00:05:12.860We just end up counseling so many men who are in this position of there's really not a lot of great stuff behind them.
00:05:21.720And they're in a position a little bit like Will's where they're basically saying, I'm going to have to do it on my own.
00:05:26.400I'm going to have to figure out how to be a man in this world, how to be a father for my own self.
00:05:31.940And there's not a lot going on behind them that's any good or worth replicating.
00:05:36.980So as we start to talk about this idea, we're connecting it, at least I am, with something else,
00:05:42.300which is kind of this Peter Thiel zero to one starting from zero. I think there's a connection
00:05:46.820here with some of the startup language and what people are trying to do generationally.
00:05:53.900So Dan, I want to start with you. We had in this clip, there's a number of things that we could
00:05:58.480talk about. But I think one of the pivotal questions that Will asked is, how come he don't
00:06:03.380want me. As you think about that question, as you think about fatherlessness, why is that question
00:06:10.320so poignant? Yeah, because I think inherently in every man, the desire to be, to have a father
00:06:20.280that is pleased with you and to be wanted is ingrained in every human being. Uniquely so in
00:06:29.920men, also true in women, but because the line of fathers goes through men, it seems to be
00:06:37.780something that really, really strikes at the core of what it means to be a man.
00:06:42.820And I think we've brought it up before in the past, but even God the Father does this to
00:06:50.040Christ the Son at his baptism, where he declares that this is my Son in whom I'm well pleased.
00:06:56.940and what the father is saying to the son is, I want him. He's mine. I'm pleased with my son.
00:07:07.820And the other side of that is what we heard in this clip, which is, I don't want you.
00:07:14.760I'm not pleased in you. And I want nothing to do with you.
00:07:19.760Brian, I want to get your take on it. Why do you think that question is so important?
00:07:24.820Yeah, it hits hard. Exactly what Dan said. There's a creational, it's a design feature. This is a design feature. The way that a car that has no oil is going to be throwing lights and saying, this won't work. This was made to run with some oil lubricating things up, right?
00:07:46.900We were made to live under the approval and the direction and the fatherhood of God.
00:07:54.040So when you take that away, when you take away the most potent human analog to that,
00:07:59.540which is earthly fatherhood, it's supposed to image this and prepare us for and teach us about
00:08:03.980this cosmic fatherhood of God, you've taken away one of the most central relational grounding
00:08:11.620elements in human life. And you can't just do that and not have extreme consequences. I mean,
00:08:20.600very, very serious, serious consequences on the level of an individual human life,
00:08:27.460on the level of a family, generations, all the way up to a society. When you take that away,
00:08:35.960you've tinkered with something central, right? You've destroyed something central.
00:08:40.640So this clip hits so hard because all of us, to some degree, understand the longing that this character in this show, that's not real and whatever.
00:08:53.780We know that this isn't a real family, but we know when we watch it that it's not just a real thing that they're pointing at, but it's like a central thing.
00:09:04.740Many, many people know what it's like to have a father who has rejected them.
00:09:09.760Or many people know what it's like to have a father that did not give his overt felt approval.
00:09:18.080You know, so many sons and daughters had a father who was there, but he was never pleased with them.
00:09:24.200And so I think there's just an open wound, like a raw, gaping open wound in our society right now in some unprecedented ways in this moment.
00:10:57.820who the best fathers emulate, you know?
00:11:00.720And so the healing, first, the recognition that you are actually hurt, like this sounds like therapeutic kind of stuff, but usually men in this situation, I've found there, they need to look the problem in the eye that yes, your father was actually as awful as you're saying.
00:11:25.700and the ramifications are going to be felt for the entirety of your life.
00:11:31.660And then to look to the answer, which is, is God, the father to start showing them
00:11:38.740how God, the father will fill a lot of those gaps that they feel, you know, it's such a
00:11:47.320personalized thing with these men because, you know, you sit down in counseling with
00:11:53.700some guys that you're like, in a lot of ways, you're really competent. You're, you seem like
00:12:00.440you're tougher than me. You have, you know, a lot of these guys have, that I've spoken to have
00:12:07.380really good paying jobs. It seems like they're doing okay with their family. And then they'll
00:12:13.520just break down because of this, like we said, this lack of approval from a father, this relationship
00:12:23.600that's so key and so core to their identity being in disorder. And so the first, I think the first
00:12:33.560step is recognition that that's actually what happened and then pointing them to God, the
00:12:38.840father. I know that doesn't sound like a very satisfying answer and you get into the building
00:12:43.120work after that, like, okay, now what do you do? But identifying the problem, identifying like,
00:12:50.620why are you the way you are? Why do you have these longings? And then directing them at the
00:12:56.520ultimate source, which is God the Father, is the very first step in the process of healing.
00:13:02.980Yeah, it seems like part of that, so part of what you're getting at is like a confession.
00:13:07.560Even sometimes confession is, obviously, we think of confessing our own sin.
00:13:12.720But also just, you know, when we speak about the things that have hurt us, there can be healing that eventually comes from that.
00:13:21.620It seems like, Brian, one of the other things that we have to do, certain people have done well.1.00
00:13:32.920So when you're thinking about it as like a pastor, and maybe you counsel a young man in this situation, why is, and we're talking the right kind of empathy here, but why is that an important aspect of helping them?
00:13:47.160Well, I think that—consider how the father wound hits. It's like, no one cared for me. No one accepted me. No one was proud of me. No one was behind me. I had no cover. I had to figure things out. I was rejected.
00:14:04.620So when you talk about pastoral counseling or even just the encouragement amongst men,
00:14:13.240you know, a man encouraging another man as a brother, we're talking about a fatherly kind of work, right?
00:14:19.620And so you can't just get down to the mechanics and yell at the guy, well, do better.
00:14:26.560You have to start by recognizing that there genuinely was – there were things stolen from him.
00:14:34.120There genuinely was a wrong done to him.
00:14:37.180It would be like if I was counseling a woman who had been sexually abused or sexually assaulted and I just went right to the here's what you need to do to get over this type of thing and never acknowledged you've been sinned against in a heinous way that is going to affect you.
00:14:55.620And it is not wrong of you to be deeply wounded by this.
00:14:59.900And for men particularly, it's not wrong for you to be so deeply wounded by this that you shed tears over it for a man.
00:15:10.180It's not shameful for you to feel this kind of intense loss at this issue.
00:15:17.020And starting there, but then like Dan said, then when we move to the fatherhood of God, it's not trite.
00:15:22.660you know, it's like in Joel, when God says through the prophet that he will restore the
00:15:29.180years that the locusts have eaten, the hope acknowledges that there were years that the
00:15:34.700locusts ate. Like there were years where the plague came and you worked and everything was
00:15:39.640taken from you and you were left with nothing and you felt like you were going to die, right?
00:15:44.820So I do think it's important just because encouragement, counseling, brotherhood,
00:15:49.360it has a fatherly element to it. And so even in our encouragement of one another, in our
00:15:54.600counseling of one another, we are stepping into a fatherly adjacent role in doing that. So you have
00:16:01.580to start where a good father would. You know, and it's really interesting if you look the opposite
00:16:05.700at men who have had good fathers, even in story, you know, I think you kind of see this inheritance
00:16:10.940that's been stolen from a lot of the guys that we're talking about that have not had godly
00:16:17.760fathers or father at all. And you can see the longing because we all share in this longing.
00:16:23.080So when we're reading Lord of the Rings and you get to that part where Theoden is dying,
00:16:29.100let's see if I can do this without crying. And he says, my body is broken. I go to my fathers
00:16:34.420and even in their mighty company, I shall not now be ashamed. And we all hear that,
00:16:42.040even us with good fathers and go, man, that is amazing. The honor that is rightly bestowed
00:16:50.320on his forefathers to where he had to essentially die in glorious battle to be worthy to be in the
00:17:00.680hall with his forefathers. And so I think empathizing with these guys, it's probably
00:17:07.380not the right word because I can't empathize with them. I can sympathize, but I can't empathize
00:17:12.580because I didn't have a father that left me. I had a father that was there. And so
00:17:18.540sympathizing with these men is, is much more in reach because I can even look to Thayden and go,
00:17:26.660man, that is a legacy. That is a legacy that makes my heart sing. Like that I could be
00:17:32.940win honor and glory to be counted worthy to be with my forefathers that have come behind me and
00:17:39.260built a kingdom you know and these guys like you said they're starting at zero well and it seems
00:17:45.340like dan that a huge point of this is guys who are maybe realizing that wound maybe they're accepting
00:17:51.960it confessing it whatever you're at a pivotal moment brian before the show we were talking about
00:17:57.320this propensity for being black-filled like yeah i i kind of see a lot of these guys as like you're
00:18:03.340at a real crossroads because we've seen culturally you can take it certainly you know thinking about
00:18:10.260the riots in 2020 and all these disgruntled young men there were a lot of young men who are just
00:18:15.820disgruntled they have no fatherly leadership so what do they do like you know burning down cities
00:18:20.880and stuff like this what do you when you're thinking about these guys what do you need to
00:18:26.780guard against in yourself. And that keeps you from going down the black pill route. It seems
00:18:31.940like one of the things is, if you're sinned against, it could be really easy. Anyone who's
00:18:38.060sinned against, especially grievously, you can focus on that to the exclusion of, I'm also a
00:18:43.600sinner in need of God's grace. Yes. So what are some other obstacles with going down this black
00:18:49.120piled route. Yeah. So the way that the sin against you works itself out is that it does affect,1.00
00:18:56.600when it's not dealt with, it affects your whole life. Because we're going to talk about this more,
00:19:01.300but you get none of the things that you ought to have received in shaping you to be prepared for
00:19:07.700life. So you don't have, there's cultural zero, there's financial zero, there's, you know, you
00:19:12.400haven't had the approval of a father. And so some people are really, really, they're just little
00:19:18.500mice. They shrink back. They're not confident. Some men are wildly proud because they're
00:19:24.000constantly posturing for approval, and it's really because they want everybody to approve
00:19:28.600of them all the time. Everybody has to think I'm great. Everybody has to look at everything
00:19:33.440that I think and say it's right. It's just another aspect of this wound, right? So we're
00:19:40.240talking about a sin against you that gets in and kind of worms its way into a whole lot of
00:19:45.480different areas of your life. And one side effect of that, I think, like you mentioned, is that
00:19:52.780it can lead to a lot of sinful ways of dealing with the sin against you. It's pernicious because
00:20:00.240you have this sin against you that's actually damaged your ability to be prepared to be a man
00:20:06.780or a woman, which is to know how to deal with your own sin, to know how to deal with your own
00:20:12.640weakness, to know how to be a human being. So then you're going to be tempted to deal with
00:20:19.060that sin against you in all sorts of sinful or radically unwise ways. So one of the things you
00:20:24.480need to hear is for a sympathetic guy who's in your corner to come along pastorally or as a friend
00:20:32.600or as a father figure, whatever it is, and come in and acknowledge the wound, understand, be an
00:20:39.480understanding person, and then also not let the person wallow there because they love you.
00:20:45.980You know, what's interesting about the black pill movement with fatherlessness is that it's0.63
00:20:51.940actually within the grain of how your fathers have sinned. And so we say like doing a startup,0.97
00:20:58.920doing a startup, zero to one, whatever. That's not necessarily like the cleanest metaphor because
00:21:04.280you do have an inheritance. If your father abandoned you functionally, actually, I mean,
00:21:11.500that is the inheritance of generational sin that you're going to be tempted to. And so it makes
00:21:17.240sense that the black pill movement to a lot of these guys that don't have fathers would be0.94
00:21:21.880attractive because ultimately at the core, the black pill movement is shrugging off responsibility.0.94
00:21:29.560It's saying, I'm not going to take responsibility.0.92
00:21:32.900The world is set up against me, and it doesn't even matter anymore,
00:21:55.920I understand why you're angry with your family all the time and why you're you're it seems like
00:22:02.600your fuse is a centimeter long and it goes like that and you're set off I understand why you
00:22:09.780don't seem to be able to have self-control with alcohol I understand why you're having all these
00:22:15.800problems why you're financially in wreckage and I love you enough that I'm now going to step in
00:22:22.160like a father would have when you were three or four or five, and teach you how to actually
00:22:27.000repent of your sin, take radical responsibility, and get out of the mire, right? People who hate
00:22:34.000you will just, they will pick at the wound for you. And there are blogs, and there are Reddit
00:22:38.600threads, and there are all kinds of manosphere guys who will help pick at the wound for you,
00:22:43.840and they will fertilize the root of bitterness and basically say, yeah, you don't even understand
00:22:49.760how bad you have it. You don't even understand how much you've been wounded. You don't even
00:22:53.800understand how bitter you should be and how angry you should be. And the reason they do that
00:22:57.760is because bitter, angry people are easy to manipulate. They're easy to manipulate. They're
00:23:03.160easy to monetize. All of that stuff is just another false father figure stepping in and
00:23:08.820taking advantage of a bastard world. So in order to address it, you absolutely have to be the kind0.96
00:23:16.140of brother or father or mother who will step in and say, I'm not going to let you
00:23:21.100just stay here. I understand why you're there, and I'm not going to shame you for being there,
00:23:28.940but I am going to give you—it's going to be hard, but I'm going to help you.
00:23:33.120Yeah, I think that's a phenomenal point, and I think part of it, too—I've seen this in
00:23:36.960counseling—right, we want to honor our fathers, and then we want to repent of their sins at the
00:23:44.640same time. Doug Wilson talks about this in Father Hunger. The wise son will repent of his father's
00:23:49.100sins. But think about this laying of foundation. Before you can even get to that point of a
00:23:53.540startup, a generational startup, let alone a business startup, you cannot be laying the
00:23:58.140foundation when your heart is full of bitterness towards your fathers. Yeah, absolutely not.
00:24:02.180And so there is this process where you have to forgive, you have to commend them to the justice
00:24:08.340of God, and then you have to repent of your own bitterness. And I've noticed for guys too,
00:24:13.980this can be, it might take five years of really continually repenting, you know, noticing you,
00:24:20.520you want to say derogatory things about your fathers. Um, and, and everybody's usually on a
00:24:26.080scale. Yeah. But what we have to do again, you forgive them, you, you acknowledge, you know,
00:24:31.760where there was sin, but then you move on. And a lot of us, you know, as, as you're helping these
00:24:36.940guys, like a lot of them, you think about Will Smith, like he's not going to have peace with his
00:24:40.500dad, it doesn't sound like. Maybe years down the road, but some guys never will. Maybe dad's
00:24:44.720already dead. So it's not like you can actually make a real peace, but you're still going to have
00:24:50.640to honor and forgive. You have to recognize that the gospel and the demands the gospel makes on us
00:24:56.540is a hard but good gift. When Jesus teaches us to pray, forgive us our debts as we forgive our
00:25:03.180debtors, and then explains it. For if we do not forgive others when they sin against us,
00:25:07.980neither will our Father in heaven forgive us when we sin, right? That's a hard good gift,
00:25:13.380because what God is doing there is he's actually being a good Father. He's freeing us from what
00:25:18.400will only destroy and enslave us, which is bitterness, black pill, rage. The anger of man
00:25:24.180does not produce the righteousness that God requires. It is not a safe emotional state to
00:25:29.620remain in. It's even righteous anger is supposed to drive us immediately to righteous action,
00:25:34.480so we can deal with it and move on, because it's not a safe thing for us to handle.
00:25:39.580Vengeance belongs to the Lord. He will repay. So for us, we have to remember that God only
00:25:46.800gives us good gifts, including the duties he gives us. So when he—he doesn't suggest—he
00:25:51.840requires that we forgive people who sin against us, even in heinous ways. Like, it is a requirement.
00:25:58.620We have to understand that that is actually a part of—that's the kind of fatherhood we needed
00:26:03.340all along, is a father who will say, do the hard thing and do it now, because it's going to destroy
00:26:09.040you if you don't. Yeah, I think that's a great point. It seems like also, Dan, okay, you're
00:26:14.540doing a startup. Before maybe you lay the first brick in the foundation, one of the things we
00:26:19.440have to have is inspiration, right? You have to have a vision for what you're trying to build.
00:26:24.140It seems like one of the ways men could be motivated is by reading the stories of other
00:26:28.060men who, yeah, maybe they had a bad lot. Maybe there wasn't great fatherhood behind them,
00:26:32.600But they were still able to build something glorious. So as you're thinking about this issue, why is the appropriate vision an inspiring vision? Why is it important as we push toward the startup of a generational legacy?
00:26:45.900Yeah, well, I know that we've talked before about that Seneca quote, if a man knows not which port he sails, no wind is favorable. And that kind of makes sense with the black pill movement. Again, if you're not familiar with it, it's just essentially saying everything is worthless, pointless, whatever. It doesn't matter.0.98
00:27:31.320And the thing is, God wins the hearts of men through story.
00:27:35.340You see this, like God is telling a story. He wrote it. He wrote his word as a story, a narrative from creation all the way to ultimate judgment in the end. Everything is a story. And so going to these stories of the great men is absolutely a major help.
00:27:56.760and then the challenge is though right practicalizing it right how do you make i can tell
00:28:03.620you the story of king theoden from lord of the rings and you can go yeah that's great but what
00:28:09.280does that look like you know thursday morning when i go to work a job i don't really like
00:28:15.000you know and go home to a family that i'm having a hard time with and a mortgage that is difficult
00:28:21.060to pay, you know? And so at that point you have to practicalize it and just ask the question,
00:28:28.060what am I for? Yeah. What do you exist to do? And if you don't have a father who's there saying like,
00:28:35.220son, this is what you exist to do. And let me show you by the way I live, that is a really
00:28:40.700hard thing to get ingrained in you. And it is easy to become, you know, depressed about that.
00:28:46.960So, so yeah, I mean, then, then you start the building blocks of like, what am I for?
00:28:52.440What do all men exist to do when you have, go ahead.
00:31:14.120A father would come alongside and be like, son, son, you smell bad.0.56
00:31:17.980I'm giving a silly example, but you tell your kids,
00:31:20.620there comes that conversation when they're 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
00:31:23.580and they're about to go out the door, and you say, hey, son, come here.
00:31:26.380Let me teach you about deodorant and how to take a shower properly.
00:31:29.100So there's like that relational equivalent of not being able to smell your own BO that absolutely requires you to have men in your life who will be a father to you and actually know.1.00
00:31:48.080This is why internet celebrities won't do it.1.00
00:41:32.600Yeah, well, I'm also starting a second company right now.
00:41:35.400So one of the things that's really challenging for me being on the admin side
00:41:39.260is trying to navigate all of the rules.
00:41:42.800There are so many stinking rules, from taxes to government regulations, payroll stuff, I mean, legal structures.
00:41:53.100All of that is really challenging, especially when you start off not knowing what the rules of the game are, and you're trying to discover them.
00:42:02.800I mean, so that was like, it sounds like I was actually preaching this.
00:42:11.100You know, life is kind of like a startup.
00:42:12.800No, but seriously, like when you're starting something fresh like this and you don't know the rules of the game, it is a really, really difficult task because you have to discover them as you go along.
00:42:24.820And sometimes, believe it or not, you find out that there are certain taxes that have to be paid the next day.
00:43:38.020Well, this is one of the most interesting things about Clint Eastwood movie, Gran Torino, is he fails his kids, his kids leave, they mutually hate each other.
00:43:47.760But then he kind of has a redo with the neighbor kid who he calls Toad, which is very racially insensitive.
00:43:55.140But what's great about it is he's basically, like, he'll take him to the barber and he teaches him, like, here's how you talk to a man.
00:44:02.420He notices he's being all awkward around this girl he likes.
00:48:46.760But, Dan, I just want to ask you, like, how do – there's got to be something different about the way you, for instance, focus and think about a startup.
00:48:54.380It doesn't seem like we spend very much time wallowing.
00:48:58.000We just say, okay, no school, we'll build one.
00:55:19.400And that's how most of us think, though.
00:55:20.980And that's what gets us in trouble. Okay, by the time that my kids are entering adulthood, I hope to have our home paid off. That's a modest goal. That's not like, oh, my, everybody's going to throw a party for you. That's great. Now you have a foothold. They're not going to start from zero, right?
00:55:40.740You might not be able in your life to own 30 or 40 doors of real estate.
00:55:45.720Not everybody's going to be able to do that.
00:55:48.160If you start with a goal that you're like, in five years, we're going to be millionaires,
00:55:51.760and we're going to be doing the real estate thing and start a business and all that,
00:55:54.820you might actually end up failing at all of that spectacularly because you tried to do everything,
00:57:33.100So now you have to find those fathers and take those practical next step, but you have to understand that your goals might be more modest than you really at heart wish they were going to be, and that's fine.
00:57:48.480Yeah, so one of the things we've been talking about is being aware of blind spots.
00:57:52.240Brian, I want to ask you just a couple blind spots that people could potentially fall into if you're in this generational startup mode.
00:57:59.460And one of them certainly seems to be extremism because we lack this generational stability from fathers and grandfathers who have gone before.
00:58:09.680You think about some of the companies who've been around forever.
00:58:12.960They didn't have a vision and trajectory for a decade even.
00:58:40.740It can be I have an extremely unrealistic standard for everyone around me, including myself, and I think that I'm just going to be a millionaire in five years or whatever.
00:58:48.540Everything needs to be perfect tomorrow.
00:58:50.280When you don't know, when you don't have lived and experience to draw on, you can't look at a father in history and say, this is what it looks like to be stable and fruitful as a man, a woman, whatever it is.
00:59:01.160Then what you can tend to do is develop these mental models that are shiny and perfect, and the world is going to obey my model.
00:59:08.460yeah have never having anybody who's actually had a positive vision and guided you through their
00:59:15.900vision like a good father or even a good pastor would do because in in counseling just the same
00:59:21.300thing as in fathering you can you know you sit down with your son or with a parishioner at your
00:59:26.280church and and you immediately see like there's a whole lot of problems and the goal isn't to fix
00:59:31.980all the problems that minute it's going to it is to fix all of them but it's going to take time and
00:59:37.640you start with the first thing yeah and so if you don't have a guide who has shown you like here's
00:59:43.000how you actually accomplish these tasks then you will be prone to extremism yeah because you don't
00:59:49.020know how to actually progress yeah you'll mistake knowledge for maturity you'll mistake knowing1.00
00:59:54.420things for being mature like so you'll develop the guys in this situation women do this too0.87
00:59:59.500just sometimes in different areas more commonly in different areas women tend to do this with like1.00
01:00:04.880our family was really unhealthy growing up. We ate off the Cisco truck, whatever, you know,1.00
01:00:09.300seed oil is everything. And then women can become absolute Nazis about food in completely1.00
01:00:15.900unreasonable ways. And everybody must obey my mental model. We talk about this on BreitHearth1.00
01:00:20.940a lot. Like, ladies, you're not allowed to just march in your house and say, we're going to be
01:00:25.740vegans now. No, you're actually, no, don't, no, stop. Like, back it up. It can be essential oils,
01:00:30.600it can be anything. Men do theology a lot where they're like, listen, I have figured out the
01:00:36.000perfect theological model for literally every aspect of systematic theology. And if you don't,
01:00:40.440there are, there's two categories in the world. There are people who agree with me about all of
01:00:44.400them. And then there are imbeciles who are not really Christians. And I didn't make the rules.1.00
01:00:49.220That's just the, but those are the rules. Those guys are going to have a real hard time being a
01:00:54.340husband, a father, churchmen, because they're being stupid is the technical term.1.00