[SPEAKER_01]: What's up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls around the world, welcome back to Real Talk with Zubi.
[SPEAKER_01]: On today's episode, we have got a guest on who I've been following for many years, although I haven't had him on the podcast yet, I've been looking forward to this one.
[SPEAKER_01]: He is a family man, he's an entrepreneur, a military veteran, an author, a public speaker, this man does a lot of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is the one onel me, Nick Freydus, welcome to the show, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, thanks for having me on, Zubi, it's an honor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Nick, I know that a lot of my audience are going to already be familiar with you in your work, but for those who aren't, just give a little intro.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and I've been married to my high school sweetheart for 27 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: This past Friday, we have three grown children now, two daughters in a boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Join the military rat at a high school, serve with the 82nd Airborne Division, the 25th Infantry, and then serve with army special forces, kind of.
[SPEAKER_00]: colloquially known as green berets, and I racked a couple of tours over in Iraq, got out of the military and ended up running for public office like a moron and served served 10 years in the state legislature in the Virginia House of delegates, which was a tremendous honor.
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually got to represent James Madison's district who's the father of our constitution.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I was in politics, I started to get involved more in social media and part because I realized that the press was never going to give me a fair shake or even quote me correctly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I realized very quickly that if I actually wanted people to understand what I was doing, what bills I was carrying, why I was voting the way I was, or just kind of what was going on behind the scenes and politics, I needed to go directly to the people.
[SPEAKER_00]: because I felt like the press had a real agenda.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I started to learn very quickly that there was definitely a hunger for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I've been doing social media ever since.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now it's something of a full-time job for me, along with being a husband and a dad and other things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, a social media, something you ever thought that you'd find yourself in.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I do remember I was in the I was in first special forces group in the in the early 2000s And I remember when I got my first my space account and I thought oh, this is this is kind of interesting, you know, then Facebook
[SPEAKER_00]: But no, I didn't, I didn't think it would ever be something I would do as a quote unquote occupation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember the first time I got introduced as a state legislator and social media personality.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I looked over at the house, I was like, what the hell did you just call me?
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, I think it has proven to be a very, very powerful and effective tool, and like I said, for me, it kind of exploded all at once in 2018, there was a really heated debate that we were having around the second amendment around guns and
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, the press, the other side of theologist totally took me out of context, light about what I said, and being able to go on and just all I did was publish my speech.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, here's what Washington Post is saying I said.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what the Richmond Times and Spatches saying and what I said.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's what I actually said.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it kind of exploded.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got to think over across social media.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got around a hundred million views.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where I realize like, okay, I have an enormous opportunity here to be able to tell people exactly what's going on from my perspective, and that's where it kind of all started.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've seen the journey a little bit over the last few years just like I know you've seen mine and I want to ask you a question which for the last six or seven years I've kind of been wondering myself about my own sort of rise in popularity on social media and this is why do you think what you do and say online resonates with so many people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think part of it is people see it as authentic, because I usually am just sharing kind of stories and perspective where things I learned.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not constantly going on there trying to preach it, everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's more of an idea of
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what I've learned through these different environments, these different occupations I've had, and these different experiences I've had.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's also the willingness to say things that may be culturally unpopular, but people recognize as being inherently true.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's been, I think that's a big part of why.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason I say that is because of what people stop me in the airport and say they appreciate about my content.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, the other thing too is I think I get very real about talking about being married, talking about being a husband, talking about being a girl dad, talking about raising a son.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as I show those experiences and things I've learned the long way, especially now since my kids are all grown.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of young fathers, young parents that kind of appreciate the insight as they're about to go down the journey I've already been through.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think all of that kind of combines to, again, that's what I get thanked for, but people who meet me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's what I think it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know for your channel, one of the things I really appreciated was one, you were willing to say things that were culturally and popular at the time, but weren't inherently true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've always seen you being able to do it in a very authentic way, but also in a way that was funny, but hopeful, like you're not a black pill, sort of a guy where it's like, oh, everything's doomed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think people appreciate that, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they appreciate healthy optimism.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't want to be told that everything's fine and just calm down.
[SPEAKER_00]: They want things to be properly addressed and discussed.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they also want to know that the sky isn't falling every five seconds.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know that's one thing I've always appreciated about your content.
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, there's something you were just saying there, which I can, especially over the past year, really relate to, which is being a young father.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, I had my first first son last year when this video comes out, he'll be hitting one year old, Lord willing, my wife and I plan to have many more, as many children as the good Lord will give us.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I hope that we get many, many more.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I definitely wanted to talk to you about that because,
[SPEAKER_01]: one year.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm in a new marriage.
[SPEAKER_01]: First marriage, if I say a new marriage, because someone might think, I was previously married or something, but I'm new to being a husband and I'm new to being a father in the grand scheme of things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, I'm blessed to be able to talk to my parents about this because they're going to celebrate 50 years this year, and you know, I'm one of five kids and they have 11 grandchildren so far, so
[SPEAKER_01]: Their veterans in this, but it's so good to talk to older men and women who have just been doing this for a longer time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I get the sense that particularly when it comes to marriage, relationships in general, and also to parent head to some degree, but certainly with male female relationships, it's one of those topics where I think that almost everybody is lying almost all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: everyone has an incentive to lie, everyone has an agenda and it's also one of the only topics where everybody also feels qualified to speak.
[SPEAKER_01]: So whether you, so whether you're unmarried, married for a long time, divorced, happy, sad, old, young, male, female, every single person.
[SPEAKER_01]: can participate in this conversation, but I just think that due to sensitivities and not wanting to upset people, of course.
[SPEAKER_01]: But also just people's own agendas and incentives.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's quite rare to find people who just honestly speak about the reality of it all.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I really appreciate the fact that you do.
[SPEAKER_00]: yet no it's it's amazing how much bad advice there's there's two areas i think you're right um politics and marriage uh and and raising kids are three areas where people who have either had just horrible records or no experience at all feel infinitely qualified to offer advice to everybody else
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's critical because when you think about, when you think about marriage, and how it is fundamentally like the building block of civilization of society, you would think that we would be, we would have a little bit more scrutiny for what we believe and what we actually apply.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's shocking to me how many people treated as, well, we're just going to give it a go and if it makes me happy, great, and if it doesn't make me happy, well, then I guess we'll just split up and we'll divorce and we'll figure out how to manage the kids if we have any.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, this is like arguably the most one of the most important decisions you will ever make in your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my wife and I both come from families of divorce.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, we have great relationships with our parents, absolutely love our parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, I mean, on my side, my parents got divorced, remarried, divorced again.
[SPEAKER_00]: On my wife's side, they got divorced and remarried.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we got married at 19 and 20.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then we immediately, and I was in the military, which doesn't have the best record for marriage, and immediately moved to the other side of the country where we had no friends, no support network, no church, that we were attending.
[SPEAKER_00]: So whenever people tell me that, oh, you guys just got lucky, I'm like, you're on crack.
[SPEAKER_00]: We literally did all of the things that people would advise you not to do, you know, wait longer to get married and make sure that you have a good support network or team around you that's going to help.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just don't have any of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the question was, is okay, so how do we make it in 27 years in very difficult environments?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way I explained it to one person wants to ask me to say, well, we had a biblical worldview of marriage.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, well, what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, well, I mean, the Bible has a lot to say with respect to what my duties and responsibilities are as a man as a husband as a father.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has a lot to say about what my wife's duties and responsibility are is a woman, a wife, and a mother.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has a lot to say about what kids responsibilities are.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we decided, because we didn't have a lot of the ideal things modeled for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We decided that, okay, we're gonna take this seriously, and we're gonna act in behave as if it's all true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that doesn't mean we perfectly executed all of it, but it's shocking how the successful the results were under very less than ideal circumstances.
[SPEAKER_00]: But and there's a lot of things I learn through that and it's one of the reasons to whenever I talk about marriage, I again, I don't do it from this kind of like preachy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, just follow these five steps and everything will be fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, no, there's there's there's going to be a lot of buffs of the road.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's going to be a lot of figuring things out along the way, but one of the things I can say in Jordan Peterson, I think articulates this well too.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something about
[SPEAKER_00]: this idea of making a commitment to another human being that you're very serious about, which is to say that it is you and I till we die against the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we will make it, we will have each other's back, we will see each other through, you know, in sickness and health, for richer, for poor.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my wife and I have really experienced that, and we did learn a lot of important lessons along the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorite things to tell young men, I said, if you're listening to a married man, and you get this advice a lot from men when you're first getting married, they're like, look.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna teach you two words right off the bat.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're gonna make your life so much better.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, dear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just, you know, whenever your wife is upset, just say yes, dear and do what you say, do you wanna win the argument?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or do you wanna happy marriage?
[SPEAKER_00]: And when I tell young men as that's some of the worst advice you could ever take.
[SPEAKER_00]: treating your wife like a petulant child that has to be managed or conducting yourself in such a way to where you don't have any say or you don't lead or you don't argue or fight for the things that you believe in is a horrible way.
[SPEAKER_00]: to to govern your marriage because right off the bat she's not going to respect you and she needs to respect you for both her sake and yours and you not willing to actually engage with your wife and have those discussions and really work it out is not showing love to her and she needs that and so do you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's so many things like that where I just wrote a book called The Man Book where I talk, I have one chapter where I say how to win an argument with your wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as soon as people saw that chapter, they're like, oh, so it's a fiction book.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, no, no, it really, you really can do it, it really does work.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I know, I'd kind of went off on a rant there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, it's, I,
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't explain, marriage is one of those things where it will either be horrible and dreadful and you will regret it, or it will be just an absolutely wonderful thing upon which you will build the rest of your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the decisions you make, the decisions you make before you get into marriage and the decisions that you make when you get married and the decisions that you make afterwards, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: I would determine all of that, and that sounds obvious, but it's amazing to me how many people start off marriage horribly because they started off the whole concept of dating horribly, and then when they got married, they thought it was all about the wedding, and they were just kind of, and then once they get into conflicts, it's like, oh well, I didn't expect this.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was supposed to make me happy all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if it doesn't make me happy and adequate amount of time, well, then my job is to leave.
[SPEAKER_00]: As opposed to saying, well, no, I'm going to experience far more joy and peace by actually working through issues with this other person I've dedicated my life to.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what's going to help us actually navigate the bad times and come out of the other side, far stronger, far happier, far more knowledgeable, far more wise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, man, there's a lot there.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's very, we live in a very strange and confused culture in so many ways and this topic which is a very important one because it's the sort of basis of family and therefore the entire society and nations.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think it's a huge shame the way that marriage has declined, not just in terms of people getting married, but also just the perceptions and expectations around it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's this strange self-perpetuating cycle because
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when I hear certain people talk about marriage and what it means or what it doesn't mean and how people should respond and react to things, it's quite scary how few people seem to give it the degree of seriousness that I believe
[SPEAKER_01]: It is supposed to have, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of just treated as extended dating.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you constantly see the things of, you know, people will very openly say, I've even heard, you know, people who are supposed to be people of faith, you know, just say things, oh, you know, like, why would you stay in a marriage if you're not happy or like why it?
[SPEAKER_01]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: It's happiness is a weird thing because yeah, you should you should be happy in a marriage.
[SPEAKER_01]: You should be happy in these situations, but this sort of idea that you're just all the time supposed to just kind of be on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cloud Nine, there's never meant to be any arguments and men and women are never meant, you know, husbands or wives are never going to get frustrated with each other and I don't know, it's just treated very flippantly and even in situations where their situations where there are children involved.
[SPEAKER_01]: So many people, particularly online, but even in real life, they just talk about it so with such a disposability.
[SPEAKER_01]: and I'm not surprised that when young men and young women who are not married and perhaps are thinking about it, when they see those kind of conversations or they witnessed what perhaps even happened with their own parents or people around them or their aunties or their uncles and they see how
[SPEAKER_01]: sort of disposable it all was this isn't even getting into all the issues with family courts and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not difficult for me to see why they're just like, I don't know if the juice is worth the squeeze.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the other thing that has to be understood is that there's been there's been kind of a cultural and political attack on marriage or very, very concerted one going on for, I mean close to 200 years now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if you read Karl Marx, if you read Engels, they were very anti-marriage.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anti-marriage,
[SPEAKER_00]: Sex was something to just be kind of like promiscuity was something that they celebrated.
[SPEAKER_00]: They felt that the biblical of the traditional institution of marriage was patriarchal in a negative sense at the same time that it was oppressive toward women.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see this reflected within the feminist movement as well when you read people like Simone de Beauvoir where she said that women should not be allowed to choose to be a wife and mother
[SPEAKER_00]: And in Simone de Beauvoir wasn't just some crazy redditor, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: She was a very influential movement or influential person in the feminist movement.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you see that there was a concentrated political and cultural movement to try to denigrate the institution of marriage.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you see that it was uniquely targeted toward women.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, it's not hard to understand why so many people now have a jaded view of marriage and why more and more young men have a very, very jaded view of marriage, where it's what's the point of me getting married to someone that can at any point choose to leave me take my kids and force me to pay her while she sleeps with somebody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, when you categorize it that way, why would you assume that level of risk, especially when a lot of the marriages you might see around you in and divorce, or not particularly happy?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the thing that I would ask people to consider is, okay, but why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why was there such a conservative effort to denigrate the institution, which has been the building block of civilization for thousands of years of recorded human history?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's somewhat foolish to say, yeah, we know that this carried us through thousands of years and floods and wars and famines and everything else, but this complete degenerate deadbeat Karl Marx has said that it's really, really bad and so, but then you added it out like the family court component, you add this idea where the state has increasingly tried to play the role that was typically paid by the father.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you take all of that, and you also take it to consideration legitimate grievances, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Legitimate disparities, which took place, legitimate problems, and it's not hard to see why so many young men now have a very, very critical view of marriage.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I would offer as the kind of counterpoint to that, the counter argument to that is, again, the thousands of years of human history where we've seen this as the building block of civilization,
[SPEAKER_00]: Part of the reason why marriages are failing right now is because they're starting off with a completely inappropriate and accurate worldview.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it goes back to what we were saying before.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you view marriage as it is your job to make me happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, then you don't love that person.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a selfish thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're taking another person and you're using them physically emotionally, spiritually, whatever it is in order to fill some sort of gap in your own life for personality or relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're supposed to make it better.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then of course, when they don't make it better, well, then yeah, of course you trade them out for somebody that will make them better.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is is that as you're doing this to other people, they're doing it to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so now we treat people as commodities.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we treat the deepest, most important relationships that we're supposed to have as some sort of commodification of that relationship itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas if you take the opposite view, if you say, no, no, part of what I'm sorry, wait one second.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got all that background noise.
[SPEAKER_00]: I apologize.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas if you take the view of, well, no, I'm going to look at this as something where, yes, this other person makes me happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a physical attraction there.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's an emotional tie.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's intellectual attraction.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's spiritual connection.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever it is, I have now fallen in love with this person.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I haven't just fallen in love with their body.
[SPEAKER_00]: I haven't just fallen in love with how they make me feel.
[SPEAKER_00]: I fallen in love with who this person genuinely is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to make a commitment to them where we're going to race kids together, we're going to fight through all the things and there's no exit strategy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once you have that sort of commitment to another person and they demonstrated to you as well, it changes the whole dynamic of how you approach problems, how you approach communication, how you approach everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you go into it though, and this is one of the reasons why one of the most unpopular pieces of advice that I give people is do not get physical while you're dating.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't mean you can't hold hands or hug or kiss or whatever, but if you were getting sexually active with a person before you're married, a lot of people look at that, the modern thing is, well yeah, you gotta try to see if you're sexually compatible.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's absurd, like that's horribly ridiculous and the reason why is because if you truly love and respect another human being and you want to commit your entire life to them,
[SPEAKER_00]: Part of the fun of being married is figuring out what you both like on the physical side, and it's really easy to figure out when you're not bringing a bunch of baggage in with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you've spent a good portion of your life trying out a bunch of other people and now you settle for one, now you're constantly comparing their constantly comparing and it's problematic.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other reason why it's a problem is not just because of the baggage it causes, but I think especially for men,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean it's true right there's an element of truth that they hot crazy matrix and you will see guys that will They'll get involved with the girl because they're physically attracted to it, which is important right physical attraction is important But then they immediately jump into bed Which right off the bat is a bad sign because it doesn't show good discernment on on either person's Part and then all of a sudden they start to ignore the things that will cause problems and marriage because they're chasing after the physical
[SPEAKER_00]: So they haven't had fallen in love with who that person is, they haven't fallen in love with what they think or what they believe or how they see the world or what their hope streams and ambitions are.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, they've just fallen in love with their body.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so now when they get into marriage and all of a sudden the real hard questions come up to play, you're not going to solve everything with sex.
[SPEAKER_00]: You will solve something, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're not going to solve everything with sex.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you didn't actually fall in love with who that person was.
[SPEAKER_00]: You fall in love with how they
[SPEAKER_00]: The other piece of advice I always give to young men is if you've never had a serious disagreement with your girlfriend or your fiance something where you guys really had to work something out you're not ready to be married
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you should actually understand how do they think and how do they process information?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do they deal with conflict?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do they argue?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll see men all the time where they look at them and like, well, I can never win an argument with my wife because she's never wrong and the whole, okay, did you have any arguments for you got married?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we'll know when we were, when we were dating, everything was great.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, because you were both putting on a show for one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: You were actually hiding some genuine aspects about yourself, your past, your experiences, the way you viewed things, you were putting it on a show, and now you got married, and now the marriage begins, and you can't put on the show 24-7.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you don't know how to deal with conflict between each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew that my wife was capable of logical and rational debate before we ever got married.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we discussed important issues before we ever got engaged.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the same token, I've also realized something.
[SPEAKER_00]: God didn't screw up when he made my wife the way she is, and the way that women think about things.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't mess it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't accidentally forget to make them more like men and the way they think.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my wife understands that God didn't screw me up when he made men to think the way they think.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the biggest things that we discovered is being a married couple is she's supposed to think about things differently.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm supposed to think about things differently.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when we come together as a married couple and we think about things together, she has certain advantages.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have certain advantages that we are able to use in concert with one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the recognition that marriage is not a competition between husband and wife, it is a cooperative agreement between husband and wife that makes us both better throughout the process.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that actually recognizes how you deal with conflict.
[SPEAKER_00]: It also appreciates that you have different ways of seeing things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you use these things to your advantage because those differences in the way that men and women think have negative and positive manifestations.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what you want is for both the positive manifestations of the way a woman things and the positive manifestations of the way of man thing to come together to work in concert with one another in order to solve problems that you would never be able to solve with the same effectiveness or efficiency if you're only using your manner of thinking.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, how do you figure that out if you've never had a serious discussion or disagreement or argument with the person that you want to marry.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's a lot of things like that that I talk about and I encourage young couples to explore before they tie the knot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because again, those are the things that say you're for success of marriage.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not putting on a show that eventually you will have to stop when you can't maintain it 24 or seven.
[SPEAKER_01]: Given everything, you just said there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know if you have some people have kind of clear guidelines on this or suggestions and other people don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what are your thoughts on the idea of how long a couple should date before?
[SPEAKER_01]: getting engaged and or married just generally speaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think it was, I think it was Josh McDowell.
[SPEAKER_00]: I might be wrong on that, where he was saying that he thought it was appropriate for people to date for at least a year and then have a relatively short engagement.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and I think there's something to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The going through the whole year together, whether you're officially dating, you're just, you know, each other very well, whatever it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something to that because you go through each season.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll give an example of this that my wife has said it's fine for me to share before.
[SPEAKER_00]: I learned that birthdays were hard for my wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason why birthdays were hard for my wife is because growing up her parents got divorced and her biological father would forget to call her on her birthday a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, I'm sitting here, it's her birthday.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, oh, this is a fun day.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is great.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna celebrate, and she's really dealing with some issues that she went through growing up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, they weren't debilitating.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was still capable of having a fun time on her birthday, but it was something that I needed to know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you'll get into those things every once in a while where you might have had one experience growing up, where Christmas means something different to you than it means the other person, or various celebrations or traditions or whatever else it might be.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes going through that stuff, going through a full year of that stuff and letting those things kind of manifest and learning about one another can be helpful.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can be instructive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, so that you can better know, you know, how you're, how this person that you care about grew up with the experience, how it impacts them, how it affects the, uh, how it impacts the way they think about things.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's all important.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the short engagements are also important in my opinion.
[SPEAKER_00]: mainly because, again, I have a Christian worldview, and I always try to stress people, just because I preach a biblical worldview, doesn't mean I've always lived up to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just think it's accurate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think sex is something that's supposed to be reserved for marriage, for a variety of practical and moral reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've dated for a year and you've been good and you haven't crossed those boundaries and now you're engaged, well, it becomes easier to cross those boundaries because, oh, we're gonna get married anyways.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think having a shorter engagement kind of relieves some of the maybe the potential temptation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Having said all of this, do I think you have to date someone for a year to get married?
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do I think you have to, you know, have a short engagement in order for your marriage to work?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do think these can be useful, useful guidelines in setting your marriage up for success.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing that I would say, and this is something that everybody, or I should say everybody, a lot of people contradict me on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those say, we need to wait, you need to go out, again, one of the worst pieces of advice before marriage people get is, we need to go out there and you need to experience the world and you need to go have fun before you settle down.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a horribly inappropriate toxic way to look at marriage because what you're essentially telling someone is go have a lot of fun, go do other things with other people and oh, isn't that exciting?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you settle down when you get married.
[SPEAKER_00]: You basically settle for that, okay, this is now the norm and whatnot.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I could look back and dream about the days where I was wild and crazy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't want to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't want to build a life and add someone to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to find the woman I love
[SPEAKER_00]: And I didn't want to go experience a bunch of other randos before my wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted this to be something special between us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want her to wonder if she's being compared to someone else.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to wonder if I'm being compared to somebody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, these are things that we wanted to keep within our marriage.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's the advice I typically give to people is, make sure that you fall in love with who someone is
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and then, again, I think you have to prioritize certain things about other things when you're talking about marriage.
[SPEAKER_00]: And faith in worldview are the most important.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're marrying someone with a diametrically opposed faith or worldview, it is not going to work out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't care how many common interests you might have as far as extracurricular activities.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't care how physically attracted you are to the other person.
[SPEAKER_00]: It really comes down to it when you have to navigate difficult situations and when you have people very, very different, faiths or worldviews, it just doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it becomes incredibly difficult when you start trying to raise children and raising them up and giving them sound advice and wisdom for the future.
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
[SPEAKER_00]: Spin it up time to get to know someone and truly know what they believe, why they believe and make sure that you guys believe the same thing, not in every aspect, but certainly in the most important fundamentals.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then make sure that attraction can actually survive conflict and difficulty and challenges with one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then at that point, they say, these people are like, aren't gaged for five years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, what are you waiting for?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't get that either.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't get that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do have a question Nick, given the situation with both your own parents and your wife's parents.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you guys got married young, 20 and 19, even by historical standards.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that would be considered on the younger end.
[SPEAKER_01]: How did you have that degree of combination of wisdom, insight, and conviction?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you can fast forward 20 something years ago, I'm curious as to how at the age of 20,
[SPEAKER_01]: everything you're saying makes sense to me, but how did you, how did you both have that level of conviction?
[SPEAKER_01]: I know I'm sure it's grown over time, but how did you have the wisdom to go?
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, you know what?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the way we want to lay this foundation for the remainder of our lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, I mean, I think the ideal advantages to watch something done correctly saying you know what to do right.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is something to be said for seeing it done wrong and knowing what you want to avoid.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not ideal, but it's always a question of,
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you choose to get out of the experiences that you have?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is another thing I love about your channel and the way you talk about things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always this idea of taking ownership of what you can control within a particular environment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my wife and I couldn't control that our parents got divorced.
[SPEAKER_00]: We couldn't control that we grew up in that sort of environment where there was things that weren't ideal.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there was a lot of things that were great about our parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am so grateful for my parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: I learned so much from them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love them deeply.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it was one of those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, OK, we're going to choose to learn all of the good, wonderful, proper things that our parents demonstrated for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're going to choose to learn from the things that maybe weren't demonstrated.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the question is, is, OK, then what do you use as a guy?
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the part where I go back to scripture.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you say this a lot of people think it's cliche, or it's just like, oh, of course, you I heard that in church.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: The world, culture, academia, they all have certain things.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're giving advice with respect to what dating should look like.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what sex should look like and what raising kids should look like.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then there's also the Bible and that's giving advice as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we decided we're going to believe in the Bible.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what we're going to believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we knew tons of people that believed what academia said, what culture said, what Hollywood said, we saw that and it never worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: Never worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were never happy with the results.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would so confidently tell us what we should do as their own marriages were suffering or their own relationships were a shambles.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the reason why they felt so confident what they were saying is because it was popular.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if it was popular to go out and sleep around or go clubbing or do these other things, well, that's what everyone was doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So clearly that must be what you should do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're like, okay, but we don't like the results.
[SPEAKER_00]: So who has marriages or who has relationships?
[SPEAKER_00]: The results of which we want.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we would look at them.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things we found in common was, well, first of all, they took the Bible seriously.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing is that they burned the ships, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole Cortez thing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: What did Cortez do when he got to the new world?
[SPEAKER_00]: He burned the ships.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because he wanted the crew to know that there's no going back.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're either going to make it successful or we're going to die here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my wife and I were very serious about that we are burning the ships.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no exit strategy.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no it is you and I that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, once you both have that commitment and you mean it will now all of a sudden you have to work things out and one of the biggest things you work out right off the bat is is communication and how you work through problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll never forget this one argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was two arguments that we had the first two years of our marriage, which were formative for both of us.
[SPEAKER_00]: My wife and I both liked to debate, were both passionate people.
[SPEAKER_00]: We both think we're right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you think that was a recipe for disaster, and instead it was a recipe for success, and here's why.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll never forget this one time, my wife and I were debating an issue, and I was starting to get a little bit condescending and my debate.
[SPEAKER_00]: us strategy and I remember she looked at me and she goes, I need you to talk to me like I'm the woman you love and to this day 27 years later I remember that moment of her saying I need you to talk to me like I'm the woman that you love and a couple of things were important for me in that moment one is I needed to realize that her and I had both come from backgrounds where he did argument divorce.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if I wanted to demonstrate love to my wife, but I wanted to have a robust debate, then I had to stick out my position.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to explain why I thought, a particular course of action was correct, but I had to do it in a way where she didn't feel like I was gonna bolt for the door if I didn't get my way, where I was gonna get angry or as I was gonna get physical.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had to make sure that I was moderating my emotions.
[SPEAKER_00]: in my words to demonstrate that no, I'm going to fight for the things that I believe are true, but I'm going to do so without causing you to have any sort of insecurity about my commitment to love for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was very formative for me and I always try to do that now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm always very, very careful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even when I'm very passionate about something, I choose my words carefully to make sure that nothing I say causes her to believe that I don't love her, that I don't
[SPEAKER_00]: And the moment she said it, I literally pulled out a bag and I started to pack it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she goes, what are you doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, you just looked me dead in the eye and said, maybe we did get married too young.
[SPEAKER_00]: That signifies to me that your thinking, maybe this was a mistake.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I may be mad about what's going on right now, but I never think this is a mistake.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she goes, no, no, no, I didn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't mean this was a mistake.
[SPEAKER_00]: All I meant was is that, you know, clearly we don't have all of the communication skills worked out between us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe that's because we got married young.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, well, Tina, you need to be careful about what you say, because I'm not responsible for knowing what you meant.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm responsible for reasonably interpreting the words you used.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that caused her to say, ah, Nick also came from an environment where certain terminology meant that this could be over.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I need to make sure that when I'm speaking to my husband, I'm respecting him and what I say, and I'm never causing him to think that I think he was a mistake or the wrong choice.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just those two simple things that we worked at right off the bat were, again, instead of saying, oh, yes, dear, or instead of her treating me like, you know, a child, we treated each other with respect and to treat one another with respect means that sometimes you have to argue through it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We learned so much about each other in that first year.
[SPEAKER_00]: And once we learned the lesson, we're like, okay, we've learned something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we're going to apply it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not going to continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over again.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to apply these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every once in a while we might slip up.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now when the other person says, hey, you're doing this, you acknowledge it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing that we found so valuable is,
[SPEAKER_00]: When you say that, okay, scripture, or the Bible is going to be a foundation for our marriage and what we believe about marriage, what it provides is it provides an external authority.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these people that say, oh, marriage is a 50, 50 partnership.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it is it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's garbage.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, you have equally important roles to play, but I'm the head of my household.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Scripture says so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now does that mean I'm a tyrant?
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely not.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the sort of leadership that I'm supposed to wield is the kind that says that my wife's safety supersedes my own.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Scripture says, husbands love your wives as Christ love the church and gave his life for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: What it means is to the extent where if we were ever in danger and there's only one seat left on the lifeboat, she gets to live and I die.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's my obligation, that's the level of responsibility that comes with that leadership.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now what it tells her is she has to respect your husbands and submit to your husbands.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that doesn't mean she has to submit to any immoral decision I make, not at all, because the Bible still has standard for both of our conduct.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what it means is like to the extent that we can't come to an agreement about a particular course of action, she has an obligation to not only trust me in making that decision, but then help me make that decision successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, when you say either of those things, the world tells you, oh, that's ridiculous, that's a patriarchy, or she's getting to run rough shot over you because it's all about what she wants and not about what you want, like no.
[SPEAKER_00]: We both have rules that we have to govern by.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the nice thing about having that external authority is that if I'm screwing up, teeny can come to me and be like, baby, scripture says this and you're not doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the response from me is not, well, I'm the head of the household.
[SPEAKER_00]: The response from me is, you're right, and I'm wrong, and I will do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can do the same thing to hurt.
[SPEAKER_00]: This blows guys' minds, where it's like, no, no, I can go to my wife and say, baby, this is scripturally not justifiable.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is incorrect, and you can't be doing it this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: She will look me dead in the eye and be like, you're right, and I'm wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are we able to do that when so many couples find it so difficult?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they either don't have an objective authority outside of themselves that they can appeal to.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all about their happiness or their emotions or their thoughts in that particular moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's about this idea of not being able to yield when the other one is objectively correct.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I don't have any problem telling my wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that I just go along with what she says when she's in fact correct.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's that I acknowledge that she's correct.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I was wrong, I acknowledge that I was wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she does the same for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because both of us have demonstrated the capability and capacity to do that for one another, it makes it easy to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because ultimately, I'm not fighting with my wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: My wife and I are fighting with a particular challenge.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the goal is for us to be unified on what the solution is going forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm not trying to defeat her in an argument or debate or of course of action.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're trying to find unity in that and then going forward in order to achieve it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, when you have an objective authority that you can both appeal to, it makes it so much easier to do all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's the thing that I would chalk up to our success.
[SPEAKER_00]: As we believed it was true, we applied it like it was true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even when we screwed up, we used it as a corrective measure to get us back in line.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a lot of wisdom there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love to hear that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting, Nick.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there are so many reflections came to my mind as you were speaking.
[SPEAKER_01]: And something that just struck me, which I think speaks to some degree of the sort of sickness of the sort of modern Western secular culture,
[SPEAKER_01]: which is that in almost every aspect, when it comes to health, when it comes to wealth, when it comes to well-being of the mind, body, and spirit, when it comes to relationships and marriage, we now live in a culture where to be successful in any of these regards,
[SPEAKER_01]: you have to go against what the norm is.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to go against the grain in every single thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the general mainstream culture in society will has a message when it comes to food and exercise or lack thereof when it comes to relationships, when it comes to marriage, male female dynamics, money and spending, and it's kind of remarkable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just like in order to be in shape, like if you do what the average American does,
[SPEAKER_01]: You are going to be overweight, out of shape, not able to do a pull-up.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to be in rough shape.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll probably be on a few medications, certainly once you're over the age of 40 or 50.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when it comes to taking care of your body, you have to go against the grain.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't eat like the normal person.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't exercise like the normal person.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to make decisions differently.
[SPEAKER_01]: When it comes to marriage, we all know, you know, the statistic is always up for debate, what the actual divorce rate is in America, but it seems to be somewhere between 35 and 55 depending on who you're talking to.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of those are too high.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if it's someone's like, well, actually, it's only 35.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like 35 is still a horrible number.
[SPEAKER_01]: You shouldn't have 35 percent of marriage is failing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's kind of interesting, it's just like in all of these regards, if you go with the flow, if you go with what society and culture and social media and generally sort of telling you, you are going to fail.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you treat your money like the average person and you're buying things you can't afford and you're eating out at restaurants you can't afford and you're going on so many vacations and you're leasing some expensive car when you're bank account can't afford it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're going to be broke.
[SPEAKER_01]: We often hear these stats of, I don't know, again, the numbers differ, but so an X percentage of people can't afford a $500 emergency or a $1,000 emergency.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whenever you see these numbers, like they're scary, 75% of the population or something like that is overweight or obese, and the numbers keep on increasing.
[SPEAKER_01]: and gosh, I don't even know if I have a question here.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just kind of find it fascinating like when I think back, I know we all can look back at history and maybe times we weren't alive with these rose-tinted glasses, but it seems like through certainly most of say the 1900s.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, if you did what was just normal, you'd kind of be okay, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you do what the normal person does, you'll be okay, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll be able to take care of your family, you'll be able to forward things, you'll be able to feed them, you'll be in decent health, at least relative to the time, you'll probably have a successful marriage because most people do, you'll probably have a bunch of kids because most people do, and now you have to just be like very, very conscientious
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think there's a lot to impact there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it really comes down to a question of world view.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me take a word we use a lot in America, which I think is when inappropriately thought about is that the source of a lot of our problems, freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you talk about freedom to American, it's like, oh, yes, freedom's important.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what we're fighting for, and that's what we die for, and that's what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all about freedom, freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was talking to go, I'm like, well, I definitely want political freedom, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to live under a tyrannical government.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe in the sentiment and the flaws and the lack of the declaration and dependence that we were created equal and that we've been in doubt by our creator was certain and a lot of rights that among these are life-living and the pursuit of happiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's what I've also found.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that one, while I enjoy my freedom, the things that have given me a sense of identity,
[SPEAKER_00]: My responsibility to God, it's my responsibility to my wife, it's my responsibility to my children.
[SPEAKER_00]: Getting married does not make you freer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet I am significantly more happier as a result.
[SPEAKER_00]: Having children definitely doesn't make you freer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet I significantly happier as a result.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I wanted the freedom to make the choices on who I married and all that, but I think it's important to understand that freedom devoid of responsibility leads us to licentiousness and degeneracy, not liberty.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing that I think is key in that is this idea of victim mentality.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I tell people all the time, I have known people who were legitimate victims of things completely beyond their control.
[SPEAKER_00]: but who didn't have a victim mentality, their attitude was that sucks, but hey, life ain't fair and I need to take control and I need to make good decisions so that I can rise above and I can overcome and I can conquer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those people are always more successful and happier.
[SPEAKER_00]: Regardless of their circumstances, always more successful, more happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've known other people that were, from the outside looking in, born with significant advantages, and yet they had a victim mentality, and their lives are always worse off.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't matter what financial advantages that they have or what social advantages that they have, their lives are worse off because of the way they view the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think one of the biggest problems that we have, and this is kind of a more feminine trait, and it's the feminine trait of trying to avoid harm.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the positive manifestation of trying to avoid harm is making good risk assessments, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not wanting people to be unjustly harmed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's wanting to be able to help people get back up.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's wanting to help people heal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are all positive manifestations.
[SPEAKER_00]: The negative manifestation is when you insist
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I see right now is the currency of the realm has become victim status in the West.
[SPEAKER_00]: The more victim points that you can accumulate within intersectional politics, the better off you are, the more moral you are, the more entitled you are to special privileges or subsidies or whatever else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the thing is is that victimization has almost become something that we worship as a source of morality and identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see this instantly when you look at someone's ex-profile, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Go on their ex account.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they've got all kinds of mental illnesses, everything else listed out there, it's like, OK, this is someone that's competing in the intersectional Olympics or the victim Olympics.
[SPEAKER_00]: Victimization is real, and it happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes our people are victims of systemically racist or sexist or bigoted systems.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the proper response to victimization is not honor its pity.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I see someone that's been victimized, especially through no fault of their own, might my instinct toward them is pity, not celebration.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, when that same person who has been victimized, rises above their circumstances, or learns from it in such a way to where they overcome it, or they help others overcome, that is where I render honor.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's very, very important because when you place honor associated with the victim title, or the victimization or the active victimization, you're encouraging more victimization real or imagined.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you place the honor at someone overcoming difficult circumstances or challenges, now you've placed the honor in the proper position, which is something bad happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've recognized what caused it to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've learned from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've developed capabilities, skillsets, to overcome these things or to help other people overcome it, that is an honorable trait.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think somewhere along the line, we developed this world view where everything is about freedom, everything is about me, everything is about what I can achieve in my happiness, and my self-actualization as Maslow would refer to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way that I achieve moral legitimacy within this particular society is I dwell on, and I make a critical component of my identity, every sort of difficult trauma that I face throughout my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think we need to reorient our world view to once again, remember, yes, political freedom is important, but I want liberty not like such a sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I understand that freedom comes with duties and responsibilities.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with respect to avoidance of harm, I can't bubble up the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bad things are going to happen, but each bad thing that happens, each challenge that presents itself is an opportunity for growth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to take control of the things that I can with an any given situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm certainly going to try to make it better, but I'm not going to allow bad things that happen or trauma that I experienced to become my identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to become useful tools that I utilize in order to get better.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you change those two fundamental things about the way people view the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think things get exponentially better over time because we're putting the right emphasis on what is worthy of honor versus what is worthy of pity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and I think that would go a long way.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would also argue that I want everyone to find Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, as a black trans woman immigrant who's neurodite virgin, I have to say that all of that was very offensive.
[SPEAKER_01]: Indeed.
[SPEAKER_01]: In patriarchal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it says the white man.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, my mouth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: How dare you?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what is interesting, though, is I do get the sense that, I mean, I've made the point several times.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been making the point for years that I do think that we're past what I call peak woke.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that it peaked.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd say about four, four years ago, four or five years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd say around sort of 2020.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if you think back to 2020, 2021, we were just like at the peak of all of the madness, whether that's the gender madness, the COVID madness, the BLM, white people bad madness, just,
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was crazy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have noticed I was actually going to put out a post yesterday saying that I've noticed a significant decrease in the amount of pronouns and mental illnesses and flags and hashtags and peoples bios because there was a time where I was like every third profile I looked at.
[SPEAKER_01]: She heard they, um, Ukraine flag, mask, mask emoji, hashtag BLM, like it's been a while since I've seen a profile that's kind of, maybe they're all on blue sky now.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, probably.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I was just speaking at a University of Washington Seattle, it's still there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: At least, it's definitely a lot more open to ridicule now.
[SPEAKER_01]: Totally.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think speaking about this stuff seven or eight years ago, it felt a lot more lonely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Still did it anyway, but it seemed a lot more lonely to be critical of some of these ideas, whereas now I think that the tide has just turned.
[SPEAKER_01]: In multiple countries too, I think the same is true in the UK.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's true in the US.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, maybe it's not true in Canada, but I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do have a question Nick, and I asked this particularly as father to daughters and a son.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you make of this increasing divergence in polarization that is happening with young men and women?
[SPEAKER_01]: not just in the USA, but it seems to be happening across the West.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're seeing women actually moving very strongly towards the left.
[SPEAKER_01]: Men, it seems like kind of slightly towards the right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like young men are gaining more interest in pursuing faith and going to church whereas the importance of that is declining for young women.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've seen some
[SPEAKER_01]: I always take polls with a grain of salt, but I've seen some things that are actually indicating that men in their 20s are actually more interested in marriage and starting families than young women of a similar age.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess two questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do you think that is happening?
[SPEAKER_01]: I know it's a big one.
[SPEAKER_01]: And number two, how do you think that plays out?
[SPEAKER_00]: Men are revolting against the narrative that they've been fed for the last 20 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for the last, especially last 15, it's masculinity is toxic, and we've had an entire generation of young men that have grown up under this idea within their public school system, within the university, within the Hollywood, and the revolting against that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was inevitable.
[SPEAKER_00]: The, you don't build a civilization by alienating young men.
[SPEAKER_00]: They will find their place, and a friend of mine, uh, uh, uh, Rudyard Lynch says that I think it's an African proverb that says that if if a, the men cannot find their place in the village, they will burn it down to feel the warmth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this was always going to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: The question is, is what direction will young men revolt in?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, thankfully, because of people like Charlie Kirk, I would argue because of people like yourself, there's a lot of young men that are revolting toward the idea of, I want tradition, I want faith, I want a wife, I want children, I want those things that they'd give men a sense of meaning, purpose and identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the problem is that the same time this is happening in the West, we have a very feminized church.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you're starting to see a push back on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see that with guys like, you see a more masculine church coming into existence, not at the expense of femininity, but in a complementary fashion to biblical femininity.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see that in places like with John Lovol, Josh McPherson, Josh Howardton, West off.
[SPEAKER_00]: Women were really targeted with this whole idea of family as a form of oppression.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where I go back to Marx and angles and the feminist movement.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just had an episode on this where I talked about how women have been specifically targeted for about two centuries now.
[SPEAKER_00]: That traditional marriage is, again, a tool of capitalist oppression or authoritarian patriarchy, whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the state was offered as a substitute for a husband.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, to the extent that you get married or you have a kid, you don't need no man, you don't need a husband, the state will intervene on your behalf and help you take care of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the state will intervene in order to ensure that you have access to opportunity or abortion or whatever else it is, in order to free you from the patriarchy, from tradition, from the Bible, from whatever, from many limitations, to include limitations that are just placed there by reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't change the fact that women can carry children to term and men cannot, that's not a thing it is what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what has happened over time as men of revolted and has been a found good role models in the form of like Charlie Kirk or yourself or John Leubler or others, they're going back to the church and looking for more tradition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was exemplified within a poll recently where they asked young men, I think it was between the ages of 18 and 29, they asked young men who voted for Trump, young women who voted for Trump, young men who voted for Harris and young women who voted for Harris and last election.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they listed off 13 different goals or priorities.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a young man that voted for Trump, the number one priority was having children.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number three was like getting married.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's because for conservatives,
[SPEAKER_00]: having children is synonymous with getting married.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the idea that you would just get married and not have kids is kind of a foreign concept to conservatives or the idea that you would deliberately have kids without getting married as a foreign concept to conservatives.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was number one for men having children.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was number six for young women who voted for Trump.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm going to predict right now that that's a lagging indicator.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think what will end up happening is if you went back and took that same test in about five years, because young conservative men want to have kids, you're going to start to see it become a higher priority for young conservative women, and in part because women traditionally conserved with the status quo is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you looked at young men who voted for Harris, it was set up.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was lower than what young conservative women wanted.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you looked at young liberal women, it was 12th out of 13th.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, here's what's important, understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one, they all answered the same way on their lowest priority.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was basically fame and notoriety.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think they all answered no on that one because they all intuitively understood that that's the wrong answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, if you'd said that fame and notoriety is my number one priority, it's like, okay, you're in narcissists, straight like so.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they all listen to that as the last priority.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then liberal women literally said, having children was the lowest priority for them, the lowest measure of success in their lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, that's because if you're a liberal woman, you fully embrace kind of a Marxist explanation of power structure, and you fully embrace the feminist narrative on what marriage is for, and the downfalls of marriage.
[SPEAKER_01]: Quick, quick question here, Nick, just to just interrupt to clarify something.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you remember, is this, was this asking about lifetime goals, or was it goals in the near future?
[SPEAKER_00]: knows it was like like how do you measure success within your life?
[SPEAKER_00]: And again so you see this huge disparity between the way conservatives answer in general and the way the left answers in general but then you still see that disparity between young men and young women.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so again I think the problem is that we have right now is most of the propaganda has been
[SPEAKER_00]: The propaganda has been directed toward young man in a negative way.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're the problem, you're the, if you only were more feminine, if you were more understanding, if you were less masculine, everything would be good.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the propaganda toward men is you are bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: The propaganda toward women is you're wonderful, you're excellent, you're in power, you're great, you don't need no man.
[SPEAKER_00]: that propaganda is a little bit harder to shake even if you think at some fundamental level there's something wrong with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so as young men revolt, I think women will come around to that, provided that young men revolt in the proper fashion, which is to say, I'm not going to be a barbarian that just becomes capable of taking whatever I want, or I'm not going to just, I'm not going to become strong, capable, and professional so that I can, you know, sleep at the ton of women and have a begotty, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to become that because I want to be the sort of man that can
[SPEAKER_00]: That sounded like that sounded oddly specific, specifically targeted towards someone.
[SPEAKER_01]: There aren't that many Bugatti's in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, men could revolt in an opposite direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: If men decide, you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I'm just going to be strong and capable and powerful, so I can take what I want.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, women aren't necessarily going to like that response, but here's the scary part.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately, there's not a lot they can do about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the things that is makes this particular time so dangerous and many people have pointed this out is that you can denigrate men all day long.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can say whatever you want about men, but at the end of the day, the reason why women have voting rights, civil rights, is because there were enough men who believed that that was morally correct and were willing to vote for it, supported, established, defended.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have a critical massive man that decide, you know what, this was a mistake, we're not doing it anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can throw all the protests you want, but you can't stop them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the revolt is happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's already in place.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say that men like us have an obligation to provide purpose direction and motivation for men to choose to not only be strong and capable, but also be honorable.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in order to do that, there has to be an external standard for objective morality and truth that we can point to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ooh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot there.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, on this issue and so many others,
[SPEAKER_01]: I kind of flip back and forth in terms of how I approach them sometimes, because I'm definitely not a black pillar, I'm not a doomer, a lot of people, sometimes people criticize me for being too positive.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I just think that it's the same with, I see a lot of talk right now about the birth rate crisis again in our countries, but across the entire developed world and even beyond that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I think on a long enough time frame, these situations just naturally resolve themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're not going to happen in a way that is going to sort of
[SPEAKER_01]: Please, everyone, or in a way that I even necessarily think is optimal.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would rather that millions or even billions of people don't have to go through certain types of pain or challenges or regret in order for them to kind of learn, you know, kind of contact to learn.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I just think that that's going to happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so if I think, for example, I've had on my podcast a guy named Stephen J. Shaw, who is an, I think he's originally from Ireland, but he lives in Japan, and he's probably the world's top demographer globally when it comes to birth rates and fertility and death rates and all of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a demographer.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is his job.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's done that for decades.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's got all the stats.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the most interesting findings, one of the most interesting statistics that I've heard him say,
[SPEAKER_01]: which I feel like almost nobody knows is that what's the best way to say this?
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you think of all the women at who are 30, who are not currently mothers,
[SPEAKER_01]: Half of them will go on to be mothers and half of them will not.
[SPEAKER_01]: The age where it becomes 50, 50.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is for all reasons.
[SPEAKER_01]: The age where it becomes 50, 50 is around 29, 30.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if we kind of extrapolate that, I don't know what the numbers offer man.
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, the age would be a little bit higher, but there's going to be some number for men, perhaps in mid to late 30s, where again, it becomes 50, 50.
[SPEAKER_01]: So ultimately, the future goes to those who show up for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if someone is just adamant on whether they're a man or a woman and I don't want I don't want to have children and it's not worth it and I don't want all that responsibility or I just want to be able to you know do do whatever else There's a part of me which you know if it's someone I know personally or I have some type of care for you know like I'll I'm more willing to kind of engage in the conversation and try to perhaps convince them or persuade them towards my direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of got into the point where I kind of shrug and I'm like, look, humanity is not going extinct.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, humanity is not going extinct.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think 50% of the births happening in the world right now are happening in Africa.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the country, my family, is originally from the median ages 20.
[SPEAKER_01]: The median age in Nigeria is 20.
[SPEAKER_01]: The median age in Japan is 51.
[SPEAKER_01]: South Korea's birth rate is down to like 0.7 or something.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have no connections to Japan or South Korea.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but there's something of in me as a human being that I feel like that is a huge shame.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I think it's a massive shame that a million more Japanese people are dying every year than are being born.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but it's, it had no, it's one of those ones where it's just like, look, I don't know how to, I have ideas of course.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think this particular issue, it's kind of like it's gone so far, same with the same with the marriage thing, same with lots of these.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's going to take some decades, perhaps a century plus, and you know, people will bear the fruit of their ideology and their behaviors, ultimately.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are going to be a lot of people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a, I had a tweet kind of go viral the other day where I said, I think it's, I think it's a strange decision to willingly choose to end your own bloodline, but it's not my job to stop you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I don't, I think it takes a lot for someone to kind of make that decision.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think for people who don't want to make that decision, but there are things and structures and systems that are making hard for them to achieve what they want.
[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely think we should do our best to try to address that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But from the ideological standpoint, I'm just like, look, you know, if the Mormons and the Amish go on and the evangelicals go on to inherit the US side then so be it.
[SPEAKER_01]: If, you know, this demographic rises and this one shrinks, kind of,
[SPEAKER_00]: So be it, you know, like I joke all the time that whenever you look at representative government, it's ultimately a numbers game and if you look at the average birth, the United States birth rate is below replacement rate at this point, but liberal women have a point five birth rate.
[SPEAKER_00]: and conservative women have a 1.5 to 2.
[SPEAKER_00]: 2.1 is considered replacement.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it means within one generation, we've got three times more conservatives than we do with rules.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I will say this all the time when people are like, oh, I want more people to choose to get married or choose to have families.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, I want people who have thought carefully about what it means to get married and to have families to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for the people that want to kind of perpetuate this nihilistic view of humanity,
[SPEAKER_00]: this self-destructive view of humanity.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I don't want them to just get married to do it, and I don't want them to just have kids to do it, because I don't know how many they're gonna abort before they get to one that they're willing to keep.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't want that to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I would like is for people to once get to have an appreciation for what is true, and then to do the things that actually provide identity, meaning, and purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, you're absolutely right.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are a lot of people that are self-selecting to end themselves in their bloodline, and I think that's horrible.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the same token, if I think that is the fruit of that ideology, to treat human beings as if we're a virus on the planet, to treat a man as if they're all just patriarchal tyrants, to treat humanity in general as if it's the source of the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a very nihilistic and depressing world view, and it doesn't perpetuate itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why wouldn't?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so yeah, I don't think we are so used to population growth growing exponentially, because in 1,800, the population of the world was a billion people, and by 2000, it was over 7 billion.
[SPEAKER_00]: What people are going to be shocked is we're about to live through a time where the global population is going to shrink significantly in certain areas, primarily the West and Asia,
[SPEAKER_00]: while it's still blowing up in other places like Africa, like India.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's gonna be interesting to see how people respond to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Elon Musk first said that, you know, depopulation was his greatest concern.
[SPEAKER_00]: People looked at him like he was crazy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then all of a sudden, you look at the demographic numbers and he realized just how quickly population shrinks.
[SPEAKER_00]: When all of a sudden you're looking at a drastic population drop in Japan where it's
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was China, by the end of the century, would be well under a billion people, like almost down, I think, 750 million, which is, yeah, that's like the entire population of the United States being wiped out in a great way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like 70 years, that's nuts, that's nuts, but it is the fruit of an realistic world view.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like you said, to some point, this kind of works itself out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now one of the things that I've said a lot about the United States is if you are pushing a political or social ideology, which doesn't
[SPEAKER_00]: Venerate the family or producing children will that you will buy necessity, lose power over time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unless you can import a new population and convince a new degree with you or make them dependent upon you as for political power.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or you can educate everybody else's child.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the prominent things that we've seen in the West is while the left doesn't have anywhere near as many kids as the right, they do fill the vast majority of teaching positions, professor positions, Hollywood positions, so they have a great deal of control over culturally shaping institutions, even if they're not reproducing in a way that would be above replacement level.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's gonna be interesting to see what happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe in fighting for culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, these things,
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they eventually will, and I feel sad that I think, I don't know, if I fast forward 20 to 40 years from now, I think we're going to live in a world where more people than ever, or a higher percentage of people than ever, feel a really sense of just deeper grit of making the wrong decisions.
[SPEAKER_01]: when they were younger, in a way that I just don't think that's ever happened before.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a concern to me, but I think it's just like, I don't know, people make their bed and ultimately, ultimately they lay in it, you know, the species will be fine, will be okay as humanity, and yeah, I don't know, it's an interesting one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's also an important point where sometimes people, because we have more access to
[SPEAKER_00]: both good and bad depending on how you look at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: One way of more access to information than ever before.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you were growing up in the 1800s, you didn't have instant access to everything that was going around the world in a heartbeat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nor did you feel any sort of obligation that you had to, were responsible for, I had to fix the world's problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: it is a more recent phenomenon that's such a large sector of the population thinks it's their obligation to save the planet, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Not get a job, but no, just save the, I can't get a job.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm too busy saving the planet, like, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's that whole idea of making everything into a catastrophe or
[SPEAKER_00]: while at the same time ignoring the burdens that you can effectively manage.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's one thing that's interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing that's happened in simultaneously is it's never been more easy to get cheap dopamine hits.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for instance, when a man says what's
[SPEAKER_00]: Why should I go through the trouble of actually trying to foster a relationship and getting rejected and going through it and not knowing what's going to happen next when I can just watch porn?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or why should I go through the trouble of actually building a career and having all these things where I could just disappear into video games or AI or whatever else it is?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's interesting how at the same time that
[SPEAKER_00]: On one side, people are taking on burdens, which they have no real capability to fix, while ignoring the burdens that they do.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also have this flood of cheap dopamine hits, which don't actually provide the purpose and meaning people are looking for, but they provide just enough of a response to stimuli or chemical reaction that it gives kind of like the cheap impression of relationship or the
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what's unique about this particular time in history that hasn't confronted us before.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before, if you didn't learn from your mistakes, you starve to death, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you didn't learn from mistakes, the barbarian horn tore down your city and killed you and sold you into slavery, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we're at a point where there is such wealth and abundance and general security, at least through the lens of world history, that people are allowed to kind of go along in this stasis.
[SPEAKER_00]: for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, it becomes easier for them to become nihilistic about the future.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wonderful part, though, is that the moment you accept that no there is truth, there is objective reality, and I have a role to play.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not here by accident.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not a random collocation of atoms.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a role to play, but God given role to play.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in so far as I seek that out and I'm doing it, there will be difficulties, there will be challenges, there will be struggles, but there's meaning and purpose and identity and all of those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the biggest thing I've had people ask me, you know, when I, you know, I was no longer a green beret, right, I was no longer a member of a elected office.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's always like, well, did you have a sense of loss?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you have a sense of loss of identity?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was proud of being a green beret, I was proud of being and a member of the Virginia House of delegates.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was proud of other accomplishments or accolades or credentials, but that was never the source of my identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: My source of identity is in Christ and that never goes away.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never lose it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when things are going great, wonderful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when things are going, you know, badly, I never anticipated that things would not go badly in some situation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I never lose my sense of identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never lose my sense of meaning or purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's what people are desperately seeking for.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is, is they've been given all the wrong places to look for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Man, you know, I was just thinking of what you were saying there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also think part of the reason why a lot of these things will resolve themselves is because I think human beings in general, and especially young people,
[SPEAKER_01]: are generally going to pursue and emulate what they see as being aspirational.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what's really you know so people are taking all of these different paths and as you said people now have a visibility not just within their own neighborhood or town but a global visibility of men and women of all different ages who have pursued these different life paths right so you're going to have millions who have taken the you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: hook line and sinker, they took the sort of nihilistic, hedonistic, libertine path.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we can see when I went there 50, 60, 70, even 80, we're going to be able to see how they generally end up.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're going to have people who have taken a more
[SPEAKER_01]: a traditional path or pursued a marriage and having children and grandchildren and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be able to see in the future, okay, like this is how this is all played out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think young people are smart enough to sort of look and discern and go, you know, I want to be like that guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to be like that guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that that visibility is going to, is going to, is going to help in a way, because
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, I just, yeah, in the past, people couldn't really see that, and I don't know, I think truth always wins in the end, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it doesn't always win incrementally, but again, reality is undefeated, because it's sooner or later, the consequences for not, what's the saying I can't remember who said it goes, you can ignore reality, you can ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: The big question is, do people come to the proper conclusions about what is causing them pain?
[SPEAKER_00]: And if they don't come to the proper conclusions, they can offer a really, really horrible prescriptions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what's going to be interesting to see is how quickly people can associate the bad policies or ideas with the pain and the longing that they're experiencing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to your point, the more people that emulate it, we can make it, we can make all kinds of good academic arguments, we can defend esoteric principles all day long and that's all good and fine and noble.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the real question is, are you living in such a way to where if somebody looked at the results of your decisions in life that they would want to replicate them, that they wouldn't want to implement them in their own life?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why, again, I'm encouraged by the fact, and I always tell people, I'm not saying be unaware about what's going on in the world or larger geopolitical problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: But understand the example that you're setting for your kids and the people around you is, first and foremost, set not by some wise thing you said about the war in Ukraine.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's said by,
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you managing your home?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you managing your own intellectual development, physical development, emotional development, spiritual development, professional development?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you managing these things in a way that provides other people something to emulate?
[SPEAKER_00]: And if the answer is yes, not only does it help them make better decisions about their life.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now, when you actually do want to talk about those larger issues, those geopolitical issues, because you've done the right things on the things that you can control, you're probably in a better position to actually impact those larger issues.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're certainly in a position where somebody is more interested in what you have to say about those issues.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if, again, if you're the sort of person whose life is just going down the toilet because you're spinning all of your time, ranting about, you know, climate change.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't, like, I don't have time to get a job and get my life together.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have a time to stop writing bad checks.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm too busy saving the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to be disregarded.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but that should be encouraging, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That should be encouraging is like, oh, great.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the things that can ultimately not only have the most meaning for what I'm trying to solve right now, which might be just how to pay my rent, long-term have the most meaning on the bigger issues too that we want to solve.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, I think what you get some encouragement from that.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, Nick, last question I want to ask you, and this is a very personal one, and I'm very curious to get the answer on this.
[SPEAKER_01]: As a father of a one-year-old son.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for any young parents who might be listening to this in your 20 something years of being a parent what are some of the most critical and tangible takeaways or bits of advice that might not be common wisdom would you have for raising kids in this modern world?
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we're going to say not common wisdom, here's what I would say.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a tendency when you start having kids to let the children become the priority, the marriage has to be the priority.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, that's not to say that your kid isn't going to require more of your time or energy of course they are.
[SPEAKER_00]: One year old can't do anything for themselves, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So of course, there's going to be more of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what your kids need far more than every single opportunity you could possibly provide or every soccer practice or recital or every Disneyland trip, what your kids need more than any of that is no that mom and dad love each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: because what you are actually projecting to them from your marriage is what do healthy, loving, respectful relationships look like.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when your kids see that, when the kids see that mom and dad not only respect one another, not only work together, but love each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm big one too, where I say flirt in front of your kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: flirt with your spouse and in front of your kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're gonna be grossed out about the same token, they're gonna love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It provides your kids such an enormous sense of security.
[SPEAKER_00]: when they know that mom and dad and the marriage is strong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because eventually what you're doing is you're teaching your son what to expect both with respect to his duties and responsibilities and his own personal expectations to be a husband and a father one day, you're gonna do the same thing for your daughters, God willing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just see so many people that they think that once they have kids, the entire marriage is there to serve the children.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while that's an important component,
[SPEAKER_00]: It can't be the totality of your marriage because otherwise it'll break down and there's arguably fewer things that you can do that will be harder on your kids than to break up that relationship between mom and dad.
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
[SPEAKER_00]: Spend the time, the energy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Definitely I tell young dads, you don't understand how important it is for you to have that like that strong contact with your child.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of times, dads are kind of like, oh, this thing's fragile and what I do with it, especially dads that grow up and maybe small families, you're in a bigger family, but hold your child, spend that time with them, challenge them, but never forget that your children will always be watching how mom and dad behave as husband and wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's one of the greatest things you can do for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, on that note, my wife is going to go to the gym and I'm going to take my son and take him out.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, now that's wonderful wisdom.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nick, I love chatting with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love what you're doing for the world and putting it out putting out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's incredibly incredibly important.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's
[SPEAKER_01]: So valuable, I know a lot of people tell you that, but keep doing it, man, because it's real and I've got a huge amount of respect for you and can't wait to connect in person.
[SPEAKER_00]: Big, big honor for me, because I've been a fan of yours for quite some time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So thanks again for everything you do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before we close out, tell us the name of your book again and where people can find it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, the book is the man book.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can kind of find it anywhere that you would buy a book.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've got like 53 lessons in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Things that I've learned that I think every man should learn.
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of it's very serious about how to have a serious discussion with your wife, how to have an argument with your wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of it's more fun, like how to properly kick an adore, or pick a good home defense weapon.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we kind of do all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, you can find the man book pretty much everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome, thank you so much, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.