this file out from his desk, puts it on the table. Sergeant Penn had enough dirt on me to put me in the bad line 10 times over. He sent me to the good line. I never got to thank him because he died of cancer. And that comes to the first lesson of fatherhood. Don't fret over what's before you, what's going on right now. You look down the road at the potential that they can become because there's truth to this saying. It's better to be short-term means so you can be long-term nice. Okay? If Sergeant Penn had not done what he'd done, I would not have gone into the Army. More than likely, I would have went to prison or possibly died in prison or perhaps both. I touched a lot of people's lives. I saved a lot of lives. And I put my intellect and my abilities to great use. So thanks. That's good on him. All right. Lesson number two. Don't become a father too early. All right? I had no father. In my 20s, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. So I am glad I only did a bunch of rehearsing and I never actually got taken up on the offer of slipping one into past the goalie and starting a whole reproduction of bullshit. I'm just glad that never happened for me. But the leadership that I learned in the military got me ready for being a father. For instance, I had a soldier of mine who shows up 19 right out of high school working at McDonald's. I pulled some strings. I get him to work at a local aluminum foundry where he's throwing ingots into the fire, getting burned, having a hard time. Then we get the orders to deploy to Iraq. I could see the potential this guy had. He didn't believe it. In fact, every time I'd ask him to do something that was even a little complicated, he would look at me and go, sorry, what do I look like to you? A rocket scientist? I'd laugh it off. By the time we got back from Iraq, I had talked to this guy to go into community college. So he did. Graduated. Worked as a mechanic for Harley-Davidson. Worked his way through his four-year degree and got his master's degree. And guess what? Aeronautical engineering. In fact, his first name is Joe. I'm not going to use his last name because he actually has a pretty prestigious job. He's actually building components and rocket engines that quite possibly will put people on the face of Mars. All right? So you need to be able to do that. Yeah. Let life teach you the lessons that you can teach to your children when you're ready. Don't rush it. All right, number three. This is really important. Don't quit. All right? Most importantly, don't let your children quit on themselves. Listen, you are not going to win everything. You are not going to succeed at everything. In fact, who wants to live a life where you win everything, you bang all the prom queens, and you got a billion dollars? I don't think I'm going to live that life. It's pretty boring. How many best-selling books are there that has a hero that lives a life like that? They don't. It doesn't exist. All right? And you have to be able to demonstrate this. You can tell them to their face, you know, don't quit, don't quit, don't quit, but they have to see it coming from you. Like, my last duty assignment when I was moved from Michigan to New York State, my oldest daughter was 10. My youngest was roughly eight. And they got used to seeing me three times a month. And I had to tell them, like, hey, hmm, I got to go to New York. And they were upset. They were like, oh, we're never going to see you. It turned into a horrible tear fest. And I made them a promise. I said, I will see you twice a month. Not three, three times a little bit much, but twice a month. And for five and a half years, I drove 571 miles one way to hang out with my kids. I drove two cars into the ground during the winter when there was nine feet of snow towards Buffalo. I had to take the train. And let me tell you, the people who take the train, there's a whole different class of people. And that's some crazy stuff that goes on there. But until this day, you know, I hope that that example I serve for my kids moving forward will pay dividends because the ability to take the hardship, take the hits, keep moving forward and never quit, it means all the difference in the world. All right, now the fourth one here. And this one, for some of you, might not be important, but some of you might. You got to keep curiosity alive. All right, because things get learned better, faster and to a deeper degree when they're fueled with curiosity than any other thing in the world. For instance, I'm a horrific dyslexic. By the time I was going into eighth grade, I read at a third grade level. I discovered Dungeons and Dragons. I know I'm one of those geeks. What can I say? By the time I started ninth grade, I was reading at a 11th grade level. I'd read everything there was on that subject, the Dungeons and Dragons, every Dragon magazine. In fact, I spilled over to science fiction and I was running my own games and coming up with my own worlds and galaxies and different types of energy weapons. I mean, it blew people away when I would tell them. In fact, I'm thinking of writing a book about it, that's neither here nor there. All right, now, for the divorce men out there, and I'm one of them, in fact, most people are divorced today. Who thinks it's absolutely insane that your soon-to-be or your ex-wife decided she's not happy with some crazy dude in robes, clacks a hammer, and says, you know what? I get serious kids four days a month. Does anybody else? That is absolutely insane. Okay, and, you know, this little joke, there's this bad sex for a woman that lasts a couple of minutes. Bad sex for a dude that can last the rest of your life. You'll be paying for that for 18 to 21 years. 26 if they're in college, in the wrong state. So I think we're going to wrap it up there and move a few minutes shy, but I'll open up for any questions or answers. You guys got anything of me? Hey, Terrence, just one big longtime fan. I'm also a veteran, and unfortunately I've seen too many men just destroyed by divorce. For those who haven't served and for those listening online watching this after it's posted, I've witnessed firsthand the military use its own tools that are supposed to have members turned against them to favor some fat wife who cheated on them while they were deployed. So my question to you, and hopefully to the men listening to this afterwards, what tools can you look forward to? I mean, there aren't many there, but what tools can you try and look for to try and defend yourself when the rest of the system is arrayed against you? Okay, well, I'm putting together... Well, the answer is two-fold in this. Number one, I'm putting together information course called Administrative Violence. Number two, if you were in the military, the military is run by a very, very tight sense of regulations and so forth. And there are a lot that cover the soldier. Now, I myself had to deal with quite a few soldiers that were getting hammered themselves. And I can't tell you how many times I had a commander and first sergeant looking at some E-4 like, you're gonna give her all your pay, blah, blah, blah. That's not supported by the regulations. And I would literally approach the first sergeant and I'd say, look, specialist such and such does not have to give away all of his money and what you're doing is called Undo Command Influence. I am going to go to specialists such and such. I'm gonna give him a DA 1559 which is a request for an IG investigation into this bullshit. Okay. So, if that soldier doesn't have a chain of command that's willing to do that, he's gonna have to learn how to do it himself. And a DA 1559 is all fun and games until you fill it out and your chain of command gets a copy of it and you hear everyone's asshole slam shut because when that happens things will be done to the letter to the regulation and they will not cut any corners. It's a very good question. Anybody else here serving the military? All right. Okay, so we all are very well aware that there have been a rash of male suicides especially like you said in the last 20 years especially active duty guys. We're all strong men in our own communities. We're all looking around trying to do what we can to help locally. How do we recognize, I'm not a military guy, right? How do I recognize that military guy that's got the good image going and all that but secretly inside you think he's gonna off himself at some point? Where do we, how do we help, how do we improve that situation across our individual areas? What do we do? I'm gonna be honest, that is really tough because military men are really good at putting up the facade and most people like my former commander who killed himself four days before I was planning to do the exact same thing. He came in to talk to me like two days prior to that and I didn't even see it on him. That's a good question. I mean the only thing is to get as much face time as you can because there will be certain things that are said especially if that particular servicemen is going through hard times with his wife or is divorced. I mean that that pushes everything up way higher for the risk of that actually happening. So you might actually use that information as a preemptive, I don't want to say strike but it's more of a preemptive warning that he's at a higher risk of that happening to him. No problem, no problem. So I hope this is helpful for everybody at least for those that applies. But I have a partial custody arrangement and one of the things like the emotional management when I'm looking forward to that weekend and then something comes up she's getting older whether it's a birthday party or something for which she needs to be in her mom's area and like managing that disappointment when you're looking forward to that weekend and it just kind of takes the wind out of you. I'd like to hear just tips. Oh my god, yeah you're absolutely correct. My youngest is 16 now just got a car doing her own thing. So I look forward to having my kids with me all the time. Even the older one I'll pester her to come for Sunday dinner and stuff. But life gets in the way and to be honest as a father one of your highest duties is to prep your children to basically be self-sufficient. I know it sounds sad but that's the reality on the ground. When I'm 70 if I live that long god I hope it don't but I don't want my kids to be like 35 and still living at home and can't take care of themselves. I mean that is not good but yeah that let down could be pretty devastating and especially if that's happening because of parental alienation which is very common and if you think that's happening to you you take her ass to court and get that on the record because in my opinion that's a form of child abuse anyone else. Alright guys give it up for Terence Pop Thank you! What he represents is patriarchy We're here to do work as men as patriarchs There's nothing more natural than being a father