Foreign.

Hello, my name is Will Spencer and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.

This is a weekly show featuring in depth conversations with authors, leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world.

New episodes release every Friday.

I'll be out for the Christmas and New Year's holiday for the next two weeks, returning to brand new episodes on January 10th.

In the meantime, while I'm gone, I've got some special pieces for you.

First up is this episode, which is the audio from my recent live stream with Steve Cruz of the Regular Man Podcast.

I'm a big fan of Steve and his work, especially because Reformed theology and culture can get a little ivory tower and high minded.

That's not a bad thing.

Theology is heady business, but it has relevance outside the ivory tower as well, in the lives of everyday men and women who are faithful believers but who don't have extra letters after their name.

Steve does an awesome job of connecting those dots.

He's sharp, relatable, and very clearly knows the blessings and struggles of working class believers in America.

Our conversation is full of gems from him.

I was enjoying hearing his takes, just like he enjoyed mine.

And may this episode be an example of how different kinds of men, dwarves and wizards, let's say, can come together for common purpose in faithfulness and righteousness.

Friends, we're not just recording conversations on the Will Spencer Podcast.

We're part of a restoration project for Christian civilization in the west and I need you in this fight with me.

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Supporting them isn't just spending money, it's investing in an American reformation.

And please enjoy this live stream conversation with the host of the Regular Man Podcast, Steve Cruz.

Hello and welcome to Season two of the Regular Man Podcast where we celebrate God's gift of masculinity in the life of the Regular Man.

I'm your host Steve Cruz and my guest today.

Been all over the Christian reform circuit lately from conferences and podcasts, one on one sit down interviews and he was recently on Crosspolitik, and he's even been on TV shows.

He's a storyteller and adventurer who traveled his time from Stanford to over 30 countries and ultimately wanted to find the quest for truth, which brought him back to the States.

And he met the Lord at a very unlikely place and unlikely event.

He was gracious enough to me to be one of my first guests on my first interview.

And I didn't know what the heck I was doing when I started this podcast.

And now is the host of the Will Spencer Podcast.

Please welcome Will Spencer.

Will, my friend, thank you for coming on.

Great to be here, Steve.

Thanks for having me.

Again, congratulations on your second season.

Oh, thanks, Thanks.

I learned a lot.

A lot of things to improve on.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I've been doing it for four years and I'm still learning new stuff all the time.

All the time.

And they say it takes 10 years to really get good at anything.

And that's.

Well, that's an exciting idea because I couldn't have predicted the things that I would learn this past year.

So what will I be learning at year 10, God willing?

I really don't know, but looking forward to it.

Yeah, I am, too.

Now, you've been all over the map.

Like I said in the intro.

You've been at the Fight Life Feast conference.

You were on Crosspolitik.

I even saw you on one of the news channels.

Was it Oan one News network or something like that?

Yes, one American News Network.

I had gone viral for a tweet saying that Christians shouldn't do yoga.

So they had me on for a 15 minute segment.

That's great.

That's great.

What kind of pushback did you get on that?

Well, a lot of Christians are very attached to their yoga practice.

A lot of Americans are very attached to it, frankly.

And I try to explain to them the origins of yoga as a practice, that it's explicitly Hindu in origin.

Now, that doesn't mean, if you're doing a few stretches over at the Y, you know, with your grandma, that you're engaging in.

In idolatry.

But, like, that's such a small sliver of what's going on.

So when I explain to people like this word yoga, the word itself means yoke, like means union with the divine.

That's what the word means in Sanskrit.

And so it all flows from there.

And when I explain that to people, they get pretty mad.

So.

So if I ever want to.

If I ever want to provoke people on Twitter, I just do one of those and for I, I don't do that, but I just posted that one and it went.

This would have been six months ago, probably more.

And went viral.

And so when America News had me on to kind of explain the origins of yoga, what the word means, what about it specifically is idolatry and false worship.

And so that was.

That was a lot of fun.

I remember that tweet, and it automatically reminded me of about a year, year and a half ago with Brian Souv and Eric Kahn tweeting about yoga pants and stretchy pants.

And they put on this, this, this meme of the idol when Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego not bowing down, but everybody else is band bowing down to this Nebuchadnezzar idol with.

That's wearing stretchy pants, just cracking.

And that went viral too, man, that.

That went over like a fart in church.

Because people, man, women love them stretchy pants.

Crazy.

Yeah.

Well, the two.

The two are related.

Yoga is a very sensual exercise.

There's something like.

I think a statistic that I had given was that 60 million people in the United States have done yoga.

That statistic was incorrect.

It was actually one sixth of the adult population.

There's 360 or so million people.

That includes kids.

16 of the adult population has done yoga.

And the vast majority of those, at least two thirds of those are women, primarily white and Asian women.

And so when you run it back to see when yoga became popular, it was in the 1960s and in the 1970s, which was the first echoes of the sexual revolution.

So it's not a coincidence that when you fuse Eastern mysticism, which is what yoga is, with this very sensual form of exercising.

Right.

And then you throw yoga pants onto that, which are very revealing in terms of women's figures.

Like, all of these things, they all fit together.

It's not a coincidence.

They're all very much.

They're very much related.

And the arguments in favor are some of the same.

It's just stretching is what a lot of people say.

Well, maybe in some cases it is again, the why with your grandma.

It's probably just stretching.

But in most cases, I would probably venture a guess, conservatively, 80% of yoga classes in America, it's probably more than that, have religious overtones in terms of advanced postures, in terms of sequences and in terms of like Shiva statues and chanting and stuff like that.

That's the vast majority of yoga classes.

But.

And then also it's like, well, it's convenient for me to wear these stretchy yoga pants.

I understand, certainly understand convenience, but there's a higher, higher law that we're accountable to that asks us to do inconvenient things.

And so, and so there's a, there's a definite thrust in America right now, like, well, let's just turn a blind eye to a lot of these things and not ask too many questions.

But I think we actually have to start asking questions.

It's convenient for guys to be in whitey tighties all day and watch tv, but nobody wants that, Nobody wants to see that.

Right?

There's a certain level of self respect and then respect for other people.

You're certainly not loving your neighbor if you're doing something that causes them a temptation to sin or something like that.

For to touch on the modest aspect of the conversation of things like that.

You're going to the gym and you see these women wearing things that will literally accentuate every single detail.

And then they look at you when, even if you glance and then you're like, oh crap, I got, that's not right.

I can't be looking at that.

And you're on the machine that I'm trying to use.

So now I'm some weirdo waiting around for this machine or the, or the, you know, a bar bench or Smith machine or something.

And you're just, especially the ones who have like the lights and they're, they have their, their camera all set up and then they act like they're some, they're virtue signaling and you're some weirdo staring at, you're making a production out of this lady.

You're doing this on purpose.

You're, you're being that, that used mattress, as Eric Khan would call them.

Right, right.

I, I, this is thankfully at my gym.

I haven't seen anyone set up a phone yet, so I'm grateful for that.

But yeah, they're, they're girls wearing very revealing stuff and it's just like, oh my gosh, just, just make it, just make it go away.

You know, what are you, what are you doing?

Like, are you married?

You're married and you're showing off your body.

But you know, God forbid you say anything like that.

You know, are you unmarried?

Like, what is it, what is it that you're looking for at this environment now?

You know, I just, I just try to ignore it and get done what I need to, but it always stands out to me when a girl shows up dressed modestly, you know, whether it be, you know, in athletic pants that are less form fitting.

I don't know, they're like basketball pants or something like that.

Yeah, that clearly.

Yeah.

This is someone who's here to actually get work done, and I really appreciate that.

And I think that one of the challenges we face today is there's such a.

There's such a push for women to behave in immodest ways.

Like perhaps you remember the Lily Phillips, you know, episode that happened last week about that girl who slept with a hundred men?

Now, like, I can confuse.

That's terrible.

It's terrible.

Well, yes, I agree with you.

And the only reason, and I'm not saying you.

The only reason why people got worked up over, rather than over the next day was that she regretted it.

Right.

She gets on camera and she's very tearful about the whole thing, about how awful she feels, and then there's an outcry, you know, And I'm not saying in Christian spheres, I just mean in the public spheres.

Right.

But if she hadn't been upset about it, would it have been okay?

Obviously not.

But the problem is people only got worked up on it about it, probably in the secular world is what I'm talking about.

When she regretted it, but it was wrong when she conceived of it, it was wrong when she executed it, and it would have been wrong no matter how she felt about it the next day.

But what was she doing?

She was doing what culture has told her to do, which is like, your body, your choice, you know, you own your sexuality.

You can do whatever you want with it.

God has nothing to say about what we do with our sexuality.

So go.

If you're going to sleep with 100 guys, go ahead.

On what moral grounds are you going to say that's wrong?

Is it like somewhere between 40 and 50 that we start to draw the line?

And that's the part of the dialogue that I'm not seeing anyone doing.

And I think the yoga pants and the.

And the working out at the gym, I think it's all connected.

She just took to the logical extreme what people are already doing, and only people are now only getting worked up about it now that she regrets it.

And that's, of course, not an objective moral standard.

Right, Yeah, I totally agree.

And I see this, you know, as a.

As a husband and especially as a father.

You know, I saw that.

That short interview, and I saw her break down, and I saw, you know, her kind of go over the events very briefly, and I'm thinking of my kid.

You know, I'm thinking of my daughter.

I'm thinking.

I'm like.

Like Every piece of me is, is, is heartbroken for this girl right now who clearly has, you know, bad dad issues.

You know, clearly she.

Nobody's going to sleep with 100 men in one day who doesn't have a father issue.

Like, those are some scars that have, that have gone deep over years and years and years.

Possibly she.

She was molested or abused, raped, didn't have a father figure.

These are constant threads that, that run through a significant amount of this kind of behavior.

That's not just.

It's not conducive to society.

It's.

It's degrading society and it's degrading the family.

It's degrading the individual themselves.

But to your point, the whole culture is saying, yeah, go sleep with as many people go, because that's how you find fulfillment.

Go do drugs, do whatever you want, try to change your biology and pretend that you're a woman if you're a man, because, hey, whatever makes you feel happy, that's what you should do.

And the things that make you, you know, sin is usually pleasurable for a short time.

I think the Bible even says sin is pleasurable for a short time.

But it's.

Poison kills you.

It's, it's.

And it just doesn't just kill you.

It kills every part of the world that you are part of.

Everybody who loves you, everybody interacts with you.

And I see that to your point, it's just a logical conclusion.

If.

If ice cream is great, then have a gallon of ice cream.

And if having a gallon of ice cream is great, then have two and have it every day.

And it's killing you.

Yes, very much so.

I think you're probably right about her father issues, but I don't know for sure.

What I can say is that since the 1960s, really a bit earlier.

It started in the 50s, since the 1960s.

And again, sorry, you can go back to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and you can see the active attempt to subvert what you might call family values happening way back.

So this is not new.

What you see is, in our society is the flouting of all sexual morality.

It all just goes right out the window.

The idea that you will sleep with just one person for life and that's your spouse, and that you won't do it before you get married.

I think that might be one of the most forbidden ideas in America right now.

But it's the Handmaid's Tale, you know.

And the thing is, what we see, not just Lily Phillips onlyfans models et CETERA what we see is increasing intensity of attempts to just throw that out the window.

So transgenderism is part of that.

Gay pride parades are part of that.

The idea that, you know, it's not your body, your choice, maybe God has something to say about what we do with our bodies.

That is a forbidden idea.

You are not allowed to say that idea.

And that God has something to say about what both men and women do with their bodies, both of them, it's an equal standard.

And so we don't actually see anyone talking about that.

The idea that, for example, woman's sexuality and a man's.

But sexuality is for.

To enjoy in the context of marriage, not just for having children, obviously, but that's a big part of it.

And when you take that and you strip sexuality from its sacred component, meaning enjoying the context of marriage and having kids, and you just give it away to everybody, what you're doing is you're saying, like, oh, God doesn't get to tell me what to do with my body and with my.

With my private parts.

That's.

That's what people are essentially saying.

And that is maybe that might be the.

The biggest unspoken value in America today that is shared all the way up to the level of the White House and the incoming administration.

Let's not shade things.

But to say that, no, actually God has something to say about what you do in the bedroom.

He has a lot to say about that.

In fact, that idea, I think, could not be more foreign and alien to the United States and to the west today, and more confronting.

I think it's maybe our universal pet sin of the United States today.

So to your point earlier, I mean, if you do confront that, you know, one of the reasons I like some of the people I've mentioned before and really this.

And we're going to get into kind of this cultural shift that we've seen, like a vibe shift in the Christian church these days.

But one of the things that I really appreciate, because it's just kind of in my nature, is confrontation.

People are.

Nowadays, I'm starting to see an awareness, not just an awareness of that sin and those things, but they're willing to confront that.

They're willing to say, no, this is wrong.

And I don't think that the squishy, big evangelical kind of milquetoast churches of modern America that have been prevalent over the last couple generations have done that.

I just don't.

I think that they've been comfortable in their pew.

They've been comfortable in.

And just, you know, sit there on your hands.

And don't worry about what you're.

What the world's doing around you, because you're going to be whisked away and saved the day.

And who's flying the plane?

Oh, no.

A pile of pants?

Oh, no, nobody's here.

But recently I've seen a change in that.

And I wonder what you contribute that to.

Do you think that that's.

Do you think that's explicit?

Or maybe there's a combination of.

Do you think that's explicitly because of the.

This red pill kind of, you know, they say an awakening.

Really it's just an aversion of feminism, which every man should be.

Averism is evil.

Or do you attribute that to guys like the biblical masculinity?

Guys like Michael Foster and Eric Kahn and Doug Wilson, who've been doing this really for a long.

A long time, promoting that biblical masculinity and patriarchy for years.

So I think the vibe shift.

I'm going to put the vibe shift squarely on the men who are engaged in it.

And I can do this because I've been in the manosphere.

That's how I found my way, in some sense, into the Reformed church.

Sort of all happened at the same time.

But one of the things that I saw in the manosphere, again, this is the secular manosphere, is I saw men that didn't have brakes on the train, right?

Like, they just.

They were going full speed in a particular direction along our trajectory of ideas.

And like Rola Tomasi, Andrew Tate, those kind of guys that are, yeah.

Elliot Hulse, Jack Donovan, Brian McClure, all these guys.

Yeah.

So fresher fit, Rolex, Mossy.

Those are the guys that have cracked the mainstream.

But they were much smaller, smaller time comparatively.

They were still very successful men, but smaller time, comparatively.

Men who composed the manosphere.

So I watched this movement from the inside, and you can see a train that's going in a particular direction.

You say, hey, guys, that's the direction your train is going.

Like, look out up ahead.

There's a bridge out, right?

And one of the things that I've been disappointed to see is that, you know, I was in that world and I could see that.

I could.

I could see the trajectory of the ideas.

And I'm like, well, I don't agree with that.

So I'm not going that way, right?

Like, because I can see where.

I can see where this leads.

If it's taken to its logical extreme.

I could see how it leads to, quote, unquote, hyper patriarchy.

I can See how it leads in all these bad directions?

Those are not my values.

That's not the direction I'm heading.

So I'm going to adjust my trajectory a little bit to make sure that I don't go over the side of the bridge, which is the direction this is going.

So that's how I've always engaged with those ideas.

Meanwhile, other guys, either they denied the trajectory of the ideas or they were in favor of them.

Who knows?

But with masculinity and particular.

Particular, a lot of men get very excited when they begin to discover these values, in part because they feel a sense of personal power overcoming apathy, and also because it's socially transgressive against, like you said, a feminist kind of culture, which I think we live in.

And so that's a heady mix.

Right.

And I don't think there's necessarily anything intrinsically wrong with that.

But unless you make sure to cut it off, then the trajectory of ideas goes in a very bad direction.

And so that's what I watched happen in the manosphere.

Guys who didn't accept that the trajectory of their ideas, like, the ride has to end.

You have to be accountable to a standard, a universal standard, or you're just going to drive it straight over the cliff.

And so I don't put, you know, I don't put responsibility for the train going over the cliff.

I don't put responsibility on the guys who scheduled the train, who got the train going.

I think every man is responsible for his own train for recognizing that there have been warnings, for recognizing that, for failing to acknowledge, again, the trajectory of ideas.

I'm not looking at that.

I'm not looking at that or it'll be fine.

Don't worry about it.

No, guys, the bridge is out.

I put responsibility on the individual.

And just real quick, because I think you asked about pastors and stuff like that, so I've been working through with a client, this book, Pornography as a Suicide of the Soul by Dr.

David Edgington.

He would be a fantastic guest for your podcast, by the way.

He's primarily known for his book the Abusive Wife, which is about women who revile their husbands.

So he also wrote this book about pornography.

It's excellent.

It's just like 70 pages.

It's not much.

It's not.

It's not a.

It's not a weighty, heavily researched, you know, social, socially scientific study.

It's not systematic theology.

Yes, exactly.

So I.

This book, there's a statistic early on, I don't.

I won't.

Flip around and find it that says that something like one sixth of pastors have, like, anonymously admitted to engaging in pornography.

Right.

And so, and that data is old.

It goes like.

In the 1990s, there was a survey of pastors as well, and something like 16 of them had anonymously, in a survey said that they had engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior.

So they didn't specify what that was or whether they'd repented for that behavior.

But I think the moral compromise that has been part of American culture, particularly with regard to sexuality, has been a big problem.

Why A lot of people have turned a blind eye because they recognize that he who is without sin cast the first stone and then everyone turns and walks away.

I think that there's been a lot of.

A lot of that.

A lot of probably more than we realize.

So just wanted to touch on that as well.

Yeah, I'd love to have him on.

We can Talk later in DMs and you can give me his contact info if you've got it.

Yeah, yeah.

The.

I really want to go over.

I know we talked about a little bit, and it's.

I think it's really obvious just in how you speak, but you're not like.

You're not like me, and you're not like one of the red pill guys, and you're not, you know, you have a very, very unique way about you, and I think that's attractive to a lot of people.

I think a lot of people are attractive to.

You're well spoken, you're articulate, you're intelligent, and you have substance behind what you say.

You're significantly more polished in the way that you say that than I am.

I think we have more in common than I may recognize.

But thank you very.

I understand what you're saying.

Thank you.

But that's just a way of.

I'm just saying I appreciate your podcast, appreciate what you've done over the years.

It's awesome to see you have the success that you've been having.

And I want to talk about your.

You rebranded.

You used to be.

You used to have the, the, the podcast, the Renaissance of Men, and now you've rebranded to the Will Spencer podcast.

What was behind that?

Tell me the reason.

And then is there.

Are there changes in how you're going to do interviews, or is it just going to be topics or what's that going to look like?

Yeah.

So the Renaissance of Men, which I started in 2020 at the same time I got baptized.

It didn't start out as a Christian podcast.

Actually, it was a conversation.

It was a podcast about this.

Excuse me.

This global rebirth of masculinity and.

Are you still there, Steve?

I am, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Got it.

Sorry.

The thing went full frame for me.

Sorry.

It's my first time.

So this global rebirth of masculinity and.

And during the course of recording that podcast, I was working on a documentary about that, and the documentary ultimately failed.

I was unable to get funding for it, which turned out to be a great blessing, thanks be to God.

Because the manosphere, subsequently, in 2020, late 2022 and early 2023, absolutely collapsed.

Like, the bottom just fell out from under it.

Thankfully, I had already taken an exit into reformed theology in 2022.

And so the podcast went from being about masculinity and this global rebirth for the first couple years transition to being about the Reformed theological world in many cases from 2022 through 2024.

But I realized that the title, the Renaissance of Men, I didn't really see this global rebirth happening in quite the same way that I did before I became a Christian.

There had maybe been, you know, some sort of belief that masculinity was going to save the world.

And I came to realize that Christianity, Christ is the one who's going to save the world.

It's his job, not masculinity's job.

And the Renaissance, of course, had a lot of occult themes going on.

And so I recognized that the Renaissance of Men as a title was no longer appropriate for me as a Christian, and it no longer reflected my interests.

I just wasn't interested in this conversation anymore.

And so I decided to rebrand the podcast.

And I was thinking about different names and the Will Spencer Podcast.

Well, first of all, it's the name that's least likely to change.

So there was that.

There's no risk that I might get tired of it in a couple years, but really, I was talking with friends, and they let me know that what they found compelling about the podcast was not necessarily this global idea of masculinity or reform theology specifically.

It was the approach and the attitude and the intention that I brought to the interviews.

So they weren't necessarily listening for me, but they're like, for the things that I have to say, because I do a lot of listening on my podcast, but I love it.

It's that they were there to see the people that I found interesting and the questions that I would ask and the things that I would surface from their work, whether they're authors or content creators or influencers.

So the podcast Very much was, was like, okay, this is for the guest.

You're coming into my house and we're going to sit and we're going to have a conversation for 1, 2, 3, 4, even 5 hours, and we're going to find, I'm going to find out who you are and how it's relevant to people out there.

So it really was very similar to Joe Rogan.

Like, the Joe Rogan podcast is not about him, you know, so much.

It's about his guests.

It's about the conversations.

My podcast essentially had taken on a very similar character for a Christian audience.

So for that reason, I thought the Will Spencer podcast was a better.

Was.

It was a better name than anything else that I could, that I could come up with.

That's awesome.

I agree with you about the renaissance of men.

The first time I ran across it, I was like, huh, okay, Renaissance.

All right, let me, let me listen to it.

And then you end.

In your time on your podcast, you've had some really big names on there and you've had some, you had some long form content that I was like, I really like that.

I know I'm not the TikTok person, you know, I'm not the Instagram person.

I frankly, I think Instagram is like for fish face, Fish face, lip ladies and navel gays and dudes that, you know, they just, they're out there just wearing their stretchy pants and filming themselves in the gym.

You know, that's honestly what I see in Instagram and then animal videos that.

Get suggested to me.

So I was gonna say, so for Facebook, it's like cat videos and it was like the, the Diyer.

You know, this is how to make a furnace out of a clip.

You know, toothpick.

There's some weird stuff.

But I really appreciate X.

And you know, rumbles, there's.

There's nobody there.

There's like two people that watch rumble.

But X.

I really appreciate X, because although Elon Musk isn't, it appears to me, and I think he said it before, that he's not a Christian.

He does value some of the things that we as Christians value in freedom of speech.

You know, being able to not be constrained in the freedom that God's given mankind.

Like, our country only gives us freedom because God himself gives man freedom.

That's the purpose.

That's the purpose of our existence, is to choose God in his sovereignty.

Simultaneously, the same thing.

It's weird.

Yeah, jb, I like to get the chats on here.

JB says the word of God is everything, not some book or bestseller.

Go see Jonathan Kleck.

He is an angel of the church of Philadelphia, is appointed by Jesus Christ.

All true.

Okay.

Cool story, bro.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

So is your show going to be more based on interviews like you have been in the past, or are you going to have solo things?

Are you going to have it scripted, just an outline, or is it just going to be flying by the seat of your pants?

Kind of like what I do.

I'll continue doing interviews primarily on the podcast, but I'll do more solo content on YouTube.

I started the podcast on YouTube because I realized when did I do that?

Would have been early 2022, probably something like that.

Because I realized that a lot of people were going to be listening to podcasts on YouTube and that was a good decision.

You know, like, I have a episode with Rachel Wilson that's going to crack 70,000 downloads.

70,000 views on YouTube.

Yeah, it's awesome.

But like my most downloaded episode doesn't even have an audio format like Spotify.

Apple doesn't have even close to that probably because audio podcasts have very low discoverability.

So you go to YouTube and you watch a video and you get another video suggested to you because they have all that.

But like podcasts are so wild west.

You have Spotify and Apple and neither of those are particularly like podcast centric social, excuse me, social platforms.

So YouTube, when something does well, it does really well and it gets suggested by the algorithm to new listeners.

Podcast growth, audio podcast growth.

I.

I don't actually know and I don't think a lot of people have a good idea how that happens.

There are top 10 charts, but to get on the top 10 chart, first you have to have a top 10 podcast.

So Google, you know, are other ways to grow people just searching for podcasts.

So SEO.

But honestly, like the way that I see audio podcasts going, I'll keep doing it because I love it.

But the way that I see audio podcasts going is I think now that Covid is finally over, I think the election of Donald Trump signaled the end of the COVID era.

Finally, thank God.

But people are going back to real life.

And so what people want to see is interviews on YouTube where two people are sitting in the same room together.

High production value in person conversations, I think are where it's very, are very much where it's at.

The problem is that's very expensive.

You need equipment, you need a producer, you need lighting, you need to get the person out there.

So there's A high, high bar to really do something like that.

I think that there's still a future for audio podcasts, but I think the emphasis should be on video especially.

So that's my take.

Going forward in the future, the audio only podcasts will probably struggle a little bit as people just go back to real life.

That's my guess.

Yeah, I think I agree with you there.

I'd really like to see some changes in YouTube for, I mean I'm really, really hard on YouTube.

I'm on my fourth YouTube account because it keeps shutting me down.

Because I don't mind, I don't mind talking about what COVID 19 or.

But you know, because I don't.

I shoot to.

I, I'm as authentic as it possibly can, can be and I think people appreciate that and I know that my listeners and viewers, they don't beat around the bush.

They talk very directly.

I see it in my emails and I love it.

Exactly, exactly.

And that's, that's who I, that's the whole reason that I started this podcast was, was I didn't feel like anybody was talking to me.

I'm a knuckle dragon guard.

I'm a wrench turner.

I'm a blue collar guy.

I'm a guy who, you know, I can talk about, you know, if I really, really try.

I can pretend to be really articulate, but I'm just not, I'm just not a real, I'm not a salesman, you know, I can scale it down or scale it up, but I just like people just being real and I think that's an attraction that people have to Joe Rogan and, and it's just we've been so starved for authenticity.

Just we as people, as human beings have been so starved for authenticity and everything is curated for TikTok and for Instagram and for, for all these things with, with the lighting and with all this stuff that I want, I want to say and, and ah.

And have that weird silence in between because, because I think that that's what people want.

I think that's real and that's a real conversation that people have.

I just wish that there was some changes to YouTube specifically where they didn't censor the crap out of me and anybody else who doesn't mind talking about COVID and trans delusions and gay mirage and all those things that you can't say in polite society.

But the truth is the truth.

I don't, I'm not gonna not say it if it's true.

And if you want to suspend me and you want to ban me, then I'll.

Fine, I'll just say I have like 51 followers on my.

My newest YouTube account because I'm on my fourth YouTube account.

Yeah.

So being constrained by that kind of pressure and that restriction of I just.

It's antithetical to everything that I'm about.

So there might be wide success on YouTube.

There might be.

That might be the wave of the future or something.

Maybe.

But if it is, I don't want to be a part of it because I don't want to go the way of bowing the knee to Caesar.

I just don't.

Yeah, yeah.

YouTube is tough.

I mean, for all the progress, I think X has created a sort of a little bubble that the dialogue is so freewheeling on X.

Almost.

Almost to a fault.

I think it is to a fault at this point in some place.

But yeah, one way or another, like, it's very freewheeling.

And we forget that X is unique in that regard because when you go over to YouTube and when you try to talk about COVID you know, I posted a clip from an interview that I gave and it must have been in 2021, something like that, where I talked about like jab data from 2021 clip is at least two years old and posted to my own channel.

Got got flagged for a warning on a clip that was 2 years old.

And so I just think that they haven't updated their algorithm to match.

Maybe they will, maybe they won't.

But yeah, it's very odd that in a social media environment where you have X just lapping everybody in terms of how fast information travels, that YouTube is still stuck censoring the same old topics that I thought we resolved those.

That's what the 2024 election was about.

Right.

Was we're going to resolve whether or not our society wants to go in that direction.

We answered that question.

And so my Hope is that YouTube will ease up on some of that because we should be able to talk about this now.

And I don't know why they haven't.

Maybe because Twitter is not as enjoyable a video watching site.

That's not its primary function.

It's trying to be everything to everyone.

It does have videos and I think their video integration is very good.

But I think YouTube understands that it still has a monopoly.

I think I heard that YouTube is the largest search engine in the world, which makes it.

Yeah.

So they understand that as as much of a dangerous upstart as X is.

And I think it is.

They understand that they're still in the leadership position, for better or worse.

So my hope is that they.

My hope is that they catch up and make some of these topics more open.

But, you know, it's not like the trans discussion really happens here.

It happens on TikTok anyway, so.

But yeah, I feel you on that for sure.

Elijah Ellis says X has become the new free speech platform.

I agree, and that's kind of.

My point is YouTube isn't YouTube.

You have to fit inside their box and they genuinely don't want people like me in their box.

And that's fine.

I'm okay without that.

I'm not going to change who I am because of clicks.

I think that's, frankly, I think that's super gay when people do that.

Right?

Yeah.

It's odd what gets censored and what doesn't get censored on YouTube because I remember a couple years ago I had a friend who was going to start a platform for Christians because he was worried that Christian content was going to get censored on YouTube and it was theological content.

I'm like, I have not seen any Christian explicitly theological content censored.

It's just not.

You can talk all day about soteriology, baptism, minionism.

Just dive deep into whatever explicitly theological topic you want.

As soon as you start touching on morality, moral choices, that's when YouTube has something to say.

And I think that there's more wiggle room in there than might be obvious.

You know, you don't have to be dropping hard facts about the jab or abortion or whatever.

I think that there is an evangelistic moral case to be made from theological principles that doesn't come across in an accusatory or transgressive way.

And I think that there's a real opportunity there.

Now, that's a subtlety of language approach.

You know, that's a.

We have to conduct an infiltration operation into unfriendly enemy territory.

And so that's a job for certain kind of people.

Right?

Right.

The job of the knuckle dragger, the bruiser, the wrench swinger.

That's a different.

That's a different sort of thing.

And I think that there's room for that.

And so, you know, there was a.

There's a dwarf and there's a wizard, and they're both part of the fellowship of the ring.

You need both of them for different purposes.

And I think that that speaks to something that's very powerful and very true about men, is that you have men that are more aligned with dwarves or More aligned with elves or more aligned with wizards.

Like not for nothing, men like to play RPGs and they like role playing games.

They enjoy that because there are different personality configurations that make them suited to different kinds of combat.

And so, and so if we're going to be running a spy operation, we need insiders to be infiltrating these platforms versus that more confrontational, hard nosed approach.

There are probably other platforms that facilitate that.

YouTube being.

Sorry, Twitter being a good example as well.

That's probably the best one that I could recommend.

Yeah.

We need some hobbits to jump in the gate and open the gate so that we big fat dwarves can come in and swing some axes and the.

Elves can stay on Instagram.

Yeah.

And they, and they can just shoot their arrows from afar in their high towers.

Exactly.

Talking about their, their theology from ivory towers.

Yes.

I really appreciate you with the flowy hair.

Yeah, I like that, I like that.

I'm going to use that later.

Please.

I like your, your Lord of the Rings analogy.

Excellent.

Now switching gears.

I'm hesitant to bring this up on, on my show because I'm not a news show, you know, at all.

Sure.

Even, even politics.

I'm, I'm much more, I'm not nuanced whatsoever.

But we just had another, another school shooting today at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin with about, they had about 400 kids that attended that school from all the way from infants, infants to 4 and then from K through 12.

Like it's the same kind of school that my kids go to.

And so when I saw it on the news, it just hit me right between, right in the heart, you know, and it sounds like there's five kids, including the miner who is the shooter, who was attending that school, are dead and five injured.

Oh, wow.

And emotions like this always run really high.

Like they're, they're, they're always 100 miles an hour.

And for me, like the first thing that I always feel with a school shooting, with a church shootings, anything like that, somebody comes into a business and just blows everybody away is rage.

I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm.

What's his name?

Gimli.

I want to just destroy everybody.

I want to chop some heads off.

I want to go burn it down.

I want to find whoever's responsible.

But when the cowards shoot themselves or someone shoots them, I don't have that opportunity.

And I feel like, you know, everybody feels things a lot differently.

There are people who can identify with me that the first thing Mostly men, I think usually first thing that we feel is rage.

But there's heartbreak and there's emotion and there's regret and there's this, this hole to try and fix that, to try and fix the problem.

And, and it really pisses me off when people use awful tragedies like this and manipulate it for a power grab to stoke division and to try and to blame inanimate objects for something that's a deeper, deeper problem that, that, that they're used for to, to accomplish their, their evil end.

The problem is never the tool, right?

It's never a gun, it's never the, the a knife, it's never a brick.

It's never.

It's the evil inside the demonic murderers that's the problem.

Unfortunately, it sounds like the shooter's dead.

And I've got to say thank God for all the courageous police officers who run towards gunfire using the same damn weapon that evil people use for evil so that they can go and protect people.

So police, fire, corrections, EMTs, all the first responders who keep us safe and deserve our respect and admiration.

I love you.

Thank you.

Thank you for doing what so many people won't do.

But people look for a short term answer that's not even an answer to satisfy their emotions.

Like confiscating guns and banning guns and writing more laws and more legislation when you already have.

A school is already a gun free zone.

Airports are already gun free yet.

But yet people who were bent on, on murdering other people a laws, they're already going to break the law by murdering people.

How is making another stupid law going to help them?

A gun is a tool, just like a knife or just like a brick.

You can kill somebody with a brick or you can build a hospital.

You can kill somebody with a gun or you can use it to protect another person.

What, what do you see?

You know, I'm asking a rhetorical question because we both already know, but what do you think the answer to all this is?

And do you think we have.

What do you think about the possibility of posting armed guards at all the schools in America and all the churches and to protect the people who should be.

I mean, these are soft.

These are kids, man.

These are little kids.

Men are supposed to protect women and children, not freaking shoot them up.

And I'm not seeing enough men stand up with their own concealed, carry their own.

I don't carry a knife.

Dude carry pocket knife, do something, jump on him and slit their throat.

I don't care what you do, but do.

If you, if you're a man.

You should be protecting these kids.

What do you, what do you think?

Well, I was.

While you were talking about that, I went over to.

I went over to Twitter to see if I could hear.

Here we go.

Finally just showed up.

Shooting occurred in Abundant Life Christian School 12.

Yeah.

Mass shooting.

This is not getting.

It's not getting a ton of play, which is very odd.

Yeah.

Because it's a Christian school.

Exactly, exactly.

So what do I think about all this?

Well, it's really easy for people to try and make laws that change people's outer behavior.

Right.

It's very difficult to say that the only thing that truly changes our character is the Holy Spirit.

That's hard, right?

Yeah.

And what everyone.

This relates to the yoga conversation, the yoga pants conversation.

You know, we want to control people's behavior by outer.

By outer laws, as opposed to having a pro moral society where people within themselves constrain their own behavior.

We don't want that because we want to be able to say, like, well, I can do the thing I.

I can do the things that I want to do because I'm not doing anything illegal.

Right.

Because we want to be our own God.

That's right.

That's right.

And that's where America is at right now.

And we haven't just, we didn't just get here overnight.

It's the long, slow degradation of a society that has abandoned its commitment to moral virtue.

And so like the school shooting, all of these shootings, there are many things, their expressions of rage.

Right.

They're expressions of revenge.

They're deeply sinful, incredibly wicked.

To take the lives of innocent people for whatever your agenda is universally.

And they're symptomatic of a society that has essentially given up on training kids up in righteousness.

Right.

And by training kids up in righteousness, a lot of people will say, oh, that just.

That goes straight into tyranny.

And sure, there, there are plenty of fathers and families that teach that with a very heavy hand.

For sure there are.

But that's not righteousness.

You know, training in righteousness does not mean tyranny.

That's somebody doing something wrong.

And so what we have is.

What we have is a society that's gone schizophrenic.

You have people on one side that have.

That are completely anti.

Naomi.

No man, no one can tell me what I.

What to do.

My body and my choice.

I have my personal relationship with God, and that's all you need to worry about.

And then on the other side, you have sort of hyper legalism hyper patriarchy, you know, controlling kind of instinct that's coming as a response to all that, as opposed to what actual fatherhood and discipleship looks like.

America gave up on those ideas decades ago, literally gave up on those ideas.

And you could see that in the 2024 election because I think what was really at root was a choice between the ultimate conclusion of feminism.

A 50 year old something woman lawyer.

Never, never been married.

Sorry.

She was married.

She never had kids.

Far as I could tell from having lived in California, she failed upwards and she was handed her nomination for the presidency, for the candidacy without it earning a single vote.

She was the most, the least popular vice president in history.

And like she just happened to be standing there when Joe Biden, you know, essentially had a, had a brain malfunction on stage.

Right.

And so it's, it's, it's culture, civilization that are just handing this woman up the chain and that a lot of people are like, yeah, that's totally fine.

Versus a man who, Donald Trump may not be a virtuous man.

I don't think that he would call himself a virtuous man.

He certainly does have virtues, many of which are admirable.

You know, I think his commitment to sobriety is incredibly admirable, especially considering how old he is and the circles that he runs in.

I think that's very admirable.

I think he's very much a family man.

He's got a bunch of kids, bunch of grandkids, he's built businesses.

He knows what it is to fail.

Right.

He's lived the high life and now he has.

And he survived an assassination attempt and I think it truly did shift his character too.

Yes, exactly.

I don't.

Was the, was the second guy even really trying?

Like, what was that guy?

Yeah, he popped a bunch of shots and he, and, and the FBI agent or this or the Secret Service or whatever shot like seven times and missed him every time.

That's the caliber protection that we have.

He, he drew down.

And the FBI agent that was supposed to be protecting, or one of the FBI agents or the Secret Service rather, he shot like five or seven times and he or she missed every single time.

They're gender.

Don't assume their gender, Steve.

Yeah, I guess, I mean, who knows?

Could it be they.

Them.

Right.

So he survived two assassination attempts and I do think that meaningfully shifted his character.

I would be very curious.

I don't know.

I don't.

I think maybe at the end of his life he'll write a, he'll write A memoirs and we'll get into, you know, what this past summer was like for him, surviving assassination attempts and how it shifted his outlook on life.

And I think that's been very good.

I think it's matured him and given him a more statesmanlike kind of Persona versus what he had, you know, more like a wrecking ball in 2016.

But here's a man who's built, you know, who's grown, who's, who's fathered kids and grandkids, I think possibly great grandkids as well.

And so what we had in 2024 was a choice and the election was a choice between the ultimate outcome of feminism and a more patriarchal vision of what it means to live in society.

Legacy, family, you know, business, growth, prosperity.

So we made, we made the right choice collectively as a nation, I think we made the right choice.

And there's a place past that of, you know, sexual fidelity, chastity, modesty, all these, all these very present relational things that everyone doesn't really want to look at.

Because that is where you get into true, like virtuous, righteous patriarchy.

That's where you truly put feminism away forever.

That's where men and women truly accept into their God ordained roles.

And to do bow the knee to Christ and God's word.

And people don't want to do that, but that way is the only way that we can get rid of things like abortion.

That's the only way that we can truly get rid of school shootings, unfortunately, is by recognizing how essential oral education is for people and that it needs to come from a transcendent foundation.

And we're just not there yet.

We're just absolutely not there yet.

Maybe we will get there in our lifetimes.

And I think the way we can do that is we embody that in our lives as men and hope that our witness tells the story.

I don't know if we'll ever have a position on the world stage that we get to do that from.

Maybe, God willing, we will.

But that's where the rubber truly meets the road of building a just society.

Inner transformation of the hearts of Americans.

If, God willing, chance to do that.

Yeah, I want to be fair to all the families of this horrible tragedy too, including it sounds like, it sounds like the shooter was also part of this school.

So I want to be fair.

I know details about it.

I know no details about it at all besides what you've told me.

I want to be fair to their family as well.

But the influence that we have on our Kids.

And I say this as a guy who's been a single income family, who's led a single income family for years and years and years until just recently when my youngest is out of diapers and was attending a school and now they're all three in a private Christian school.

I've got to say that there are so many detractions from your family in your pocket every single day that Christians and non Christians alike are so wrapped up in this stupid phone, in social media, in a nicer car, in a nicer house, in a bougie purse, in a $200,000 Maserati or Benz or, or whatever.

You're missing out on what matters.

And what matters is those kids.

And even, even to the families of kids who are struggling.

Take their stupid phone away, okay?

Take their phone away.

Focus.

Get in.

Get into church.

Read your Bible with your family.

Have a family devotion time.

Have family worship.

Sit at your table and eat your dinner together.

Your phone can wait.

Your tablet can wait.

Your, Your business phone call can wait.

I don't care if it's a merger.

I don't care if you're going to lose.

If you're going through bankruptcy, that bankruptcy will be there in 10 minutes, 20 minutes.

Your kid might not be so for, for everybody through all the distractions that life has to offer.

And, and, and your, this even envelops people who have the, the good and right and true and glorious call to, to be productive and to be, to take dominion of the, of the world and to be successful in this world.

To be the 10 talent servant, to be good at what, what God's called you to do, that still pales in comparison to your primary duty, which is your family.

And, and your family needs you first and foremost.

And if you need to put barriers up and you need to take those, those phones away, you need to take the tablets and turn off the phone.

And maybe it's you.

Maybe you're the problem.

I don't know.

Maybe you are.

Then stop it.

Stop it.

Focus on your family.

Focus on your marriage, focus on your kids, Focus on your church.

Focus on being a good man for, for the individuals, the lives that God has entrusted to you.

You're the husband.

You're the father.

Be a man and do your job.

Turn everything off and be present for your family.

And I don't know anything about this, this family.

You know, I'm just speaking generally to everybody because the same problem is heard around the world that you're not.

Men typically are too exhausted, exhausted from their, their job to play with their kids, or to take their wife out on a date, or to sit and do their homework with their kids, or to, or to eat dinner together.

And those are the most important things to do because that's what God has given you.

Your primary duty, your primary duty is to teach your kids, teach your wife, protect them, and to bring them up in the Lord.

And if you're not doing that, if your kid is a rebellious kid, you need to focus more on your kid.

You need to turn off all the distractions.

Maybe they're so rebellious because you haven't given them something to do.

Maybe they're rebellious because you haven't given something productive to do.

Go cut the grass, man.

Go find a hobby.

Go do something, start a small business and make it your kids.

Give them something to invest in.

You know, again, I'm generally, I'm generalizing for everybody, but over and over and over I see this, this thread that, that continues through secularism, through Christian circles, through everybody.

And it's just men's abdication of their role, of their duty, of their responsibilities.

It was there in the garden with Adam.

He abdicated his duty.

He was supposed to be there to protect his wife from the serpent who deceived her and he wasn't.

He sat there and let his wife be molested.

He let his wife be deceived.

He let his wife to commit sin and then he joined her in that sin.

And I might be taking this bridge too far, but I see the same thing going through generation to generation.

And I see if you're too busy with whatever you have going on and you're letting your family be deceived, you're letting your family sin, you're letting your kids be absorbed in this horrible, horrible culture, that's your fault and you need to repent and you need to make it right and you need to get off your ass and you need to be a man, you need to be a husband, you need to be a father who invests in your kids, who invests in your family, who invests in your wife, who invests in your church and lead them the right way because that's the first step of protecting them.

You protect them from the evil that seeps in around you under your nose.

And you could be the biggest, baddest dude in the, in this town.

You could be the, the best marksman you could be able, you could, you could be a three time black belt, Brazilian jiu jitsu guy.

But if you're allowing your kids and your, and your wife to Be deceived.

You're allowing your wife to go to the gym and yoga pants where everybody can see her stuff.

You're allowing your kids to go pick up a weapon and blow somebody away.

That's your fault.

That's your fault.

Anyway, I'll step off my soapbox.

No.

What do you have to say to all that?

No, I agree.

I agree with all of it.

I think that there was a nationwide abdication of fatherhood following World War II.

And there are many reasons, many reasons why.

You can chalk it up to, you know, extreme shell shock from, from the war.

You could chalk it up to, you know, American GIs coming back in the 1940s and flooded with all the prosperity of the 1950s and thinking we've won.

What do we have to pass down?

You can, you know, you can chalk it up to Billy Graham, who knows?

You can chalk it up to the sexual revolution.

You can chalk it up to drugs like they're.

There's so much that happened between the years 1945, 46 and 1966, 20 years, that two decades we're going to.

We would spend our entire lives unpacking it.

And it's probably a worthy endeavor.

And whatever, whatever specifically went on, there was a big break that happened in terms of what fathers believe their responsibilities were and what they carried through and what they passed on.

And so what we have now 80 years on is we have at least three generations of fathers.

So you have the baby boomers, we'll say the greatest generation, fought in World War II.

You have the baby boomers were their kids.

Generation X of millennials were the kids of the baby boomers, Right?

And then the millennials kids are Gen Z, right?

So the first Gen X and millennials, their kids are Gen Z.

So you have four generations now where you don't have fatherhood.

Fathering, father leadership as an American cultural value.

I mean, righteous fatherly leadership, as in, I, your father had something to say about this, and I'm going to intervene and you are not going to like it.

Everyone's going to call me names and I'm going to do it anyway.

Because the Bible says this, that kind of fathering and not do it in a tyrannical way.

You know, because on the other side of abdication, it's like, ah, well, whatever.

It's.

Everyone else is doing it.

That's abdication.

On the other side, there actually is abuse.

Abuse is a very real thing where, you know, you're, you're carrying out discipline, but there's too much of you in it, like I'm going to get my frustrations out of life.

I'm going to vent them through this situation.

That is a very real, that is a very real thing.

And I don't mean to make light of it, but in between abdication and abuse, you have absence, single motherhood, fathers taken off, or mothers divorcing the men and alienating the fathers from their kids.

That's a very real thing.

Where women will take advantage of no fault divorce.

They'll, they'll enter into the divorce industry, the meat grinder, they'll make false accusations against their husband, take their now ex husband for half of his wealth and then alienate the kids, poison the kids against their own fathers.

There's that.

And you have fathers who just take off.

Right.

So what we have over.

And when you really look at it without emphasizing any one of those application, abuse, absence, when you don't emphasize any one of those as being anyone's particular fault and you just pull out to the 50,000 foot view, we don't need to assign blame.

Right.

When you look at that and you see the percentage of families and fathers in America that lead righteously, it's vanishingly small.

Vanishingly small.

So many problems are being ignored, missed.

Right.

Dismissed or just, you know, encouraged.

Right.

All because, and you're right, it does tie to gyms and yoga and yoga pants.

All because fathers decided or were taught or whatever that they're not going to intervene.

And a big part of that, unfortunately, is that the good men who would be great fathers don't trust themselves.

And that that's a problem that I've dealt with a lot of my men's mentorships is good and righteous men who have a genuinely good heart see what the word of God says.

They're so afraid of becoming the tyrant that they don't take action.

And I think that that's a big subsection of men who listen to content like mine.

Content like yours, probably more.

They're very quiet because they don't want to be the abusive dad that they had.

They don't want to be the caricature of the oppressive.

Yeah.

And so that's very, very difficult.

And my advice to those men is usually it's like the sword and the stone.

If I pull the sword from the stone, will I become a tyrant?

So many good men worry about that.

And the reality is if you're worried about that, you're probably not going to become the tyrant.

Right, Right.

And that's what's really needed, is men to courageously Step into leadership and recognize that, yeah, you might get it wrong, but getting things wrong with a sincere heart is a very different thing than getting things wrong from a malicious or sinful intent.

We have to be more forgiving of ourselves, of stepping into leadership and recognizing that we will get things wrong.

We're going to think things all the way through and we're still going to come to the wrong conclusion because there was a piece of data that we didn't know.

Okay, welcome to Earth.

We do the best we can with what we have.

And so what I try to encourage men to do is to step into that leadership and accept, like, do their absolute best.

If you do your absolute best, you know when your conscience acquits you, when you've done your best, you know when you've done.

And.

And even if it goes wrong, like, well, I know that I did my best.

I'll still repent, I'll still apologize, I'll still fix it, but at least I can sleep it knowing that I did that I did my best.

And I think we need more men to do that.

And that really goes to exactly what you said.

Like, the intent, even the law.

It's the intent behind the law.

It's the spirit of the law.

You hear all these phrases about, about laws where.

And Jesus talked about this with the Sadducees and Pharisees, the teachers of the law, where you might be, you're changing the law, you might be trying.

You're telling everybody to wash their hands, and they go up another inch, another.

Go up another inch until you're washing the whole body and you're.

You're taking this money and calling it Corbin and dedicating it to the temple, when you should be taking care of your primary responsibility, which is most important, your intention, even if you're technically following the letter of the law.

Sabbath.

When Jesus himself heals on the Sabbath, and the Sabbath is.

You're not supposed to do any work.

Well, is healing work, or is healing a human being more important than the law?

Is the intent behind the law more important the law itself?

And I would say the intent behind the law is more important than the law itself.

And I will prove that with Jesus's words when he said the Sabbath was made for man, not man made for the Sabbath.

Right?

And I think that with everything that we're talking about, the intention is the most important thing.

The.

The intention behind somebody doing something evil or good, even if it's the same thing, your intention is what matters.

And if your intention as a man is to do the right thing and to stand, to start a family and to be.

You're going to screw up, dude.

I screw up every single day.

Every day.

Whether it's at work, whether it's at family, every day.

But my intention is to be a good man.

My intention is to be a good husband.

And sometimes that pisses my wife off.

It really does.

And sometimes she needs that.

And sometimes she needs that corralling and she needs that.

Oh, this is getting a little emotional right now.

I think we should, we should revisit this maybe in a couple of minutes and then just walk away.

You know what I mean?

This moment right now.

You mean the moment in your house?

Go for it.

I'm just, yeah, I'm just saying that the most important thing to consider when you're making a decision, whether it's something professionally, something that's personal, something that's really, really close to you, like your family, like your wife and kids, your intent is the by far, by far the biggest weighing standard of your future actions.

So if you're intent behind getting married and doing all these things, if your intention is to be a good, righteous man, is to be a good dude to your wife, is to be a good person, that weighs heavily and that's extremely important.

And I think pulling the sword from the stone, if your intention is to be a good righteous king, then pull away, man, pull away, wield that sword and be the righteous king that God has sovereignly decided that that's the position that you're going to be in.

Whether whatever position in this world that you find yourself, if you're in a leadership position, your intention is to be a good leader, then do it man, own it.

Step into that role, be a good dude and be a good leader and own that and maintain that right intent.

Yeah, yeah, I'm just thinking of Hebrews 4:12.

The word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing ascender of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Right, that's.

There's your tool right there.

Right.

To know your thoughts.

Yeah, there it is.

Now, Daniel Morgan asked, can you touch on current split and reformed camp and ons and a lot of stuff.

And I respectfully, Daniel, I'm not going to.

And I don't want my guests to either.

And I don't mean to be, certainly don't mean to be rude about this, but I think what's happening with a couple people in the Reformed circles isn't something that needs to be addressed out here.

It really doesn't.

It needs to be addressed on a phone call with people privately, because that's what Scripture says to do.

And putting it on social media and putting it on interviews and putting it doing all these things is actually violating what Scripture says.

You can find that in Matthew 18.

Jesus gives very, very clear examples of what you ought to do in these situations.

And even though many of the men that are wrapped up in this current Reformed spat, I respect the hell out of them.

I really do.

I love them, but I'm not going to wade into who's.

Who's at fault for what.

And.

But the truth is you just need to pick this stupid thing up and make a phone call and be a man and.

And handle it like men.

And whether they come to an agreement or whether they come to.

Or they don't.

Right.

You still have to obey Scripture regardless.

And if they read and then apply Matthew 18, I think all that would go by the wayside.

So, Daniel, I appreciate your comment.

Unfortunately, I'm not going to address it, and I don't want Will to either, because I think it's detrimental to the church.

And I think that the parties involved need to.

They just need to do it.

They just need to pick up the phone and talk to each other.

A counterpoint, rather than picking.

Picking this thing up, you should put it down.

Which is to say that.

Yeah, no, I know it's a joke.

Because one of the things that's definitely true is that whatever is happening on social media between two men that aren't you is a distraction from the things in your life that are.

And for myself personally, and I'm not the only one who's talked about this, I have a podcast coming out this week with Matt Reynolds from Barbell Logic.

Yeah, he has a new book coming out called Undoing Urgency.

It's a great book.

And one of the things that's really clear about this moment is that we as Christian men have a unique opportunity to build right now, and whatever that way that means anything to us, whether that's building, you know, a podcast, whether it's building a business, whether it's building, you know, shed Outback, or whatever it is, we have an opportunity to really build something that will contribute to our families, contribute to our prosperity, contribute to the effective running of our household.

Picket.

Right.

And one of the things that's definitely true is that whatever is going on on social media will not add to your ability to build.

And so the time, the energy and attention that people have been putting into the discussion without taking any position on it, I'm not taking any position on it, but that time, energy and attention can go for the individuals who are not involved, can go to so many other places.

And I really would encourage men to take advantage of that perspective.

And now that the election is over, the 2024 election is over.

It's about a month so, about six weeks in the past 36 days.

I'm one of.

One of the guys literally counting the days.

That's good.

No, that's great to know.

Like, it was quite a night.

Now that that's in the past, we need to be focusing on the future and it being face down into your phone, whether it be on X, whether it be on TikTok or Instagram or whatever.

Or chess.

I don't play.

I love chess.

I don't play online chess because I don't want to have my face stuck in my phone all day trying to analyze a chest position.

So put the phone down, delete the apps, say what in front of me can I focus on now that I have this opportunity in sunshine?

And I think that that.

May that bless you because that's my approach to all of it.

Daniel says respect both answers, gentlemen.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um, I.

I agree completely with you, Will.

I think that you're the.

The more time that you spend on things that don't involve you and yours, the more time you're wasting.

And.

And God's going.

God's given us a finite amount of time and you don't know how much time you have.

And when.

When we even as Christians, right, If you're not a Christian, you're gonna have a bad day, bro.

You're just gonna have a bad day.

It's not gonna, like, like every day of your life is gonna be bad, and then every day of your forever is gonna be even worse.

So.

So that really is even.

Like before, like that's over here, before you even get into the club.

Like, that bouncer's not letting you in, you know, like this whatever crap you're dealing with is the best your life is ever gonna.

Ever going to be.

It's all downhill.

And then for a Christian, conversely, this is the worst it's ever going to be.

Like whatever you're dealing with right now, whatever your.

Your stuff, the.

The worst, even the most atrocious things like that.

Like that.

The Covenant shooting and this one in Wisconsin, like these.

This is the worst that it'll ever have in your life.

Yeah.

All it is is uphill.

All it is is going to get better.

And if you're not doing something with.

When you are called as a Christian now, when you're called to account for every single day and every word that comes out of your mouth, and the boss is staring at you like, all right, I give you 10 talents.

What'd you do with them?

And you're like, oh, I scrolled on TikTok.

Oh, I went and did a bunch of yoga.

I wore stretchy pants in the gym and made everybody look at my hoo hoo while I recorded them.

That's what you're gonna tell the boss.

That's what you're gonna say is, I got a bunch of clicks.

I virtue signaled.

I tried to ban a bunch of guns that have no bearing on.

It's what the best answer is.

Put the phone down.

Put the stuff down.

Act like a man.

Go build.

Go build.

I had Matt on last.

Last year also.

Phenomenal guy.

Amazing guy.

Love that dude.

Love him.

And again, DM me his book stuff.

I want to buy that too.

Hopefully have him back on because he.

I love the simplicity of Go do hard things.

There's a bar that's cold.

It reminds you of wielding a sword.

Put a bunch of weight on it and go lift it.

Go lift it with something that requires you to expend your strength and to quit.

Do the most that you can today because you'll be able to do more tomorrow.

And I really do feel like all of life is that way.

I really do feel like God designed our human body to reflect our spirit.

And I.

I think that if you don't embrace the hard things in your life every single day, then you're just weak.

You're just a weak dude.

And.

And you're gonna get weaker.

And doing the hard.

Doing the right thing is always the hard thing.

So if your intention is to do the right thing, you're gonna have a rough life, bro.

You're gonna have conflict.

You're gonna have people.

You're gonna have people who don't like you.

You're gonna have YouTube banning you from three different accounts.

And.

And you're just gonna have to keep doing it until they stop, because you're not going to.

And I'm not trying to make myself part of this do hard things thing, but Forge and anvil.

Oh, my.

Guys, I hear Will has mastered the sword.

There's a rumor we have unconfirmed reports.

Okay, we'll have to talk about it.

Miss you Connor, but miss you.

But men are supposed to do hard things and, and I love Matt because he, he just embraces that and he says that about everything.

And then he proves that when he coaches guys and when he tells you how to do, how to be a better man, not just in your physical body and your physical shape, but just you as a man.

He does a lot of life stuff just for free for people.

He impacts people on, on a daily and I respect the hell out of him.

So if you guys aren't following Matt Reynolds at barbell logic, you definitely should look him up, check him out.

Dudes a stud.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think that he, he has a good example of what a lot of us men can and perhaps should be doing.

He's not super active on social media.

He will post from time to time, but in general he's busy building his multimillion dollar company and he has been for 15 years.

And so it's just a known thing.

You only have so many hours in the day, you only have so much attention to give.

And so whether the drama is in global politics or whether the drama is in the reform world or, or whether it's in the sports world, doesn't matter.

There's no shortage of drama that we can all choose to spectate in.

The reform stuff is a little closer to all of us, probably because it involves growers, we have online, people we know in real life or both, or ministries that we're personally attached to versus something happening in Congress, for example.

Maybe it's not happening with our congressperson, but it's sort of a couple degrees removed.

But no matter how far the degree is removed from you or how close it is participating in drama, that doesn't actually, and I don't mean to be dismissive about it by calling it drama either.

That's not my intention for saying that.

Participating, let's call it conflict.

Participating in conflict that doesn't immediately involve you does two things.

It doesn't help.

Absolutely doesn't help.

And it risks getting you involved in it.

And that's the worst thing that can happen because once you get involved in it, you're in it until you can exit.

And so a casual comment made about something on social media, you know, especially, especially X can go viral and then you can be dealing with it for the next 72 hours.

Right.

And so.

Or two years or two years or more.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, like that's a very rare case, right, the that you would be dealing with something for two years.

But we have to be mindful about.

Well, if I'm going to.

This is how I choose to use X.

Every time before I hit send, I ask or post, I ask, if this tweet were to go viral, would I be willing to stand in the public square starting right now to defend it until it dies down?

Because there's always a curve.

Even my biggest Tweet that did 23 million views, even that fell off after about five days.

But like, for example, over Thanksgiving, I put the phone away, I had something to say about, but I was like, you know what?

No, because I don't want to post this right now and then be responsible for it while I'm with family, while being distracted, like, oh my gosh, who's saying what about where that I have to respond to.

And that's how I choose to engage with social media.

And I do that to protect my time, to protect my attention.

Now, I'm a pretty public guy.

I have a lot of followers, right?

And so I recognize that I can, because I have.

I can post things that take on a life of their own.

And, you know, for better or for worse, I've done it many times.

And yet still.

So it's an imperfect process no matter if you choose to do it.

And yet I have so many tweets in my drafts folder, both on my web browser, Twitter and on the phone where it's like, I don't know that I want to deal with any blowback from this right now.

I might be 100% behind the thing that I'm going to say.

And I'm like, you know what if this upsets the wrong person and it makes it all the way up to wherever and I get the blowback from either former friends or future enemies or whatever.

It's like, I got other stuff I want to do today.

And I know that that idea could be considered controversial in the sense of we're in a clicks and attention driven culture where everyone's trying to get attention for what they're doing.

And I think that attention can be a positive thing if you have something helpful and healing and potentially even profitable to speak into it, by all means, if you have an offer, coaching program, a book that you're trying to sell, start a podcast, start up drama and sell the thing.

It's a very well traveled business model right now.

So that's a way that attention can be used positively.

Of course you have grifters and stuff like that who create negative attention.

Don't do that.

But in general, if that's not you if you're just trying to get attention for your edgy tweet, recognize that if you succeed and you get all that attention, you will then have to manage that attention.

And the attention that you're giving to the attention could be spent on reading a book, going to the gym, playing with your kids, focusing on your work, doing something for the future.

Because I can tell you, 23 million views on Twitter.

That's cool.

That was a pretty wild day to watch a tweet literally go viral around the world.

And did it meaningfully improve the quality?

And I'm grateful to God for it.

Did it meaningfully improve the quality of my life?

Yeah, I got a nice check from X for it, but that hasn't continued on since then.

And so there's a temptation and X Twitter has always been good at this.

It's even better at now.

But this is not new.

This is pre Elon.

X has been very good at the hot take thing.

You have a thought, bang, you post it, it goes send it.

And Twitter is very good at that.

And that can be great for, for a political dialogue.

That can be great for sharing news like the first assassination attempt.

Twitter had gone around the horn three times before the mainstream media, even before CNN even said Trump falls down and hits self or whatever.

You know, I had already looked all the way through, like, oh my gosh, bullets literally were in the air.

This just happened before CNN even posted about it.

And so Twitter's great at that, right?

It's fantastic for that.

But there are consequences in our use of it that I think men, particularly today, now that we live in a more conservative friendly environment, have to put on their training wheels and understand that now that you don't have to worry about getting kicked off the platform for your pace and as you take now, you have to worry about the opposite, which is what if it does well?

Which is just gets eyeballs and traction and you get sucked into something that you can have a better spending your time.

You can spend your time on something better.

And I think that's the lesson that a lot of men are having to learn the hard way right now is not just social media like doom scrolling, but like based and edgy takes that generate attention that keep you stuck to the phone.

And I think that that's something that everyday regular men need to worry about.

Now that might be new because a year ago pre elon Twitter was your doom scrolling Instagram TikTok, you're just scrolling, just passively consuming.

And now those same guys, you know, they won't get censored for the things that they say.

So now they say them.

But that's equally keeping you hooked into the algorithm.

And we need to pop out of the algorithm and get back into real life.

That's grass, man.

Go do something.

Go do something productive.

I include myself.

Yeah, me too.

Like it's hard.

So I, again, I genuinely feel the burden that a lot of people have.

This is, I don't get paid for this.

I just do this.

I do this because I think it's important.

I think that there's a need for it and people haven't stepped in the gap.

And so if there's a gap, I'll step in.

I don't care.

I would say that I'm a natural born leader without trying to sound arrogant, cocky.

And I think that, I think that people need to gravitate towards those natural born leaders and offer them support wherever they may be, whether it's your personal life or professional life.

You see those people who are genuinely trying to, whether they're perfect or not.

Nobody's going to be perfect, but at least they're trying.

And I think if people are trying, then you should offer them your support.

And that leads into the next thing I want to talk about.

I think it was the last thing I want to talk about.

We're getting kind of long in the tooth here.

Cool.

January 20th.

Donald Trump is going to be sworn in.

Huh?

Got it.

That's inauguration day.

Got it.

Yeah.

Donald Trump is going to be sworn in as only the second U.S.

president in all of U.S.

history to serve two non consecutive presidential terms.

The first, of course, being Grover Cleveland.

He was the 22nd and then the 24th president from 1885 to 1889 and then 1893 to 1897.

What do you think about Trump's first presidency?

And what do you, what do you expect to see in his second term?

More assassination attempts, probably.

I'm so stoked that you asked me this question because I think it's so interesting.

So I think Trump, I don't know if Trump expected to win the first time.

Right.

One of the reasons behind his victory was 4chan meme magic.

I think there was a significant portion of the American population, particularly young men, who they didn't care what Trump's policy proposals were.

Maybe he didn't have any.

Who knew?

They just knew that he was a brick thrown through the window of the establishment, which he was 100%, which he was right.

And, and, and one way or another, he provided four years of air cover to Let men build.

Under a Clinton administration, for example, there would have been no manosphere.

Right?

That like, because I came up through the manosphere and discovered reformed theology in 2022.

So 2016-2020 was when I was covered discovering this kind of like world of masculinity that would have not existed under a clinical to the presidency in the way that it did.

So one thing we can say for sure is that Trump absorbed the fire from the media, whether he Russiagate hoax or whatever, that no longer got focused on individual men.

And that's why you had a lot of growth and prosperity in the economy.

But he was a bull in the China shop.

I think he himself would admit that he was naive.

I think he's confessed, he's made bad appointments, he trusted people who knew where the bodies were buried, who stuck a knife in his back like he, he probably was.

He didn't understand the level of blood sport that he had signed up for.

And in fact, he actually said a lot of people missed this.

It was during the convention, the Republican National Convention.

It was after the assassination attempt.

He was on a couple different interviews.

I want to say it was Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn.

Definitely on Joe Rogan.

It was, it was a talking point that he had for a while.

He was talking about, you know, there's some really.

I'm not going to try to do a compression.

There are some really lean.

Andrew Isker does a really good jump.

Does he really?

Yeah, it's great jobs.

He's like race car drivers, 0.1% or something, boxers, you know, bull riders.

Like, he talked about these deadly jobs and he's like, you know, the presidency is a deadly job.

He said that on a couple different very high profile podcasts.

And that was very interesting to me because I don't think he had previously recognized that it may be true.

It may be true, God forbid, but it may be true that like if he really wants to create the change, that he believes it.

I believe he's.

I believe he's a good hearted man and he cares for the United States.

He's not a redeemed man.

He's not a Christian, not a believer yet.

He may get there or the time is done, but he's not a believer.

But I believe he genuinely cares about America and Americans.

Right.

He may have recognized once the bullet grazed his ear that to truly create the change that he wants, it may cost him his life.

Right?

It just may.

There's precedent for that.

Plenty of assassination attempts on US Presidents trying to change things.

Kennedy probably being the most famous one.

And I don't think Donald Trump had ever considered that, that he would be in that category.

We're all just going to make a whole lot of money, right?

It's all good, right?

Like, no, it's not all good.

It's not about making a whole lot of money.

It's about making a very specific changes to the world to bring about this kind of globalist kind of thing.

So he may have recognized that this job that he signed up for, the President of the United States, an actual change agent in the presidency, may cost him his life.

And I think that he has conducted himself very differently since that realization.

I think he's become more grounded, I think he's become more fatherly, more grandfatherly, brought that side of his personality forward quite a bit more.

And I think when he gets inaugurated, if I had to guess, if I were the guy who got elected, I would have two things in mind right now.

My plans, my actual plans would be so deep secret buried.

Like, you're coming into our no cell phones lockdown.

There are five people in this room only kind of skiff secure, confidential environment, I think is what.

It's something like that.

Yeah.

And like, five people know what we're actually doing, and that's it.

And these are, like, these are true bros.

And such an intense campaign of massive shock and awe behind the scenes that you hit the ground absolutely running as fast as you can in the first hundred days.

And I think.

I think we're going to see.

And I think that's how I would handle it.

Like, I wouldn't be a consensus builder.

No.

We're going to spend a couple of years getting to know everybody, and we're all just going to do this big kumbaya, like.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

You're.

The bullet grazed my ear.

I felt it.

I felt it hit my ear that we're.

We're in a different.

We're in a different category of violence now.

And so I think what we're going to see leading up to the election, and we're seeing it now with this, your drone thing and, you know, the conflict in the Middle East.

And I think that there's an attempt to throw sand in the gears.

And so far, Trump seems to be unflapped, you know, sort of unflappable about the whole thing.

But I think once we hit go on January 20th and 21st, we're going to see like 90 crazy days.

I think it's going to be absolutely wild.

Buckle up.

You know, I don't think we're going to see societal collapse, but I think it's going to be a wild ride.

And I think the wild ride will be less time than to get to the midterms.

I think the midterms is too late.

I think they will probably have to go as hard as they can, as fast as they can in the first 60 days before the news cycle has a chance to catch up.

And I think that the elite, the establishment, whatever, the regime, whatever you want to call them, I think that they recognize, perhaps only too late, they recognize that their media apparatuses that they have meaning, the mainstream media, cable news, TV news, stuff like that, are way too slow.

Way, way, way too slow.

I think they screwed up so massively big time by selling X to Elon.

I don't.

I think they're now recognizing the giant mistake that was.

So they're at a disadvantage in terms of the news cycle.

The news cycle can't turn over fast enough to stand up to a shock and awe campaign being conducted through X.

And so just to go back for a second, this makes discipline with social media and devices even more important for men because the massive temptation will be to be stuck to her phone all day watching and commenting on all the headlines.

That will be the massive temptation.

I'm sure that I will face it, right, because it's fun.

There's a fun component to it.

And, and every bit of attention that you give to these things will detract from the things that you can be doing in your own life that I think are very necessary.

So I think between, I think, I think once Christmas and New Year's are over, I think all bets are off for the first three weeks of January.

I think January 20th, we're going to see a lot of craziness.

And I think the craziness that we see is going to be the tip of the iceberg for a whole bunch of craziness.

We are not going to see, like, as the FBI offices on January 20th and 21st are going to be insane.

They're going to be insane.

We may never hear about it.

The CIA, we may never hear about it, but it's going to be absolutely wild.

We'll feel it.

We'll feel it in the rattling.

The ship's going to be rattling and shaking as it's going over, going through turbulent waters.

But it's going to be really important for men to have social media discipline in terms of their use of devices so they don't get too caught up in the headlines of the day.

And they keep their focus on their businesses, their family and their faith.

And that, I think is going to be the real challenge for Christians over the next couple of years is the men who are able to maintain discipline in the face of constant headline distraction, like head down focus, what are you building?

The men who are able to do that.

And it's going to, you know, I think it's going to be an even harder discipline.

There's a lot of talk and we've talked about porn and all that.

And so I think that that is a very well traveled set of ground for men in the Christian faith.

Right now there's still more work to do, but I think people are familiar with the nature of the challenge.

What we haven't yet discussed yet is the distraction of social media in general and the need to be truly disciplined in how we use that to make sure that it doesn't become a distraction of the godly activities we could be doing in our lives.

And the men who are able to succeed at that, like Matt Reynolds, shut it off, go away.

Stay focused on the mission.

We'll see the next two years be massively profitable for them, profitable in terms of their faith if they invest energy in that, profitable in terms of their family, profitable in terms of any growth of business or effort.

Because while everyone else in the world is going to be so fixated on the headlines, if you're sitting at your desk and you have your head down and you're getting your job done, you will outpace everyone around you, liberal and conservative.

And that, I think, is the opportunity that's ahead of all of us right now.

So January 20th, buckle up for a wild ride.

But like, remember, you can turn it off and you probably won't see it.

I can close my laptop, turn off my phone.

And things are pretty chill here in my studio.

And I think every man needs to be reminded of that in his everyday life once we do actually get to inauguration day.

I agree with you 100%, man.

And you said it way better than I could.

Thank you.

You hit on a lot of points that your focus as men still needs to be.

Go build.

Go take dominion, go focus on your family.

These things are going to.

It's not as if the things don't matter.

I want to say, it's not as if the headlines on social media, they do matter.

These things do matter.

The things that we're seeing in the reform world, they're important.

And you still have a life to lead.

Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you.

Off no, that's great.

I don't mind it at all.

I appreciate your perspective and 100% man, the headlines matter.

They do.

But similar to the organizational structure of the government, the president really doesn't matter all that much to you and yours today.

It really doesn't.

Your senator really doesn't matter.

The one person, then, the one elected representative that matters the most to.

Where it matters the most to you is the sheriff.

Your local county sheriff matters the most.

He can literally tell the president, yeah, I don't care.

We're not doing that here.

And there's nothing they can do about it.

Nothing.

During the COVID shamdemic, I was praying that are sheriff or sheriffs around the world, around the country would just say, yeah, no, no thanks, you can do that.

We're not going to.

But they didn't.

Right?

But the sheriff in your county has more power over you than literally anyone in the country.

That's the person that you need to focus on your local politics.

And this is where Michael Voster gets it so.

Right.

And Michael Clary and all these guys who focus on local elections.

Your emphasis that what matters to you and yours and your family, what impacts you every single day, your grocery bill, your local laws, your local magistrate, as it were, your regulations, your taxes, all that's counting, man.

Yeah, so.

So all this stuff might be happening with Trump and with the, you know, whatever, and that's cool, that's great.

But it's.

It.

The amount that that's going to affect you is minuscule in comparison to what's happening every single day in your county, in your local jurisdictions.

That's what's going to matter to you the most.

So if, if you really do care, you really do want to sit on here and go scroll and tweet and, and boast and whatever the hell they.

They call it these days for, for whatever you do on.

Get your voice heard and do it locally, man.

Go.

Go to your city council, go to your, your local sheriff.

Go, go talk.

They have to talk to you.

You, you're part of the, you're part of the county.

They have to talk to you.

So the.

If you want to be involved in your elected conversation, your sheriff should be your, your first and foremost.

Stop that.

That should be top of your mind because it's what's going to impact you the most.

And then speaking of what's going to impact the most, the president, the president's picks and their nominations for, for cabinet, that's what's going to matter the most to his presidency.

Because the President doesn't make all the people, all the, all the decisions for all the things.

There's just too much.

So the cabinet members who are going to be leading in this area, in that area, the FBI and the CIA and then the nsa, and I really want to talk to you, I want to see what you think about his cabinet, potential nominees.

Cash Patel for the FBI.

Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Cabbard, jfk.

I mean, these are some pretty conf.

You know, they're confident, confrontational or controversial people that a lot of liberals really, really liked before and they don't like now.

And I want to get your perspective on that.

Yeah, I'm not a super political guy, so I don't keep up with the headlines.

I mostly get secondhand information.

But it seems to me that the people who Trump has nominated, they genuinely want to change things and that they're committed to it.

And I think the one thing that Trump learned, excuse me, after his first go round, is that a lot of people talk a big game about change.

Very few people have the spinal fortitude to pull it off.

And I think Trump was one of those guys.

I think his first administration, he talked a lot about change.

I think he may have meant it, but at the final analysis, at the end of 2020, during that election, not a lot had changed.

And, you know, but I'm even willing to say that that's all of God's providence, because, you know, the election of quote unquote, of 2020, whatever went on there, like, it's pretty clear that we had Biden and Harris, we had Democrat control for four years, right?

And so I think that if we're.

Taking whatever went on there at 2:00 in the morning with a bunch of buses pulling up with, with 100% ballots for Biden, Harris, whatever happened, whatever, whatever happened there.

But actually, but it doesn't matter.

Let's just say, let's just say, let's.

We're going to go into fantasy land now.

We're going to ride our unicorn into the magic fairy kingdom and say that it was a legitimate election.

I know, I know.

Just.

That's too much, Will.

It's just too much, man.

I believe in fairy kingdoms.

Well, let's say, right, like, we're gonna ride through the Candy Kingdom on our unicorn.

And in the Candy Kingdom, the 2020 election was legitimate and was totally, was up and up, but it still gave people the chance to see, like, okay, we got four years of Biden, right?

We got four years of untrammeled And Trump went away.

Trump vanished.

Like, he did not maintain his place on the world stage.

Commenting on the behavior.

He wasn't a commentator.

He didn't show up on TV news programs.

He was kind of invisible.

He started Truth Social, but he didn't.

He wasn't really a major political figure.

He just disappeared.

He was out there.

He would comment from time to time.

So he wasn't even on the stage.

Right.

So you had four years of the Democrats, and then what happened at the end of four years of the Democrats is that even the Democrats were like, hey, yeah, so, yeah, this.

This hasn't been awesome.

There is no measure at which it's been awesome.

And so what that did when we came around to the 2024 election is you had a.

You had an election that was too big to rig.

And it was too big to rig because a lot of Democrats, a lot of the liberals woke up and they recognized the trajectory that their party was going for, and they're like, we don't want to have any.

Any part of that.

And so there's a providential component of, like, okay, like, even if it was, again, in the magic fairy kingdom, a legitimate election, which it wasn't, it was still became a very powerful teaching tool.

And so I think that there are a lot of people who are like, okay, yeah, we don't like the direction the Democrats are going.

I think the disaster in Afghanistan was a big deal.

The border crisis.

Trump was talking about build the wall in 2016, and it was like, the most racist thing ever to say.

And now you had a bunch of liberals like, wow, this illegal immigration is a real problem.

You know, it's funny thing about that.

I know a guy who wanted to do something about it back in 2016.

What was that guy's name again?

So, like, a lot of people reluctantly woke up.

And the four years in 2020, what's that?

That's fake news.

Fake news, right?

Yeah.

Well, the four years of 2020, 2024 sort of made them without excuse.

What are you seeing here that you like?

Nothing.

So it did allow for more of a mandate to be given to Trump.

And it did also show who was willing to break ranks before it was popular.

Right.

So that, I think, probably has given Trump a good salt.

Like, Elon Musk is a good example.

Like, Elon Musk is like, hey, he was talking.

Elon Musk was talking about crashing birth rates years ago.

Like, a lot of people were saying, because they're still in this kind of 1960s leftist political mindset.

Like a population explosion is the biggest problem.

Elon Musk was on stage at some big tech conference and was like, actually, I think population collapse is the big problem.

He was way ahead of the curve on that for a lot of people.

So it's given Trump the opportunity to form alliances with people who, I think that they're ambitious.

I think that there's a godly form of ambition.

In fact, there's a new sermon from Doug Wilson about godly ambition.

Well, it's new to me.

It's a couple years old.

It was served to me on YouTube algorithm.

I think there's a godly form of ambition that wants to create change.

And I think it's an ungodly form of ambition.

That's about self glorification.

And I don't ever want to say that there's a politician out there who only has godly ambition.

I think to even succeed as a politician, period, you have to have some self glorification be part of your makeup.

Otherwise I just, I literally don't think you can make it in that world, period.

That doesn't mean that the person is like this irredeemable kind of individual.

It just means that it's the nature of the beast.

So I think you have a lot of people who, they want to create change.

I think they have the spinal fortitude to do it.

I think they have the mandate to do it right.

But will they see it all the way through?

Will they wrestle the thing down to the ground and hog tie it?

Will they really, really do that?

And will they be protected enough from the, from the consequences and all?

But this is a standard problem that men face every human faces.

You can say that you want to be the righteous godly leader in your home, great.

And I want that for you.

But are you willing to be the righteous godly leader who tells your daughter who you love, who you've been lax about this with?

I'm sorry, you can't go out of the house looking like that anymore.

Like, when that is rubber meets the road and when your wife's like, oh, really?

You're like, yes.

Are you going to stand up in that because you've been lax before?

Are you really going to take it all the way down to that level?

Well, what about that one time?

Like, you're right after.

Repent for that.

And you still have to hold up your godly authority.

A lot of men will break.

It's a very common thing.

Men and women will break off the sharp point of true conviction of change when it starts to get really painful.

And sin is painful.

Moral shame is very painful.

The conviction, moral conviction is very, very painful.

That's its purpose.

That's our conscience waking, like, ow.

And so the question ultimately will be, how down for how down for it, how up for it are the people, our Trump and the people on his side?

Like, everyone wants to be the God emperor until it comes time to do God Emperor stuff.

Everyone wants to be the patriarch until it comes time to do patriarchy stuff, when it gets really unpopular, when everyone starts screaming because it's so alien to our culture today.

And that will be the big question.

And so we're going to watch that play out in Trump's cabinet appointments, we're going to watch that play out in Trump's administration, we're going to watch it play out in the mainstream media.

And I think we desperately need it to play out in the everyday lives of men.

And again, I don't mean to keep beating the dead horse on this, but it will be a very, it will be very easy to be distracted from being living righteous lives by watching other men fight righteous battles online.

Same temptation of sports.

We can get secondhand glory by watching the guy break free for a 50 yard touchdown to win the game.

Amazing, right?

But like, are you going to break free or a touchdown in a way that's meaningful within your life, Are you going to fight for your own, not necessarily your own glory, are you going to fight for your own victory in your life and stop watching the other man do it?

And so what I hope happens is that we see so much victory, so much winning, you get tired of winning that seeing Trump and seeing his administration rack up some quick wins, I hope it doesn't inspire men to merely be cheerleaders for the quick wins.

I hope it inspires them to go get wins in their own lives and then we will really see change in America.

Because you're right, the president, he can crush it at his highest level, as cabinet members can approached it at his highest level.

Will that percolate down into your weekly productivity, your weekly to do list, will that percolate down into your family worship?

Probably not.

You still have to lead in that.

So if every man that his own level of influence, whether it be around his dinner table or in the office of the President, takes this on and goes to win in the ways that they can, then we will see change in the United States.

If we're expecting Trump and his cabinet picks to do all the work for us, we will be disappointed.

But if we take advantage of their wins to inspire us for wins in our own lives, I think we'll be very happy.

And that's what I ultimately want to see for America.

So really it comes down just like in the church.

You know, you can preach theology all day long or in the White House you can talk about policies all day long, but really once you put them into practice, once you actually use application of what you're learning and what you're saying you're going to do, that's when you get the resistance, that's when you get the, the, the, the hard fought battles that you need strong Gimli's for guys, guys who are willing to swing the axe.

Yeah.

So once you put it into practice, when you're, you're, you were talking about if you're willing to stand there in front of your wife, in front of your daughter and say you're not, you're not going to leave this house wearing that, looking like that.

You're not going to talk to your friend like that.

You're not going to talk to your mother like that.

You're not going to talk to me like that.

You're not going to talk to whoever you don't.

Exactly, exactly.

Once you actually live out those biblical principles, once you actually see the cabinet members put into practice these things that we've been promised, the result is the same.

You're going to get massive resistance.

Because it's one thing to say something, it's another thing to do something.

And the doers are the ones who, yeah, they get stuff, they just have done.

They're the builders and the shakers and the movers and the shakers and they build empires.

But they also have the biggest amount of resistance in their life.

The ones who just go with the flow, the ones who just talk, you know, they want to talk about it and not be about it.

There's no resistance to them because they're not actually impacting other people's lives.

If you want to impact other people's lives, be about it.

Don't just talk about it.

Live with the application, don't just talk about theology.

Live it out in your life, in your, in your daily life.

And I think you're right.

I think that once, I think the cabinet members that, that Trump has, has slotted for those positions, once they start actually acting out those policy changes, there's, there's going to be some massive resistance to them and that's fine.

They're going to write in Chicago and Frisco and Portland and la.

Cool.

Burn it down, man.

Burn it, baby, burn it.

Because personally, I want it to burn.

I do.

I want these crazy Sodom, Gomorrah cities who have rejected Christ for generation after generation, and they're living in their sin, and the sin that they live in is their judgment on them.

And they're going to burn themselves down in that judgment.

And I want that to happen.

I want judgment to come.

So that's a long way of saying, I'm excited about what's happening.

I'm excited about the next couple.

Couple years.

He's not a perfect president.

I really, really don't like his position on abortion.

I really, really don't like that he's moved the whole Republican Party to the left.

But I really do like that he's a.

Okay, you don't like it.

Cool story.

Do something about it.

I really like that he's the bull in the China shop.

I really like that he's the guy who's going to flip you off and not apologize.

I really like the fact that he's just going to take names, kick down doors, bag them and tag them, and then see what happens when the dust settles.

And I think that we've been sorely, sorely, we have needed that for so long, and we haven't had it.

Because before Trump, there really wasn't much of a difference between Republicans and Democrats.

They, they say something, they don't live out their platform.

They don't believe.

They don't believe what they say.

And they're not answerable.

They're not.

They're actually not answerable to you and me, to their constituents.

They're answerable to the lobbyists and to the big corporations who pay for their next election.

And I really like the fact that it's not everything that I want to see in an elected representative in the president, but it's better than what I had been getting.

It's better than what I.

And he's going to knock down a whole bunch of nonsense that drain a bunch of the swamp that I have hated for my entire life.

So I agree with you.

I think, I think there's a lot to be excited about the next presidential for the Inauguration Day.

I think it's going to be fast and furious.

I think it's going to be no holds barred.

I think it's going to be breakneck speed.

But I think you're wise to give people that caution to say, don't get wrapped up in all these things that are happening because you still have a job to do.

You still have to go take dominion you still have to go build your business.

A good employee, be a good husband, a good father, a good.

Whatever you have, you still have to do all those things for the Lord.

Yeah.

And I just want to offer a bit of encouragement, you know, to you, Steve.

Like you and I, as you said, we're two.

We're two very different men, right?

We come, we come from different worlds, we have different backgrounds, different approaches, but we're both valid versions of what it means to be a man.

The kind of man that you will reach is different from the kind of man that I will reach.

Not that there isn't plenty of crossover, because there is.

But I want to offer an encouragement to you to keep speaking in the ways that you have.

Because men like you need.

Men like you, they need that reminder.

They will hear those reminders differently from you than they will for me.

That's just one of the natures of what it means to be a man.

Different kinds of men listen to different kinds of men.

And that's absolutely fine.

So I want to encourage you to keep doing what you're doing and to stick with this and to keep speaking into the lives of men and keep encouraging them in the way ways that you do.

Because I think they will be needed, I think they are needed very much so for men to look when they feel like, whoa, okay, I'm lost right now, swimming.

What do I do?

Who's a man that I respect that I can turn to, who I think would get me?

And I think that you offer that to so many men.

And so I think there's a big opportunity for the working class regular guy out there to find a country that is much more friendly to him than it has been probably for the past 50 years.

Even as early as the 1970s, there are charts that show how manufacturing jobs began to leave the United States as we transition to a more college centric economy.

Big disaster, huge portions of the American population.

And I think we're seeing a shift back to valuing working class middle class values, valuing men who think with their hands, who don't just think with their minds.

There's nothing wrong with either one.

You actually need both to build a functioning civilization.

You always have.

Civilizations go wrong when they forget that, when they forget that they need wizards and that they need dwarves.

You know, if we want to get fantasy about it, right, the role playing.

Fantasy, role playing about it.

But the reality is there are so many different kinds of men that can speak into the lives of different kinds of men.

As long as they stick with It.

So I just massively appreciated everything you've had to say and the way in which you say it.

And so I just want to offer my encouragement to you as we go into this next phase of American history, that may God bless men like you and the men who work with their hands and speak truth.

And even if they get kicked off of YouTube for speaking truths in a gruff and uncomfortable way, like, we need men like that.

So I'm very excited about that.

I appreciate that.

And if that happens, you know, then I'll make a fifth and a sixth and a seventh YouTube account, and I'll have 40 or 30 or 20 people have.

I'll have, you know, grandma or whoever watching me is still rooting me on, because I.

I do.

I do think it's important, and I do think that men, they just need that straight, give it to me.

It's the coach mentality.

You know, it's the drill sergeant mentality.

It's the way that I think that most fathers, when they're in their corrective measures, when they're in that phase, you really need to be, just give me the boundaries, tell me what to do, how to do it, and then if I screw up, I'll dust off, I'll do it again.

You need those men who are hard.

You need those men who are strong.

You need those men who are going to tell you, you're fine.

Get back in there.

You're fine, you're okay.

It's gonna hurt tough.

Wrap it up, tape it up.

You can ice it tonight.

Now go make that play.

You know, you need those guys who are.

Who call you into that because that's virtuous, having men to take on that while you're.

While you're in pain, while you're injured, while it sucks.

Embrace the suck.

Embrace and go finish the job.

And even if you lose, you finished the job, man.

You made the play.

Even if you didn't.

Even if you didn't score the touchdown, well, you finished the game.

You finished the play.

You did what coach said to do.

I just really think that if we had more men who would do that, if we had more men who were less white collar, more blue collar.

I really think that if we had more.

More trades and less academia, we need both.

That's true.

But right now in this world, we need men to shut up and do work.

We need men to shut up and lift.

We need men to shut up.

Stop talking.

Stop scrolling.

Stop.

I don't care about your opinion.

Do something.

We need.

We just meant people.

We Just need people to shut up and do something.

And I think that, again, it's important that we have various different perspectives.

But empires are built for men.

Working families are built.

They're maintained, they're groomed, they're cultivated for men working and doing their job.

So if I could offer anyone, including Trump and his presidential nominations, including the amazing cops who are out there protecting ourselves, protecting us, the military, the first responders, EMTs, the firemen, the corrections officers, everybody who do, who run towards the bullets while we run away, anybody listening who does pipe fitters, H vac, electricians, mechanics, the people who make this country run, those are the people who we need to respect because those are the people who just shut up and do their job and they make empires.

They're the ones who have the family members at.

When they're 80, 85, 95, they're 100 years old and they're dying.

It doesn't matter if they're a senator, it doesn't matter if they're a sheriff, they're a father first, their husband first, they're.

They're a church member first, they're a community member first.

And the lives that they impacted, they ran into that building.

The kids that they saved will remember them forever.

Those are the people that you want on your deathbed.

Those are the people that matter.

So build that.

So build those relationships.

So build what matters.

That's my two cents.

Amen.

100% with you, Will.

Where can people listen?

Watch your podcasts, your interviews, your topics.

What do you have coming up?

Yeah, I'm actually really excited because tomorrow I'll be interviewing a man named Carl Teichrib who wrote a book called Game of Gods.

It's a big 550 page book about the history of the progressive spirituality in the new age.

So it's the world that I found my way into, which ultimately led me to Christ.

And I was leaving a voice note for him today, and he's done is.

It's like I got on board a little boat, you know, in a stream somewhere in Northern California, and the boat just carried me downstream to a river, to a tributary, into this big ocean.

And so I didn't know that when I was setting out and I found my way through it.

And so I'm reading this book and it's like, oh, wow.

Like you've just articulated for me everything that I saw, but from the outside and from a Christian perspective.

So I'll be interviewing him tomorrow.

We'll probably talk for four or five hours.

So I'm really looking forward to.

I'm really looking forward to that.

And one of the things that I'm going to be doing with the rebrand is focusing a lot more on that, you know, sort of aspect of my background, so time in the new age psychedelics.

Because unfortunately, one of the things that we're going to see with Kennedy, I think he's the director of the FDA or Health and Human Services, something like that.

You know, he's, he's made psychedelics, you know, a.

Top, top of his priorities as part of the FDA's war on public health.

He said they've been suppressed as part of the FDA's war on public health.

So psychedelics are incredibly dangerous substances and to the spirit as well as to the mind, to the body.

And so I will have a lot to say about that.

So that's kind of the direction that I hope to go with the Will Spencer podcast is speaking into more of those global spirituality issues to find me and everything that I do.

You can go to Will Spencer co links and that'll take you to my Twitter, my Instagram, my YouTube substack.

It's all, it's all at Willspencer co links and then.

Are you going to go to the next fight Laugh Feast?

I know that you went to the last one in Fort Worth.

Are you going to go to the next one in 25 in October?

I think it's 16 through 18.

Yeah, that's, that's the current.

That's the plan.

I'd love to be there.

Like, you know, as soon as I saw the way like Joshua Hames did all of his podcast booth set up, I'm like, oh my goodness, I gotta, I gotta throw a whole bunch of like cameras and stuff into it, into a great.

And just like, oh my gosh, we have my little microphones and he's got like lights and cameras and that's just incredible.

So, yeah, it's an amazing opportunity.

Opportunity?

Dude, you're telling me like I was all the way at the end, like all the way in the darkest recesses of Fort Worth and like I could see like the, the background, the backdrop was the, the stage, which was cool.

But I'm trying to talk to, you know, Chance Summers and Joe Morris and Dusty Devers and all the guys I'm trying to have a good interview with.

And then like by day two, I was like, dude, this sucks.

I don't, I don't have the lights.

Huh?

All the clapping and all the cheering interrupting you.

Yeah, I couldn't hear anything.

There was all kinds of technical difficulties I had.

And that was my fault.

You know, I didn't bring, you know, I have a small little, I do all this stuff for free, so I don't spend thousands of dollars on stuff.

And it was like, dude, I'm so out of my league right now.

All these people with like $30,000 cameras and these lights that are like, they should be in a studio, like in a movie, on a movie set somewhere.

You got the big old, like 3 foot, like dome light or whatever it was.

I was like, I'm so out of my league right now.

But Josh does it right, man.

At Red Pill Reformation Reformation.

Red Pill Reformation, Red Pill.

Yeah.

Josh does it big.

And Parker too.

Parker Brown Watchwell podcasts, dude, they go all out.

These guys got in the car and threw a bunch of stuff in the back of an SUV and drove down and they have the whole big booth set up.

Like you guys, me again, Greg Moore from Dead Men Walking, he had these lounging chairs that were super comfortable, the leather chairs.

And he had all the booms, the microphones, and you guys did it, right?

I have a phone.

I have a phone and a blue Yeti.

Better than nothing, man.

Honestly, like just setting up the phone and recording and just syncing the audio to the video, that's better than I just did.

Audio only.

And just because I had had a crazy month of travel and I was like, I just don't want to deal with the camera right now and leaving it all set up, I guess.

So I, but I wish I had gotten video.

I wish I had just, you know, gone instead of doing everything at like this elite level.

Like, it would have been sufficient for me to just set up my phone and record the audio and sync the two.

But, you know, you live and you learn.

Yeah, yeah, I'll do that next.

I'll bring a little bit more next time, but I'll certainly not have the same audio, video problems that I had this last time.

I'm excited to see you there, man.

And next time we're good, we're going to have to do a live, a live live stream while we're there.

Let's do it.

Grateful too.

Well, let me close this out and then make sure everything gets uploaded and I'll let you go.

Cool, Sounds good.

Thanks, everybody for listening, man.

I, I, I so appreciate you as always.

Written and review the podcast, wherever you listen.

Try not to watch it on YouTube.

There are a bunch of commies.

I'm not a fan as always.

Go to regularman stuff.com check out the mean offensive.

Tweets, mugs, other stuff on there.

This hat.

This pretty nice hat.

I'm not gonna do it.

Yeah, nice camo hat.

Flex fit.

Just don't wear it to church.

You'll have to answer some questions.

Might offend the pastor's wife.

While you're there, you can also sign up to be on the regular minute wall right here.

Five bucks a month.

Will, I still need your signature?

I haven't got it yet.

It's actually.

It's actually right above your head.

What?

Yeah, it's that one that's got the big loopy thing.

Yep.

Now I feel like.

Now I feel like I retard.

That's okay.

The signature looks absolutely nothing like my name, and it's completely silly, and I should learn a new signature that looks like an adult.

All right, well, I'll hound the next guy.

I'll hound my next interview for it.

Until next time, be on alert.

Stand firm in the faith, act like men, and be strong.

Thanks for listening.

Well, that was great, man.

That was awesome.

I really enjoyed that.

Thank you.

Sa.