00:00:49.100why you want me to be your daddy i have no daddy you have no daddy well let me tell you something
00:01:03.940come here give me a hug you're listening to the king's hall podcast making self-ruled men
00:01:12.780who rule well and win the world well gentlemen welcome to season two episode one of the king's
00:01:22.160hall podcast i'm not really sure dan how you begin the show on a chipper note after that clip which
00:01:29.480always gets me you had to give us a minute here eric yeah what is it about that clip yeah well
00:01:37.540It's really interesting when you watch it because it's from Jenny Jones.
00:01:42.240Very classy TV programming from the 90s.
00:01:44.940Yeah, and so it was a whole shtick that she had where it was like drill sergeant shaming middle school-aged boys into behaving for their single moms.
00:02:07.000But the drill sergeant's face when the kid said, yes, sir, I do like he was they started cheering.
00:02:13.820The crowd did. Yeah. The audience. And he was like he looked like he was going to cry.
00:02:18.840And then he's well, well, why? And the kid's about to cry, too. I have no daddy.
00:02:24.960I think it's particularly moving to when you think about this, because in America, how many people are in that situation where they're saying essentially the same thing?
00:02:34.200I have no daddy. It seems to be something that resonates with a lot of people. And when you look
00:02:40.760at our culture, there's a desperation about this situation as well. So current data as of 2021
00:02:46.160indicates that roughly 18.3 million children live without a father in the home, which is roughly
00:02:51.92025% of all children in America. Guys, that's a high number. It's unbelievable. There's a lot
00:02:57.080of fatherlessness. That number jumps up to 35% when looking only at adolescents. So as kids get
00:03:03.060older it seems like parents are more likely to divorce and that affects teenagers as you know
00:03:08.440teenagers that's going to be a huge demographic yeah uh that sets the tone for the next generation
00:03:14.160so compare those numbers in 1950 in which just six percent of children lived in fatherless homes
00:03:20.140clearly fatherness fatherlessness has drastically increased and been a problem something happened
00:03:26.920as we'll see in this episode in the 50s and then in the 1960s but i think gentlemen that reality of
00:03:32.980fatherlessness actually goes beyond just physical absenteeism. Many more fathers, though present,
00:03:40.060abdicate their authority and responsibilities and may nonetheless neglect to have a meaningful role
00:03:45.360in their children's lives. So you have certain things like workaholism, dads who are just
00:03:51.300negligent or not there. But whatever the case, we have uninitiated men who are clueless about what
00:03:57.520their responsibility is as men going into adulthood. And our friend Michael Foster has
00:04:03.020called this sort of phenomenon, the clueless bastard, uh, bastardization, I guess, of our0.99
00:04:09.120culture. So you can also look at a few other numbers, which we'll do. And then I want to ask0.97
00:04:13.180you guys a question. One of the things that we look at is birth rates. They continue to plummet,
00:04:18.660meaning there will be fewer and fewer fathers in the future. So since about 2007, the U S birth
00:04:23.960rate has fallen by 20 percent 20 percent 20 and since 2007 seven i remember 2007 yeah it's not
00:04:31.820like my truck is older than 2007 my car is from a different millennium
00:04:36.460it's also pink it wasn't always though which is like faded cherry red but also yes so drastic
00:04:47.020numbers two of the major events by the way uh why 2007 there's also a huge drop off in 2020
00:04:54.220So 2008, the economic crash, that made people want to have children less and less.
00:04:59.020And then 2020, we don't have all the data, but birth rates are absolutely tanking even more because people are saying, well, look at inflation, myocarditis, vaccine.
00:05:23.200And because of the current hormonal health crisis that is afflicting, Brian, both men and women, we've talked about on BrightHearth and the Hard Men podcast.
00:05:30.780Some studies have estimated that sperm count in men will be so low that by 2050, reproduction will become physically impossible.
00:05:38.920Maybe that's why we see these like womb labs, like grow a baby in a lab stuff on social media.
00:07:55.740I think that the family itself is a foundational covenant structure of humanity.
00:08:01.220You know, we talked about that a lot in season one.
00:08:03.640It is the support structure holding up all of human civilization, economics, politics, education, even giving your life purpose, you know, like waking up and getting out of bed has a lot to do with family.
00:08:20.320And so the purpose or the motivation to continue in work, to building grand structures, to making churches, all areas of life have families at its foundation.
00:08:33.800and the single biggest factor, the single greatest authority is the father.
00:08:40.880And the father, I think, is such a determining factor in the well-being of these family structures
00:08:47.100that I do believe it's the single most important authority in all of men.
00:08:52.560We've actually seen that in studies, too.
00:08:54.320I think it's something like in the mid-80 percentile.
00:08:58.140Like, whatever the father does religiously, that's what the kids end up doing.
00:09:01.380Yeah. I mean, if you were to just chart like a graph of influence versus number of people, you know, like a father has tremendous influence over a few number of, you know, a few people, whereas like a politician, it's inverse, right? You have little influence over a lot of people.
00:09:18.700And so a father has maximal influence over people, image bearers. And so if you're just, I mean, just to think about this as simply as possible, imagine the archetypal man that had a good father versus the archetypal man that had a bad father or the archetypal woman who had a good father versus the archetypal woman who did not have a good father.
00:09:45.760And so I think that that authority is the most important human authority in shaping and directing entire cultures and times of people.
00:09:55.840Yeah. And you see the effect of fatherlessness in many, in sometimes ways that you might not understand immediately that it is an issue of fatherlessness that you're seeing. But think about something like our obsession with these top-down, famous, big figures to be our daddies in different spheres.
00:10:17.580I even mean the obsession with the president of the United States. When you have a fatherless culture, a culture where you have none of that organic, low-level leavening everywhere of good fathers raising up good sons and daughters, you start to reach out to figures that you hope will fix the problem, will parent everybody.
00:10:38.420And so you become obsessed with Donald Trump or you become obsessed with Joe Biden.
00:10:43.620You just become obsessed with this father figure at the top who's going to fix everything or influencers.
00:10:50.320And a lot of times we pedestalize people who are celebrities because you don't know any of their faults.
00:10:56.240I think it happens in the reform world too, Brian.
00:11:35.140There is an intense father hunger in the land and is the heart of why families, churches, and societies are failing.
00:11:41.380The degradation of fathers is largely why we no longer have a robust Christendom.
00:11:46.120So to put it yet another way, there will be no Christendom without the recovery of fatherhood.
00:11:51.360So Brian, I want to ask you that question related to, specifically, we've been about the new Christendom.
00:11:57.440So tie those together, new Christendom and fatherhood, how do they connect in your mind?
00:12:01.220Yeah, so Christendom is going to be the result of a leavening of the gospel's work through society, if it's to be a Christendom worth having, right?0.73
00:12:12.720What we don't want is just a top-down sort of apparatus where you have a few key leaders here and there in institutions and political spaces who are imposing a bunch of stuff, Christian stuff on people.
00:12:25.900What we want, and the way the gospel is designed to work, is to have the gospel leavening society itself, leavening families.
00:12:34.940And what do you need at the family level if you're to have a healthy society?
00:16:01.440The responsibilities that are in front of you are not world dominion.
00:16:07.060They're not hope in some abstract politician, you know, some ideal of Christian nationalism that we need to legislate towards or, you know, you are one man.
00:17:11.920You're reaching downstream in the generations, and you're changing history for a people.
00:17:20.140You can do that, not because you're God, but because you can simply obey the duties God has given you right here, these small little duties as a father.
00:17:28.180And I think that is just such a captivating, hopeful note that we want to strike.
00:17:32.660Because, man, when I hear that clip in the intro, I almost can't hold it together.
00:17:37.440Still, I've heard it dozens of times probably now at this point.
00:17:41.200And it can be absolutely depressing and bleak when you start to consider some of the realities.
00:17:49.840And the effect can, I think, make you go either into the ditch of despair, just black pill.
00:18:49.600The first thing that we were talking about,
00:18:51.400so what's one of the symptoms we see in culture
00:18:53.700that men are fatherlessness, we came upon this Papa YouTube idea, and it's titled Dad, How Do I?
00:19:00.480It's got 4.37 million subscribers. So, Dan, I guess just first off, I think this is a symptom.
00:19:07.680Tell me about Dad, How Do I? Do you think it's a symptom of fatherlessness? And what is it?
00:19:11.440Yeah, it's really interesting. I was talking to my younger brother the other day about this,
00:19:16.760and he said something about he was looking for a car repair or something, and he stumbled across.
00:19:21.740I don't think it's the dad who, how do I channel, but it was a different one where the guy's like, Hey, uh, I didn't have a dad to show me how to change oil in my car.
00:19:31.340And, um, you know, I figure a lot of you probably don't have dads either.
00:19:35.060So I'm just going to show you how to change oil in a car, you know?
00:19:39.120And it stuck out so much to my brother because we both had a father, you know, that showed us things like that.
00:19:45.800He was like, wow, that to me was really insightful as to what's going on.
00:19:53.520And so, yeah, Eric and I started looking at this poppy YouTube thing because if you want to know how to do almost anything, you go to YouTube and you look at it.
00:20:01.820And this one YouTube channel, Dad, How Do I, I think his number one video, millions of views, is How Do I Tie a Tie?
00:20:15.800And then his third and fourth videos, as far as view count, are like thanking people and saying, I'm proud of you.
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00:21:04.440Yeah, so he's got a video called I'm Proud of You, which was, he's basically acting like a father.
00:21:10.800He reads from Teddy Roosevelt's Man in the Arena.
00:21:13.520Yeah, that's right. He was talking about critics. Like, hey, don't listen to the critics. You know, I'm for you. I'm in your corner. I'm proud of you. I love you. God bless you. And the comments, people are just falling apart.
00:21:24.580Yeah, that's what really, I guess, hit me was when you read the comments section, you see the father hunger.
00:21:31.100You see people longing for just a father figure in their life to say, I'm really proud of you.
00:21:36.800I look at your life and I think, you know, you are an encouragement to other people.
00:21:43.560The other thing that he does that I think is really interesting, when he opens the shows, he's usually got a dad joke, but he always says, hey, kids.
00:21:50.920and I'm sitting there thinking like okay maybe it's dorky maybe it's cheesy a people are eating
00:21:57.440it up it'd be there's something about it that resonates because I think there's just such a
00:22:01.680vacuum in our world for yeah it really is a tragedy that that along with the 4.4 million
00:22:08.280other people it's so impersonal it's synthetic you know because he's not a real dad he doesn't
00:22:14.400know you he doesn't know if out of you yeah he's not but people are so hungry for it almost like
00:23:00.120This has been happening in Japan for a long time, where we had a military member who was going to be touring in Japan with some government officials.
00:23:08.020And they said, just so you know, there's a chance that one of them will bring their robotic girlfriend or wife, and you must treat them like a human being.
00:24:53.380Yeah, I think that this probably seems like a shallow example using YouTube is like, well, yeah, I mean, I I have to look up how to change the alternator on my car.
00:25:02.320so does that mean I have father hunger
00:25:57.400Let me show you how to patch a hole in drywall.
00:26:00.100Let me show you how to change your brakes, much less the deeper things in life.0.99
00:26:05.020Like, hey, son, let me show you how to win a woman.
00:26:08.580Hey, daughter, let me show you affectionate and love so you don't seek it from any worthless man that passes along.
00:26:14.780I mean, so I think the YouTube thing is a perfect example of how deep this problem goes.
00:26:23.380And it's even human functioning, not just human flourishing, but just the very elemental things in life.
00:26:30.860Well, I think, Brian, it's tied to stuff you guys have talked about on BrightHearth.
00:26:34.160But I was thinking the other day after church, I was talking to Lexi about this, where midwifery and OBGYNs and stuff like that.
00:26:42.840We have people who give birth, but it's really because we lost a whole body of knowledge that wives and mothers used to pass along to each other.
00:26:50.920Yeah. So for both of the sexes, it seems like there's just been a the household got destroyed.
00:26:56.700And with it, we lost like many, many generations of competencies.1.00
00:27:02.200Yeah. Yeah. When you talk about, I think, a lot of what this shows isn't necessarily like that you have one particular skill that maybe you failed to get from your dad, whatever.
00:27:13.680That's going to happen. You're going to have skills that you're going to look up.
00:27:16.120but honestly, most of the answer to this, like most of this is actually a dad showing you,
00:27:23.120just living with a dad, having, this is just the tip of the iceberg out here that's a diagnostic
00:27:28.260showing you kind of like, whoa, there's an issue here. Because for most of us, our dads didn't do
00:27:34.260less. If you had a dad, they didn't do lessons with you. You were like, now, son, we're going to
00:27:38.220blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What happened was if you had a father who was a good, especially a
00:27:42.820good christian present man you just did stuff with them hold the flashlight that's what you did you
00:27:47.760held the flashlight and even those kind of things are are endearing where you you know we a lot of
00:27:53.660us can commiserate about you're like well you know i did stuff with my dad but like he really
00:27:57.680didn't trust me to do anything other than hold the flashlight but you still saw the process
00:28:02.200you're familiar with it and it's funny because now i have my kids and i'm like okay you want to
00:28:07.600mow the lawn, but can you though? Everything that involves mowing is sharp. It's sharp and it spins.
00:28:15.240It's a death spinny thing. And, and you start to, you realize that the answer isn't like dad
00:28:21.960university. It's the love of a father, the presence of a father who will just simply live
00:28:28.100with you and be there and just involve you and that you want to be involved with. Cause you know,
00:28:35.320Dad's awesome. I love being with Dad. I love just hanging on his belt loops when he's doing stuff in the shop, and it's probably annoying to him at some level, but the answers to these Papa YouTube thing is it's not just about skills. It's really at the bottom about love.
00:28:55.900Yeah, I think so much like in John's gospel that you get is Jesus talking about being on the same mission as his father.
00:29:28.340I mean, a father should tell you what you're for, what you exist to do.
00:29:32.580I mean, you can see this like all the way back when you look at the Middle Ages to where there's like, hey, you have a family crest or you can do like a family crest designer or whatever.
00:29:42.160Imagine if you had a family motto that was you inherited.
00:29:46.280Like, no, this is your identity is that we exist for honor, you know, or we exist for this.
00:29:52.720this is your crest tying you to your ancestors, or even last names. A lot of people have the name
00:29:58.620Baker or Smith, or you can think of a lot of names like that. That ties you to something,
00:30:04.580to an identity, and it's supposed to be from your father. And so you can see that like,
00:30:09.220hey, son, we go to church every Sunday because we exist to glorify God and worship him.
00:30:17.300So, I mean, a lot of it is identity. A lot of it is purpose. And so you have a purposeless people
00:30:50.200Lots of equivalents in all kinds of languages that just show you, again, in the fabric, in the very heart of what it means to be a human being as God created in this world is to be the son of someone.
00:31:03.820And what happens when you take that away?
00:31:06.780That's why I think it's so devastating and depressing, and it's so emotionally – it hits you hard when you see the young kids who so clearly don't have a father.
00:31:18.360is because you start to, when you understand the depth,
00:31:21.320you're understanding that we've, our society,
00:31:24.320our sin is stealing, it's robbing children
00:35:24.120And what Sternberg says in his book is he said fundamentally what the boomers who were in charge at the time did financially is they just took out more and more debt to cover these losses, and the debts will be called in fully and finally in 2050.
00:35:37.280He said conveniently that's pretty much the end of the boomer generation.
00:35:41.320Yeah, 1946 to 64 is the boomer generation.0.60
00:35:47.840Yeah. So but once they're dead and they've had their Social Security and everything else covered, then the millennials are going to inherit even more of this economic problem.0.94
00:35:56.760We've already seen it, as Dan pointed out, with inflation and some other things.0.59
00:36:00.940So that's the economic side. Are there any other levels for the boomer, this boomer divide between the other generations that you guys see that are not economic but are divisive?
00:36:12.040Well, I think especially since I think we're going to talk about this phenomena in depth later.
00:36:16.020Yes. So when I think about just this purely as a diagnostic, a symptom of fatherlessness, I think that what it shows, regardless of whether it's true or not, this is a key point. Regardless of whether all of the different reasons millennials and Zoomers might be frustrated with the baby boomers, regardless of whether they're justified in being frustrated, they are. They really are.
00:36:40.920They don't feel like they were fathered or loved or taken care of or given inheritance or set up.
00:36:46.860They feel like this is just in the zeitgeist is the general consensus in popular culture that these later generations were robbed, that our dads did not think about us.
00:37:01.340they thought about themselves, and not only did they not think about us, they actually stole from
00:37:06.300us with a lot of their political, monetary, cultural decisions. We see things like the
00:37:11.100sexual revolution coming to its height during this time, the 60s and 70s, and onwards. We see
00:37:19.080things like out of this generation, this is a generation coming out of World War II, where we
00:37:23.340really get to the height of the global American empire in its global warmongering, global police
00:37:29.400officer, spending our money on foreign wars, inflationary spending. The young men have to go0.52
00:37:35.000fight these wars. Military industrial complex. So whether there are answers to exonerate
00:37:41.200the boomer generation from a lot of these things or not, I think it's just important to see that0.87
00:37:46.500either way it shows the reality of fatherlessness, that there are whole generations following this0.58
00:37:54.240that at least are convinced that they are fatherless
00:37:59.120or that their fathers have failed them.
00:38:01.660It's interesting because one of the biggest retorts
00:38:03.860in the articles and books that I've read about the boomers
00:38:14.800one of the most common retorts from the boomers is,
00:38:18.440well, yeah, I didn't have a father either.
00:38:20.560So actually, this is a problem that predates boomers.0.85
00:38:24.000Right. It's really about a period of time that they were, that their parents were very fruitful after the war. There's an explosion in population. I think it's something like 25 million more boomers than millennials right now, even though they're, you know, dying off. Yeah. But there was a lot of them. That's part of it. Yeah. But they also had father problems there.0.57
00:38:44.500People call the boomer generation the pig in a python generation because it was this baby boom.0.87
00:38:49.640That's what's the boomers, the baby boom following the war.0.77
00:38:52.960So we lost a bunch of young men, come home, have a huge generation with lots of children, and it's like a python that swallowed a pig where you have this big lump going through.0.54
00:39:05.220And so one of the demographic features is that there is something actually unique.
00:46:29.300So I guess my question on this one for you guys,
00:46:32.120I would think, as I've seen in pastoral counseling,
00:46:35.900as we talk to these young men, because we do have them in our church, thank God,
00:46:40.180And what I tend to see at just a very practical level is, wow, you lack a lot of just basic life skills, like what we talked about, these father skills.
00:46:52.000So I guess talk about the church sphere.
00:46:53.860Do you see it as a symptom of fatherlessness, what's going on in the church?
00:46:59.200And I think we actually see that as a self-diagnosis from lots of the young men in the church, that they would say maybe sitting down in some marriage counseling or just general,
00:47:09.060hey I need advice on this issue and you start talking to them they'll say well here's the thing
00:47:13.000this is how I learned it from my dad or even more common I just I never saw this like disciplining
00:47:22.340kids is a good example that comes to mind where sometimes pastors think they can just say things
00:47:27.580like hey make sure you discipline your kids regularly and consistently people are like I
00:47:31.720don't actually know what that means but they're like how this is why so many young men when they
00:47:35.760hear pastors talking on masculinity and femininity. They're saying, stop, okay, get out of the
00:47:42.000principles and give me application, because I don't know how to do what you're—I don't have
00:47:46.580enough information already to connect my life to that principle. One of the laws of teaching
00:47:52.780is that you have to connect the new information to some pre-existing handhold in the information
00:47:59.480the person already knows. So if you just say, for example, man up or love your wife or cherish your
00:48:06.460wife, well, a lot of these guys grew up and their dad either never showed them that, or they
00:48:12.160literally didn't have one, or their dad showed them the worst possible way of dealing with that
00:48:17.940issue. So you end up with guys on this huge body of life from basic things like, oh, I'm supposed
00:48:26.500to like, when I think about money, I shouldn't just think about, can I make the monthly payment?
00:48:30.480That's not a healthy way of thinking about budget. All the way to, I thought I was being,
00:48:36.000I didn't know I was being a terrible, toxic, angry husband and ruining the environment of my
00:48:40.640wife's life. This is just how I thought you did it. Yeah. In a lot of ways, we've probably all
00:48:45.580had jobs like this where you start some entry-level position and your training is like,
00:48:50.060this is where you punch in and then here's your uniform. Good luck. Yeah. Here's your job. Go do
00:48:55.500it and except yeah and you so you don't know anything about anything right you're stumbling0.98
00:49:01.260around looking like a fool except this is how a lot of men have to operate in their lives day to0.88
00:49:08.160day is that they're untrained yeah in life and so yeah you do see that in in the church and i think0.95
00:49:15.320men not going to church is is a definitely a symptom of that in a few ways the first way is
00:49:23.680kind of like what you said, Brian, is you get these pithy like punch at men sort of comments,
00:49:29.040but it's not a very well aimed punch. Like it's, it's not a, like a, a really good punch for men
00:49:35.760is like a punch in the shoulder. Like, Hey, bozo, like, come on. Yeah. You know, like a fatherly
00:49:40.760sort of punch. Like I give to my sons all the time when I'm wrestling. I'm like, not a shot
00:49:45.160to the groin. No, not a shot to the groin. You know, when, when you, um, when you discipline
00:49:49.820your son out of anger for something that he was ignorant on, that is, that is like abuse.
00:49:56.860You know, your son doesn't know any better because you didn't teach him and then you
00:50:00.380discipline for him, you know, for that, uh, that can be, I mean, man, that's horrible.
00:50:05.920It'll crush the souls of, of your boys. And so, so many of, of men that are Christians1.00
00:50:12.420that are going to church, they either get that to where they're, they're getting hit0.98
00:50:16.680for being ignorant, or the other one is that it is so effeminate that it is degrading to be a man0.93
00:50:26.820and go to church because of the songs you have to sing, the messages that you hear, and then you're0.98
00:50:31.860being nagged at either by women or by men who could be classified as women. You have a whole
00:50:38.680selection process for elders, and church cultures are mainly dominated by women because there are
00:55:33.200I mean, the red pill movement is basically a result of the church abandoning proper teaching and instruction on the formation of men, where nobody knew how to be a man anymore.0.73
00:55:47.760We started to put forward a model for the ideal man as the pastor, because the pastor is supposed to be a man you can imitate in a church, that was selected by women for traits that were feminine to the detriment, and then slowly even shifting to now masculine traits that are actually good and godly and glorious when they're pointed at the right thing, are almost talked about as de facto just sin.0.86
00:56:12.360So what you get is Absalom. When David steps back and lets sin run rampant in his family and is passive, nature abhors a vacuum. That's not just going to be a father slot that remains open. It's going to be a job opening.0.63
00:56:29.680And so you'll have Absalom step in that say, oh, the church, this Christian Western culture
00:56:34.700that was supposed to teach you how to be a Christian man or woman in every part of what
00:56:47.220We'll teach you how to pick up women, sleep with 100 women.1.00
00:56:49.780We'll teach you how to make a ton of money and build your own Tower of Babel.
00:56:54.600We'll come in and we'll teach you how to get people to respect you, how to carry yourself
00:56:58.640with gravity so that people are scared of you. We'll teach you how to become a dangerous fit man
00:57:03.720and no guns and no martial arts. And whether it's in a Southern gun culture way or a pseudo
00:57:10.420intellectual philosophical way or an Andrew Tate way or an Andrew Tate way, that's just fully
00:57:15.340wicked, completely debased. You're going to get the red, whatever you call it in whatever
00:57:21.600generation, you're going to get an Absalom movement that steps in and wins the hearts of the0.95
00:57:28.300men to the wrong end. And what was fascinating to me, so last year I spoke at this red pill0.90
00:57:38.880conference, basically like did a lot of degenerate stuff. And they invited me because I'm a Christian.
00:57:44.540They wanted some Christians. Michael Foster had been there before, cultivated some relationships.
00:57:49.120And so, and I told them like, you know, I'm going to be just obnoxiously Christian and tell people0.72
00:57:53.120to repent to their sexual sin and trust Christ. Right. And they're like, yeah, that's fine.0.82
00:57:56.280And I was on a panel and there was this guy who is basically like into philosophy and he was a speaker and he started talking.
00:58:05.480The founder just sent me the clip yesterday.
00:58:08.300He started talking about what it meant for him to succeed in getting everything that he had been told by this red pill that he was supposed to want.
00:58:17.340He's like you get into – he starts talking in this Ecclesiastes way.1.00
00:58:22.220He's like, look, if you get every craziest sexual fantasy you've ever had fulfilled by every woman you could ever want, he says, it's pleasurable in the moment, but where it takes you is hell.0.99
00:59:13.100So you just turn away completely from any source of biblical wisdom principle.
00:59:19.440Right, because that was the original red pill, I believe, of this movement, if I'm not mistaken, where it's like you're going to work hard, get married, buy a house, have a kid.
01:00:53.680In our culture, there is no such moment of initiation.0.99
01:00:57.120The boys in our culture have a continuing need for initiation into male spirit, but old men in general do not offer it.0.77
01:01:03.460The fault is that the old men outside the nuclear family no longer offer an effective way for the son to break with his parents without doing himself harm.0.51
01:01:11.680The ancient societies believe that a boy becomes a man only through ritual and effort, only through the active intervention of the older men, end quote.0.58
01:01:20.880So I just want to ask you about that first, Dan.
01:01:59.420And I'll use a different illustration.
01:02:01.900So my wife, my first child, before we went all crazy and did like home births and stuff like that, we had a hospital birth for our firstborn.
01:02:11.320And my wife, she gets a, you know, she's leaving the hospital.
01:02:15.300She gets like this gift basket, right?
01:02:17.420Full of a whole bunch of stuff to help her.
01:02:19.280And on the front, it says, welcome to motherhood or welcome to the society of motherhood.
01:02:25.860Something along those lines, like you have arrived, you are one of us, you are a mother.
01:02:32.880And the thing that Bly taps into, and even, you know, it's interesting with the retirement
01:02:37.760culture, John Piper actually, when he talks about seashells, like don't waste your life,
01:02:42.540you know, you're like, he was blasting them.
01:02:45.540His target was off though, because it was essentially like, you should go do third world
01:02:52.080missions is what really what you should do. And that's, that's not the answer for most cases.
01:02:57.580It's not the answer, but he did tap into the issue and that's, there is no initiatory rights
01:03:03.840for men to say like, Hey son, you're one of us. You are now a man. And not just to have fathers,
01:03:13.080but other fathers, like other men to say like, come here, son, you are now one of us.
01:03:19.480So many men long for that and hunger for that.
01:03:23.240And Eric and I have talked about this a lot on other podcasts, but, you know, in hunting, this is so often what happens is you get a boy with his first kill.
01:03:33.000And the rituals around that are like, you know, put blood on your face, eat liver or heart, you know, or something like, something just like an initiatory rite, even if it's rudimentary, you know, from a bunch of guys.
01:11:49.700Basically because you have immature boys finding destructive, narcissistic ways to try to pursue masculinity in a world where there is no space for that.
01:11:58.480I do think that there was a lot to learn from something like Fight Club.
01:13:06.400they fight constantly i mean it's just like you know that's what boys do and i was like well i
01:13:12.080mean at least i should train them how to you know take a punch and to deliver a punch but all of
01:13:16.700these gyms are like co-ed yeah they're co-ed so they're gonna have to fight girls that was a
01:13:21.200problem we ran into as well yeah like no no you do not fight girls anyway anyway yeah the point
01:13:27.000is that men need this because they need male-only spaces and boys need male-only spaces because like
01:13:32.860we talked about earlier they're dangerous it's a design feature like it's actually a good thing
01:13:37.920to have a dangerous man pointed at the right enemy it's a really good thing but if you have0.95
01:13:43.920the feminine instinct which is the the feminine is a very important part of family society life0.67
01:13:50.720but if you have that feminine instinct of safetyism and protection and nurturing it kills the thing1.00
01:13:58.880It kills the thing. How can you learn how to be a dangerous man that is potent in winning the girl, in taking dominion, in being strong if you have someone over your shoulder constantly saying, no, too dangerous. No, too risky. Don't do that. Don't climb that. Don't lift that.
01:14:21.660You could get hurt. You could do this. You could do that. Like always at the forefront of your mind, there's risk there. Red alert. Don't go any further. There's risk. Whereas the masculine should say, heck yeah, there's risk. Let's do it. What if we lose? Then we lose with honor.
01:14:39.420Yeah. And the problem is there is no such thing as a safe man. A soft man is the most dangerous man of all. He can destroy a whole world. So it's not as if you're going to declaw men. If you declaw men, you make them more dangerous.
01:14:55.100because then they give way, they stop fighting, they stop building,
01:15:00.840they stop cultivating, they stop doing the things that men obsessively were made to do.
01:15:08.880The greatest artists and inventors are men historically, and it's not an accident.
01:15:15.460It's because they were meant to aggressively throw themselves into things in a way that builds worlds.
01:15:21.040And when you neuter, when you cut their testicles off and you do it by removing all of their places of struggle and removing all the male influence and removing all of the fathers and you just give them mothers of both sexes, then what you end up doing is you actually make the most dangerous man of all.0.99
01:15:50.960And Beth Moore is the master of actually detonating a whole conversation with a very manipulative feminist approach, right?0.97
01:15:58.680Because when a woman enters and says, oh, no, these mean boys are being mean to me, well, it changes where you're no longer able to have this intellectual fight.0.99
01:16:13.940The whole of rational life, as John Milton conceives it, is an agon, an adventure, and a fight.
01:16:18.980We must fight because it is for us men of the essence of virtue itself, whether physical or intellectual.
01:16:25.760So for us to progress as men, we need these spaces to fight.
01:16:28.940If courage is the testing point of every virtue, and it is, and you remove all situations or you attempt to build a world where courage will no longer be needed, you're actually eliminating virtue itself.
01:16:40.160Virtues no longer have the possibility of being tempered by heat.
01:16:43.760It's like all you can get is low-grade steel for the rest of forever because you're never going to get men who actually know how to take a punch intellectually and verbally and relationally.
01:16:52.920And men will have to in the world that exists right now.
01:17:24.160So it's very difficult to overstate how important it is that men and boys get this, get this time and these spaces and that we create them and recover them.
01:17:39.540Yeah. The importance of fighting and the masculine is, is, is hugely important. I remember when I was in grade school, um, I had a, uh, I, I caught an interception at recess and returning for a touchdown. And I was doing some sort of celebration dance. Right. One of the kids made fun of me, punched him right in the face, right in the nose. And I, I, the thing is he was, he was stronger than me. And after I did that, I was like, Oh no, what is he going to do? You know what happened? We became best friends.
01:22:48.260No, actually now they're telling him go to the jujitsu gym and punch another person's sister.
01:22:52.840But no one's telling the young ladies that they are a glory and that they are – that glory is supposed to be a gift and a crown.
01:23:04.360Yeah, their value is – it's funny because no little girl that's grown up in the last 30 years has doubted their value.
01:23:11.060Yeah. It's like, well, you know, you rock girl, you know, whatever you can do anything, whatever. But it, it's a misplaced value because it's not just for any passing, passing guy. Like you are too valuable to be displayed this way. And, and so there's that lack of affection from fathers to daughters that have shown like, this is what right affection looks like towards a daughter.
01:23:33.040But the same thing could be said about a son and directing him as far as promiscuity goes, instead of just saying like, hey, do whatever feels good sort of thing, get whatever you want.
01:23:44.760Instead, it should be like, hey, you're potent, you are dangerous, and you can raise a line of children, of sons and daughters to your own glory and the glory of God, and that's a dangerous thing.
01:24:00.940Make sure that you choose wisely the woman that you're going to select.
01:24:11.640The last thing to say about that is homosexuality.1.00
01:24:14.360I wonder if one of you would talk just a little bit about that, but it really makes fatherhood obsolete.1.00
01:24:20.460For the obvious reason, you can't multiply.
01:24:23.380I mean, yeah, you can even see this in some relationships where there will be like a much older guy who's groomed a younger man.
01:24:30.260Which is, I mean, this whole subject is absolutely revolting and disgusting, but this is a common thing that you see is like an older guy and a younger guy and you have like father issues on display for like, I mean, it's the, almost the most obvious, just a, should I call you mister?
01:24:50.320Yeah, I mean, it's such a twisted—the reason it's so disgusting is because it's so twisted and inverse of the good and beautiful things that God has given to us as gifts in marriage and in sex and in affections, and it's so unbelievably twisted and revolting.0.99
01:25:11.940Yeah, homosexuality is essentially it's the enlarging of male lust to, like a supernova, just eat the whole universe, eat the whole solar system of masculinity.0.99
01:25:27.260Homosexual relationships are often extremely promiscuous and extremely sexual.0.99
01:25:34.260I mean, like the number of partners,1.00
01:25:35.980because what you get is you're taking two male libidos
01:25:40.160and just pointing them at each other0.57
01:25:41.920in a really disgusting and perverse way.
01:27:08.900It becomes your supernova thing, although really dorky, is a really good picture because it just implodes in itself, and it just swallows.0.96
01:27:16.920And it will take an entire people with it because that's what homosexuality does is it defiles a people, not just a person.0.97
01:27:24.060It's late-stage sexual perversion on a societal level.0.81
01:27:27.320It just shows like you're in the late stage of empire, the late stage of decadence and complete lack of restraint where that which is – even the women are giving up the natural use and burning with lust for one another.0.83
01:27:43.160I mean it's just like it is the evidence that you have rejected wisdom wholly.0.99
01:27:49.180Yeah, it's essentially like the death throes of a culture I think.
01:27:52.740Dan, I want to close with something that you put on our list which I thought was phenomenal.
01:27:57.320which is that fatherlessness produces risk-averse drones,
01:28:00.400corporatism, statism, that sort of thing.
01:28:03.240We can close with this one, but what did you have in mind?
01:28:53.940My whole mission in life has been to make this company successful.
01:28:59.260And that's, I mean, that's an extreme example, but what it really reveals is that so many men don't have a, like a family motto or a crest.
01:29:09.220I don't either, you know, but I'm, I have, I'm discovering after this conversation, I'm going to make one.
01:29:14.480I think my family motto is just going to be full send.
01:29:19.960And so you can see how people now relate to government and to work and to career and to a lot of other things, very strangely, like a father.
01:29:34.320And so the expectations from those things, especially the government, almost becomes like a father being benevolent to its children.
01:29:43.180Like, oh, you can't pay for college? A good father would help you with your education.
01:29:49.240I, daddy government, will be a good father and I will pay for some of your student loans.
01:29:54.800You know, we could use tons of examples about that.
01:29:58.080Like, hey, you're getting up in age and, you know, a good father passes on an inheritance.
01:30:03.540So here is a social welfare or social security program.
01:30:10.820And it sounds kind of like over the top, but that is exactly what has happened,
01:30:16.580is that you have a political ideology, a government or a corporation
01:30:20.780or some dream that you have that you end up relating to as a father.
01:30:25.740And it just shows that there's an aimless people that has no purpose.
01:30:30.320And so it's been co-opted by status government and by corporate America.
01:30:38.360Really interesting teaser for the next episode that we'll do.0.74
01:30:42.200But it's interesting to note that the black fatherlessness rate, which is so high now, pre-1960s welfare, there was actually less fatherlessness in the black community than in the white.0.51
01:31:36.900And so your job is safe. As long as it can keep stealing from people, 40% tax rate, whatever, you're good. So you don't have to go in the agon. You don't have to fight and win. The top 5% do to go up the ladder and get to these high, high positions. And there are good leaders and good men in these jobs. But the general structure of the thing is directly conducive to anti-masculinity, not masculine virtue.