An Inspired Return To Truth & Value In An Upside-Down Culture w/ Green Beret Nick Freitas | AMP # 467

TRANSCRIPT:

AUBREY MARCUS: Nick. So good to talk to you, my man. I've watched so many of your clips and I reached out to you and I was like, man, I got to talk to this guy because there's some crazy shit going on with our country. And so I just want to jump right into the fray here. What the actual fuck is going on in the United States of America. Like, what do you see if you're going down the top list of some of the biggest challenges we're facing? Like, what are you really looking at right now? 

NICK FREITAS: Oh gosh. I mean, look, I think one of the biggest things, I mean, I do think there's a spiritual component to this. There's a political and a philosophical component to this. But it's funny I got asked once because, you know, my background was army special forces. We were the guys that were either the insurgents or we were fighting the insurgents. And I got asked like, how would you take down a country? And what was shocking is the more I thought about it and the more I thought about what was going on in the United States, like Damn, so much of what I would do if I wanted to undermine a civilization, a culture, a country, I feel like is being done here. I think a lot of it has to do with our education system. I think a lot of it has to do like on a fundamental level, I think there's this complete loss of confidence. In kind of the underlying values of who we are as a country, our history, where we should be going as a country, what's the government's proper role within a civilized society. So I think so much of that all together explains a lot about what's going on, but on a very fundamental level, when you don't have a good sense of your own meaning and purpose. Like, why are you here? What is the purpose of your life? I think it becomes very easy for other people, groups, movements, organizations, governments to really influence what that looks like. And they can influence it for a lot of really bad purposes. So I think there is at a fundamental level an identity crisis that's going on an individual level for a lot of people, where the institutions that they used to get some meaning and purpose from, they have lost faith in. And then on top of that, I think this fundamental idea that life is just supposed to be good and easy and you're supposed to get what you want out of it. And if you're not getting what you want out of it, that you're the victim of some sort of injustice and that injustice is going to be solved by the right political leader coming over and stealing from this guy and giving to you or punishing the oppressors in order to liberate the oppressed. And ultimately it puts all this emphasis on this idea that you're just kind of a victim. You're just kind of a victim. And the best you can hope for is to team up with the other victims and give somebody a lot of power and they're going to fix it for you. And I mean, I know for me, you know, my faith, my religious faith and also I would say a lot of the meaning I get from being a husband and a father, when you're secure in who you are and your purpose, you don't fall for that crap. And there's a certain resiliency that builds up against it, but there's also the responsibility that comes along with being strong in your faith, being strong in your responsibilities to be a husband, to be a father, to be a protector, to be provider. And when you, when you have that. I think there's a lot of resiliency that comes with it, when you don't, and you are desperately looking for whatever it is, love, community, purpose, meaning, man, that is a void that can be filled with a lot of bad stuff. And unfortunately I think it has been in our country.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. So let's start with the first thing that you mentioned. There's so much there and faith and this understanding and connection to God. And I remember as a child, my family was largely agnostic. They just didn't really have any connection with the divine that was meaningful enough for them to say like, all right, this is the religion we're going to follow. And with that, I still had nothing but questions. Nobody was an atheist, which is its own religion in its own state, pragmatically and fundamentally emphatically state that there is no God that is an act of faith like no other, like really, you're going to fully believe that, that's a crazy leap, but it was full agnosticism. And then through my own, you know, spiritual journeys, which took me on the plant medicine path and working with some of the great indigenous medicines. I had direct contact with the divine. And then that process over the last 25 years has gotten me closer in contact with God. And as I understand God, God represents not only some being, a deity and entity in the sky and not saying that it is not an entity. I do believe God is an entity, but more importantly, perhaps it's a field of value. It's the separation between good and evil. It's the separation between right and wrong. And so now when I look back at the pledge of allegiance, which I used to laugh at, where we used to say one nation under God, I was like, ah, yeah, whatever, one nation under some figment of your imagination. Now I'm like, no, no, that is actually meaningful. It means one nation under God. God, meaning the field of value, meaning one nation under good, if you want to call it, and that that's what actually the Purpose. And you're talking about purpose. The purpose of the United States is to be one nation under God, one nation bound by the field of value to hold the field of value in a world that is susceptible to corruption. And so I look at it now and I'm like, yeah, hell yeah. One nation under God. We gotta get back to that fundamental tenet that we all recited when we were children. 

NICK FREITAS: Yeah. No, I think, you know, I was raised Christian. And I take my Christian faith very, very seriously. It's the foundation of my entire worldview. But I definitely remember going through a process of questioning a lot of it because some of what I grew up with kind of felt like it almost made Christianity out to be like a dieting fad, right? Like if it worked for you, great. If it didn't, no big deal. It's all about you. And it's like, well, no, that wasn't it at all. And so I really started to dig into what they call Christian apologetics, but really the asking those hard questions of, why do I think this is true? Right. Cause that's fundamental. If you look at a lot of the underlying issues that we face right now in our culture, it's based off of, I would say this kind of postmodernist theory that there is no such thing as objective truth 

AUBREY MARCUS: Or objective value 

NICK FREITAS: For somebody 

AUBREY MARCUS: Like value is when people's imagination, truth is a figment of people's imagination. Everything is a story. You've all Harari getting read by Obama, really believing that there's no such thing as value. There's no such thing as truth. And this is the postmodern ethos that we're in and it's fucking madness. 

NICK FREITAS: Oh, well, whenever somebody tells me there's no such thing as objective truth, my first question is, is that true? Because no matter how they answer it, they've contradicted themselves. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right. 

NICK FREITAS: And Jordan Peterson, who again is not a Christian. If I had to categorize it, I wouldn't be so bold as to try to do that for him in any absolute sense, but it's kind of a deist idea that there is a God. The thing that I go back to people on is, again, when you look at things like objective truth or objective morality, the idea that there are some things which are fundamentally good and some things which are fundamentally bad, you don't get that from an atheistic framework. You just don't. And regardless of what people say, nobody lives that way. Everybody believes everybody operates as if there are things that are fundamentally inherently good and some things that are fundamentally inherently bad. Where does that come from? Because if it's just your opinion, or if it's just majority rules, or if it's just utilitarian, then you're not saying that something is bad. You're just saying, well, if you got enough force to impose your will, then I guess it's okay, and nobody really believes that. And that really forced me to go down this path of questioning, like, why do I believe Christianity is true and why do I believe that there's objective morality and why do I believe that there's objective truth? And again, the more I poured into that, the more, again, I discovered that, no, there's certain precepts here that just explain what's going on in the world, explain what's going on kind of in the inner workings of the human heart of the human mind, that I think provide some pretty, not only comprehensive, but provocative answers about the human condition. And again, when you have a society that holds to objective truth and holds to objective morality. It actually creates an environment where even if we disagree about some things, we can work together. We can live peacefully with one another. When we agree, we can cooperate. When we disagree, we can leave each other alone. But if you remove all that and you say that this is just about, you know, whatever, we're all just some big cosmic accident. Well, then some people come to the conclusion that, well, if I wanted a certain way, then I have the right to impose that. And if you don't like it, then you're just standing in the way of whatever utopia we're going to create. And that's a pretty dangerous place to be in. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I would say the most dangerous place to be in, to actually fundamentally believe that there is no such thing as truth or value. Then it just gives license to everybody to justify whatever means is necessary. And I think we've seen this from our government, especially, and I think it's always been the case. I mean, you can arguably go back to there being a turning point when JFK was assassinated. His brother, Robert Kennedy, the first was assassinated and all of the lies that were kind of espoused there. I think I think everybody's pretty clear that there was some interference with the alphabet agencies and creating this outcome. It was like all of the sudden, one nation under God was no longer one nation under God. Because assassinating a president, because you didn't like his ideas or believe that he was going to lead the country in the right way in a democratic nation. You're really violating the principle of goodness, truth, beauty, justice, God. You're violating that principle and then lying about it, which is a secondary violation about it. And so there was this deep rupture of trust, and it seems like it's continued where we just cannot expect truth from our elected leaders and then from the elected leaders. And part of that is because of the corporate capture of these institutions that have paid all of the money for campaign funding and then basically own what the television networks and the news is going to say, so we can't trust the news. We can't trust the government. And so nobody actually understands right from wrong. And then meanwhile, we have these other forces, as you mentioned, how do you take over a country without a shot being fired, where you undermine the very fabric of a nation itself and get everybody fighting amongst each other and degrading this sense of identity and the coherence that naturally comes from a people who respect and love one another and just basic form of patriotism, which doesn't mean that we don't look at our history and say, yeah, we did some things fucked up, like we made some mistakes, but nonetheless, God bless America, so if they can undermine that, and it seems like there's some, I watched Mickey Willis's latest film and I was looking at what potentially the Chinese Communist Party and this kind of communist agenda, if they were involved in this, and of course, I don't know the details to which, but there's pretty good ideas that Russia and China started to incept these other postmodern values that were going to deteriorate the fabric of a strong nation that could come together, united we stand, divided we fall, and we're in this place where we're more divided than ever over largely cultural wars more than anything else. And now we're highly susceptible to falling into ruin 

NICK FREITAS: Yeah, I agree with that. When I started to read Antonio Gramsci, and Antonio Gramsci was an Italian socialist that was imprisoned under Mussolini and Gramsci had the idea that Marx had gotten a lot of things right with his overall theory because a lot of people look at it as, if you look at Marxism as just an economic theory, you're really missing a significant portion of it. And one of the things that Graham, she talked about was that you have to have counter cultural institutions to really have Marxism kind of be adopted, fully embraced by civilization. What's important to understand there is like, okay, well that, but what did Marx believe about the individual? What did he believe about the family? What did he believe about the role of the state or cultural institutions? And as I look a lot of the things that have happened, whether it be through again, postmodernism or existentialism, critical theory, this idea that we can so easily place people into categories of oppressor or oppressed and just how formative those ideas have become within culturally shaping institutions, whether it's the arts and entertainment, media, politics, higher education. I feel like they've made tremendous progress and it's easy, I don't know if you've ever watched anything by Yuri Besmanov, who used to work in the media with the Soviet Union and the KGB

AUBREY MARCUS: He laid out the whole plan

NICK FREITAS: He did, but I think one thing that we miss though, is that we make ourselves far too comfortable with the idea that there's some sort of bond villain, that made all this happen, as opposed to understanding that there are certain existential questions that all of us ask, and we're looking for answers. And one of the easiest answers you can ever be fed is that this is all just some sort of cosmic injustice and you're part of the oppressed group. And the way that you're going to get even or create justice is you're going to essentially band with all the other oppressed peoples. And you're going to take out these oppressors. Well, what makes them oppressors? Well, they're doing well, like, because the only reason they did well was because they exploited you. And it's like, Whoa, Whoa, wait a second. I know a lot of people that are doing a whole lot better than me, not because they did anything to me. In fact, they created goods and services that have made my life better. They were just better at creating those goods and services. And I want to learn from that. I don't want to punish it. And one of the things that I think has become so problematic is that I understand somebody looking around at immense wealth or immense success and then looking at their own conditions and thinking, what is wrong? Like, this can't be okay. The question is that, do you then ask the question of, okay, how was that success achieved? And if it was achieved through peaceful means, through voluntary cooperation and transaction within the economy. Well, then that's a good thing. How do we learn from that? If it was achieved by somebody coming in and stealing from somebody else, whether they did it themselves or they used a government entity through cronyism to do it or whatever, well then, yeah, that's something that is unjust. That's fundamentally unjust and should be opposed. But it’s the difference between Worldview, which prioritizes envy versus a worldview, which prioritizes  gratitude. I always say, you know, people sometimes will look at the way I argue on my political philosophy or whatnot. And they'll say, oh, well, it's just because you don't know what it's like to be poor. I'm like, oh, really? No, I know what it's like to have my power turned off in the winter and my wife be cold because I couldn't provide enough and believe me that feeling stuck with me for the rest of my life as if it happened yesterday. The difference was that family, friends, people who cared about us intervened to help and the end result was I felt shame at what happened, but I also felt an immense amount of gratitude for the people that sacrificed to help me and my wife out. I also felt a burning desire to work and develop myself in such a way to where that would never happen again. And where next time I would be in a position to help somebody else cause I knew what that was like, and that's the difference when people sacrifice to help you, when you're in a position that you need it, it builds gratitude, a desire to improve and a desire to help and reciprocate in the future. When you've been fed this idea that the reason why the power was turned off is because some evil exploiter was taking something that should have belonged to you and now we're going to band together to punish everybody that has something that you don't, that doesn't breed gratitude. It breeds envy. It breeds a sense of entitlement. It breeds a sense of bitterness. And here's what I have learned whether you're a victim or not, because there are people that have been legitimately victimized, whether you're a victim or not, a victim mentality will never serve you, never serve you. It will always breed bitterness, envy and a sense of entitlement. I have seen people that were legitimate victims of circumstances far beyond their control, who instead said, I'm going to take control of the things I can take control of. I'm going to rise above and I'm going to accomplish something. And I've seen other people that were born into wealth, that took a victim mentality, that impoverished themselves and were miserable because again, it wasn't a sense of gratitude. It wasn't a sense of how do I improve situations? It was always, how do I get even with people? Or how do I take what somebody else has? And that's just become so fundamental to my worldview and how I look at things is like, am I viewing this through a prism of gratitude or envy? Because one of those is going to serve you well. And one of those is not. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Absolutely. Were you ever an athlete? 

NICK FREITAS: Yeah, not an especially good one. But no, I wrestled, I played baseball, I did track. Our school, it was funny, the school I went to was a pretty small one. We had a graduating class, like 27. We didn't have enough for a football team. We didn't have enough for a football team, but I remember going to my school principal, look, we've all seen that. I fell out pretty much every basketball game and maybe if we had a wrestling team, this would be better utilized.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. So, I asked that question because I think one of the fundamental aspects that I look at, is competitor mentality and competitive mentality is opposite from victim mentality, right? It's a slightly different vector, but in a competitor mentality, if somebody is better than you, you don't want to try and eliminate them from the game. You use them to inspire you to get better at the fucking game. You know, like I have a great group of guys and we hoop when we play fucking hard, I have to repair the fences around my basketball court every month because we're throwing people through the walls, you know? But at the end of it, you know, like I got beat by my boy, Renique, shout out. I talked a lot of shit to him and he beat me yesterday and I'm glad, I mean, it was salty, it tasted like horse semen when I lost that game. I hated every, 

NICK FREITAS: I don't want to know how you know what that tastes like. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I'm imagining, I watched Fear Factor. I was friends with Rogan. But ultimately, I'm happy. I'm like, all right, man. All right, motherfucker. Like next time, I'm going to be out there practicing my shot. I'm going to think about the shots I missed in that. And I'm going to go out and I'm going to get his ass next time. I'm grateful. I'm grateful that he beat me. I'm grateful that he was better on that Monday evening game, because that's going to draw me forward. It's like Kobe Bryant, the mama mentality, he's like, Oh, you beat me. Great. I'm happy. Now, I'm going to shoot more shots. I'm going to get better and I'm going to challenge myself to be better. And we've lost that as a culture. And now many people have it people, like yourselves and people like myself, but this idea that if somebody is out there doing better than you, this is the American dream. This is what's possible. If you put in the work, if you put in the labor, if you're Abel, instead of Cain, then instead of Cain taking a rock and killing his brother, because he was jealous of what he had achieved, look at what Abel is doing. Look at what that other person is doing and say like, all right, I respect what you're doing, you go get it. Cause that's going to draw me forward to be the best version of myself. And this is going to make me great. You know, all of your greatness is going to make me great. So I'm grateful that you're out there killing it. And as long as the playing field is fair, that's what it should be. The government should just be referees to make sure that the playing field is fair so that everybody can compete and play the game, but we've lost that idea. Now it's a quality of outcome. Come is this idea where it's like, no, no, everybody gets to score the same amount of points. So if you don't have this many points, then we're going to remove all the other players from the field and you're going to get free layups no matter how bad you suck, you know? So we're going to have a quality of points. It was like, no, there's no quality of points. This is a competition. And that's what actually drives people into their best version of themselves. Like, this is not hard logic. This is not complicated philosophy. Like the great Renaissance philosophers were not arguing about whether competition drives people to become their best. You know, they were like, I'm going to bring out my best thesis. You challenge it. I'm going to try and beat you. 

NICK FREITAS: Yeah. It used to be a foregone conclusion and so much of the benefits that we've received. The Western civilizations were rooted in certain ideals that were considered fairly universal. And you're right, competition was one of them. It was the idea that each of us, I mean, look, I get frustrated when people talk to me about the United States and they focus so much on democracy and I don't even mean the kind of the nuances between constitutional Republic, democracy and whatnot. Look, we're a constitutional Republic, but we use democratic processes. What I get frustrated with is when America is defined so exclusively based off of the political, what made the United States unique from its inception was not the fact that, okay, we're going to have a judiciary and we're going to have an executive and we're going to have a legislative and we're going to have separation of powers. And that was all interesting. That was all unique. I would say it was all very important, but it was a couple of ideas. The most fundamental one was, and even though we didn't live it out, very well initially, right? We hold these truths to be self-evident. So right off the bat, we're talking about a truth, we're not talking about, this is just a political concept or idea or preference. We only choose to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We look at that now and we've heard it so many times that we think, ‘well, yeah, of course’. No, not, ‘yeah, of course’, look at all of human history. That was a revolutionary idea that even the people that wrote it, didn't fully embrace it to the capacity that we would have wanted at that particular time. But when you say that, Hey, look, you as a human being, you have inherent worth. You have inherent worth by nature of being a human being, created in the image of God and that you have certain rights that the government didn't give to you. The government is recognizing that it has a responsibility to protect these rights that are granted to you by nature, by virtue of you being a human being. And the fact that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you have the right to pursue happiness to the extent that you would like to the extent that you would define it, provided that, you don't infringe on the rights of other people to do the same, that was what was at the heart of the American experiment. Not just a system of government, right? If being free is nothing more than getting to elect politicians every two, four, and six years, dude, I'm not interested, right? That cannot be all there is to freedom or America. It is that idea that, look, the world ain't fair. And it ain't ever gonna be. And there's always going to be inherent differences between us. You're going to start off at different places. All of that exists, right? And there is no correction for all of it. But the beautiful part about living in a genuinely free society where you have abilities and talents and property rights and inherent rights and all of these things. And I have the same thing is that you and I get to figure out how our needs, wants, desires, capabilities all work together within an environment to where when we transact, it's to mutual benefit. Right. Nobody forced the two of us to get on this podcast. We are both wealthier as a result of it. Why? Because we both chose to spend our time this way because we both thought we would get something out of it. I'm not exploiting you. You're not exploiting me. And we both got to make this choice and learn something as a result, that is what was fundamental to the American experiment and why so many people wanted to be a part of it. And I think you're right that we lose a part of that when everything becomes this power struggle for who's controlling congress? Who's controlling the presidency? What sort of special deals do I get? Either as a corporation or an activist group or whatever else it is. As opposed to saying, no, I just want equal protection before the law so that I can figure out the best way to use my talents to benefit myself, my family, my community, and then I can work with voluntary cooperation with other people to do the same. People have no idea from a historical standard when an incredible and unique gift that is, and instead we're trading it off for envy and bitterness and greed and a desire to take and redistribute. And man, I don't want that. When my neighbor succeeds, I want to celebrate with them. I want to ask them how they did it. I want to see how I can get better at what I do, when I succeed and they feel happy for me. That's the sort of energy that I want in a free country, but you're never going to get that if everything is oppressor oppressed. Why? Well, because you have stuff and I don't. And this politician told me that if I give him power, they'll take it from you and give it to me. Nobody wins through that long run. Even the people that think they're benefiting short term don't win from that because that mentality is corrosive. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I mean, I think pointing back to this unbelievably inspired aspirational ideal for the founding of our nation, I think a lot of people disqualify the brilliance of that based on the fact that, oh, well, some of them were slaveholders and then look at what they did to the indigenous people. And yeah, you're right, they didn't uphold that idea. They fell victim to the ethnocentric fallacy, which said that we, who we call ourselves Americans and in this case, white Americans or the other ethnicities that were grouped into that, we somehow have these rights and these people of color or these indigenous people don't have the same rights. They're not granted the same rights by God. There was a huge mistake and it wasn't a nation under God in its entirety because every person, every human being is one of God's children. God doesn't look and say, Oh, only these people are the chosen ones. Only these people are the children of God. Everybody's a child of God and everybody deserves those rights. And we fucked that up. You know, we fucked that up, but nonetheless, it doesn't disqualify the aspirational ideals, just we made a mistake in our ethnocentric focus where we said one group is better than another group and one group has more rights. But now we're in a world where we've moved beyond that, and I understand that there's still repercussions from those atrocities and from those failures for us to live up to our own ideals. And I think we should do our best to try and figure that out. Like the Native American reservations are in horrible poverty. And it's a real tragedy what's happened there. And I think looking at that and saying, all right, how do we help you guys out? You know, we fucked you guys over a couple hundred years ago, and it's not about taking from some and doing that, but let's do our best as children of God now to actually live up to the ideals we set, but it doesn't mean that the ideals were wrong and it doesn't mean that we had the wrong idea. It just means that we made some mistakes along the path. Let's own these mistakes. So yeah. All right. We fucked up. Let's see how we can help this situation that we created, clean up some of the mess that we caused. But nonetheless, let's not throw out the brilliance of what the foundational documents and aspirational ideas of our country were and are. Because this is still the way it's still the path. There's nothing better that exists than what the ideals are that we created. Even if we made mistakes along the way, and even if we got into wars that we shouldn't have gotten, of course we have like every nation, we have a history of mistakes that we made. WBut that's one of the things I love about our country is that the fundamental ideals, regardless of how we lived up to them at different periods in our history, there's still the best that there ever was and potentially the best that there ever will be. 

NICK FREITAS: No, and I think another important component to that, cause again, I like, I don't have a problem with the concept of restitution. I do have a problem with this concept that seems to come along with it all the time, which is no, no. What happened in the United States was uniquely evil or what happened in the West was uniquely evil. You have to be pretty ignorant of history to actually believe that. But one of the things that fascinated me when I got out of the military and I went into college, was some of the bizarre ideas that I heard about Western philosophy or Western influences on the world didn't come from courses that were designed around. It came from English classes and I'll never forget this one professor. And I mean, again, this is an English literature class and we're talking about the conquest of the Aztecs. And he's talking about this idea of this Western colonialism and Western conquest and how uniquely evil this was. And I remember raising my hand going, do you guys know how Cortez actually took over the Aztecs? Well, yeah, he came in and he had gunpowder on horses. I said, 200 dudes are not taken over by the Aztec empire with gunpowder and horses. He had the Alliance of 20,000 natives, minimum 20,000 natives that were tribes that were fighting against the Aztecs because they wanted to liberate themselves from a pretty brutal regime that used to come in and capture their children and flower wars to execute them to the sun God. Like this idea that everybody was just living in peace and harmony until the evil Westerner showed up. I'm sorry, that's not an accurate reflection of reality. Not to mention the fact that it creates this caricature of other civilizations that isn't warranted. What we need to understand is that a lot of the things that were going on all around the world were not uniquely Western. They were part of the human condition. And the real question we have to ask ourselves is, why are we? It is good that we are hypersensitive to certain activities now and that we find such a sense of moral indignation toward, but at that time there was no general moral indignation to conquest. It was just considered a regular part of human history. What we should be asking is, why do we not see it that way now? Like, why do we have this intense desire for introspection, which I think is good by the way, to question things that happened in the past and then to question why they happen in order to hopefully prevent such things from happening in the future. But if you're going to try to suggest that during that introspection, we must now conclude that we were uniquely evil in a way that, quite frankly, is not reflected in human history. Well, then you're going to come to some pretty bad conclusions. And what I've realized is that there are certain political ideologies that want us to believe that we are uniquely bad and evil, not because it's an accurate reflection of history, but because the only way they can get us to part from those fundamental values that were express beautifully, but not lived up to in the way that they should have been. The only way to get you to break from that and to adopt something new is to convince you that they were never good in the first place, right? If a good idea wasn't faithfully executed by fallible human beings, then clearly the idea was wrong. No, the idea was, is, and will forever be beautiful. But it's being executed by fallible human beings. And the real question that we need to ask ourselves is what through education and through development of institutions and social norms and mores, how do we become better? This is why in the preamble of the constitution, it says to create a more perfect union, it's the acknowledgement that fallible human beings are doing the best we can with what we have and that each generation needs to look at it as having a responsibility to improve on, upon it. But I don't think you do that by arrogantly claiming that everything that came before us and everyone that came before us was stupid and ignorant and mean and cruel. Instead of understanding why things were done at a certain time, how do we take the good from it, acknowledge the good from it, and then how do we improve upon it? Because I guarantee you, there's gonna be generations that come after us that think, why'd they do this? Why'd they do that? And if I want to be properly understood, I think I have an obligation to properly understand the people that came before me. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and the other part of this is to play this out to its logical conclusion, right? With all of these kinds of postmodern ideologies, all of these kinds of woke concepts that are in culture, play this out to its logical conclusion. We have examples of the direction that this has gone in different historical contexts. It never goes well. Like, this is not heading us, this is not leading us towards a utopia, this is leading us towards a radical dystopia, but people aren't actually playing out what this is going to mean if we undermine the fabric of our country and the ideals that stand behind it. This field of value, if we start to undermine that, what is the ultimate logical conclusion to this, you know? And I think this is what people are failing to understand is actually how dangerous these ideas actually are, you know? So somebody might look at, Oh, the pregnant man emoji. Oh, that's funny. Whatever. It doesn't matter. No, no, no. This is not a small issue actually, because this is undermining truth at its very core and it's implanting something in younger generations typically use more emojis than older generations, although I've seen quite a few distinguished older gentlemen who put a lot of like love hearts on their messages and I appreciate that. I love a loving warrior. You know, and I don't mind getting hard emojis from Bobby Kennedy when he's texting me a message. I'm like, that's cool. But nonetheless, like this idea that we're implanting these little seeds of mistruth and a mischaracterization of just simply reality. Sorry, motherfuckers. Men can't get pregnant. Like, what are you trying to do here? This is not just about some little trivial thing. This is actually a bigger problem at play here. And so I think the culture war, some people want to dismiss and say, ah, no, it's not about that. It's about the high level, political and economic. And I would just say, no, it's both. It's like really both. And both of these things matter. 

NICK FREITAS: Have you ever heard of Theodore Dalrymple? 

AUBREY MARCUS: I haven't 

NICK FREITAS: Gosh, I think you would love this guy. So that's his pen name. I'm going to look up this quote real quick because I want to get it right. And he wrote a book called life at the bottom and he was raised by his father who was a Marxist. He did a lot of work in Sub Saharan Africa as a doctor and then he spent a good part of his career working as a, I think it was a psychologist within the British National Health Service and the British prison system. And his actual name, as I believe, let me look it up, I think it's Dr. Anthony Daniels. But the name of the book was Life at the Bottom, The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. And the book is a series of kind of like papers that he wrote over time while he was in practice. And he doesn't betray any information that he should have, like names or things like that. But he talks about everything from interviewing people that have kind of been victims of domestic violence and been in one bad relationship after the another to people that have murdered people. And it's fascinating because he really focuses on this whole idea of mentality and what sort of mentality traps somebody in this never ending cycle of depression and poverty and misery. And he has this one quote that I'm trying to find here real quick. And I'll just paraphrase it, but he said, the more I studied communist propaganda, the more I realized that it wasn't meant to inform, it was meant to humiliate. So, because the more you could convince someone to remain silent in the face of obvious lies or better yet to take part in the sharing of obvious lies, the more you could reduce the resistance and essentially you would make them a party to evil. And then he concluded with this, I have come to the conclusion that political correctness works the same way. And it's intended to, because a nation of emasculated liars is easy to control. And that line, ‘a nation of emasculated liars is easy to control, really stuck with me’. And you've said it a couple times here and you've hinted at it in other areas as well. It's this idea that this isn't just some arbitrary culture war of what do you care? How does it affect you? I'll tell you how it affects me because you're challenging the very nature of truth and reality. And if we can't agree on that, if we can't come up with mechanisms that we both agree to, whether it be the laws of logic or the scientific method, if we can't come up with processes to agree on what reality actually is, and everybody gets to redefine it as they choose then it's not going to be everybody redefining it as they choose. It's going to be that some people believe that they have a special privilege to redefine reality and you will be made to care. And if that means you have to be reeducated, if it means you have to be punished, if it means you have to be killed to make way for the utopia, then I guess that's just what needs to happen. And nobody gets to tell me that that's not true because the 20th century is replete with examples of it. And I think that battle for, no, there is objective truth. And the beautiful thing is that there are neutral mechanisms. They're not conservative or liberal or right or left. There's neutral mechanisms that we get to utilize to arrive at truth and to come to certain conclusions about reality. And that's a beautiful thing. But if you throw that out, because you find it inconvenient, the moment it doesn't coincide with your political objectives or your own philosophy, I've got bad news. It doesn't mean reality is going to change. It means you're going to go through some real misery and you might impose a whole lot of misery on other people because you can ignore reality. You can't ignore the results of ignoring reality. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, well said.

NICK FREITAS: And that's the part that is just, yeah, that Theodore Dalrymple quote, man, it really stuck with me. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that I've noticed as well is this level of corruption, this kind of influence of these dark forces, it always hides within the holy. It's like the corruption swarms the sacred. So a holy virtue is actually science. Science has liberated us from so many superstitions and brought so many blessings into our life. Then we look at what happened in the pandemic and the side that was actually ignoring science. They were actually saying, trust the science. They were saying like, trust the science because science is part of the holy science as part of the universally accepted religion. But what were they actually doing? They were censoring dissenting opinions. That is not part of science. They were limiting the questions that could be asked. They were actually removed, I mean, I've had videos pulled down from YouTube. I've had posts that were fact checked that we're now seeing clearly we're supported by the pharmaceutical industries. This is not trusting science. It's like an inversion. They're using a holy principle and they're committing great evil and atrocity underneath it. Not dissimilarly from what the Catholic church did in the Inquisition. When Giordano Bruno was hung upside down and given to the flames for questioning the actions of the church at that point that is not the actions of God, that is not what God designed and desired to do, but they use the cloak of God to actually commit their evil, just like in this recent history, they've used the cloak of science or the cloak of the love for all people, or they cloak their kind of dark

NICK FREITAS: Progress

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. They've cloaked their dark mechanism within something that everybody can agree upon. And so you have to be really mindful of this for this kind of second level game theory of how they're going to do it. They're not going to do it by saying, yeah, we're pieces of shit that want to undermine the country. And we're just out to fuck everybody up. No, they're going to hide it. They're going to hide it in their own virtue and their own virtuosity and the virtue signaling of following that virtuosity. But underneath it is a much darker impulse and that's just the way it goes. 

NICK FREITAS: No, I think that's right. One of the things that's so interesting about the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien. And this was a concept that he was getting across. Obviously Tolkien was a very dedicated Catholic and it was this idea that evil can't create evil can only manipulate that which has already been created. And so it's this idea that it will pervert the creation. So you look at something like if I want to manipulate you, Right, then it is a huge advantage to me to take something that you already believe in, that you already trust, then take the mantle of it, take the credibility of it, and then use it for my purposes. Now, the moment I do that, I pervert its original intent. I pervert the beauty of the thing that it was. And what we have to be careful of is when somebody is attempting to misuse something for the purpose of manipulation, we shouldn't throw out the thing that they're using, right?

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.

NICK FREITAS: That's the thing that's beautiful. We shouldn't allow that thing to become tainted as a result of its manipulation. And one of the things that worries me is when we talk about the potential backlash to what's going on right now, there's a gentleman who runs a page called what if all his, his name is Rudyard Lynch and a really intelligent younger guy. And he talks a lot about this idea of the coming like right wing backlash and he's really nervous about it. Because he thinks that there's this problem where all of a sudden we're going to combat this kind of authoritarian approach to civilization with a different version of the authoritarian approach. And it's like, no, you can't give up on that, which is fundamentally good because it has been manipulated by somebody for bad purposes. You have to recognize that they're using it because it's beautiful and because it's true and because it has value and it needs to be fought for. Because the moment you surrender on it and you say, well, fine, we're going to fight fire with fire. That's it. Ultimately, you know, evil wins, right? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

NICK FREITAS: You have to fight it with the light. As tempting as it may be, right? Like that's the whole concept of the ring, right? And the Lord of the Rings like, oh, but if we wield it, we'll wield this power for good. It's like, no, it's corrupting in and of itself because there's an evil which infuses it. It just has to be destroyed. And I think it's one of the, I think it's one of the beautiful things about the lore and the story behind Lord of the Rings and the applicability of understanding the way kind of the nature of corruption and evil and how it will use the good to the extent that it can get away with it in order to pervert it toward a negative purpose. And one of the most important things for all of us is to understand that you can't use that power the same way you have to rely upon the good and you have to stand for it and fight for it. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, the last podcast I released was just we went through the full Lord of the Rings series and talked about the applications and kind of decoded it for our modern context. And one of the conclusions where I felt like Tolkien didn't tell the story in a way that was actually the most allegorically valuable for us is we don't know who the orcs are and who the orcs aren't and that's the thing about in Tolkien story. The orcs were all bad, it was easy to figure them out and for a warrior like yourself, if you saw a bunch of orcs there would be a part of you that would have like a devilish cavalier smile like, Oh, Orcs. I'm fucking trained for orcs. But you can go, or you want to come? All right. Orcs. Let's go. They were too easily identified. Right? Whereas now in the actual reality, you know, this orcish energy, this Sarumonic in Sauron energy was actually, it infuses a little bit of everybody. So everybody is both orc and elf and human in all different mixtures. And so this idea that you can place an entire population, Oh, these are the orcs. Oh, right wing. They're all orcs. They're all Nazis. No, they're not. There's a lot of fucking good and beautiful people. And Oh, all liberals. Oh, they're all part of this deep state agenda of pedophiles and all of this. No, man. We can't identify a person with the ideology while all of us have a little bit of Orc in us. And all of us have a little bit of Elf in us, and we got to liberate again with the powers of God with the light that can come through with the love and when necessary with the ultimate discretion of wielding and brandishing the sword like that, there is a time for that, but we also have to recognize that it's not that simple and it's not that clear right now. And the moment you cast somebody as you are entirely the villain, that's where we make mistakes. And we do that with leaders and we do that with individuals. And that's also highly dangerous because then it leads to all forms. I mean, we see it all the time. As soon as you do that, what follows next is some form of genocide. That's the way it goes 

NICK FREITAS: Because you've created moral justification for it. It's amazing how this CS Lewis, who interestingly called himself like the most reluctant convert to Christianity on the British island. But he was talking about how it might be better to live under robin bears than it would be moral busybodies and his justification for that was the robber baron or the person who's driven by greed or power that they may at times have their lust for those things. He goes, but the Moral busybody will torment you without end because they do so with the approval of their own conscience. And I know as I was going through and I was challenging my Christian faith, one of the things that really stuck out to me and it's something that I struggle with. There's a verse in first Peter that says, first sanctify Christ in your heart and always be prepared to give a response for the hope that is in you, but to do so with gentleness and respect. And I can understand the first part. I can understand the second part, man, I struggle with that third part. I really do at times, right? And it's not to say that there aren't times to respond with, sometimes with force when necessary and appropriate and moral. But one of the big things that struck me was, if you are faithfully living out your Christian life, that will not manifest itself in arrogance because the answer to the question of what is wrong with the world is you. It's that we do have that sinful nature and that moment that it's like, Oh no, it's them. That person's the problem. That person's like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, wait a second. Wait a second. Look at words in your own heart. Look at some of the darkness that resides there. Look at some of the greed and selfishness and avarice. Look at the things you're willing to justify for your own benefit. Look at those things there. Focus on that and recognize, and again, the whole concept of, or not concept, but the whole purpose of Christ was that we needed to be saved from that. And what that is supposed to do, is infuse you with a sense of humility, and love for that other person, because as much as you may disagree with what they're doing and there are things that are going on, that I can say I honestly hate the things that are going on and the things that are being perpetrated against children right now is the father in me, the husband in me, I will tell you right now there are people doing things to children in this world right now that I can't imagine in my own flesh.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah

NICK FREITAS: The things that I would do to those people if I got a hold of them. And the thing is that I know I have the capability, the United States Military spent a lot of money making me very capable when it comes to violence. And and I look at somebody hurting a child as the the clearest moral justification of imposing every sort of harm upon that person, but the one thing that I always come back to is this idea that understanding that ultimately there are times to use violence, especially in defense of the innocent, especially in the defense of truth. But I always try to distinguish between my hatred for an action, my hatred for an idea versus hatred for people, because once you make the idea or even the action synonymous with a person, that is a really really slippery slope. And I think it's very important. I try to say this, I try to say, look, I don't hate anybody. There's a lot of actions I hate, there's ideas I hate, there's ideas and actions which deserve my hatred. But I need to always recognize and I need to always be able to separate the action or the idea from the human being. Not because that human being isn't responsible for their actions, not because that human being might need to face justice or in the right circumstances that might even have to face violence, right? Because if I have to, that other human being that they're hurting is entitled to be protected, but on a philosophical level, on a fundamental level. If we're not capable of separating the idea of the action from the human being, I think we run the risk. Like you said before, we run the risk of justifying some pretty evil stuff because ultimately the moment we believe that the righteous indignation we appeal to comes from within us. We all of a sudden are able to morally justify actions that turn us into the very thing that we're trying to combat. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I mean, you're pointing to some of the really beautiful tenets and teachings of Yeshua  talking about the plank within your own eye as you're trying to point something else out and, and, you know, the impulse to throw stones without recognizing that your house is made of glass. And again, my biblical recitations are not exact, but I get the gist of what that's saying, and that's a big part of the Christian ethos. And as you're saying, and we're saying disambiguating the action from the individual, understanding that they're connected because the action is committed by the individual, but this really, I see the appropriate way of the warrior is actually to do what is necessary to stop that actual, that action from taking place, not only individually, but collectively. So it involves changing the story as well as dealing with the individuals who are perpetrating that story. So you have to work on the story level, you have to actually bring God back into the story and you have to handle what needs to be handled. But I don't see any situation and I will go to another hypothetical after this to talk about true evil, which I think is very rare, but the warrior, if the warrior has to take his sword or pull his gun and actually use it, the only appropriate response is deep sorrow. That this child of God got so corrupted that the only choice was to take their life. And like, there should be a deep moment of genuine compassion and sorrow for what you've, even if you're the one who had to handle it, like, I'm so sorry that it had to come this way. You know, I wish there was another way, but there was no other way. 

NICK FREITAS: And I've been there. I've been there, 2008 in Iraq. We took out a guy that was one of the most evil people I had tracked, I had done Intel targeting packets on the whole. I mean, this guy used to put suicide vests on small children, run them into crowded areas and detonate them. And when we got him, I felt elation, I felt absolute elation and to some degree it was the elation over that this great evil that had been perpetrated had been stopped, and a sense of elation for the people in the town that were no longer being, oppressed by this guy, abused by this guy, murdered by this guy. By the same token to your point, and I think you worded it very well. It's this idea that I shouldn't have ever wanted any situations as much as I may take some element of satisfaction that this was brought to an end. It is tragic that that's what it took. And the moment you stop seeing the tragedy in that, you're on dangerous ground, and this is again, and you said to like, it's really easy when we distinguish between, Oh, evil, good and evil again, within Christian theology, Satan doesn't present himself as a red little demon walking around with horns, right? He was an angel of light. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.

NICK FREITAS: And it is about that proper identification and distinguishing between the person and the action, but also never forgetting that you also have something within yourself that if you're not recognizing that it's there and fighting against it and constantly working to develop and to bring out that the good and to fight against that desire for evil, you will be shocked at how quickly it can present itself and how easily you will be able to morally justify it when it does.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. This is the book that I'm currently working on. I'm working on a book, the title is you versus anti you. And the concept is that the devil lives within, this devil has many names, and the Bible has the names for it, Satan or Lucifer. And then in Buddhism, it's Mara. In the Toltec faith, it's the Predator or the Parasite. In modern psychological context, Phil Stutz calls it Part X, or as it pertains to the artist, Steven Pressfield calls it Resistance. There's this force that's looking to actually negate and corrupt our light in every possible way. And we have to fight this battle internally to understand that this devil lives within in native American culture. They called it Wetiko. And it's this force of corruption and negation, this anti life, anti value, anti your soul's highest potential that is actually pulling and we're in contest and it's the choices we make to recognize it. And it's the cleaning and purification that we have to go through. Like Yeshua's 40 days in the desert, people extrapolate. Oh, he was fighting this external devil. Well, it is external and universal, but it's also personal. He was actually reconciling and defeating the devil within himself so he could step forward into his own Christic light, this universal unconditional love. And I think this concept that you're pointing to is exactly the thesis that I'm talking about. We have to find where these corrupting influences are, spot them with absolute vigilance to compete and contest against that with just absolute commitment to the fight that you're gonna show up every day and say, you know, get thee behind me Satan, not today, not today motherfucker. Like I'm gonna choose God's way, I'm gonna choose God's path and that's a constant battle and then, so I want to get to this other idea, this evil does exist, and again, I'm a psychonaut. So I've explored these different cosmological dimensions and paid very close attention. And there is actual evil in the disembodied form, like evil at the devil that exists externally. I also believe it exists. It's an aggregation of all the evil that's within every individual. And so it's both personal and universal. And I think on occasion, I'm open to this idea that somebody has been so corrupted by this force that all that is there is devil, like all that is remaining is evil. And that's something that's, you know, despite all of this discussion, which I think applies to most, I still leave open for the possibility that there are actually demonic forces that exist, that rarely manifest in its entirety in the human dimension, in this dimension of polarity, there's always some mix. Even Darth Vader had a spark of the holy. That's why he fought Palpatine to save his son at the end of the day, despite all the atrocities that he'd committed. So I always hold this possibility for redemption, but dealing with genuine malice to a person that's beyond that, like the person you mentioned in Iraq, like, that is a function and is a factor. And I think sometimes people aren't willing to look at the idea that there's actual embodied evil. In the world and that there is no other option, even if there is, still throughout that, this sense of like, man, I wish it didn't have to be this way. I wish this person hadn't been corrupted, but I just wanted to get your thoughts on what you feel about, like, Evil, the devil in general, its influence and how it interacts with people, because I'm sure you've actually seen this and it sounds like that story you were mentioning is really an embodiment of that. There's certain people that I think are beyond salvation in this life. Maybe as their soul journeys through time, there's another option that could be presented. But evil is real. You know, it just is. 

NICK FREITAS: I certainly think it is. And I think the most effective lies are the comforting ones. And it's a very comforting lie to believe that there is no such thing as actual evil, there's just our linguistic definitions of things that we don't like that we assign this kind of moral connotation to and what I would say is that, again, that might be a comforting lie, but I believe it is a lie because I don't believe anybody can look at some of the most egregious acts that can happen to another human being and think to themselves. Oh, I just don't prefer that. No, there's something inside you that screams out that is wrong. And that is even. Why? Now, again, I can't answer this question apart from my own conviction about what is true and in my worldview and in my faith, Christianity explains this, that there is a spiritual aspect, there's a physical aspect of this world and there's a spiritual aspect to this world. And a lot of times now we like to act as if because we can explain so much about the physical world that therefore there's no need to explain anything from a spiritual component. And I think that's a pretty arrogant way to view reality. I think when we look at human existence, when we look at human experience, when we look at the totality of the things that we can't perfectly explain or understand, I think it requires, as you said before, I think it requires far more faith to believe that we're all here as a result of some sort of purposeless cosmic accident.

AUBREY MARCUS: Whoops. 

NICK FREITAS: Yeah. Just one day there was nothing and then it exploded and then there was something and it's like, look guys, mathematically, this doesn't add up. But when I look at, again, when I look at through the Christian faith the explanation of good and evil and the fact that it exists, what's interesting is that a component of that is based off of the fact that God created truth. He created love and he created justice. Now here's why those three things are incredibly important because there's a lot of people that say, well, if God is all powerful and God's all knowing, and God is loving, well then why does evil exist? And I usually look back at that person. I'm like, do you enjoy your freedom? Well, of course. Do you see yourself as an autonomous human being that can make their own decisions? Yes. Well, then you had to be able to choose the opposite of love and justice. You had to, otherwise you're a robot, you're an automaton, you're just simply dancing to your DNA and I believe that God is sovereign, but I also believe that God wants a genuine relationship with us and to have genuine relationship, somebody has to be able to choose to not have it, right? My wife is mine because I lock her in a closet and I say, you're mine, we don't have a genuine marriage. We don't have genuine love. We have a domineering, oppressive authority figure that is holding her at bay. But the moment I say, or the moment you have the ability to choose something other than love and justice, I think it's a little bit disingenuous to then come back and blame God for the presence of evil. And God's very clear within scripture that he didn't just grant that choice to us as humans. He also granted it to the angels and some of them chose something different. And so I do believe that there's evil in this world. I do believe that there can be the spiritual embodiment of evil. I do believe that spiritual aspects can also greatly impact, affect the physical as well, whether it's invited in or whether it's a result of somebody exposing themselves to things that have essentially led to oppression or possession. And we say that now and people want to throw it off as this some sort of mystical idea. And I want to look at that same person and say, you don't believe in the presence of evil. Like, did you not see what people were capable of doing to other human beings? Children, innocent people that were defenseless that posed no threat to them. And the fact that they could do it with such malice, or they could do it and get from it, such pleasure from the hurting of another human being. You're honestly telling me you don't think there's any room, any intellectual room for the spiritual, the evil and C.S Lewis wrote a book called The Screwtape Letters. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Great book. 

NICK FREITAS: Yeah, incredible book, that really kind of drew this picture of a spiritual warfare that I thought was incredibly insightful. Because again, we have this Caricaturized version of it, of a demon on one shoulder and an angel on another shoulder fighting. And C.S Lewis wrote this book, the screwtape letters, where screwtape, it's a senior demon consulting with a junior demon on essentially how to destroy this guy's life. And the subtlety in it, in the day to day and what we might consider to be the mundane is just really, really powerful. There was a movie that came out recently called nefarious that was kind of written by, I think Stephen Deese. And I will tell you one of that without doing too many spoilers one of the most impactful things about this is that it was this idea of this this prisoner right and he had murdered a bunch of people and he was on death row and he claimed to be demon possessed and so they bring in this psychiatrist to certify whether or not he's capable to actually, you know, not stand trial at this point, but to be executed. And one of the most powerful points of that whole movie  was this scene in it where he’s flipping out between the times where the demons in-charge and when he's just there and when he's just there, he's terrified. He's just scared. It's almost like he doesn't fully comprehend or understand everything that's going on. And there's this scene where he requests something and he asks to please get it right because it's very important to him. And as soon as he gives that instruction, the demon comes back and he calls back to the garden. He says, never mind. And it showed that the evil that was there hated his host as much as he hated all the rest of humanity. And so, no, I do believe, I don't just believe that evil in the spiritual realm exists. I think it's perfectly logical. I think it's very reasonable to believe that it exists. And if I may be so bold and I don't say this in a sense of arrogance, I think it's somewhat absurd to believe that it doesn't exist. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Sure. 

NICK FREITAS: I think that's a comforting lie because we so desperately want to believe that we're in control of everything, that the idea that there's a spiritual component or that there's God, or that there's good or evil, or that there's a battle going on for our hearts, our minds, and our souls is something that we find deeply uncomfortable. And so therefore we comfort ourselves with the idea that Nope, nope. It's just all the physical reality. But I think when we pour in a little bit to our own experiences and the things that we felt and the experiences that we've had, and these innate desires to be connected to God and to have genuine meaning and genuine purpose, and to not feel as if we're just, I don't think that's wish fulfillment on our part, I think it's a very logical conclusion based off of human experience. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, absolutely. If you don't make room to actually believe that God is real and not real in this hypothetical sense, but real real. And not only that God created justice truth beauty but it's an emanation of the being itself like that is the nature of God is to embody this and it infuses us in us, as us, through us, beyond us and this is why we have this sense of repulsion at these acts of evil, but if you start to undermine that and say, there is no God, there is no value, then you also start to undermine this idea that there is actual evil as well. And then if you don't believe in value, you don't believe in anti value. So everything is just contrivance and everything is a story. And you've really, then opened the door by removing God from your house. Then the devil's going to be sleeping in your bedrooms, fucking your wife and eating your eggs and bacon in the morning. Like you have to pack your house of the body, mind, spirit, soul with as much God, with as much goodness, which as much value because there is somebody, you know, some force that's actually looking to come take over the host in that way. And I think one of the things that we see in this, again, this postmodernist culture is we've taken God out of the house, you know, as Nietzsche said, God is dead. And I think that was prophetic to understand that with this rationalist reductionist materialism was actually removing God and value from the notion of what it means to be a human being and live on this planet. Well, in the absence of that, then there's so much room for evil to actually transpire. And we see it in all of these moves that are not getting enough attention. And that's one of the things that I appreciate about you when the German parliament, I saw a post that you made recently, they started to reclassify child pornography as minor attracted persons and start to justify this. This is the beginning step of normalizing a certain type of heinous evil. And we're beginning, it's like they're softening the target to actually start to normalize all types of egregious behavior that will actually allow evil to proliferate throughout society. So we have to be vigilant. The more we remove God from our lives and from our country and from our culture, the more that these other elements are going to creep in. Because if you remove God, you remove evil and you can't tell the difference between one or the other. And then all of a sudden pedophiles are minor attracted persons. And it's just like saying, ah, I'm gay. Fine. Be gay. That's fine. It's two men who decide they want to butt fuck each other. Fantastic. Go for it. Have at it. You know, give it hell, whatever. That doesn't matter. It's consenting adults. Great. But there's a big difference there. It's a big fucking difference between an adult and a child and the manipulation and everything that goes on to create that type of relating. And we have to draw these clear, brilliant lines of fire, like the fucking fire that surrounded the garden of Eden that nobody could pass through. We have to create these clear lines of distinction between where that line is drawn and we have to be vigilant. 

NICK FREITAS: Well, and it's interesting cause I took some heat for that post. And like, that's not what the German parliament was trying to do. They were just trying to clarify the law that if you discovered that content, you weren't liable for it. I was like, okay, I can appreciate some of the nuances of what was being attempted, When I look at that on the backdrop of everything that else is going on, and here's the frustrating part is that when you start to dig in, especially the stuff with kids and you start to dig into the research that Kinsey was doing, and Kinsey was one of the biggest leaders of the sexual revolution in the United States. And the fact that Kinsey was, Kinsey had a table in there that was testing certain sexual responses on infants. John Money, who is one of the biggest influencers with respect to the whole concept of transgenderism. He brutalized two boys to the point where both of them ended up committing suicide. When you look at what people like Jean Paul Sartre and, and Derrida. And Simone de Beauvoir, who were some of the leaders in existentialism and postmodernism and modern feminism. They were signing on to letters in 1977, essentially trying to drastically lower age of consent laws. And you look at that and you say, Nick, nobody wants to do that. No. People do. Some people do want to do that. And the question is, how do they get away with it? Well, you have to morally justify it. Well, how do you do that? Well, it's really simple. If I can convince you that you can, again, if I can convince you to adopt this concept, that there is no such thing as objective truth. All right, well then. Okay. Then how do we distinguish between truth and reality? Well, it's about personal perspective. It's about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and self actualization. And Nick, if that nine year old has decided that self actualization is, they're not a girl, they're a boy. Well then of course we need to give them pharmaceuticals, right? And of course when they turn 15 or 16, we need to run them through medical procedures that are going to fundamentally alter them physiologically for the rest of their life without actually achieving what it is that they claim to be. And if a nine year old can make that decision, Nick, about their own sexuality. Well, then, of course, shouldn't they also be able to make decisions with respect to how they want to express that? See, it is not difficult. This is not a slippery slope fallacy. It is not difficult to say that once you have removed any sort of barrier with respect to objective reality. You can remove the barriers with respect to objective morality. And now all of a sudden the nine year old that you were giving puberty blockers to you also believes is perfectly capable of making other decisions with respect to their sexuality, that should be seen as completely inappropriate for a nine year old. But, hey, if you've justified one What is your logic, what is the boundary, what is the standard you appeal to if it's all just self actualization, if it's all just to however you identify, what truth? I'll never forget in college, we're asked to write a paper on the ethics of within the intelligence community. What was going on around the world with things like rendition enhanced interrogation and we're asked what is the biggest ethical question facing the intelligence community and everybody was writing. Rendition, enhanced interrogation, torture. I said, it's postmodernism. And my professor said, what do you mean by that? I said, I believe that if you raise a generation that believes that there's no such thing as objective truth or objective morality, you're going to get people that can justify the worst atrocities possible and believe that they're either moral in doing so, or it's simply a part of their self actualization. But there are consequences to getting rid of this that go far beyond the mundane things that we are currently discussing. These fences exist for a reason and a lot of it is to keep some pretty evil crap at bay and if you go ripping them up for one reason, that doesn't mean the only thing that you're going to let in is what you wanted. You're going to let in everything that logically follows from that. And it's about time we start asking why some of these fences are in place before we rip them up. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, I gotta send you a book, at the end of this podcast. I started a publishing press called world philosophy and religion and the books called first values and first principles. First principles of first values. And it really goes through, you know, the danger of postmodernism and how we need to bring the value back. A new story of value back into the center of culture. So yeah, anybody listening, those books available on Amazon, but I'll send you a copy. And as you're right. You're just right on the money with what these leading thinkers are actually talking about, it's overlooked how dangerous it actually is. And one of the challenges too, is that it's infected our education system. And our education system is indoctrinating an entire generation that is filled with these ideologies. And so this is a deep challenge. And I know you've raised several kids. And what were your thoughts as you were looking at education for your children and how did you navigate that with your own kids? 

NICKFREITAS: When I was getting out of the military, my oldest daughter was five and we had sent her to kindergarten and I remember her coming home from kindergarten and her teacher had told these five year olds, go home and ask your parents who they're voting for. And if they're not voting for this person, ask them why. If you think about it, that's a fairly nefarious question to post to children because you have set the expectation that your parents should be voting for this person. And if they're not, they owe you an explanation, but if they are voting for that person, everything's fine. You're essentially implanting into my child's mind that if I'm not voting for the person that you think I should be voting for, there's something wrong with mommy and daddy that maybe she should discuss with the teacher. We saw this expressed in other ways and we pulled our kids out and we decided to homeschool and that had not been my wife's and my original plan. I was not homeschooled. She was not homeschooled, but I was getting out of the military. We weren't sure where we're going to live. Our kids' education needed to continue. So that's what we did. And then when we moved out to Virginia and we got settled, we put him back into public school for one year. And then we pulled them right back out again. And we said, we're not doing this. And it wasn't because we didn't have some great teachers. We did. There were two things, the first one was that we did not feel, not only did we not feel that our values were being represented within a government run school system, and that's what it is. I hate it when we just call it public school. That sounds so innocuous. It's a government run school system, but we found that a lot of our values were being directly challenged by the authority figures that we were putting our children in the hands of. The other thing that we realized very quickly is that it wasn't just, you know, because again, we had some great teachers, we had some great administrators, but it's also all the other children that are involved there and all the crap that's going on on their home and all the things they're being exposed to, that now they're going to expose your children to. And then finally. I think it's not two things, there's three. Then finally the other one was that we recognized that we wanted our children to have an educational experience that was customized to them, not mass production. The government engages in the mass production of education with very very little customization toward your child because it's virtually impossible to do within the structure that we've adopted. And we thought that there were a lot of things in there that were either questionable, or maybe from a moral standpoint, a lot of it was just from a usefulness standpoint. When our kids were little, we gave them a very generalized education because we wanted them to obviously need to learn how to read, right? I don't care. I don't care where you go in life. You gotta be able to read, right? You gotta be able to do basic math. You gotta be able to think critically. We want you to understand the scientific method and its importance in understanding the physical world and the physical realm. But then when we got into higher grades, we started to ask the questions more about, okay, what do you want to do with your life? Right? You've been exposed to various subjects with respect to sciences and the arts and English and history, and entrepreneurship, what do you want to do? And then we started to craft their education toward what their professional goals were. And one of the things that we instilled in our children very early on was there are some paths that require various things and some paths that don't. And the thing that you need to think about is there's dreams that you have. And to the extent that your dreams can be profitable and economically viable, that's wonderful. We don't want you to give up on your dreams if they're not so much profitable or economically viable, but you're still going to need to learn some sort of skill or trade or capability that allows you to pursue the things that you love, but that also allows you to feed yourself because if you get to go off and pursue your dreams and somebody else has to fit the bill, then what you're saying is that your dreams and your desire to pursue happiness are more important than somebody else's, and that's not appropriate. It's not just. And so, we were able to create and customize a home education experience where we made use of co-ops and we made use of tutors and we made use of online programs and we made use of experiences and the end result was that education for my children was not a building that you showed up to. Education for my kids was a whole host of events and activities and where they were expected to learn something, no matter what we were doing. And see the beauty in that education. And there were times where it was tough and my wife and I could write an entire book on things. We wish we would have done different, but at the end of the day, all three of my kids are, I think, very confident in who they are. They're all very confident that they have meaning and they have purpose. They're confident in their faith. They're confident in their ability to think critically. They're confident in their ability to question things, even if it comes from us against a standard of truth and knowledge, which is very, very important. And I think perhaps most importantly of all, I have a great relationship with all my kids. My oldest daughter is 21. My son's 18. My youngest daughter is 16. People talk about how horrible the teenage years are. I have no idea what they're talking about. And I chalk a lot of that up to, we didn't isolate our kids from the outside world. They had all kinds of exposure to different ideas and concepts and people and whatnot. But by the same token, we protected them at various ages and we protected them until they were pointed to where they could properly understand the information that was being brought to them instead of being surprised by it one day through a class in a government run school that we never signed them up for, or for exposure to an idea or whatnot that maybe somebody at their school showed them on their smartphone. We didn't think they were at the emotional or intellectual maturity level to take and properly process. And did we protect them from everything? Of course not. You can't. Right? But I will say this when my kids have questions at some point, they still feel like we're a reliable resource to go to. At the same token, they're still willing to question mom and dad when they think we're wrong on something they do it in a respectful way and they appeal to standards of thinking and objective truth and morality, but that was one of the most important lessons that we taught our kids was, I always tell the story of this time where I'll never forget my 14 year old daughter knocking on my door and saying, daddy, I got to talk to you. I don't think you handled something well. Oh, is that a fact? She goes, yeah, daddy, you came home from work and you were frustrated, but you yelled at Luke and Allie because they made a mess in the kitchen, but they were in there because mommy gave them permission to make something for you. And because you got upset with them without asking them what they were doing, they're now too afraid to tell you that they were doing something for you. And in that moment, I had to look at my 14 year old daughter and say, you're right. I'm wrong. I appreciate you having not only the intellect to understand what went wrong down there, right? You processed it correctly, but you also had the courage to come to the authority figure your own life and challenge them and you had the dignity and the respect to do so in a way that was noble. I said, and so I want you to know. I'm wrong. You're right. And I'm going to go make amends with your younger brother and sister.

AUBREY MARCUS: That's a beautiful fucking story, man. 

NICK FREITAS: One of the most powerful things out of that is that, and I remember because there's been other times where I haven't handled it as well, but for, by the grace of God, there go, in that moment, it's almost like I could hear the audible voice of God saying, you have taught your daughter that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong. And Nick, you're wrong right now and she's bringing it up. And if you reward her for it. If you reward her courage and her humanity in this moment, she will remember that. And if you punish it, she will also remember that. And yeah, so that was our

AUBREY MARCUS: That's such a powerful story. You know, I feel really blessed in a similar way with my father, everything was based upon logic and reason. And so from a very early age, all decisions I could question and I would receive the logic and we would go and he would have the patience. He's a busy man. And he was a Titan of his own industry and was pulled in a lot of directions. But whenever there was an issue, we could talk about it. Dad, I want another piece of cake. I don't think that's a good idea. All right. Well, let's talk about it. And then we'd go into conversations about blood sugar and we'd go in conversations about metabolic. Like he would take the time and finally, you know, like ultimately if his logic was sound and he would win, I'd be like, all right, dad, I get it. Like, I understand the logic. Even if I disagreed and was like, okay, I get it. I actually think I could eat this cake and be totally fine dad, you know, and he might even agree with me and like, you know what, this time you can eat the cake, but you understand my logic, right? Like you understand my reasoning. And I'd be like, yes, dad, I understand your reasoning. So it taught me how to reason and how to logic. It wasn't because I said, so no, that wasn't the way I was raised. And so it allows me to continually use these mechanisms of understanding in a beautiful way. And I think that's such a powerful parenthood code that I intend to bring in when I'm raising my own children and it seems like you have so much wisdom as a father to share both in your embodiment and your knowledge, but I'm curious in particular with your son. Cause I think there's different ways, a lot of similarities. I think that's a universal similarity with how you handle that situation with your 14 year old daughter, universally applicable. But for a father to his son, about what it means to be a man and what that takes and I really appreciate your thoughts and your comments on manhood and what that means. And I was listening to one of your other posts and it was saying something that Jordan Peterson says, like a man should be capable of violence, but also know what the right situation is for that. And Jordan Peterson will say, you should be a monster and learn to control it. 

NICK FREITAS: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right. So it's not about being impotent and incapable, it's about being powerful, but actually knowing the discernment about how to wield that. So curious to, one, hear you talk about that with your son, about any type of martial arts training or how you actually approach that process of helping your son be physically capable. And then what are some, if you were going to list like five other tenants of like, this is what it means to be a man. My son, like, this is what it means to be a man on all of the different vectors. 

NICK FREITAS: Yeah. My son and I do Brazilian jiu jitsu and boxing. So we do some MMA together and I got to tell you, I am getting too old for this. Like I go, but man is repairing for me, like he's ready to go again. Two hours later, I'm like, I need a couple of days. But no, it was funny when my son and I, when he was little, were watching, it was called real steel. And it's basically Rocky with robots, right? It's got Hugh Jackman in it. And he used to be a boxer and now these robots box and my son and I are watching this and I look over at Tina. I said, Hey honey, do you know what the Agoge is? She goes, no. I said, the Agoge is where Spartans sent their children when they turned seven to become warriors. I said, watch this. I said, Hey buddy, come here. And we start kind of boxing a little bit rough housing and not hard, but hard enough to where it shocked him a little bit. I caught him. And he goes, and he runs and he tackles me and Tina goes, what just happened to my little boy? And I said, Oh no, he belongs to me now. And part of it was that rough housing and playing Robinson like that. And it's that whole idea. What does it mean when somebody says be a man? I said, well, in its simplest form, when somebody tells you to be a man in a situation where they're like, be a man, it usually always means. That you have to overcome some sort of pain or difficulty in order to keep your word or fulfill your responsibility. That's what it means at a fundamental level. So how do you do that? And what I've kind of talked about with my son, and this is applicable whether it's your son or your daughter, just humanity in general, but there's different applications for it. But like for my son, it's like, okay, there's the spiritual, the intellectual, the emotional, the physical, and the professional. I don't care what culture tells you you're a man. Your job is to protect and provide. If you want genuine femininity to flourish, if you want your family to be able to flourish, well, then you better be capable of being the safe Harbor in the storm. So how do you do that? And what all does that mean? Because it's not just physical. It doesn't just mean you can beat up somebody that walks in the door. If you can beat up whoever's out there, but your kids are afraid of you, you did it wrong. You did it wrong because that aspect of you and believe me, there's a certain part of me that has only come out in very, very few situations in Iraq. And that is for my family, never toward my family. So the spiritual, I think, is very important because I always want my son to understand that look, you're beautifully and wonderfully created in the image of God. And that comes with meaning that comes with purpose. That also comes with responsibility. There is an objective truth. There is an objective reality out there and you're not above it. It's not good or bad because you say, so it's good or bad because it's good or bad. And you need to understand what the source of that is. And you need to be confident in your understanding of it. And you need to be subservient to it because one day you do need to be the head of your household, but that doesn't mean that you're the tyrant. It means that if for some reason, for some tragedy, whatever it is, strikes, and it is your life for your wife or your kids, well, then it's your life, buddy. That's what leadership means in that biblical concept of being the head of your household. So you need to understand what it means to be a proper servant leader. And it does mean that once you take on the responsibility of being a husband, her safety and her needs are superior to your own. It doesn't mean you don't have your own goals. It doesn't mean you have your own objectives and you will work through that together and figure out what that is. That's what a marriage is, but her wellbeing takes precedence, has to take precedence, be the same with your kids. So it's that spiritual aspect. The intellectuals, I think, are very important, men should be smart. You should be intellectually capable. You should read, you should understand, you should be able to think critically. You should test yourself so much. And being able to think critically that when dangerous situations come up, you're able to process information in such a way as in order to make the right decision to be able to protect. But you should be seen as wise by your children. Your children should be able to come for you for counsel and know that it's going to be true and that it's going to be relevant. And sometimes those truths will be hard. And that leads into the third category, which is the emotional, you need to be emotionally mature. I really hate this modern idea that, Oh, well, you know, they say men should be able to cry, but what they mean is men should be able to cry whenever they want. No, you shouldn't. There are times where it is appropriate to cry. We talked about this before the show. I walked my daughter down the aisle, I kept it together when we had the first daddy daughter dance and she told me, daddy, we're dancing to this song cause I picked it for every daddy daughter dance we ever went to. And because you've done a great job, man, I lost my crap right there, dude. I lost it. Why? Because that's my little girl and she has the ability to break down and she is worthy of seeing the tenderness and the vulnerability in me with her. I don't give that to everybody else. She earns that by the virtue of who she is within my life. She's worthy of seeing that side of me. And so she gets to see it. The emotional maturity is understanding that when it is okay to show those cracks in the armor for the people that you love, so that they know they have that effect on you and they know that you love them. But you can't do that. If you're blubbering all the time over the drop of the hat, you can't do that. If you're losing complete control of your crap in the middle of something that's difficult or painful or scary, right? So that emotional maturity is very, very important. Like no son, you need to be stoic at times. You need to be able to keep it together. All right. If you want to be the sort of person that runs toward the sound of the gunfire instead of fleas from it, well, then that's going to take both intellectual and emotional maturity. And so that is incredibly important. One of the things that I think is very critical too, is that when you become a father, you also understand that your children are watching for what a healthy relationship looks like with, based off of how you treat your wife, the words you use, the emotional maturity you display in situations where you're tired and you're frustrated. Right. So that's important. The fourth there was the physical, if you're going to be strong, if you're going to be able to protect, if you're going to be able to provide, you got to take care of yourself. The dad bod is a lie guys. I'm sorry. Nobody thinks it's attractive. Nobody thinks it's good. I understand when you get older, it's a little bit harder to keep the muscle on and the fat off, get your ass to the gym more. I'm sorry. I'm not going to make excuses for it. I remember when I turned 40, I've always had a pretty quick metabolism. I was in the military, I was running, I was lifting more. And then all of a sudden I hit 40 and I came home from the legislative session. I'm like, Holy crap, I'm getting, I'm getting chubby. Well, look, I could come up with a thousand excuses for why that's okay now. It isn't. It isn't, keep yourself in shape, keep yourself in shape. I'm not saying you got to do anything crazy. I'm not saying you got to be some sort of guy like benching 500 pounds at the gym or whatnot. But look, when you are physically capable, it's amazing what it also does to your cognitive capacity, Jordan Peterson talks about this. If you want to keep your cognitive capacities, you get older, lift weights. It gives you a greater sense of confidence. The other thing too, and I'm just going to throw this out there because this is something that I would say sometimes too in Christian relationships that isn't talked about enough. I want my wife to be really proud of the guy she's going to bed with, right? Bottom line, I'm all she gets, right? I am all she gets. I want her to be proud of it. And if that means I got to suffer a little bit more at the gym to where, you know, when I come home, Hey, she's happy about it. Good. And it's not like she forces me to, or tells me I need to or whatnot, but I can tell the difference. I don't ask my wife if she wants me to work out because it's a stupid question, right? I know she loves me regardless. My job is to not take advantage of that love by just. My job is to say, you know what? My gratitude for the love that you give me, regardless of how I look or whatnot, is to keep myself in shape, not just to protect, not just to provide, but because I also want my wife to be proud of what her husband looks like. And I want her to know that I'm doing it for her. Right. So that's all wrapped up in the physical. And then that fifth category is the professional. Look, I don't think, I don't think you got to be the wealthiest guy out there. I, or whatnot, you need to be able to provide for your family. And one of the things I tell my son is I said, look, dad is, we've never been wealthy. We do pretty good right now, but we've never been super wealthy. I'd like to be, I'm certainly not against it. And certainly working to increase that, that wealth. But as a marker that I threw out there, and I know sometimes this is difficult and sometimes with things that the government does and you know, everything else that can become even more difficult. My goal was I wanted to make enough to where when we started having kids, my wife didn't have to work in order to feed, house and clothe the family. We might not be rich. We might not get to go on the fancy vacation. We might not drive fancy cars or wear fancy jewelry, but I want to provide enough where my wife doesn't have to work outside the home if she doesn't want to. And it was one of the biggest blessings of my life that I. I had a wife that wanted to do that, wanted to truly build a home. And was willing to not have some of the nicer things or the fancier things so that she could do that. So I've instilled in my son that professionally you have an obligation to provide. This is a goal that I think you should strive for. And so what you need to do is you need to start looking at developing capabilities that are going to provide you the ability to provide regardless of the circumstances that you find yourself in. And if you are developing yourself intellectually, if you have good emotional maturity, if you're physically strong, you're going to be amazed at how well that feeds in, to developing those professional capabilities that make you valuable in the marketplace. Because what makes you valuable is not, we have all these ideas. I remember when somebody, some people love to say things like, I think our soldiers should be paid just as much as professional baseball players. All right. Well, I was a soldier and I'm telling you, you don't want to pay the amount of taxes that would make that possible, right? Economies are based on supply and demand. And so what we've told all of our kids is like the skills you develop. The entrepreneurial skills that you develop need to all be rooted in this beautiful idea that the way you get wealthy in a free market is by maximizing the amount of value you provide to other people. So look at what you like to do. Look at the marketplace for those skill sets, develop them, become the best at them. Find out how to be an entrepreneur and utilize them in various ways and develop yourself professionally to where your family can always be confident that dad is going to put food on the table. Dad's going to keep a roof over their head. I said, you do that. You'll be a wealthy man. You do it really well. You might be a really wealthy man. Right. But those are the five categories, the spiritual, the intellectual, the emotional, the physical, and the professional. And that's the way I have talked about those concepts to my son. I have a very similar conversation to my daughter's because as you said, there's universals in there, but there are different applications. There are different, I believe, duties and responsibilities and that's the way I've explained it to my son and I think he's received those lessons well. And like I said, I'm very proud of the young man my son has become and the man he is becoming. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That's beautiful, man. Since you opened that door, I'd love to just explore what your thoughts are. I mean, so many of those things are universals. What are the differences in some of the things that you express to your daughters? Because in the real world, we recognize Viva La difference, men and women are different. That's just a reality, doesn't mean that there's a value proposition that one is better than the other. It just means there's a difference and we can celebrate the difference, right? Like everybody, relax. 

NICK FREITAS: I explained it once to somebody who said, look, if I'm building a house and I've got a carpenter and electrician. They can sit there and fight, the carpenter can fight with the electrician that they can do the electrician stuff just as good as the electrician and vice versa and they can sit there and they can compete with one another and try to do the job and it's probably gonna suck, right? I'm probably gonna get a lot of mediocre work and a lot of animosity or I can look at the carpenter and electrician and say both of you are very very skilled and valuable tradesmen, right? Both of you bring something unique to the table that is desperately needed in order to make this thing that we want function to its peak capability. That's the same way I feel about marriage. That's the same way I feel about a family. And so the way I express it to my daughters is, I taught my daughters how to defend themselves at a pretty young age.My daughters all learned how to shoot starting at age five. My youngest daughter, Allie used to love it when people would come over that had never shot before and she runs out there. 11 years old with her pigtails going, do you want to shoot with me? Maybe we can make it a competition and then absolutely clean their clocks. Like she just, and I'm sitting there like a proud dad, like that's right. So I don't want people to think that I haven't taught my daughters to be strong and to be capable. But when it comes to things and, and maybe this is one of the best ways to express it. I remember when a young woman on a plane, we were sitting there, we're traveling somewhere and she kept flickering with her light to try to get it to work and I said, look, my lights work and find you want to switch seats. She goes, yes. She goes, I'm on my way to a job interview. I just got married. I said, Oh, marriage is great. It's wonderful. And she goes, how long have you been married? And at that time I said, 15 years. She goes, you don't look that much older than me. And I wasn't, I was maybe four years older than her, but I got married at 19. And she said, well, how do you make it work? And I said, do you really want to know? She goes, well, yeah. I said, all right, we have a biblical worldview of marriage. She goes, what does that mean? I said, well, one of the things that means is I'm the head of my household. And she stopped. She goes, why does there need to be a head? I said, that's a great question. I said when you married your husband, did you say till death do us part? She goes, yes. I said, did you mean it? Yes. I said, what happens when you disagree? I said, at this point in my life, I said, I've been married, I've lived in 12 different places. I've been on two combat deployments, multiple other deployments. Believe me, my wife and I have had to go through some very, very difficult times. And I can count on one hand, the number of times we've disagreed on something, but on the times that we've disagreed, my wife trusted me to make the decision that was best for the family, not myself. And when she trusted me to make it, she didn't just say, okay, fine, it's your decision. Threw herself fully behind that decision in order to make it work. What I've taught my daughters is you're not going to be happy with a man that you don't trust to do that. You can be strong. You can be independent. You can think about the things you're going to do, but if you want to build a marriage and a family with somebody, you're going to want a man that can do that because I've raised you to be strong and you're not going to settle for anything less. So if you're not confident, that man can defend you, if you're not confident that man can provide for you. There's going to be something missing from that. By the same token, what do you bring to the table? It's like, well, look at what your mom brings to the table in this relationship, right? She could have done any number of things. She chose to build a home. There's a big difference between a house and a home. She chose to build it when something broke around this house, your mom put on a youtube video and because she was mechanically minded, she said, well, I can hire someone, but that's gonna cost us 4000 or I can learn how to do it. It'll cost us a fraction of the cost. And I'm going to be more capable at the end of the day because I learned how to do it. And then she poured herself into it and did it. She educated you guys. She learned how to do that, right? Not only that, but when dad came home from work or from combat, the reason why I, gosh, I'm going to get choked up. The reason why I had such a good relationship with my kids was because when I had to be gone for nine months fighting a war, and I came home, it wasn't to a house where my wife had torn me down because I was gone or wondered why I wasn't there. I came home to a home where my wife said, your father is protecting us. He's protecting this country. We are proud of him. And when we get home, we're going to show him how much we loved and missed him. My gosh. Brother, that was not guaranteed. I had a lot of buddies that didn't do that. And I held up my wife as someone to, my daughters, as look at all the power, look at the intellect, look at the emotional maturity, look at the home your mother has built. Look at the peace she brings to our lives. Look at the strength that she builds. Look at the ingenuity in the industry that she brings to it. Look at all of that. Look at Proverbs 31. That's your mom. And so I was able to point to an incredibly strong woman that my daughters respected. Um, not just because of the things that she did that may be generally associated with femininity, but also because of the strength that she displayed in difficult and trying times where she had to step up and play both roles. Cause dad was overseas. So it's that same thing when it comes to the spiritual, understand that you're beautifully and wonderfully created, that you have a unique purpose and that our faith does give you a guideline for what a strong woman looks like. And that is not a woman that is weak. That is a woman that is strong, intellectually, emotionally, physically, that is industrious, right? When it comes to the emotional I understand, and I tell women this whenever I speak to them. It's not your obligation to make good men, but you will be fascinated. You will be shocked at how a good woman brings out the absolute best in a man. I have never been so much at my best than when I was trying to live up to the expectations of my wife. Intellectually, as a woman, you need to be intelligent. You need to be a critical thinker. You need to be able to look through things. But the other thing that I have always respected about my wife is that she has a discernment that I simply do not possess. I can think about something logically. I can lay out all the problems, but my wife can walk into a situation and read it in a way that I still am not capable of fully doing. She can spot things or understand things. And sometimes she can't even fully articulate it. But when I learned that, when my wife says, Nick, something's off, something's off, Nick, don't go into business with that person. I don't. She's there. She has that intellectual, emotional maturity in the physical, you know, again, it's important for men and women to take care of each other. For a variety of purposes and then professionally we did, we taught our daughters, both of our daughters. If you ask them right now and you ask them, what do you want to do? First and foremost, they say, I want to raise my kids. I want to build a home. That's what I want to do. I want to be responsible for building that environment, that Harbor, that place of safety and security and love and nurturing. I want to do that. And I also want to, my daughter loves the theater. She knew right off the bat, she goes, making money in the theater is incredibly difficult, but if I want to do this passion, then if I get a cosmetology license, I can do makeup. I can do this other stuff, which puts me in the proximity of the thing I love to do, but also gives me an ability to make money no matter where I go. And I can develop that. And I can be an entrepreneur and I can run my own business one day. Same thing with my youngest daughter with respect to veterinarian services and things of that nature. So, again, the talk is a little bit different, but it's that idea of these roles between man and woman, husband and wife, mother and father, they were never meant to be competitive. They were meant to be cooperative. And when they are used in a cooperative function, you reach something that is so much better than the sum total of the parts. But if you're going to, yeah, if you want to sit there and fight and you want to say, no, I want to. Is true strength for a woman, being able to do whatever a man can do, is true strength for man being able to do whatever a woman can do, or is it maximizing the gifts that you have the traits and the capabilities that you have to use not only in service to yourself. But to use it in service to something that is so incredible, which is marriage and building a family. And thank God I married a woman that shared those values and decided early off. We're not going to be competitive with one another because the moment we said, I do, it was her and I against the rest of the world if necessary. And that we were going to work together and we were going to build upon our strengths and we were going to develop those strengths and capabilities. And I will tell you this. The world will tell you something different. I've been married for the last 25 years. I love my wife now more than the day I married her. And if you would ask me 25 years ago, I would have told you that was impossible. But a large part of it is because we embrace the different roles and responsibilities that we had. We communicated effectively with one another. We adapted and changed the circumstances that arose. But the one thing that we always decided upon early on, and the thing that we've tried to instill in both of our son and my daughters. Is this idea that once you make that commitment, you burn the ships, man, you decide that we're going to do this together through thick and thin and Peterson talks about this. There's something truly magical about telling another human being like, okay, we're not perfect. We're not perfect individually. We're not perfect together, but you're my ride or die, man. I love you and we're going to figure this out and I'm going to make figuring it out a priority. And that's a very special thing. I hope that answered the question. I kind of went off on a tangent. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Absolutely brother. That was beautifully expressed, man. And I've only been married once. I've been engaged a few times and never, never crossed the threshold and sealing the exits is really essential because if that exit door is painted, you're not going to actually come together to figure it out. Like you got to close the exits and that's like a big part of that. Now, if someone's being absolutely unreasonable, you made an egregious error in the judgment of someone's character. I understand, you know, I'm not going to be, in that much in the kind of traditional ethos to say, Oh, well, you fucked up, live with it the rest of your life. But nonetheless, like in as long as you guys are anywhere, approximating what that there's a willingness. And this is what I tell people when I talk to them about relationships, is there a willingness for them to come together? Work to improve and to actually solve and resolve the conflict. If there's no willingness, you're in a situation where you misjudge someone's character because they're not actually willing to commit to what it's going to take to work it out. But as long as someone's willing to give it that effort, close the fucking exits, man.  

NICK FREITAS: And you said this, you've gone back to this several times in this and it's true, values. If you are one of the things that we tell our kids and that we always tell people on our show is that getting physical too early is a real problem because it causes you to overlook a lot of other things and you have to build a marriage first. You have to build a relationship first and foremost around values. It can't be shared goals. It can't be shared hobbies. It can't be physical attraction because those things will change over time or circumstances might take some of those things away from you. But if you have shared values, if you have shared values and shared commitment to truth and a shared worldview. Man, you can get through all that stuff, but a lot of times people rush into other aspects or they start committing to people in ways that they really shouldn't because they haven't established first that they have that shared values and that shared worldview. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And this man, it's tough to follow up that brilliant rant that you had with anything. I was tempted to just end it right there and leave it. But one other thing I'll say is that there's this, I really appreciate this feminine empowerment movement. And I think there's so much value in this, in allowing women to have the power where they're not subject to what used to be a fairly dispassionate and kind of patriarchal model. And I understand this reaction towards, no, you handle everything, take care of it. But there's a difference between a queen and a ruling queen, right? Like a queen is there in support of the kingdom and ultimately in radical support of the king. Right? And it's a different model of relationship. It doesn't mean that, you know, it's different from the ruling queen. Now the ruling queen is basically a king. It's the head of the household. And that may happen as you go off and you're deployed overseas. The queen, your queen becomes the ruling queen. She becomes the head of the household and you want a queen who's capable of being a ruling queen. But there's so many challenges that develop when the queen is always in the position of the ruling queen, and then they end up getting basically a queen for a husband because they're actually acting in the role of the archetype of the king, and it works out because there has to be a head of the household. So they become the ruling queen, but I've never seen them fully satisfied. They can't relax into their innate and inherent femininity. So they're always kind of in, kind of out, but with an eye out attracted to these other Kings, but not also willing to give up their own crown to actually commit in that radical nature to be the queen. So it's an interesting dynamic that I've seen play out in this empowerment movement, which again, mad respect and blessings for however you want to make it work, but just understand that this idea that there's going to be somebody who's going to be the king could be a man, could be a woman, but don't get confused just because you're a woman, if you're wearing the king's crown, you're the king. And that means a whole set of masculine archetypes. That's going to require a whole set of feminine archetypes to actually support you in this process. And you may not like it. It may not actually keep your feminine waters gushing in this process because you may not really like what you're getting. And so just to be aware of that flexibility of like, yes, I can be the ruling queen, but I'm also willing to just be the queen. And to really devote to the kingdom and to the king. And similarly, the king is the most devoted to the queen and to the kingdom. Like any good king, the greatest servant is the one who's showing up to serve everybody the most. And reciprocally receives the respect and the gratitude and admiration of the rest of the kingdom in the household. So I think there's some interesting dynamics that are playing out, but I couldn't say anything better than the story that you shared and appreciate the kind of emotions that came up. For me, I get emotional quite a bit, but it's always in these experiences of just feeling love and truth and beauty. It's value. It's that scene in 300 where Leonidas makes that epic stand and throws the spear and shows the God, King can bleed. And then the arrows descend and pierce him. And he just, with his last breath says my queen. And I'm like, I've seen this movie 40 times. Am I going to cry again? At this point, when he says my queen at that final moment, yes, I am. I guess. Here we go, you know, so it's a beautiful thing to be able to be strong when you need to be strong. You know, I got in a massively disfiguring car wreck, you know, didn't shed a tear when shit goes wrong and bad. The companies are fucked up or things are all, there's chaos or a fight, like there's this kind of eerie calm that descends on me. And then I'm watching Braveheart. Or I'm watching 300 and I'm a fucking mess.

NICK FREITAS: Nobility and courage possesses a beauty that I think does bring out. It does bring out the emotions in us. And it's amazing to me because I do understand why if you're looking at something from a neutral position and you just said, well, why does this person get this status? And why does this person get that status? And why do they get this role? And why do they get that role? And some of it can, I think some of it sometimes to people, it can seem arbitrary. And we don't like arbitrary rules. We don't like arbitrary norms. And sometimes we feel like the rules of reality are arbitrary. And so, therefore, we want to change them. When we turn everything into social constructs, instead of asking ourselves, Do these things, do these traditions, do these roles actually exist for a reason? And look, I think people should be free to challenge things. But I think people should also look at the results. And when the people who are most faithfully living, Ha! I would try that one more time, with the people who are most faithfully living out, some sort of theory or idea about society that breaks from all the rest of the past when those people are the most miserable with respect to their decisions. Maybe that tells us that that was not just a social construct. It was not just arbitrary. But it was actually based on a lot of human experience and understanding and maybe some inherent truth within the world. Some objective truth within the world. And it doesn't mean that there can't be successful departures at times from it, but to just throw it all out as being arbitrary. I think we've been living through that for the past 60 or 70 years, in a way where I think the results are in and I'm not going to sit here. I don't want a legal structure, which tells people what they have to do or not have to do with their life. I don't want that. But by the same token, I don't want to be told. I don't want to be told when the city is burning that it's a mostly peaceful protest, right? Like, no, that's burning. That isn't working. And I don't think that we should all be forced to play along with anti reality and anti truth. I think the results oftentimes speak for themselves and I just hope people learn from them before it does any real damage.

AUBREY MARCUS: You shall know a tree by its fruits. You know, like you should know a tree by its fruits. My brother, it has been an absolute pleasure to have this conversation and also to gorge on your content. I'm happy that I've trained the Instagram algorithm gods to show me all of your new posts, so I can keep up with you, your sense of humor, the clarity with which you express things and the groundedness and the spectrum that you offer, it's a real gift to the world. You're a model for men to follow and obviously an incredible father. So it's been a real pleasure to drop in with you and hopefully we'll continue to serve God, serve the world in our own unique ways in the best way possible. So count me in as an ally in any of your endeavors.

NICK FREITAS: Same here, and thank you very much. It's been a real honor and privilege to speak with you. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, brother. Absolutely. Thanks everybody. We love you. We'll see you next week.