I wanted to share some thoughts on my mind. I was watching uh Jared Ley's video, gender roles and warnings. I started it yesterday and I finished it this morning and uh it was, it was nice. He, he mentioned seven brides for seven brothers, the 1954 movie which, which I really enjoy that movie. And uh
it's probably time to share that with my kids. But anyway, um I, I wanted to touch on an idea that he shared, I won't say dispute. Um because I don't, that would require me to put words in his mouth. I know when we're just sharing thoughts off the cuff. Sometimes we phrase things in a way that we probably
wouldn't if we're taking the time to write out our thoughts. Uh We don't always have the autocorrect going to, you know, as we speak, we kind of slip into things that we say that we don't really mean, but maybe he means it, I don't know, it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this video. Um And
that is around this idea of gender roles and what Jared was saying made it sound like uh the thought one of many thoughts that he shared may have been that, um, when we, when, let's see, when women, when women are career oriented and um, high achievers that again, this is not a quote. This is just one
I can see some people taking this from what he said, whether he intended to is unlikely. But when women are high achieving that, somehow they're disqualifying themselves from a high quality man. And this is, again, I, I'm not saying this is Jared's position, but I know that there are many men, an increasing
number of men who have this position that they're looking for a traditional situation and they'll see high achieving women as contradictory to their intent and they'll avoid them and I want to zoom this in and then slice it up a bit. Um I'll tell a story maybe to motivate all this on one of my many dates
from that period in my life. I took a uh a lady out who honestly, I, I really wouldn't have done that with that particular lady except I was, I was in a period of my life where I was just trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. And she was, she was a little bit older. She had uh advanced degrees
in stem field and she had just finished that or was on her way out. I think she was at the end of her degrees. I just went on one date. So don't, don't judge me for not remembering she was a one dater. And, um, during the course conversation, I said, well, um, you know, if you, if you were to meet the
right person, do you think that you want to start a family or, you know, do you want to take some time and work in your field first? However, I phrased it and she kind of scoffed and she said, well, I worked so hard for this degree. I want to use it for a while before I settle down and have a family
. And I was thinking to myself, this was a lady who uh wasn't that attractive to begin with, but she was aging. She was on the front of the bell curve as far as age goes. Uh Meaning, meaning she was aging fa faster than most. And I was thinking, um, jeez, you know, you're, you're gonna be an old mom
. Uh And that's not great that your kid just gets whatever's left over after you've lived out all your fantasies. But there were a lot of people in the environments I was in, who were washouts from BYU, meaning that they had, had taken the typical L DS route of getting geographically as close to BYU
as they could, even if they couldn't get into the school, which is really hard to do. Um And then, and then getting married and the ones who couldn't do that ended up where I was on the east coast and in, in two locations, two states and there were the leftovers. And so typically in that environment
there was something wrong with everyone you'd go on a date with. Because if there wasn't something wrong and they would have been snagged up in the four years, they were going to school four plus years in Utah. So most of the time, what was, what was wrong with them is that they didn't want to get married
, they wanted to do something else instead. And uh it was almost all his career. So it was quite a hodgepodge because because there was something wrong with almost all of the men as well because almost all of them had been through the same system with the same story. If they were, if they had gotten
out of that alive, there was something wrong with them. So um single, of course, I'm joking with it. Get out of it alive. Being an achieving woman does not disqualify you from a high quality man. That's actually not the problem. The problem is what you value. It's your priority structure and same goes
for men. You can have all the wrong priorities. And even if you're high achieving, the question is what are you achieving and why? And so high achieving it. If you're talking about a vector, the is a hand graph. But if, if you have a vector, high achieving just means that you have an intense vector,
it doesn't tell you where it's pointing to, if you want to think of it in more easy to understand terms, think about a compass and then how far you walk so you can walk really far. That's being high achieving. But as the Cheshire cat says in Alice, in Wonderland, if you don't know where you're going
, it doesn't matter which way you go. If you don't have a goal, it doesn't matter which way you go. In this case, you do have a goal, but it, it matters what the goal is. It matters the direction you're walking in. It's not just a question of how far you walk. And consequently, the, the the solution
to this puzzle is not to walk less distance. That doesn't make you a high quality person. It's to walk in the right direction and to maintain your intensity or develop it in the first place, right? So if somehow you took my spirit and implanted it into a 20 young, 20 something male body, uh and vaporized
my family in some horrific, you know, obviously, this is just a contrived example. We don't want any of this to happen. But if, if this happened and I was in my young twenties, knowing what I know now as a single man, I uh I would absolutely positively not give the time of day to a young lady who didn't
know full on that. What she wanted more than anything else was to be a mom, a wife and a mom and to stay at home mom at that, stay at home mom and she wants to homeschool her kids. She wants to have kids and it's for the right reasons because there's, there are ladies out there that want to have kids
as a band aid for their psychological problems and that's not good, but for the right reasons which your service and love, real love, uh what you're willing to suffer to benefit another person. And if that person didn't have that figured out in a way that was really obvious and she wasn't ashamed of
it. See a lot of young ladies, they hide this. I I shouldn't say a lot because obviously it's not a lot of young ladies who want this, but it's so funny when you cut through all the nonsense and you just cut to the chase. It's so funny. There, there are so many again, I keep saying so many, there are
young ladies out there who want this and they want a family and they look at work and they're like, why would I want that? And now we get into the all the ladies who are like, yeah, it's a chorus. They, they scream um in what just sounds like re re they scream that staying at home is work. Now let's
just take this apart. Ok. What's funny, Jared mentioned? Seven brides for seven brothers, which is he correctly puts is offensive to so many people today and it shouldn't be. It's, it's a hilarious movie. One of the things that gets discounted by modern folks. So they look at that and they say it's misogynist
, actually, it's misogynist and Miss Andrs, they rip on men just as much as they rip on women in that movie. It's hilarious because they stereotype both part, like the characters are, are extremes and they have to come to the middle and become more reasonable people on both sides. They're, they're, they're
ridiculous and then they become less ridiculous. And that's, it's funny because it's absurd both in the extremes and in the fact that they correct their courses that would never happen in real life. Be very unusual. But it's, it's hilarity ensues. Right. It's funny because especially the main character
guy. He's just so obtuse, it's hilarious because he goes to the whole, the whole beginning of the story is he goes to town because he decides he's gonna get him a wife just like he's gonna go buy flower, right? Or cut down a tree. He sings about this. It's, it's just on his shopping list for the day
. He's like, well, I'm not, I came to town to get groceries and a wife and I'm not going home till I get me a wife and it's hilarious. Um, because it's ridiculous. So they're equal, equally ridiculous things presented from the female. I, I said I should say towards the female perspective. Um, but anyway
, now I'm gonna forget where I got off on that. Uh So, oh yes. So women today, let me tell you something. Young men today will never retire. They're gonna work like dogs until the end. I'll say so I don't have to get into end times things men today have very little to look forward to in terms of what
the world says is worth looking forward to. Not like prior generations of men who had something where they could say, well, I'm going, I'm going to sacrifice all this and work really hard and this is what I'm going to get in return and in the balance, it seems worth it. And maybe not everybody is gonna
get this, but we can try Mr Frodo, we can try and it was worth it and you did try, right? It's not that way today. So the guys that are hard charging today, they're either crazy and some of them are or they're really good people because it's more about sacrifice because they know that there's not a pot
of gold at the end of the rainbow as far as what the world sells. They're after service because that's the only thing that can motivate you if you have any clue how things are today. And that's important. But think about the situation for women. It has always been the case that a very young woman like
right after she becomes a woman has the best chance to have the best life. And what I mean by that, I always think of little Charlie in the old Willy Wonka movie where he's dancing around singing about this golden ticket because his life stinks. He's got no hope for anything. And then he opens his candy
bar in Shazaam. He's got a golden ticket and everything is possible. Now, his wildest dreams and there's a song about that about um something about imagination. Um That's how it is to be a young woman. Now people will scoff at this and roll their eyes and blah, blah, blah. Let me tell you, there's not
one thing in a man's life that is such a golden ticket as getting married to a successful man is for a young woman. She can go straight from her parents house where as long as her parents aren't deadbeats, she's got everything she ever wanted as a minor straight into a situation where she has everything
she ever wanted from her husband and she never has to worry about what lies outside the castle wall. Now, there are women out there, most of whom I believe are deceived, but everyone's free to want what they want. And I, you know, that's admirable to be honest about what you want. There are women out
there who have no desire for kids. There are women out there who have no desire for marriage. There are women out there who want to have a rock star career. There are a lot of women out there who want to travel. There are a lot of women out there who want to sleep around and if that's what floats your
boat, then float your boat and get what you want. But there is a better way, there are better things to want. And it's, it's, it's amazing that this tremendous blessing is out there for so many ladies and they blow it and they decide after the fact that after all that is what they want and they no longer
qualify for what they want. And so then they're doubly miserable because they wasted what the time they had and the youth they had and they have nothing to show for it that endures. And that's the issue is that we all get old. And as you get older, your evaluation tends to become more accurate and what
you refuse to learn through precept or wisdom, you learn through experience. And uh in the last 40 years of your life, what's going to matter to you more than anything else is what you did with the 1st 40 years of your life uh that define the 2nd 40 years. And so career and travel and sleeping around
aren't gonna be on that list of in the column of pros, they're going to be in the column of what took away. So, and I should say sleeping around for the those who are watching this and who are religiously oriented, you might think that that only refers to sexual stuff. I just, I just mean promiscuity
in general. Maybe I should say that and I will explicitly say you can be promiscuous without having sex. Just dating people is promiscuity if you're a woman. So, uh, that's unpopular. But it's true. Al almost all of the same damage occurs emotionally by having lots of boyfriends or, or long term boyfriend
that doesn't end up being your husband, which there's no reason for that ever really. It's not good to deal in absolutes, but you better have a darn good reason and almost no one does. So if a guy is not willing to put a ring on it, so to speak, uh, you should think twice. Now, I say that with a huge
asterisk because I would say a wise man would never legally marry today, although he could have a wife in God's eyes. And, uh, that's a topic for a different story. So if a man is not willing to, to make an eternal commitment to you, we'll say that then he shouldn't be your boyfriend. So you'd be better
off alone because then you'd be, you'd at least have that qualification for someone that, that is worthy of you. Ok. So let's get back to Jared's maybe point, maybe the point he was making uh about. But whether he was or not, we're addressing this point of does a woman disqualify herself by being excellent
? No, she does not. But a woman doesn't become excellent through a career or through travel or through her degrees. Quality men. Not only do they not care about those things. Those are all minuses and it's not because he's going to seem like he offers less. This is very germane to the point that I'm
contending against. It's not because he will feel like he has less to offer in the face of that. It's because you will value what he offers less even if it has full value. Let me describe that with another example, I dated a gal for a year and a half long term relationship that I would just describe
as sandpaper. Uh I cared very much about her, however, she was an abrasive person and I thank God for that because I have a lot of rough corners and she sanded me down. But uh as an example of this, her, her idea of discussing something that we didn't agree about was talking about it for as long as it
took for me to just give up and go with whatever she wanted. And I've never been a pushover. And so sometimes this took weeks and eventually I was just like, look, I just don't care anymore. We'll just go with what you want to go with. And that was nice because it, it helped me be less connected to things
like basically, you have to choose your battles, you have to choose the hill that you're going to die. On usually you get one. But so she was a, she was an abrasive person. One of the things about her that I did not appreciate at all was that it wasn't that she didn't need me. So if you're a man and
you're in a relationship where a woman doesn't need you, you need to get another relationship. She will never be happy with you ever. Even if she seems happy now, you need to look in the future. It's not gonna take very long until she resents you and wishes she had chosen someone else. And that's not
a happy place to be. So that wasn't the problem. The problem was, there were obvious ways where she did need me and she refused to acknowledge those because she was so proud and that she thought that she couldn't be a valuable woman unless she didn't need no man for nothing. Right. And I was young and
stupid. It took me a year and a half to figure out that this was a terrible situation to be in and truth be told. That's probably the only time in my life I continued to date someone just because I knew there were no options is before I learned that that's a terrible, terrible thing to do for anyone
and it's a terrible thing to do to anyone. Uh I think she probably stayed in the relationship for the same reason, which is really sad and pathetic for both of us. But to be young and stupid. Right. So now I'm old and stupid, which is got its own pros and cons. Um, I was joking with my kids yesterday
. I'm turning 40 very shortly and I'm down to just a few weeks left. And so I was joking, I was like, I gotta do every physical thing before I turn 40 because I won't be able to do any of this anymore. So I've been busting out this big tile project and uh it was like, I'm gonna run a marathon the day
before I turned 40. And then one of my sons was like, yeah, and then the day you turn 40 you'll be like this. And he did like an old man, I'm all broken impression. And uh I said, I feel like that every day. I just have a better excuse if I ran a marathon uh anyway, to be old and stupid. Um It's all
relative, right? It's all relative. Um I'm actually exceedingly grateful for the uh the physical burdens under which I operate. And maybe I'll make a video about that gratitude at some point. But sticking to this point, excellence as a woman doesn't disqualify you, but it needs to actually be excellence
. If you, if you're bringing something to the table as a man that's actually valuable and your lady doesn't value it. It's as if that doesn't exist and that has nothing to do with your self esteem. Who cares about that. It's all about how happy she is. You, your purpose in life is to bring your wife
joy, more joy than she would have otherwise. And then that as you fill up that bucket, it overflows to the world, you're here to max out that, that light and truth and joy and goodness to make the world better than it would be if you weren't here. And that starts with your wife, it extends to your Children
and it flows out to the whole world. And so if she is blind to that value, she won't have any of the joy that she could have. Like when God gives us gifts, if it won't increase our long term joy, he doesn't give them. And so everything has latent value, intrinsic value. And then we receive joy from it
to the extent that we perceive that if you don't perceive the joy, if you only perceive a part of the joy, then that goes into God's calculus of whether He sends the blessing because he operates for the greatest global benefit. And so if someone else would appreciate it more than you, and that's the
choice He has, which is sometimes the case, you're not going to be the one that gets it. And our job is to learn what God is like and to be like him and as men, that's a pretty direct relationship. And so if, if the lady who's your option is not going to value who you are and you are actually valuable
. Your job is to find someone who will. And if you don't do that, you're both going to be miserable. But especially her, there are guys out there that are like, yeah, I'm, you know, I, we could go through the list and it's gonna exclude people. I don't want to exclude, but you could run through the list
of what makes a valuable man. You could say I check all these boxes, but you know, my wife, she's just not very happy and I'm ok with that because that's the, you know, I love her and I care about her and that's what a lot of men say. Once you've sealed the deal in some ways, it's just too late and you
gotta deal with it. But if you're still in the search mode, you're still in the finding phase, you need to find someone else. That's a clear, clear sign that you're with the wrong person. It is better for you to be alone than it is to be with someone who's not going to receive all the joy you have to
give or at least a whole lot of it, at least more of it than you could imagine anyone else receiving. And that, that's a high bar. And so that's what you're looking for with the ladies. So a lady who is high performing, she doesn't disqualify herself from a high performing man. And, and this is where
I, I probably have strong disagreements with other people who would use the phrase gender roles, which I use that phrase all the time. I'm not saying anyone should be less because of what is, or is not between their legs. I'm saying we ought to live up to the full potential we have and that has something
to do with the gender. We are as far as the greatest good that we can do. And as Jared did say, which I agree with is men and women. We have differences and we ought to, we, we have to optimize ourselves in full recognition of those differences. So women have superpowers and men do too. And they're different
superpowers. I guess we we it's a Venn diagram and as Children of God, there's a whole big set of superpowers and it's for everybody. And then there are some that are just for women and there are some that are just for men. Now, I'm probably quite extreme in that how I define the circle. That's just
for women has a lot to do with the fact that they can uh conceive, grow and uh nurse Children. So the beginning of life, keeping, creating a baby and then keeping it alive until it can be kept alive by others. I don't, that's really, really high on my list of superpowers that women have. There's men
cannot do that. I'm sorry. That's just not something that we can do. And there are equivalents on the male side, there are equivalents on the male side. And those matter, now, there's a whole set of things that tend to be done much better by men and tend to be done much better by women. And those aren't
so tightly coupled to, uh, physical things on the man's side and kid things on the woman's side. And so it just kind of spreads out from that point. But I think in an ideal relationship, husband, wife, relationship and marriage in an ideal marriage, uh, it should approach, you know, women are happiest
when they marry up. And so the closer you can get to the lady does the things that she enjoys out of the set of things that the husband and wife have to do. Probably the better, probably the better. I overheard a conversation between my wife and our kids, some kids some time ago, I couldn't tell you
which ones and someone said, wouldn't it be crazy if dad was the one homeschooling us? Um, and my, my wife said that would never work or something. And another kid said, why not? He was a teacher. He's a good teacher and maybe I'm inventing that. He was a good teacher. Part, I actually had two of my
Children sit in on one of my classes when we switched to Zoom for COVID. Uh, and I was still a university professor. We had switched to Zoom and I was like, hm, I'm just gonna give this link to my kids because I was teaching an intro to pro programming class and I wanted them to attend it and I told
them strictly they weren't allowed to ask questions because people would, would, I think it was weird to hear a little mickey mouse voice, little kid voice in a call. And sure enough that one of my kids kept asking questions. I was like, you need to cut that out. Um, anyway, so they, they, they did attend
two of them attended one of my classes for a whole semester. But, um, anyway, they said, well, why doesn't dad teach us? And my wife said he wouldn't enjoy that very much. He'd get bored. Which is 100% true. I get so bored doing homeschooling. It would be, it would be a crazy ride though. I, I can true
. I'll just share this now. It's, it's not 100% relevant. But another conversation I ever heard from my kids more recently was, um, they were, they were talking about neuralink, Elon Musk's thing, which I would never do and I could make an argument that no one should ever do. It's actually super important
for end times stuff. But they were like, can you imagine if, if, uh, if they put a neuralink in dad's head and they were on the same page, these two kids are who were talking from the, from the start and they just started describing how all these crazy things would happen because the computers would
get overloaded with all the things that I think about all the time. And I was like, yeah, it'd be, it'd really be something I jumped into that conversation. Um Anyway, so, yeah, so, so I think, I think a husband and wife approach the ideal when most, if not all of the things, well, it will never be all
because of the things I mentioned that are uniquely female superpowers. But most of the things that the wife does, the man could do, but he chooses not to because the wife would get more joy out of it. And it's not this, you know, hey, wife, you're not gonna work because I need to do that. So I look
better than you or some crazy thing that I've heard other people say things like that. It's hey, uh here's a list of stuff that we have to do as a family. What are the things on this list that you would get the most value out of? Not just short term pleasure but long term enjoyment. And you're not gonna
like this. It's the role of the man to have a better idea about that. Hopefully, he's very well practiced in choosing the long term and modeling the future by the time he gets married, if that wife used her golden ticket. Well, and the man does the things that he could do uniquely or to the unique degree
that he can and basically picks up everything else. So in our case, I can earn about double what my wife could. In fact, and despite the fact that she has advanced degrees and she's very capable, uh, I, I can excel her in my market value. This is another conversation I had with other kids at some point
about why does mom homeschool us? Why doesn't she work and you stay home? I said because I can do what your mom can do, but she can't do what I do. And the kids said, oh, because he understood. I said, I make about twice what she could and we couldn't afford to live here if we swapped, swapped roles
in that regard. And what we do for our main thing during the day, the other thing is I know that she vastly prefers the flexible schedule. She has as a stay at home mom and the continuity of always worrying about the same exact thing set of things every day over my life, which has been a maelstrom of
insane challenges uh at, at work and tons of risk and just, just a horrific load of stuff, which is fine, you know, and I've, I've been fine at that. One of our superpowers as men is we have testosterone and that means the harder you compress us, the better we perform by and large. That's, that's the
wonder drug of testosterone and estrogen doesn't do that. It's the opposite. You crumble under pressure, so you need stability. So, um you need to know what's coming and you need constancy and that's, that's where the ladies do really well and they tend to enjoy that much more than um high performing
men would. So anyway, those are the realities and you know, you're not allowed to talk about this and yet it's true. And if there are exceptions to the rule, that's fine, but we do a huge disservice to the majority of people for whom this would be true by pretending it's not true when it is true. So
we'll close out with revisiting this idea of a golden ticket. There is nothing a man can do short of something highly illegal and super risky to suddenly the day he turns 18, say be able to basically retire and have everything he ever needs taken care of for him for the rest of his life. There's nothing
a young man can do that grants that the closest thing is joining the military and those of us who have done it know that there are a lot of costs to that. It's not even close, but it's the closest thing. So the the other thing I was referring to, maybe you could rob a bank or something, not the banks
have any cash on hand these days, but something very illegal, some big caper, which frankly an 18 year old boy would not be capable of anyway. Whereas the an 18 year old girl, woman has everything. She needs to get that golden ticket and she could pick a highly successful man and sink in the hooks seal
the deal and she's set for life. There's, there's nothing and people say, well, yeah, but things change. What if she makes a bad choice? What if the guy looks good and then he changes or what? You know, what if he cheats on her? What if he Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fine, fine. It happens, right?
Even discounting for all of that. There's absolutely nothing equivalent in a man's life. Nothing. And that is one, obviously one of the fundamental differences between us and so good grief. Use the opportunity. Ladies, I mean, you basically, you've got a lottery ticket with an extremely high chance of
winning extremely high and it's basically free because using it later is still using it. It's just worth a lot less. Your odds of winning. Go way down with every year. They go down by the minute and if ladies knew this things would be very different. This is one reason why sometimes we can look at different
cultures and see the pros and the cons in cultures like the Amish. Amish people don't wait around to get married. The, the men don't and the women don't. And, and maybe one of the reasons the women don't is that they don't wear makeup. And so you don't hear Amish women walking around saying age is just
a number. They know that's not true. They know that's not true. Just like any other woman does, but she pretends like she can't see before she puts on her makeup in the morning. So use your golden ticket and for the guys. Hopefully this is, this is helpful to help you calibrate your metrics of uh a high
performing woman is exactly what you want. You, you want an excellent woman, but what defines excellence? You're not looking for a second rate man. If you're a man, that your ideal woman is not a second rate, man, it's a first rate woman. There's a difference and, and saying these things doesn't mean
that we undervalue women. It's quite the opposite. We recognize their true unique value that guys could never equal. And you have to look at the things that we can't already do for ourselves. The illusion in modern times is that women have a long list of things that they think they can do for themselves
that they can't actually, oh, but there's so many women that could support themselves and this and that they, they don't need men. We don't need men. That's a backwards thing to say in modern society where we're swimming in surplus for like the last 50 plus years. Sure. Sure. And yet, and yet even in
that environment, take away alimony, child support, fake jobs, holdouts, set asides and the percentage of women for whom that would be true. Would be even lower than it is. And it's still not 100% even before you start taking that away, it's still not 100%. Very few women make enough money to support
themselves as a percentage. So, and then when you add in AAA, spouse and Children, how many women make enough money for that? Very few. So as a, as a general rule, if you're picking one rule, it can't be that because it's false. But then as the surplus evaporates and is the, the rich nations of the world
degrade down to the global average. You know, Ukraine isn't full of women who are supporting themselves, who don't need no man. Chile isn't full of women who support themselves who don't need no man and you could go around the global average. Those are not necessarily poor nations, they are much poorer
places, but anywhere you get closer to the evaporation of modern unmerited prosperity, which comes from fossil fuels and um, Bretton Woods, you see all of that evaporate. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, there's no feminists in foxholes either. So as the world degrades back to historic averages
, people are going to be singing a different tune. And unfortunately, and this is already happening with millennials and older generation Z people, young millennials and older generation Z women are finding out that they don't have the options that they used to and that they blew it and older millennials
and younger generations, uh generation Xs are already past that, that awakening point. But they were sort of the last ones that eked out the ability the ladies to snag a decent quality man after they were past their prime and had partied their prime away. But the past of primes today have, have very
little hope and that is just going to get worse. So use your golden ticket while you've got it. But that's, that's my response to Jared Easley's gender roles and warnings video.