Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Present Fathers podcast.
My name is George. This is a very special episode.
I am very pleased to introduce you to our very special guest, Nick Freitas.
Nick is a man who has dedicated his life
to furthering the values that have made this country great on so many levels.
I respect him and have learned so much from him just across the Internet,
seeing his speeches and talking with him directly through this episode.
So what you're going to get in this episode
is direct from Nick, his views on how we saved this country.
His answer may surprise you on that one.
It's not through politics.
We cover many other topics, like his military service,
founding his family with his wife,
their marriage, how they've instilled values into their children.
And he gives a great deal of advice
that is very direct to fathers and men in general
for how to take back our country,
how to be an authentic man
who lives with masculine values in our current day,
and ultimately how to be the best version of yourself.
So you're really going to love this episode.
A humongous Thank you to Nick for his time and for his entire team
working with us to make this episode possible.
I know you're really going enjoy it.
We thank you so much for all of your support.
Do yourself a favor.
Follow Nick on all of his different platforms YouTube,
Instagram, Spotify, etc.
He is Nick J.
Freitas on all of those platforms,
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Whether that's Apple or Spotify or Google, you name it, please leave us a review.
We really believe in the mission that we are bringing forward in terms
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All right, enough for me. Let's get into the episode.
Thank you so much for all of your support.
We love you all, and we hope that you really enjoy this episode.
Welcome to the Present Fathers podcast.
This is the show that focuses on climbing the mountain of fatherhood
together.
We believe that dads matter.
That's why this show is for you.
So gear up, dads. Get ready.
It's time to start climbing.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Present Fathers podcast.
Our guest tonight is Nick Freitas.
Nick is a former Green Beret combat veteran
and he is a current delegate in the legislature in Virginia.
I know I'd messed up the title there,
so you can correct me in a second, Nick, on that one.
But he's also the host of the
podcast called Making the Argument, and we are very thrilled to have him.
So please welcome Nick Freitas to the show.
Nick, How are you doing, man?
Doing really well. Thank you guys for having me on.
Yeah, it's a real pleasure.
Real privilege.
Excuse me.
And just very excited to get to speak with you
on all the things that you know, really why we founded this podcast.
All the cultural issues that are stacked up against men and fathers specifically.
And I know that you share a lot of the same passions that we do.
So really looking forward to learning from you in this one.
So if you could start introduce yourself and a little bit about your family
and we'll go kind of into when when you started in the Army and go from there.
Sure. Sure.
Well, I so I've been married to my wife, Tina.
We were high school sweethearts.
We've been married for 24 years now to be 25 years.
Next May, we have three children.
My oldest daughter Lily, is 20 and actually engaged,
so she'll be getting married next June.
And then my son Luke is 17.
And actually, gosh, I can't believe I just said he just turned 18.
He's.
He's actually a man.
Yeah, I know. I know.
He's going to be one of two adults now.
He's going to be going into the Army most likely next year.
And then my youngest daughter, Ashley, is about to turn 16 in December.
So it was an interesting year for us.
My, my, my son turned my my oldest daughter is turning 21.
My son turned 18 and my youngest daughter is turning 16.
So it was kind of those, you know, milestone milestone birthdays.
But yeah, so yeah, Tina and I got married
again pretty much right out of high school.
I enlisted in the Army,
actually enlisted in the National Guard when I was still in high school
and then went active duty As soon as I graduated.
My senior year went off to a gorgeous Fort Benning, Georgia,
to go through Army infantry.
Basic training was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division as my first unit
and then served in the 25th Infantry over in Hawaii.
And then first Special Forces Group, the couple of tours over in Iraq.
But yeah, Tina and I got married less than a less than a year out of high school
and had all of our kids when when we were in the when we were in the military.
And we've been living in Virginia for the last 13 years now.
And where are you a native to?
So originally I resigned from Northern California.
And yeah, don't tell my constituents here in Virginia.
No. We grew up in a really beautiful, nice little, little place
in Northern California called Chico, and it's way up north and everyone.
So you say northern California, people go, Oh, San Francisco, No,
San Francisco's the Bay Area.
That's not Northern California at all.
We grew up in an agricultural area.
But yeah, that's that's that was our original.
We're both Tina and I were born and raised
outstanding.
So let's talk a little bit about the Army.
You did say you became a father while you're in the Army.
I guess all of your children. So
how was that experience,
especially your Green Beret at the time, I assume, when when they were born?
No, it was all before.
No, no, it was a little bit of both.
Okay. So my
we got to it was I was in the 82nd Airborne.
I got there in 98 and kind of went through,
you know, obviously went through like erm
old school sniper school ranger school that they could set
and then I was going to re-enlist because we had one battalion
that was going to Kosovo and at that point that was the only game in town.
So I said, All right, I'm going to,
I'm going to re-enlist and I'm go one battalion over and go to Kosovo.
My sergeant major got like really upset about that.
He's like, we've paid for you to go to Ranger School.
We paid for you to go to air assault school. You're not.
You can re-enlist, do what you want, but you're not going one battalion over.
So I said, All right, fine. And I was going to get out.
I was going to get I was going to go be a cop. My dad was LAPD.
And I remember coming home and my wife was like,
you know, babe, we really haven't planned to get out of the military.
Maybe we should say, why don't we do one more, you know, one re-enlistment.
They'll let you go wherever you want. Your first re-enlistment. I Right.
You want to go to Italy or Hawaii? She goes, I want to go to Hawaii.
So we go to Hawaii and like three months later, 911 happens.
I remember looking at her gone, Well, babe,
I know what I'm doing for the next decade, Right?
And so I waited for we we were I was waiting for the 25th Infantry to deploy.
That didn't happen as soon as I wanted to.
And then I actually lost two friends.
One guy I went through basic training with, one guy went to Ranger School
with very early on when that helicopter went down in Afghanistan.
This is like really early on.
They're both Ranger regiment guys.
And so I told Tina I was like, Oh, babe, I want to I want to volunteer for SFA.
I'll let you pick the group.
She wanted a group closer to home,
so I ended up picking first group and I ended up getting it.
But now we had our first daughter before I left
the 25th ad, Tripler Army Medical Center.
We affectionally referred to it as Tripler,
but Tripler Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii
was where we had our first, and then we had our other two kids.
When I was in first group over at Fort Lewis, Washington.
Gotcha.
So you had children before your first deployment, then?
I had my yeah, I had my daughter and my son
had just been born before I went on my first tour.
Yeah. Okay.
So this is something I can't really relate to
because I deployed and then became a father.
Did that.
How did that change your outlook as a soldier?
Oh, man.
Knowing now that you've got little ones at home,
not just the wife waiting on you, you know, there's this
I don't know if you ever seen that
they'll get as a mel Gibson Mel Gibson movie, The Patriot.
And there's there's this
scene where they're in like the South Carolina,
the equivalent of like the local legislature or whatnot.
And and Mel Gibson's character is kind of arguing
against this idea of like being too hasty and going to war.
And he has this line where he says, well,
you know, this this war will be fought on our home front.
Our our children will see it with their own eyes.
He goes, You know, I have a wife and children.
You know, what is to happen to my kids if I go to war?
And the guy responds that wars are not fought only by childless men.
And it's it's absolutely true.
But by the same token, when you're when you're overseas,
you still have a job to do. And
I had two kids,
my first deployment, my third deployment, I had three.
And I remember my my youngest daughter,
I was very blessed to be home for all of the deliveries.
I was very blessed to be home for all of their major firsts,
like first Christmas, first birthday for all, except for my youngest daughter.
I missed all of her.
First the first birthday, first Thanksgiving, first Christmas first
I was gone for all the
but I remember this.
There's this one.
There's this one operation we were doing in 2008
and we were out there in Green Berets operate
everything is by through and with, you know, the indigenous forces.
So six Green Berets, about 25 or 38 regular
Iraqi army, about another 25 to 30 Iraqi militia.
And we're just doing kind of a check on this one house,
which you knew was a bed down location for for a pretty bad guy.
And next thing we know, grenades go off the whole deal.
And we had two Iraqis down.
And I was actually the senior NCO for it because we're doing split team ops.
So I was the senior guy for the Green Berets on the objective.
So we we shared the objective, what they were trying to find it.
And, you know, most of the operations that we had done
had been very intentional in the sense that we weren't surprise.
We know what we were doing.
We stack up on the door, you know, do your thing right.
This is one
where, again, we were still ready, but we weren't anticipating a firefight.
And so
it happened for we secured the objective.
And I guess the point I'm trying to make is in that moment,
everything was was reacting to a situation that took place as opposed to us
planning a hit where we were going to go after a high value target.
And there was this one moment where I thought that this guy had gotten away.
And so we've got our we've got our cordon and we've got our perimeter end,
and it's the Tigris River is on one side of this
and this this little house right by the Tigris.
And it's like really thick. You don't expect it
to be this thick in Iraq, but right up against the river it is.
And so we there's this little hidey hole.
I find this little Heidi hornets,
me, one of my interpreters and one of my Iraqi militia guys.
And it was this point where there is no good way to go into this.
There's not.
It's like one way in, one way out.
You're hoping the guys that are gone are dead,
but there's no good way to do it.
And I remember
sitting there in that moment, I got all the time in the world
to think about it because we've got a perimeter set up.
I got Apache gunships going up and down the Tigris,
but someone's still got to go down that hole.
And I remember I remember having enough time
to think about it and one of the things that went through my mind was
how do I explain to my son if I don't do my job right now
and and it was kind of you kind of come to the conclusion that,
look, I can either jump down in here and whatever happens happens,
but this is my job, or I can try to come up
with, you know, I can try to make it somebody else's job.
Yeah. And at that point, you kind of realize, like, you know what?
I can live with whatever happens next, but I can't live with being a coward.
And I sure as hell can't raise my son the way I want to raise him
if I know that about myself.
So it's it's definitely hard.
You're thinking about your kids, you're thinking about things you're missing.
You're thinking about your wife when you're overseas, but
you also your obligation is not only to your country,
your obligation is to the people that love you to be
in a like, I guess, in a way worthy
of the respect and admiration that they hope they have for you.
And it's good. It's
it's really heavy stuff, too.
You know, I think a lot of us don't really have to grapple with those thoughts.
Well, I mean, less than, what, Less than 1% of it to grapple with that.
And then even with that, you know, I deployed before I had kids. So
that's I love the way you put that, though, where
you had to really in a way of like, well,
how can I face my family if they know that I didn't
do it to do what needed to be done?
So let me be crazy.
They'd never know.
But you would, right?
Exactly.
Yep. That's the they call it the, you know, the burden of command.
Yeah.
You were the senior guy, too, so you can't really pass the buck on.
And, you know, it's not without being a close to them right?
That's the other good thing about being in a in a, in a unit
with a bunch of, you know, type-A males is everyone's like, I want to go in first.
Right? Right. Yeah.
That's funny.
So you were in the Army about 11 years, right?
So what what was the deciding factor then?
Because, you know, most people say, oh, you just coast your last, you know,
nine at that point to get the the retirement.
So what was the
the kind of catalyst there for the family to get out of the military lifestyle?
It was crazy because I had a man, I had a good thing going, right?
Yeah. I was a I was our first class.
I probably would have got Master sergeant within the next couple of years
just because height of the war self promoted very, very quickly.
It's not I wasn't anything special.
It's just, you know, we didn't have enough assets, guys, that you promoted quickly.
And I always wanted to be a team sergeant that was going to be
I wanted to be a team sergeant in combat.
That was that was kind of my professional military goal
because I just had a lot of respect.
I had this team sergeant named Mike Langenberg, who
he was my first team sergeant.
Great guy, total hard ass, right?
But part of my language, but really just just
made me a maybe a better operator.
And I was like, you know, that's that would be you know,
I don't I don't want to be a sergeant major one day.
I don't want to do anything like that.
But I'd love to be a team sergeant
and here I am right at that point where I had gone to this course
called Sephardic, which was a close quarters battle.
Of course, they run you through within S.F.
and it's a pretty intensive course.
And typically speaking, if you've gone to that,
you have a very good chance of being in what they call
what they used to call the canters and commanders and Extremis force.
The teams.
And and that was that was kind of a prestigious,
you know, team to be on and no guarantee that I would have gone to that.
But it was definitely an option at that point.
And I remember talking with my sergeant major
when I had I had had the chance or had the chance to think about it.
I decided I was getting out and he came up to me
and he goes, You know, FREITAS Well, why are you doing this?
I said,
I said, Jerry, we just
had one of the most successful tours we've ever had.
I mean, we got the number six target in Iraq,
we got the number one sort of north target, I said, And yet I got to fill out
a 42 page PowerPoint to be able to get outside the wire, right?
I get all these permissions to go out and do my job.
And then, oh, by the way,
when we did our job and when we did it successfully,
because the guy that ended up
being hiding in that hole ended up being the number six target in Iraq,
I said, when we get it successfully, I get kicked out of battlespace
because the conventional commander that was running that area was mad
that, you know, he wasn't invited to go play along on that mission.
Even after we explained that, like, dude, we weren't going to get that guy
that day. This was it anyway.
And and Jerry, who I really respected.
Great, great, great operator, great guy.
Jerry looks at me, goes, Nick, that's that's a B.S.
answer because if you don't like something,
you stay in, you gain the rank and you fix it.
I said, Oh, that's interesting, Jerry, you're a sergeant major.
How many of the problems you've been able to fix?
And he had some choice words for me.
And at that point, it was no longer Jerry and Nick.
It was Sergeant Major and sergeant.
Right.
But but, but he can see that It was a good point.
It's that's our major.
The problem that we're facing right now
is not with guys in uniform that aren't doing their job right.
Even though we got some of those guys.
The problem that we're face right now is we got a whole lot of guys
in suits in Washington, DC that don't know what the hell they're doing.
And at that point I didn't necessarily think I was going to get involved
in politics in the sense that I was going to run for office.
I just thought that I wanted to get into some space where
hopefully some of my experience or
whatnot could either go toward informing people on policy
or at the very least help get the right sort of people
elected to where they could have a positive impact on policy.
And so that's that's kind of where we made the decision that we were going
to get out of the military because it was it's one thing
that again, it's one thing to ask men and women to go overseas
and to risk everything for for a mission.
It's something entirely different to time to go overseas and do it
and then tie their hands while they're doing it.
And then, as we saw with the withdraw in Afghanistan,
which was just absolute disgrace and a slap in the face,
quite frankly,
we have a we have a government that I think uses men and women's lives
very cheaply from the military, unfortunately.
And so we didn't get out because we got out
because if we were going to fight, we wanted to be allowed to fight.
And because we thought we might have a
we might have the ability to change the way some of those decisions were made.
Yeah, I can I can relate to having hands tied.
I was a field artillery officer, so I was an FSO.
Yeah.
And had PID from multiple sources
with an Apache looking right at dudes dragging a mortar up a hill.
And we were denied clearance.
And I'm like, And then an hour later, my fellow
know guys in the company are getting shot at on the other hilltop by mortars.
And I was like, Why am I here?
Yeah, my one job is to literally do that.
And anyway, it's super frustrating, so I can definitely relate on that front.
And for me too,
a big part of it was just family.
I looked ahead at what the next 15 plus years were going to require of my family.
Even in training, even when you're not overseas.
And I was conventional army, I wasn't so off
and I was like, this isn't it's a bad bargain for them, you know,
I don't want to make my family pay that price.
My wife and I had a very interesting
conversation on a satellite phone in Bangladesh
because I had got back from my first tour in Iraq, had to go to an advanced
noncommissioned officer course that I had to go to the 18 Fox course.
So this is my downtime, right? This is my home time. Right.
And I'm back at Bragg doing training away from my family.
And then I have to go on a jet set because we've got to go over and we got to train
Bangladeshi border guards.
And then when I'm over there, I get an opportunity to go to Sephardic,
which was a pretty incredible opportunity. And
yeah, we had it.
We had an interest in my wife, as has just been phenomenal.
I always tell people the reason why, the reason why coming home
was so seamless for me,
because it wasn't for a lot of guys,
was because my wife absolutely went out of her way
every single time to make sure that
the kids, you know, they missed Daddy, but they were proud of Daddy.
They're too young to know what was going on.
And there were there were other people that took this a lot harder.
But not my wife.
My wife made sure that, no, look, your daddy's over there serving
and we're serving here at home by
by supporting him and having his back and praying for him and everything else.
And I just
I can't give my wife enough credit for the good relationship
that I had with my children
early on, because that could have gone very, very differently.
And it is entirely because
of the type of woman she is that's really beautiful to here.
And then I'm thankful that, you know, she was that strong for you
and for the family through all of that, because you're right, that is
not always a given.
I know a lot of a lot of people don't have that experience.
So I guess final question on Army stuff for me,
and I'll start kicking it to the other guys.
Here is
what I like you
to talk a little bit about, you know, what you guys did
after the military and kind of how that transition went for you.
That's usually an interesting story.
Sometimes it gets a little crazy, but
the final question I had on
Army stuff was at what point did you start really explaining to your kids,
you know, what you were doing or have been doing in the past?
You know, because like my daughter's
eight now, so she's like, So were you in the war, Daddy?
You know, so you're not you know,
it's kinda like, man, I don't know how much or little to tell her.
And that's something I always kind of struggle
with because I don't want to lie to her,
but kind of making it age appropriate.
And so it's always such a difficult topic to I don't want to be like
the type of vet who never talked about anything.
Yeah, yeah.
And I was so one of the things I tell veterans whenever
I'm speaking to groups that like Memorial Day or Veteran's Day or
whatnot, is like, if you don't tell the story, it's
not that the stories aren't going to be told.
Let it be told by people that have no idea what actually happened.
They'll be the college professor.
They'll be the, you know, the reporter.
They'll be somebody else that, you know, sat close enough
to see the fight, but not close enough to get any blood on them
that want to tell your story.
And so it's really important
that you tell your own, otherwise they'll never hear it.
And I know that can be difficult at times.
I think age appropriate is the right way to put it.
Now, look, I don't pretend that my tours were like
just I mean, I knew guys that were in Mosul in the tough years.
I know guys that were in Sadr City in the tough years.
And look, they had a different tour than I did.
I mean, I think we went over there.
We got a lot of targets.
We did our job, but we didn't lose any guys on the team.
And I'm so thankful for that.
You know, I lost friends, but it ended up being a later tours
and other deployments.
And so I think it's important for them to to, you know, understand
kind of what you were doing on just a basic level.
You know, when they're really little, it's like you were going over there
and you were trying to protect people and you're trying to serve your country.
And when they get a little bit older, my son and I, obviously
we've had a lot of conversations.
He wants to go infantry. He wants an airborne contract.
So we've talked a little
bit about what that means and what the job is.
And I think, again, I think age appropriate is
is the right words and there's certain things
you spare from it until they they have the spiritual,
emotional and intellectual capacity to be able to handle the story.
And there's other things that they don't necessarily need to know.
I think they need to know enough to understand why it was important
and why what you did was was necessary.
Even if and I've had plenty of conversations, this my kid, my my kids
all know that I have a huge problem with American foreign policy.
It's not as if I think we've all made wonderful decisions.
The point is, is that when we were over there, I still had a job to do
and there's still good you can do from that job.
And so I think explaining that is is important.
But yeah, I mean, there may have been look,
there may be things that you experienced or whatnot that are not
necessarily things you know, your kids need to know about.
I think that's something to pray about.
But but definitely, we definitely tell the stories.
Definitely tell the stories.
Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great point.
I work in medicine and I don't agree with everything
the American medical system does, but I know that I can still do good
within the system.
So I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
But I wanted to talk about something you mentioned earlier.
I'm going to butcher the quote here, but it's something like
old men dine in comfort while young men die on the battlefield.
Right. We see that situation over and over.
I read a book called Skin in the Game by philosopher named Nassim Taleb,
if you're familiar with him.
And his concept was that people in Rome, for example,
like your podcast from a couple of days ago, was awesome.
Really enjoyed that.
They had skin in the game.
Your your generals were often on the battlefields
or emperors even sometimes fought on the front lines, right?
Whereas now our leaders are never on the front lines right.
So talk to me about skin in the game and how that's changed kind of the dynamic.
You as someone who's fought on the front lines,
what's going to be different about the way you engage in politics
versus someone like myself who has not been in active duty?
I think there's a lot of ways that I mean, first of all, I've heard
some people say that, gosh, anybody that serves in office should have,
you know, should be a veteran or whatnot.
I totally disagree with that.
I don't I don't think it's a necessary prerequisite.
I think it can be a helpful prerequisite, especially depending on on what
level of government that you're serving.
Not like I serve on state government. I don't handle a lot of foreign policy,
but I but we do handle veterans issues.
And so there's been times where I've been able to use
that experience to be able to say, hey, look, this is
this is why I think this is relevant or why this might be important.
So I think what it really comes down to when we talk about skin in the game is
really, really trying to identify
based off
of your experience and based off of what do you have to lose?
Right. Like, what is what is this going to cost you?
Thomas Sowell, who's one of my favorite people ever,
He likes to say that there's there's nothing more stupid you can do than
take the decisions
and take the decision making responsibility
out of the hands of the people that make it pay a cost for the decisions
and put it in the hands of people who pay no cost for making the decisions.
Yeah, and it's one of the reasons why in government
I'm constantly trying to get decisions out of the hands of of government
because there's no possible way everyone can have infinite knowledge
about all the ways that the decisions are going to impact millions of people.
And so there's a certain degree of humility
that I think is is necessary and I think a certain degree of humility
that actually comes with being in a position or in a field of
whatever it is, doesn't have to be military,
law enforcement or first responders, whatever it is.
There's a certain degree of humility that comes from actually
being in the trenches, wherever that trench may be.
It may be the classroom, it may be the operating room,
it may be the investment room. Right?
It may be
wherever it is, you're going to have unique experience in that area,
in that zone that's going to be able to inform the decisions in a way
that somebody's reading about.
It is just simply not going to be able to appreciate on the same level.
And I think that's that's really important.
I think the other thing that we're starting to see within our society
now as well is this idea that you can have a certain amount
of subject matter expertise and that counts as real world experience.
And those two things are not necessarily the same thing.
Someone can be academically very in sight or very
knowledgeable of a particular topic
that doesn't mean they've done it and they know what it feels like to do it.
By the same token, there can be people that have a lot of experience
doing something but but don't have a much breadth
with respect to their knowledge on a particular topic.
All right.
If you stormed the beaches of Normandy, you know a whole lot about what it is
to go down on a ramp, run up a beach where people are fine, where empty threes
are firing in around that you.
That doesn't necessarily mean you have the same experience
as some of that was planning Operation Overlord.
And so sometimes I think it's important for for when we when we look
at having skin in the game there should be a depth and breadth to that.
But I do think it's important whenever whenever we're talking about
potentially making decisions that are going to impact other people,
either either having that experience or having enough humility
to talk to the people with that experience
to make sure that whatever your good idea is, whatever, whatever you think,
that sounds good on paper actually works well in reality.
And I'm kind of like a larger cultural issue.
What we're starting to see more and more
now is and this is really concerned, I think, for young men,
they're kind of checking out on a lot of those things
when it comes to getting married, having a family, having kids.
And if you have a generation of young men that don't see a future or
within a family structure,
that's a lot of young men
that don't have skin in the game with respect to your civilization,
and that doesn't mean they're not going to do anything.
Oh, they're going to do something.
They're going to find purpose and meaning.
There's there's a really interesting quote I heard.
I think it's an African proverb
that a guy named Rudyard who runs this show called What If all his
and he hasn't an one of his videos talking about the coming backlash.
And he says there's an old African proverb
that says that if you don't give young men
a place in the village, they will burn it down to feel its warmth.
And that's the part where I look
at our society, in our culture and where it's going right now.
And that's the sort of the lack of skin in the game that I'm concerned about.
Such a good point. Thank you. Yeah.
Yeah.
So, Nick,
would you say that's kind of what has inspired you to continue
to serve our country as a delegate or are there other inspirations
that have kind of done that as a cultural thing?
What would you say?
Oh, it's so serving as a delegate was primarily about trying
to get government back within what I thought its proper role was.
So again, my, my, my faith informs my worldview,
and my faith tells me that there is a God and there is objective truth
and there is objective morality and there's a created order in men. And
part of that created order is understanding the proper
duties and responsibilities and what I call, like the various provinces.
So you have the province of the individual.
What are your individual duties and responsibilities
spiritually, emotionally, professionally, physically, etc..
Then there's the family, then there's the civic organization,
the church, and then there's government.
And what I started to getting more and more concerned with
was this idea that government was constantly inserting itself
into those things, which were the province of the individual,
the family, the church, the civic organization,
and assuming for itself powers and authorities that I did not think
were appropriate and which I think are ultimately destructive.
And so my my whole purpose of getting involved in politics was
was to make an argument for why government may have an important role to play,
but it's supposed to be very, very limited and specialized.
It's not supposed to be this this wide breadth of powers
where it's constantly interfering in your day to day decisions.
And so that's what motivated me to get involved in politics,
What motivated me to get more involved on kind of the cultural aspect
that I saw going on was learning the
and it's something
that I wasn't aware of, but again, experience having skin in the game
taught me
a whole new perspective on the idea that politics is downstream from culture
and where the situation we're in right now, not because we didn't
elect the right people, we're in a situation
we are right now is because I believe a particular narrative
has essentially captured most of the culturally shaping
institutions that we have
within our country, whether it be media, academia, public education,
arts and entertainment, Hollywood, and now increasingly even the church
and so the reason why I started talking more about the role of
what does it mean to be a man?
What does it mean to be a husband? Was it mean to be a father
was not so much to to give people advice on
how to do it as much as it was to share perspectives, insight?
Because I'm at an age right now where I have some experience with it.
And and I've I've seen where I've screwed up and I've seen where I've
gotten things right.
I've seen what the results of both are and wanting to share that as part
of a larger overall message, especially to both young men and young women.
But obviously, I have I have a lot more experience being a young man
due to essentially say that, look, this is a
getting married and having a family is not just a nice thing to do.
I would argue that for the vast majority of us, not everybody,
but the vast majority of us, it's actually it's absolutely essential
not just
for you, not just for your family, but I would argue, just for civilization.
And and that in it is hard
and it's supposed to be,
but it is it is worth it in a way
that I just can't explain to someone that hasn't experienced it.
And so I try to do the best I can on relaying those stories
and those experiences
so that people will have have the courage to take it up and do
the things that are necessary, develop the capabilities that are necessary
in order to take on that mantle and take on that role.
I know exactly what you're talking about, and I really do care
more about the future.
After I had my son, I made a huge it's a subtle shift where
now I've got some skin in the game, I've got a kid, and I need to make sure
the future is good for him because he's going to be there.
So yeah, let me. Absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah.
And I wholeheartedly agree there's such a lack of accountability.
There's a degradation of morality and reality and truth in the nuclear family.
The nuclear family is being attacked on all sides.
And I think that's one of the things that's dissuading
young men to getting in a family because masculinity is toxic.
MALE Right.
You can't be masculine. You can't you can't raise a family.
You can't be the leader of your household.
It has to be 5050 and your wife has to say everything
or you're just the controlling, obsessive troll, right?
And so there's all these, yeah, there's all these absurd things.
And it's just a complete degradation
of the Western society, culture and as a whole.
And so my question to you is, if America is heading
this direction, how do we course correct Right.
What are we the next Rome?
Yeah. No, it's a good it's a good question.
We did a two part series on that on our podcast.
And one of the things that we focus more on is
everyone talks about the fall of the Empire.
I'm like, Dude, you got to start with the fall of the Republic.
Why did that fall?
And I think one of the things that's that's problematic
and you see this a lot within political discourse,
you always hear this conversation
about our democracy, our democracy, our democracy.
I think increasingly when people hear that what they think is, oh,
you're talking about your democracy, not mine.
But here's here's one of the reasons why I believe and this isn't conspiratorial.
I just think it's it's based off of incentive structures.
One of the reasons why politicians like to talk so much about democracy,
democracy, democracy as if it's the the key defining feature
of the United States or if it's the or if it's synonymous with with freedom
is because when you're thinking about democracy, you're thinking about politics.
And when you're thinking about politics, you're thinking
about the people who are in charge, which are politicians.
So it's beneficial for politicians, for people to be thinking that the primary way
that you achieve effective change within society is through politics,
because they're the ones that control the power in that situation.
The most impactful thing that you can do
to save your country is how you raise your family.
Like this is not debatable.
This is not debatable.
The reason why we're in this situation right now is because in large part
we have a we have a generation of younger people
that grew up within academic institutions
and with entertainment environments
with very, very little parental influence on their decision
making process, on their exposure to ideas.
And people always say, well, parents should take a hands off approach.
You don't want to indoctrinate your kids like your kids are going to some degree,
you know, come into contact with some form of indoctrination.
The question is, is it will it be by people that love them
and want the best for them or somebody else?
And your public school does not care about
your kids more than you, at least I hope they don't know.
And that's not it.
That's not necessarily a ding on them. That's just a reality.
And so so the real question is, is that if you want to effect positive
change, well, then my question is going to be, what are you doing with your kids?
Are how involved are you in their spiritual, emotional,
physical, educational development?
How involved are you in that process?
And then what are you what are you both protecting them from?
And then what are you also exposing them to?
Right.
Because, you know, protecting your kids doesn't mean you you know,
protecting your kids doesn't mean you save them from every bump and scratch.
It does mean you try to protect them from the scars, right?
Yeah, right.
You don't want them You don't want them being forced into decisions.
They're going to have lifelong consequences, right?
When they're not at a
when they're not at intellectual maturity to be able to handle that.
But you do want them to be able to kind of test those bound test
the boundaries of their skill and their knowledge, and to explore that
and to be able to push for.
But you're doing that within that that environment as a parent
where you have some control over that situation.
So you're preparing them to be well equipped to go into those environments
when you don't have control over the situation.
And so that's one of the most important things that we can do right now.
But I will tell you this, and I make people mad when I say this and I'm sorry.
Like my I can't stress this enough.
My intention is not to offend people or make them mad when I say this.
But what I have seen
as a parent, what I have seen as a member
of the Education Committee in the Virginia House of Delegates,
if if the primary source
of education for your child is the public school system,
you are probably going to run into a lot of problems.
Respect to the way your child interprets reality,
the way your child interprets their responsibility within reality,
and the way you manage your relationship with your child.
Because what you've done at this point is
you've outsourced to a different authority.
Maybe it's a teacher, maybe it's administrator, maybe it's their friends,
maybe it's the social media app that they spend all their time on.
You have outsourced the significant portion of responsibility
for teaching your child how to think about the world
and interact with it to those sources.
And none of them should be as invested in your child as you are.
And so that's number one.
You can change the course of a country in one generation
if you have enough parents doing that.
But unfortunately, what I see is I see a lot of parents,
even conservative parents,
even Christian conservative parents who share my worldview
where they will they will delegate that
responsibility or delegate large portions of that responsibility to someone else,
and then they'll go out and get really super involved in politics.
You're not saving this country in the next election cycle.
Yeah, the politician is you need you need good
representatives, you need people, good people in politics.
But that's not the most fundamental thing to saving your family
or saving your country.
That starts with the family.
You have to begin there.
And here's the good news, right?
If you start with the things that you control, like,
you know, how am I educating and raising my kids?
And you start with the things
that you control with respect to how am I, you know, you know, how am I investing?
How am I running my business? How am I working?
How am I becoming more resilient?
How about becoming more physically capable?
How am I becoming more professionally capable, intellectually capable?
These are all things that you can control
because as I was just telling a group of college students last night,
this ideology that has been foisted on to people right
now, especially younger people, that is resulting in exponential growth
with respect to mental illness, depression, a
lack of people getting married, a lack of people having families.
A lot of these people that have bought into this
and actually think it's a positive course of action,
they are going to wake up one day.
Hopefully it's in their early twenties for some of them
and won't be till their forties and fifties
and for some of them they'll never wake out of it.
But the vast majority of Americans wake up one day and think to myself,
What have I done?
I was lied to.
This is not supposed to be this way.
And if and if all we're doing
is making an argument and telling them, Hey, the stuff you believe is a lie,
the stuff you believe is a lie, The stuff you okay? Great.
Are you pointing to truth and not only pointing to truth,
can you actually demonstrate it in the way that you're living your own life?
Because people will hold on
to a convenient lie
and never let it go
if they don't actually think there's a real alternative.
Yeah, but that same person growing up in that environment,
that just feels like the decisions are just not panning out
and they're looking around and they've got a friend
that's got it all together or, you know,
they're seeing other people that just have it.
What's different?
They will start to ask those questions and at that point
there won't be any social media influencer that will be able to
will be able to to defeat the power of a life lived.
Well, yeah.
And one of the things through there is that
they're not they're pursuing the truth that their peers will give them.
Right.
And they're they're not taught logic or critical thinking
because that usually comes from the father.
Oh it's, it's, it's worse at this point.
It used to be that we could argue
that they just weren't teaching critical thinking.
Now and again, some people get upset when I say this.
I'm not trying to make overly generalized statements here.
Sure.
In many circumstances, what you see in pop culture
is not just them not teaching critical thinking.
They're teaching that critical thinking is a tool of the racist patriarchy.
And then what it does is it actually subverts the narrative
of the lived experience of the oppressed to the benefit of the oppressor.
It is one thing to to have someone be ignorant of logic.
It is another thing for them to think logic is bad.
And that's what we're running into now.
It was the party's most essential and final command.
You have to ignore the evidence of your own eyes.
Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, God.
Well, yeah. Or.
Well, right now we're going to need a whole second episode just on that.
Hey, I wanted to just follow up on the culture thing.
You said it was.
You know, politics is downstream of culture,
and I've seen you referenced neurotic before,
talking about culture specifically and him and and the group,
the Friday night tides and that kind of stuff.
They talk a lot about how really the early warning signs of all
this stuff is in movies, is in games.
And, you know, as conservative Christians, that's an arena
we have totally failed in.
We have stuck out to, oh, that's that's child's play
kid stuff, you know, comic books and all that kind of stuff.
And not to get all nerdy or whatever, but we kids like that stuff, right?
They're watching cartoons, they're watching movies
and so we have totally given up this
arena where the other side where, you know, they're saying don't believe
your eyes as has co-opted that entire system.
And so it's no surprise that you've got an entire generation
now that's been brought up watching all these shows
and movies and games, espousing all these woke ideology.
And parents are totally blindsided by it.
And it's like, well,
this is why you need to pay attention
to what they're playing or watching or listening to.
It has gotten so easy.
Even like the schools, they're definitely trying
to inject this into childhood stuff.
Yeah, because I just did a FOIA request for schools in my district
based off of books they have in their library.
And I have just found some that I'm telling you right now.
There's going to be some issues.
And I'm not talking about some, you know, edgy literature.
No, I'm talking about blatant pornographic imagery.
So, yeah, if you're not sitting there and watching shows with your kids
and not understanding what it is that they're consuming on a regular basis,
that's very problematic. Now, here's the here's the good news, right?
Because so much of this sounds like doom and gloom.
The good news is, is that if you are actually taking that time with your kids
and I don't mean like sheltering them and not letting them watch anything
except, you know, I don't know, eighties Christian movies where
only blues.
Good. Yeah.
We watch we watch Star Wars with our kids.
We watch John Wayne with our kids.
I was movie Star Wars movie.
It's just a big no, no, no.
That is absolutely
There's three Star Jar Binks.
There's three more where it's like and then there's
the travesty that we will not even mention Star Wars.
And then there's Disney.
Star Wars. Yes. Yeah.
But but so my my son and I, we used to love watching those.
You know what I watch?
And then with my girls, we use I'll tell you one of the one of the
greatest decisions my wife and I ever made and we made it totally accidentally
was when I was still in the service we had for a while we did this thing
where whenever I was going to be gone for a while, we'd each pick a book,
we would get turns picking a book and but it had to be a classic.
That was the rule, had to be a classic.
So I picked something cool, like The Count of Monte Cristo,
and we both read that when we were apart and we would like
get on the phone and talk about it.
And then she picked Pride and Prejudice.
Dude, Jane Austen is brilliant.
Like, I'm not even I, I give no apologies.
Jane Austen is brilliant Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility.
I mean, let me tell you how bad this got.
And I promise this is going somewhere.
I was at an Irish pub in Colorado Springs with, like, S.F.
buddies, military buddies, the whole deal.
And they were having trivia night, right? They're having trivia night.
We're just sitting there. We'd had a long day at work.
We're just. We're having a Guinness, right?
Having A Guinness sitting there, and we're all sitting there not paying attention.
And all of a sudden on the trivia, it comes up.
It goes name the Jane Austen books that don't have an end in the title.
And I'm looking around and everybody's scratching their head.
I walk over to this table. There's there's a bunch of lady sat there.
I'm like, It's Emma, Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park.
And I was never here. I walked back over
that.
But the reason I point this thing out is because when my kids were little, right?
When your kids are little, they want to do and they want to watch
what mom and dad are doing if you give them the time.
It is fascinating how much time your kids want to spend with you
and not with Blue's Clues or whatever else.
Pop draw.
If you want to sit down, have the time with them.
And so my girls, they watch BBC
adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.
And I'll never forget when my, my, I she was 12 at the time.
My oldest daughter, she's watching this other show
and this man and woman kiss and she goes,
Daddy, look, what did you see that?
What? I see What? They just kissed. Yeah.
She's going to lose her character.
They're not engaged.
And I was like, How does it point, Oh, my God.
She's like, No,
you can't do that, Dad, Did you and Mommy kiss before you were engaged?
Whoever I am, never.
The point is, is that you can have these shared experiences
with your kids which transcend you hear this all the time.
Like, Oh, it's a generational thing.
Some of my kid's favorite shows growing up was I Love Lucy,
Little House on the Prairie, Gilligan's Island.
You know, we would watch this together.
They thought it was hysterical. They loved it.
They never thought for a moment they were missing out on anything.
But the value system were very different.
I'd say it was always perfect, right?
Not a lot of values in
those old movies are perfect, but it's certainly not what you're getting on.
Again, Paw Patrol today.
And so sitting down
and actually investing in that time on the entertainment sphere,
your kids will develop kind of an idea of what is fun in part
based off of what they got to do with you.
And so
again, by this, my daughter was in a play the other day.
My my 15 year old daughter.
She's she's in a play.
And, you know, they're all sitting around talking about what they were with
what they're doing.
I went to the movies, so I hung out with friends because I castrated my goat.
By the way, guys, if you really want to scare,
you know, potential suitors for your boys, get your daughter a goats and then,
you know.
Yes. Anyway, notice they say
this is not an issue where you've got to sit there
and just be, you know, Nurse Ratchet the entire time, like, oh,
you can't have that. You can't do that. But put that away.
You kind of know big fun things to do with your kids.
Build those experiences with those kids and you'll be shocked
at how their idea of fun is so drastically different
from any of their friends that were essentially raised by a tablet
or raised by their, you know, their peers within a public school environment.
Yeah, in the public school environment,
it kind of adds and not to upset people, but it does add to the problems.
But to go back to what you're talking about,
like with the nuclear family and our responsibility,
it's not only fathers, but, you know, the mothers as well.
And being a parent, I guess my question to
you would be how can we kind of counter
some of this culture besides, you know, what's the best way to,
I guess, teach our
children to fight things like wokeism and to fight things
like term limits and and all the issues that we have going on Society day.
I mean, we have so many issues that are actually hitting us all at once
that even as adults were like, how do we how do we fight this?
So I guess the question is how do we teach our children
what they need to know in order to change the next generation's outcome?
Yeah, well, first of all, the dumbest statement
ever uttered in Western civilization was just that.
The dumbest. Well, put it in the top 100.
Right?
Is you shouldn't talk about religion in politics.
Religion and politics are going to affect a significant portion
of your children's life one way or the other.
And so you better talk about it and you better prepare them.
The one thing
that I try to encourage parents is, is to say that
a lot of conservative and Christian parents think that they've
taught their children how to think and what they believe when in reality
what they've top em is, is an incentive structure.
You go to church and you behave, You listen to mom and Dad, you repeat
what mom and dad say about politics or about life or about values,
because when you do that, you're rewarded, right?
When you're and when you don't do that, you're punished.
And so what you've what you've taught them is kind of
like this arbitrary respect for authority.
And so that works out fine.
Maybe when they're under your roof.
What happens when it's a college professor is the authority figure.
Now, what happens when it's a boss?
What happens when it's a friend group?
What happens when it's, you know, some sort of celebrity that they admire?
The media, the media that becomes the authority now.
And so one of the most important things that you can do is your kids how to think
and then teach them why you think the way you do about things.
And then the next step for that, there's there's two next steps.
One is at some point you will do something.
Your kid will catch you violating the rule that you told them was important.
And at that point, what they're what they're determining is, is the rule
sacred in the sense that it applies to you as well,
or is the rule arbitrary based off of who's in power?
Because if your kid comes to you because they've caught you, you know,
using a word you shouldn't used or, you know, overreacting to something
or not thinking something through before you committed.
And they respectfully this part they respectfully come to you
and say, Dad, I don't think you handled that well.
Can I talk to you about it in that moment?
Every ounce of
because this has happened to me, every ounce of me wanted to be like, oh,
you know, you don't approve of the way the person that is feeding and clothing
and housing. You did something.
Oh, do tell what from your 14 years of experience is equipped
you to be able to provide this sort of analysis?
Well, the answer is you you equip them to provide that sort of analysis.
It's out there and an example to.
Yeah, sure, I, I came I've shared this one before I came home from work.
I was really tired.
I was frustrated.
I was stressed out.
I walked into the kitchen and my two youngest kids have just
destroyed the kitchen
and this would not be the first time my two youngest kids
have destroyed the kitchen.
And I was angry. I was like, What have you?
What are you doing?
You know, again, a lot of time in the military, a lot of time training
I can project, right?
Like, what are you doing?
Put that down clean all that up, go to your room. I'm just.
I've done. I don't want to.
And they started to try to explain, Right?
I don't want to hear it. Just do what I say.
Go to your room.
I go back upstairs.
My oldest daughter knocks on the door.
Daddy, can I talk to you for a second?
Yes, sweetheart.
What is it,
Daddy?
I don't think you handled that very well.
Okay?
What do you mean, Daddy?
The reason why they were in
the kitchen is because Mommy told them that they could make something for you.
And so they were down there.
They were doing their best
trying to bake something for you that they knew that you would like.
And when you saw the mess and you got mad at them, now
they're too afraid to tell you that that's what they were doing.
And why.
And I remember sitting there and first of all, you're feeling like an absolute jerk
because, you know, your kids were trying to do something nice for you.
You flew off the handle.
Then you feel like an idiot because now you had to have your 14 year
old daughter correct you.
Then you feel even worse because she's right
and and thereby, by the grace of God go I because there have been times where,
you know, I've told my kids I'm, you know, I'm too busy, whatever.
But I remember that moment thinking
she had she had the courage
to come and knock on the door and ask to talk to me.
She saw that I was in a bad mood.
I could have very easily told her to go to her room too.
She had the courage to challenge an authority figure in her life
that she respects.
She did it respectfully.
The analysis that she used of my behavior
and their motivation and the circumstances was spot on.
I said, In this moment, one of two things is going to happen.
I'm either going to reinforce to my daughter
that the authority that I will in
this household is not arbitrary
and that the rules that we enforce also apply to me.
Or I'm going to teach her that I'm just some sort of tyrant
and you just better do what I say and that's it.
And so I remember looking and I said, Sweetheart,
I want to thank you for coming to me.
I want to thank you for doing it respectfully.
You are absolutely right.
I'm wrong.
And I'm going to go apologize to your brother and sister.
But I want I want to thank you
for having the courage to do that.
And I have like to this day, I have a very, very good relationship or whatever.
My daughter is struggling with something or thinking through something or whatnot.
We'll sit and we'll talk about it.
And I think it's it's really important,
especially if you come from a Christian worldview. And I do.
The authority I have as the head of my household doesn't come from me.
Exactly.
It doesn't come from me.
I am a
I am a caretaker of that authority. Yup.
My my job it is to utilize and exercise it in a way
where my my primary concern is the well-being
of my wife and my children, even at the expense of my own well-being.
Should the circumstances of the situation call for it?
And what I need them to understand about the rules that we come about is
they're not rules because Mommy and Daddy says so
the rules because there is a God and there is a created order.
And these have been put in place for our well-being and our benefit.
And my job as a father and our job as parents is to help you understand
that they exist, why they exist, and why they're actually beneficial for you.
But if the
moment they see us violating it, they can't respectfully
bring correction at the appropriate time, Well, then we've taught them.
It's none of that. It's just I'm in charge. I'm bigger than you.
I make the money. Whatever it is, I'm in charge.
Do what I say.
And that is the last lesson that you want your kids to leave the house,
you know?
So anyways, that's that's one of the ways that I think you equip your children
the other things. So that's the fundamental right.
The fundamental thing is to teach them the why that you objective morality,
objective truth exists that that's built into our faith.
And then it's about how to think and how to think.
Well, and when you ask your kids questions and you give them scenarios
and you give them things to think through at the dinner table or whatever else
that is, it really
it becomes like a game of, okay, how would you respond in this situation?
Or, okay, if someone said this, what would you say back
in when you start to
when you start to develop that sort of communication with your kids, that
when they find themselves in situations, many times they know how to answer,
and then the times that they know, the first person they come and ask is you.
And that's what you want.
You want to be asking you not to talk.
And so when you've established that relationship, that dialog
and that process of going back and forth and they see it as a beneficial thing,
it is a fun thing, then they'll they'll do it more.
And that's what you want.
You want when those difficult situations come,
you want him to be prepared. And when they don't feel prepared,
you want him to come to you to get prepared.
And at the Times when you maybe don't know the answer, you don't make something up.
You just say, That's a really interesting let's let's think about that.
Let's look about that. Let's let's, let's consider it together.
And that's what you always want because when they go to college
or when they go off into the workforce or the military or whatever else it is,
and they're faced with problematic situations,
you still want to be seen as not only a safe harbor,
but you want to be able to seen as someone that will give them wise advice.
And so yeah
so good
men yeah stock a.k.a China by the way.
Yeah. Yeah.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm sure they have our best interests in mind.
Yeah. Yeah.
So you gave a great example of I don't know if you ever read
the book called Tender Warrior, but kind of that I highly recommend.
You should read that book written by Green Beret who became a pastor after Vietnam.
Okay, But great book.
But you were you were talking there about how, you know, we are the protector,
but we also need to be tender in those moments.
Great example of that with your daughter.
They're just an amazing thing that everyone can kind of
probably have a very similar experience already.
And their, you know, if their dad, they've had a similar situation
and they either handled it right or they didn't.
So the beauty is, you can learn from it and you better.
So thanks for giving.
That very personal example
can be flipped at the other end of the spectrum
now where you need to be the warrior.
Yeah, you've you've made some videos about how dads need to be dangerous.
Can you get into that?
Because I think especially for Christian men, a lot of Christian men
there, they're very meek and there are times where you need to be a lion
and it's a balance.
That's that's why the Tender Warrior book is so good.
It's all biblically based.
But I'd love to hear your perspective on, especially in today's day and age,
where it seems like,
you know, you're treated like a,
you know, a total knuckle dragging brute.
If you even dare to be a protector. Yeah.
Until you're needed.
Exactly right.
But when it comes to your family, you know, how dare you stand up for them?
Yeah, I haven't.
I haven't been in too many dangerous or violent situations.
When somebody picked up the phone
and called the nearest gender studies major to show up.
So I think
I think one of the important things
for men to understand is that to be to be a warrior
in the context of being a husband and father doesn't mean, you know, Canaan,
I I'm very sorry that there's coming today
very soon with that reference won't actually have the same cultural meaning.
But it doesn't mean that
it doesn't mean John Wick, although that would be cool.
It basically means that you you take seriously
that you do need to maintain a certain degree of if you're
if you're able like I always have to caveat this
because someone will say like, oh, so a dad in a wheelchair can be like,
okay, clearly
we're not talking about situations where somebody has a debilitating and,
you know, yeah, letter of the law.
Yeah, but,
but if you're a husband, like the moment you decide I'm going to be a husband,
if you don't look at that as I am now responsive, both for the physical safety
of somebody else, I think there is something flawed in your reasoning.
And I had a situation once where I was talking with
a young woman who was engaged, you know, very well-educated,
and I was just telling her I'm like, oh, I love being married.
Being married. Great. Congratulations.
And we were talking a little bit about, you know, roles and marriage.
And she goes, Oh, we don't subscribe to those traditional gender roles.
I said, Oh, that's fascinating.
Can I ask you a question?
Because yeah, I said, Let's say you and your fiancee, you know, we're here in D.C.
You and your fiance just went out to a nice dinner.
You're walking back to the car and then all of a sudden
a guy jumps out of the alleyway with a knife.
Now, in one of these scenarios, your fiance jumps in front of you.
And in the other scenario, he jumps behind you.
In which scenario are you more attracted to your fiancee?
And she goes, That's that's not fair.
I'm like, Oh, I guess you just answered the question.
Then it's you.
I said, Look, can we just stop playing make believe you?
You don't expect your man to be konan.
You don't expect him to be, you know, the rock, right?
You don't expect all that. That's fine.
That's that's not a reasonable expectation.
You do expect your man to protect and defend you.
You want him to.
And in fact, if you don't have that expectation
because you don't think he can, I guarantee you
there's going to be an element of respect missing from your marriage.
That is not going to bode well for the relationship.
By the same token, for I
young men get mad at me sometimes when I put a lot of onus
and responsibility because I hear a lot of men nowadays.
I'm like, Oh, it's just too hard to find a wife.
It's just this just too that.
Like, I get it.
Like, let me acknowledge up front
that culture has drastically changed the way many women
see men in their responsibilities and their role within society.
There's no there's no question about that.
Like I, I can definitely appreciate that that's problematic.
Do you know what the solution is to it? Yeah. Strong men
like I don't know what to tell you.
The answer is always the same. Strong men.
So part of your responsibility,
if you want to actually have a wife, if you actually want to have kids,
is you need to stay in a reasonable level of physical
and you need to have the mental capacity and the mental capability
to engage in violence when necessary.
Right.
Not going around picking fights or anything like that.
But if your wife honestly doesn't think you could
protect her in a fight, there's something wrong, dude.
There's something wrong.
Every kid wants to be able to tell their buddy, My daddy
could beat up your daddy.
Not because they actually want their dads to fight,
but because they want to be proud that their dad is a protector.
Okay, So if you don't feel like you adequately fill that role,
there's some things that you can do to correct that.
Right?
Go to the gym a little bit more, lift some weights. Right.
You know, eat a little bit better like this is this
is not just something you're doing, too, by the way, for your physical prowess.
Right. Or for your ability to fight.
Lifting weights is good for your mental capabilities.
This is this is scientifically validated, right?
Lifting weights is good for you.
Staying in shape is good for you.
Another thing that I tell men sometimes is like, look,
you know, when my wife agreed to marry me,
what that meant was, is I'm all she gets for the rest of her life.
For the rest for my life. Right.
But I hope she doesn't kill me. Right?
For the rest of for the rest of my life.
I'm all she gets.
I want her to be proud of what she's got, right?
I want to be proud of what she's got and so I think when you look at this,
not so much from the idea of, okay, I've got to be
you know, I've got to be some sort of, you know, uber warrior to be able to know.
But you should stay in good physical shape because that has a lot of benefits
beyond just physical protection,
you know,
being able to know how to throw a punch or two, what to do in a fight is actually
going to make you a lot more confident, not just within this series of physical.
It'll make you more confident at work.
It'll make you more confident in your social relationships.
So I would tell I would tell men that, look,
take your take your physical.
You know, well-being seriously.
You know, carve off the time that you need to be able to do that.
For me, I love going to the gym in the morning.
It just it starts my whole day off.
Well, it gets me going.
It gets the blood flowing. It gets me thinking.
And by the time, you know, 10:00 rolls around in the morning,
I've already accomplished something that day.
And I think that's also very, very beneficial.
The other thing I start to do is my my son, who, again, you know, just turned 18
a while back.
He's he's been like, dad, I want to do I want to do martial arts.
Like, okay.
So I found a gym where they do Brazilian jiu jitsu and boxing.
We do MMA. And I will tell you this,
doing Brazilian jiu jitsu at 44,
not quite the same at 25, you're definitely going to want to stretch more.
I learned that the the hard way,
but this has been a great experience for me and my son to go through something
where we're we're all in awe and we're learning how to fight.
And it's it's funny.
Comes home one day
and he tells his mom he's like, he's like, yeah, I got to work, right, Mom?
I got to get back to the gym.
I got to you know, I got to get I got to get back to Ima.
I got to do this stuff. I got to work hard. She's like, Why?
Is because I need to know if I could take Dad in this prime.
And and I was thinking to things like what?
I think it's adorable that you think I'm still in my prime.
I really appreciate that too.
I've never got to happen.
It's called dad strength.
And you know, our sons can't beat us. I don't know.
I can't beat my dad.
My dad could have beat my grandpa. Just it is what it is.
If he's got to learn the hard way, so be it. But
so anyways, take take that.
Take that role and responsibility seriously.
I don't know a single man that has decided to take that role
seriously, whether it's maybe, again, just lifting weights or maybe,
you know, taking a boxing class or something like that,
I don't know, a single one that has regretted that decision.
So, yeah.
So, Nick, along those lines, I grew up with a single mom,
didn't have a dad around, you know, to kind of learn a lot of this stuff.
You mentioned on a previous podcast, Building a legacy is an important part
of a father's job.
It's kind of part of his duty to his son.
Talk about building that legacy when you don't already have one.
I think it's a little bit easier to jump in and one right,
if you're, you know,
King John the ninth, it's a little bit easier to know what your legacy is.
Yeah.
How do you build a legacy from scratch when you don't necessarily
have one to jump into?
Know That's that's a good question.
I, I was primarily raised by my mother.
I spent the summers with my dad,
but I had great grandfathers and I have a great dad like I love my dad.
My dad was still very influential in my life,
even though I only got to see him, you know,
three or four months out of the year.
It is a it is a very, very good question
because I see a lot of men that find themselves in a situation.
In fact, when I when I talked about legacy,
I had people say, God, dude, I don't have that.
I don't I don't know.
I have no idea who my grandfather is.
As far as my father, there isn't anything that man left me
that I would want to share with anybody else.
And that's the part where
it's important to understand that, no, you still have a legacy.
It just begins with you.
You're the one that starts it.
You're the one
that has made the decision
to change the entire trajectory.
A family.
I mean, you think about that for a moment because you're right.
It it is it is easy to fall into a legacy and have something
established to protect, protect it, to build upon.
It's like you already have something built in that that you love and that you're
concerned about. It's
but for you to get here,
regardless of how you got here,
there is a line of human beings that goes back for thousands of years,
thousands of years, and now it's you.
And it is shameful
that the people before whoever it was, didn't do enough to actually
make sure that you had a legacy to protect or that you knew what that legacy was.
But it is amazing when you think about it
that potentially hundreds
or a thousand years from now, somebody is going to look back and say,
the reason why our family turned out the way it did is because somebody
at some point made a decision that I'm not going to tolerate what I was given
and I'm going to make sure that my children have better.
That's incredible.
I mean, in some ways, if you think about it, that's just
what an incredibly powerful impact
to have on generations of people you will never meet.
So I always tell people, if you can't if you can't look behind
something, that doesn't mean there's nothing to look forward to
and you're going to be the guy that sets sets the foundation for it.
And that's that's incredible.
That's incredible.
That's it. I'm motivated. Love it.
It's great. Thank you.
A little twist on that question, kind of part B of that.
I only have a daughter and probably won't have any more.
How do you how do you think that?
You know,
not that I don't leave a legacy not having a son, but yeah, you know,
I think there's a lot of guys
who it's something I've had to wrestle with a little bit too.
Like, you know, my name won't pass on all that kind of stuff.
That just culture.
Is that just, you know, me being stupid?
Or I go, How does that play out?
Also, you know, what's your take on that one?
I think it would be totally disingenuous
to tell it to tell another man, especially when I
when I have a son that like, Oh, that's no big deal.
No, I get it. I totally get it.
I will say this, though.
The the most
important legacy I will pass on through my children
is going to be their commitment to Christ.
And that's not a it's not a gender specific commitment.
Right.
It I'll put it this way.
There is a lot of there is a lot of cultural push for men, especially men
that see their traditional role of wanting to build that legacy and and pass it on.
The son passes on the name, but your blood passes on regardless.
And most importantly, the values that you taught pass on regardless.
And that's the real legacy.
Like ultimately, when I stand before God, he is not going to be concerned
on whether or not my name passed on.
He's going to be concerned on whether or not
I glorified him in a way that impacted others.
And I hope I live my life in such a way where I am far more concerned about what
God will say to me when I arrive than what man will say about me when I leave.
And so, again, that the the importance of legacy
is every bit as relevant with daughters as it is with sons.
And it is every bit as important, I think, to
the source of all value, which is again, our creator.
And so I don't I understand it.
I understand it from a cultural level. I do
I think from a scratch, scriptural level,
there is no less importance either way.
I agree.
I just want to kind of flip the other side of the coin
because it's I think it's natural for people to gravitate to the Suns
only and absolutely no, it's it's a no.
I think it's really important.
It was it was funny my
when my oldest daughter got engaged
her her fiance's name is Nick, and I was teasing him.
I said, well, you're going to take her name, right?
And my daughter was like, We don't need to nick criticism.
Like, okay, that's it.
That's good.
Oh, listen, what what skills do you think fathers are lacking the most
that are essential for raising children that are going to be capable adults?
Right.
As we were talking about how like this they didn't have somebody.
So basically he's having to pioneer, right?
He's having to fight the battles that his parents did not fight.
Right.
And so what are what are those essential things?
I think so we kind of break it down into categories.
You there's the spiritual,
the emotional, the intellectual, the professional, the physical.
I think in all those categories, men have responsibilities just as men.
And then we have responsibilities as husbands and fathers.
And so the question is, is that how do I how do
I develop those capabilities and each one of those categories
so that I'm able to fulfill the obligations that I have
and then am I able to pass on those skill sets to my children?
And so the spiritual development, I think, is the most important
because it's fundamental and foundational to everything else.
And so knowing what you believe in, why you believe it
will help make sense of everything else that you do.
And so if there's something off with that, if there's something wrong with that,
it will typically ripple effect into the other categories as well.
You know, the the emotional and the intellectual side are
pretty obvious, right?
Like emotionally, men should be able to project power.
We should be able to intimidate when necessary.
But we should also be able to project tenderness toward the people that we love.
There's a side of me that my kids wife and kids will never see.
There's a side of me that has only been seen by a very select few people in Iraq.
But there's another side of me that my wife and kids see that else will see.
They might get glimpses of it, but not the way it is for them.
And so that sort of emotional maturity is really important.
I'll talk about one of the biggest areas where I have failed in this is that I,
I have a temper and that temper doesn't result in like,
you know, violence or aggression toward my family or anything.
That what it typically does is, is it causes me to,
you know,
not operate as effectively as I as I could.
And one of the primary sources of that anger is printers.
I don't know what it is,
but printers just deserve all of our disrespect and animosity.
And there's nothing you can do to a printer that would make me feel bad.
But but things like that, developing that sort of emotional maturity,
to be able to be in control of yourself and your thoughts.
And again, this is a biblical command, right, to take capture every thought.
That's that's really important.
The intellectual side, I think all of us have different interests
and all of us have different kind of things that we go toward, but
developing a kind of broad intellectual capability.
So, you know, there's to be things that you specialize in,
and those are going to be things that you're really interested in.
I was I was interested in in critical thinking in political philosophy
and economic policy.
And and so I spent a lot of time doing that.
As I get older, there's other things that I've got really interest.
I got really interested in gardening
when COVID hit, and all of a sudden the shelves were bare.
I'm like,
Holy crap, I never want my family to have to be dependent
on Walmart to be able to feed.
So I'm going to learn about this.
And then and then I started learning about other things.
And so I would just say the key to intellectual capacity is to have a very,
very good foundation within critical thinking and an understanding of of truth,
and then to
never grow bored of of learning new things.
Yes, it's actually it's a really exciting process.
I think one of the biggest pet peeves I have with some elements of public school
and I know I'm not trying to bash on everybody in the public school system
about try to bash on that.
It's just a system that I have a problem with is that I think sometimes it robs of
of our our curiosity and our passion for learning
because it's so focused on do this for this test and then, you know, here's
your great as opposed to just recognizing that we live in an incredible world
and there's all of ways to educate yourself, especially now.
So just never, never lose that hunger for education.
And when your kids start,
learn something that may be different than what you ever did.
Like my dad never cared about baseball.
He learned about baseball because I cared about baseball.
And then some of our greatest memories growing up with my dad are watching
baseball games that he never cared about until I came along with an interest,
you know, the the
professional capability we have to provide.
And it's, you know, this whole oh, go chase your dreams.
Go chase what can feed your family. Right.
And get that as close to your dream as possible.
And then and then develop the skills and the capabilities to be able to, again,
love the work that you do, but understand that there's value in any work
that allows you to feed your family and take care of them and provide for them.
And then on the physical side, or just keeping yourself in shape
because in order because again, if you want to be at your peak
professionally and physically and emotionally or relationally,
the relationship is a big part of that emotional and intellectual component
and spiritually, well then it does require you to take care of the body as well.
And so find the things that
that you enjoy doing that provide you that capability.
But I think there's I think there's a lot of good mentorship out there
right now that you don't even necessarily I think it's important.
I mean, you guys have a core group of people right now, right?
You're in, what, four different states.
We are at its peak.
And you guys for for various reasons, you know,
respect one another.
You bring different experiences, you bring different things to the table.
Like all all of that is, I think another thing that is really important
for men is to have that core group right This is my go to war group, right?
These are the guys that these are the guys that I can call them up at 2:00
in the morning and say, Man, I need you here and they're going to show up.
I think that's
what I think that's really important for for men as well.
So, yeah, those are just some of the things that I would say is as
get those foundations in first, get them solid
and then start to start to build out
and just develop those capabilities over the things that you can control.
We focus a lot of things we can't control and it makes people depressed
and and a lot of times it actually drives them into stopping
the focus on the things that they could actually make better.
Yeah, and that's actually kind of all tied to masculinity, I feel like.
And one of the things I wanted to pick your brain on was just masculinity
and the idiot
who decided to marry that word with toxic because there a toxic people
and there are masculine and feminine women and men and it's like,
I just want to hear your thoughts on the word masculinity.
And what do you think it means as a father and how that can kind of say,
well, okay, so let's let's let's be as generous
as possible to the toxic masculinity crew.
Let's just be as generous as possible.
Let's assume that what they met
is that there are certain traits
associated with masculinity, which, if used in certain, can be toxic.
Okay, I got no problem with that.
Now let's do femininity, right?
Like if you if you want to break it down
according to these categories, that's absolutely fine.
The thing that I like to tell people is that, okay, what are masculine traits?
Competitiveness, aggression,
A capacity and capability for physical violence?
Okay.
Everything I just mentioned would be
predominantly associated with masculinity,
but They're all morally neutral in that capacity and of itself.
They're morally neutral until something happens.
So if my capacity for physical violence
manifests itself in stealing someone's purse,
yes, that is that is a evil manifestation of that masculine trait.
If it manifests itself in me stopping the guy that stole the purse
and giving it back to the nice old lady that had it stolen from her,
that is a part of positive manifestation of a masculine trait.
So in the problem that we get into nowadays is that whenever a man
demonstrates what might be considered a more stoic quality
or, or again, that, you know, competitiveness or whatnot,
they don't
label the negative manifestation of it toxic need.
The label, the trade itself is toxic.
What if I what if I help the girl get a Well, that's not what I'm talking about.
No, no, no.
You don't get to do that.
They do this all the time.
They talk in incredibly broad terms, and then when you call them on it,
they narrow it back
down to the thing that nobody disagreed with in the first place.
And it's like, okay, what do you really want here?
And I think what some people really want is the feminization of men.
They see men as the problem.
And you'll hear this sometimes.
Okay, yeah, fine.
There's some good men that protect women, but who do they protect them from?
Other men.
So, see, the problem is still men.
And I like to say, Oh, yeah, you're right.
Because if we had a civilization comprised exclusively of women,
there'd be no violence or conflict.
Oh, yeah.
No, no, no, no such thing as female aggression.
Like just because men have the capacity
to to engage in physical violence in a way that most women don't.
And so therefore, it manifests itself that way in reality.
Does it mean if you took men out of the picture,
they're no be there, no longer be physical aggression anymore?
Like, oh, my gosh.
So part of it is just, you know, getting people to understand, like, look,
put aside all these culturally stupid terms, like I fight against them
because I think the ridiculous and I think they're perverting the whole process.
By the same token, I don't like some people
and what they call the manosphere
that have now created this idea that no, no,
you know, going out there and having a high body count and
having as many beautiful women as possible and doing this and, you know, forget
you know, that's that's what being a man is all about, because all the top guys
and all the kings, they had harems and they had cars and they had this.
Yeah.
If you want to know what took down
most of those top guys, it was having harems and it was, you know,
absolutely.
So they were never bankrupt.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, we should be what we should be projecting right now
because here's, that's the backlash that's coming.
They told a whole generation of young men there's something wrong with you.
And now we've got some men coming up going,
There ain't nothing wrong with you, man.
You need to, like, double down on all of those attributes.
And the problem is, is that a lot of people,
especially within the environment I'm sorry,
but if you're a £125 soaking wet youth pastor in skinny jeans
is the guy that is trying to convince your well,
this is what biblical masculinity looks like.
That ain't getting it done, man.
That ain't getting it done right.
We need the sort of men that can be the tender warriors that can't say that.
No, no, no.
Your object as man is not to go out there and have a bunch of meaningless trysts
with a bunch of women. No.
Your job as a man is to go out there and find that woman that you love,
that you passionately respect, that you can build a family around
so that you can build the sort of men that civilization rely on.
You can build this sort of women that civilization rely on.
That's what your job is to do.
And in order to do that, you have to be capable, right?
I want the dude.
I want the dude going out there and telling everybody else, told
all these other young men,
go out there and do all these things
which we know are immoral and self destructive.
When I show up at the same room with that dude, I want him to be scared of me
right now because I'm going
to do something harmful to you will be because it's all an act, right?
It's all projection.
Yeah.
I want him to be able to look over and be like that, dude.
Okay, that's.
That's a killer. Yes.
So it's the sort of thing where if we're going to be
if we're going to be saying, this is what biblical masculinity is, again,
biblical masculinity is not like, oh, okay you know, no, biblical masculinity
is I'm respectful to women
because I understand that they're beautifully
and wonderfully created in the image of God.
I'm respectful to my wife,
both for her own sake, and also because I'm teaching in the way I treat my wife.
I treat my son how he should treat his wife and I treat my daughter,
how she should expect to be treated by her future husband.
Right. These are the things that I do.
And when we say it, we better say it
with both passion and conviction because it works.
But we also better be able to defend it not only intellectually,
but we should be able to defend it physically.
We don't want we don't want young Christian men
to look at all of their, you know, male Christian mentors and think,
okay, yeah, what they're saying might be true,
but I'm pretty sure a strong gust of wind could take him out.
Right? Like, no, be formidable.
The John levels got a great book on this called Warrior poet
and John levels.
I mean just really
massive amount of respect like another guy that I really admire is Victor Marx.
You want to talk about a guy that went through some stuff
and but is just one of these guys that exudes
this idea of, you know, that that that gentle warrior.
And that doesn't
mean he's always gentle, means he's gentle with the people that deserve gentility.
And he's warrior with the people that deserve warrior.
And nobody's confused in it.
It's so that's that's what I would say on that.
It's like we got to show we can acknowledge
that there are certain traits that are both masculine.
It can be it can have really, really bad manifestations.
And the way that you counter
those is with the pop, the positive manifestations of masculinity.
And that's what God commands us to be.
But Nick, I'm confused.
I was told that Justin Trudeau is the ideal male
Oh, Oh man, I don't know.
Oh gosh, there's so many jokes that just came to mind.
And with appropriate
well, to save them for a reaction.
Yeah.
So one of the questions we always ask our dads that, come on,
when you close your eyes and you stop
and you think about a core memory or your favorite fatherhood story,
what is that that you envision there, Oh, gosh.
Okay.
I'm going to probably I'm probably going to have to go with two,
if you don't mind.
And then this is kind of crazy.
My dad was a homicide detective
with the LAPD.
And again, I only got to see my dad about three, three,
three months out of the year.
And but I would go down with the summers and every
so I'd be like, You want to come and come to work with me?
Yeah.
And he understand, right?
My dad is my dad at the time was like five foot seven.
It was kind of a bigger guy, but he was five foot seven.
He was real tall.
And I
always kind of knew my dad as being kind of funny and sarcastic and the whole deal.
And it definitely had a serious side.
Like I knew my dad was, you know, a real man, but
I guess I saw the tender side.
I and we we go in to the station.
I think this is when he was yeah, I was working
I think South Bureau homicide and
we're sent down and he goes and I'm
just kind of sit at his desk as you want to look at some crime scene books.
I Yeah sure
Good Father-Son direct and he gets it goes am I'm going to get a cup of coffee
I like I go to the bathroom because I come with me.
So he grabs the he grabs the the pot and he's
is walking over to the coffee maker and he shows me where the bathroom is.
As I walk back out, he's he's got this pot of coffee and he's sitting there
and there's this guy sit up on the bench, handcuffed, tatt's everywhere.
Pretty sure now pretty sure he was he was probably me 13.
And and I kind of whispered to my dad, Dad, what?
What is what are those tattoos mean?
It what it looks like was. Oh.
And he goes,
he goes over to the guy, starts putting the tattoo
and the guy starts to lift his head up because get your head down.
And I like I was like, Dad, it's cool.
Like, we don't it's like, I'm not sure I'm going to be mad.
He's a get your head down.
He's like, okay, so this tattoo right here means this.
And this tattoo is with this gang over here.
And and it was one of those things that doesn't seem like a huge deal, but
I mean, here I am, 44 years old, telling you about this story,
because in that moment, I got a glimpse
of the man the bad guys, see,
and it was like, whoa,
okay,
my dad's bad ass.
Yeah, that's amazing. And part of.
Yeah, But so that was that was one story.
The other thing that was really formative for me
growing up, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention
it was all of the times going over to my dad's dad's house
because my grandfather lived five miles away from me.
And so I would go over and
we would watch John Wayne marathons,
TNT and USA and whatnot,
and then we'd go to the dad because Grandpa would want to smoke us pipe
and he would tell me stories of running away from home
when he was 16 to join the Navy during World War Two
and working as a logger and working as a firefighter.
And again, my, my, my grandfather, Bill Freydis,
was one of just the most beloved guys.
Like everyone.
Everyone just loved Bill.
I think like five six, right? It
but it was one of those things where he did a lot of
did a lot of mentoring for me
without ever like us intentionally saying, okay, we're going to mentor now?
No, he was just he was just there whenever I needed him
and and willing to share those stories and and there at the games
when my dad couldn't be he's the one that picked out my wife
when we were we had a car wash
at the high school and
and he'd pulled up because he was going
to support his grandson and went to and, and Tina was there and
he goes, he goes, Nick, you needed you need to date that girl.
You need to date that girl like dad or grandpa.
She's like, she's not interested in me.
Way out of my league is like that.
No, no, that's that's the one you need to date.
And it was funny because when we got when we did start dating
and when we got engaged, this is the other side of it was, What do I wear again?
My grandpa has been rooting for this girl and me to get together, and
Jean and I got engaged and like she gave me a kiss.
And my grandpa's just looking her with this look like, Oh,
and she looks up because what's, you know, What's the matter, Papa Bill?
He goes, Oh, honey, nothing makes you sick.
I thought
it was
so both of those.
Both those men. My other grandfather to Papa John was.
Was really influential as well.
But I got to see that tenderness of my grandma,
my grandfather's and the wisdom and the stories.
And then with my.
With Dad again, I got a dad that, you know, really worked
hard to be involved, even though we live so far away.
But, man, I will never forget the moment I saw again.
I'll never forget the moment I saw what the bad guys saw.
And it made a huge impression on me and it made me thankful.
You know,
sometimes people treat this like, well, well, gosh, weren't you scared? No.
Nope. Because I never got that look.
I never got that look.
But it made me feel safe
that if anybody ever going to hurt me, they were going to get that look.
Absolutely.
So, yeah, it's a great distinction.
Well, thanks for sharing those stories.
Those are awesome.
Like to switch it up with a little bit of an odd question for you.
So if you could spend a day with anyone living or dead, who would it be?
And why is it Thomas Sowell?
So living, living it would be
okay. Okay.
Can we just
right now, we all agree, right now that we're not going to say
the typical answers with, you know, Jesus, you know Moses.
All right.
All right. So living.
Yeah, it would be Thomas. All right.
I don't fanboy about celebrities.
Like, I've met some pretty important people,
some pretty powerful people, some pretty famous people.
And I'm never the type to go over and, like, ask for an autograph
or a picture or anything like that. It's like, Oh, that's cool.
That's for
if Thomas Soul walked in that door right now, like, this would be over, right?
And I could understand it. Oh, my God.
You would not believe in, like, for the next, like,
for as long as he would give me, would just sit there
and ask him questions and, like, be taking notes and like, the.
Hamilton Can we film this?
Right?
Like, I, I admire that man so much for the work that he does
and the intellect that he has, that that would be Thomas Soul would be.
Oh, gosh, that that would be that would be pretty incredible. Yeah
Someone someone dead.
Gosh, I'd have to think about that.
Okay. Let me.
It's always hard.
You not want to leave anybody out right?
Frederick Bastiat.
And this kind of goes to my my interest
in political philosophy and whatnot.
And it allows me to share the name of someone that isn't, you know,
is commonly known within within the sphere.
But Frédéric Bastiat wrote
a book called The Law, and he wrote a lot of other books as well.
He was in the legislature in France in the in the 1800s and died fairly young.
But his book, The Law is I used to buy that book 100 copies at a time
and handed out whenever I would go talk to people
because he did such an excellent job of breaking down complex concepts
in a way that were easy to understand, incredibly relevant,
not only for the 18 1840s, France, but for today.
And he's he's another person
that I would just love to be able to sit there and have a discussion with
because again, his intellect was just incredible.
And I would love to ask I would love to not only ask him questions, I would
love would just sit there, be like, how would you respond to this?
How would you respond to this? How would you respond to this?
And then I would write all of that down.
And then when he disappeared from our meeting,
I would say like, look at all these create responses.
I came up with some of it.
But yeah, that's that's two people.
I mean, obviously if we were going back, if we were going back in there,
biblical times and whatnot, there's David.
David is what I'd want to,
I'd really want to talk to Joshua as well.
Yeah.
Because I think I think a lot of men kind of
I think a lot of men kind of resonate with David.
We want to be that warrior.
We want to be a man after God's heart.
But we also just wonder how,
like on some of the stuff he did, like, how could you?
Yeah.
So I don't know.
I guess I've screwed up this whole thing because I love stuff like that.
That's not I was kind of just giving you as a joke
because I know you're such a huge fan of Thomas Soul, so yeah,
the real question was, I know you're a pretty funny guy.
Your shorts and stuff are absolutely hilarious.
You know, my wife and I will actually just sit there and scroll on pretty often.
It's pretty funny if we get a good laugh out of them, but,
you know, humor.
I think a lot of dads are too, too far on like stoicism, you know.
What's your take on humor and how important it is for dads to just
sometimes just have a laugh and be goofy with your kids and stuff because you're
all serious all the time.
It's not realistic, right?
Real life isn't that way.
You know, some things you just got to laugh at.
So you're going to do it.
You're you're going to do damage to your kids if you're serious all the time.
Right.
And I mean, that sincerely.
There are a lot of dads that think they want to play this, like purely stoic role.
And, you know, I've
got to say, I never seen me cry.
And I can't say I you and like
you do damage your kids.
Nothing about. That's biblical.
My my.
One of the things I really loved about, you know, my of
I love about my dad and loved about my my grandfathers was how funny they were.
They were just the wit and the sarcasm was so quick
when when my when my mother in law
first saw my dad and I together
and saw us interact,
she went over to Tina and said, are they okay?
Like, are they do they not have a good relationship?
It seems like, no, they're like super close.
So why are they so mean to each other?
It is because we my dad and I joke about this all the time.
Like to this day when we, you know,
you know, call each other up or whatnot, like we're
it's it's a series of very, very witty, sarcastic jokes toward one another.
But we still tell each other, you know, I love you.
I love you, too. I love you, dad.
And it's and we mean it.
We mean it.
So I think the humor I the humor and I think to some degree, healthy
sarcasm is actually important.
I think it actually teaches kids how to interact in kind of a funny way,
how to not take themselves too seriously, how to sometimes not take,
you know, bad situations too seriously.
Like how do you not to be irreverent, right?
And not to be disrespectful, but at the same token,
a little bit of laughter can actually bring a
whole lot of calm and a whole lot of joy to to a situation.
And so all of our kids, we I am 80% of the time with my kids.
I'm more like funny and jovial and sarcastic and
and they love it.
And they've they've all
they've all developed a very, very healthy, funny sarcasm as well.
But again, it's not insulting.
It's not mean spirited.
Most of the time. But
but I think it's really important.
I think humor is I think humor is critical because it's one of the ways
it's also one of the ways that dads can kind of show tenderness
without feeling overly vulnerable.
Because, again, we don't we don't want to we don't want to appear weak to our kids.
We need to be strong for
and jokes and joking around with them and teasing a little bit
in a way that's safe and fun is, I think, incredibly healthy.
So now we that a lot of like if you were to come over to our house for dinner,
it would be nonstop us kind of like joking with one another like,
you know, really friendly like jabs at one another and things like that
and would buy my future son
in law first came over it.
It takes a little getting used to.
I remember my daughter actually in a in a car accident and it wasn't a bad one,
but she called us up and she was shook up a little bit.
And so I went and I her up dealt with everything, you know,
as soon as I came up, gave her a hug. Are you okay?
Is there anything you need?
Are you sure? Okay. Went over.
You talked to the sheriff's deputy, talked to the, you know, other car.
Is everyone okay over here?
Do you need anything? We came back, sweetheart.
Do you want to talk about it? You know how he felt. Okay.
And just like, helping to kind of work through this is what happened.
This, like, okay. Yeah.
No, honey, Stuff like this happens, you know, the whole deal.
So, like, for the first 2 hours of my interaction
with her after this happened, it was all tenderness, concern,
empathy, sympathy, the whole deal.
Her boyfriend comes over and the first thing I say to him is like,
you know, you better watch your girlfriend.
She was kissing the steering wheel earlier,
and it's just a little weird, right?
And and was like kind of horrified at first.
And and Lily explained to him like,
you know, look, for the first 2 hours, my dad was just sitting there
and anything I needed.
And you know, holding me when what he got there, the whole deal.
This is his way of letting everyone know that everyone's safe, everyone's okay.
If nobody's mad, nobody's angry.
It's going to be all right. Stuff like this happens.
And B, at first he was like, Man, I was kind of a jerk thing to say,
but and again, she did.
She not have any injuries? I wasn't making fun of any.
Like, we don't have to go to the hospital. We drove straight home.
So I think the humor is really important.
You And that's awesome.
Final question before we wrap up.
What is the best piece of advice somebody has given you as a father?
Oh, gosh,
you know what?
I'm going to have to come up with a list of answers to questions like this, because
whenever I whenever I'm asked, I never I can never think of one of the best.
Yeah.
Or maybe maybe reverse and just say,
what is some advice you would give to a like a new father or to any father that.
Well I'll put it, I'll put it this way, both as a as a father and as a husband.
I can't I'm
trying to remember who was the first person to tell me this
because it's something I've told my kids now
and it's something I told Dad.
It's it's something I told the man that's going to marry
my daughter
was essentially that if you don't love Christ most,
you're never going to be able to love your wife, your kids,
or when I told it to him, you're never going to be able
to love my daughter the way she deserves.
And for people that don't share my worldview, that probably sounds cliche.
I cannot emphasize
I cannot emphasize how foundational it is
to everything else I've talked about today.
So that would that would be it.
If you don't, you can't love Christ the way he deserves.
You're never going to be able
to love your wife for children the way they deserve.
God, that's good.
That's. You know this, right?
Yeah. Beautiful. Love it.
Yeah.
I'm a I'm writing that one down, and that's probably what I'm going to say.
Yes, absolutely.
Thank you for that one.
Yeah.
And I. I agree wholeheartedly.
You know, I've the last couple of years for me have been years of
a lot of growth just in every aspect of my life,
mainly with my walk with him and
so much of what was wrong in our marriage
was because I wasn't pursuing Christ well enough.
And making that fix.
It's amazing how a lot of the problems of sort of themselves out.
So that's probably the best advice that you could give.
And that scenario.
So thank you for that one.
Nick Where can people find you now?
It's a hard place to find you, but you know, for those who may not know, yeah,
we made it pretty easy.
Nick Jay Freydis I know Freydis is not the easiest
last name to spell, but if you, you f REIT
as anybody typeset into Google or whatnot, you know, Instagram, YouTube,
we put it, we've put a lot of time on into our YouTube channel lately
where we've we've tried to, you know, share some meaningful experiences.
I've been a husband being a father
on our on our YouTube channel, which again is just Nick J.
Freydis our podcast making the argument.
We do two live shows a week.
We're going to be adjusting some of that
in the future because I've got to go to a legislative session here in January.
But those are those are the best places.
Do follow us on on social media.
Awesome.
And then I just wanted to kick it over to you
for any closing thoughts or comments you wanted to leave with the audience?
No, no, I appreciate the opportunity.
I mean, the biggest thing I'll say is,
you know, a lot of the things that I talk about, I had
I had somebody that's not a fan of mine told me I was I was being arrogant.
And some of the things that I say and the confidence which I speak of it,
and I guess the one thing I would just want to make sure
that people understood is that man,
the confidence is is entirely into
just seeing things work.
There is
none of what I talk about or my experience is what I do
I ever mean to be boastful or arrogant
as if I've got everything figured out or have had it all figured out or whatnot.
When I when I say there are, by the grace of God, I absolutely mean it.
And I have been so blessed to have a wife
that has has
really just prayed for me and and worked with me
in this marriage in a way that is just so meaningful and precious.
So the experiences that we share are both
the successes and the failures
are intended to come from a deep place
of humility
do. Well, thank you, Nick.
It's been a real pleasure.
And I'll speak for all of us.
You know, we're thankful for your example.
I think you are setting a example for men in the country,
you know, from any walk of life, really.
And like we talked about, a lot of these cultural issues start with us,
you know, in our own families or young men looking to start families one day.
So thanks for being a good example and kind of using the voice and platform
that you have for good.
And I know
that your series on on your YouTube channel,
you know, about being a father and about being a man.
We're like some of the best videos I've watched in a long time.
So I appreciate the effort you put into those
because I think they're going to do a lot of good.
And yeah, it's just been a pleasure to learn from you and to have you on.
So thank you so much
and thank you dear to your wife for being such a great support.
And congrats to all your kids hitting those milestones this year.
And the wedding with your daughter is outstanding now.
Thank you all very much.
All right.
Well, that's enough talk. Let's get Kleiman.
We'll see in the next one.
Thanks for tuning
into this episode of the Present Fathers podcast.
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