 What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men, as patriarchs. There's nothing more natural than being a father. Welcome back to the 21 convention second picture art edition in Orlando, Florida 2020. Our next speaker is a first time 21 convention speaker, but it is definitely not his first time being on stage. He is a pastor, he is in the actual definition of the word of patriarchy. He has seven children, happily married. I want you to please welcome Dr. Foster. Good morning for a little while longer. I left a mind in me that once got invited to speak at a really big conference with a thousand people. And I was excited and I showed up and it was like a Christian and Duke thing. When I got there, they gave me a piece of paper and I said, what is this? And these are the topics we don't want you to talk about. Right now I'm talking about health, sexuality, all these things I wasn't allowed to talk about. And honestly, none of those things were in my speech or in the talk I had to give until that moment. That moment! I was like, that's not how this works. I am a truth teller, that's where a preacher is. They tell the truth. I put all those things in that talk just because that's not going to happen. Someone asked me, why are you going to the 21st? They hate women, exogenous, pick up artists. What are you doing with those people? Anthony gave me no such list. He has put no limitations on me at all. He hasn't asked me to mute my Christianity. The fact that I'm a Presbyterian pastor, that I believe that Jesus Christ is the way the truth of life. No one comes to the Father except through Him. That I believe that heaven is real, that hell is real, and that salvation is something that everyone needs. He hasn't told me to mute anything. Which is a good thing because I don't mute things. That's not how I work. But I'm here because you guys care about the truth. You want to hear the truth. That's the whole idea behind the red bill. You guys are truth seekers. I'm not afraid to share the truth that I know. I'm happy to be here. I'm really countered a privilege. I'm not just here to teach. I'm here to learn from you guys. I look forward to spending time with you. But I want to talk to you about how to go from a bastard to a patriarch. That's what I'm talking about today. And some years ago, I was watching perhaps the greatest film in the generation. My generation's got a clip starring Adam Sandman. Ever seen that movie? The premise is it's, you know, not great film. But I used to play cards for a living and when I would come home, I would just kind of lay around in the middle of the day and watch TV shows. And on this particular day, 14 years ago, my wife was in the kitchen, pregnant with my first son Hudson. Barefoot, I promise you. And I was in the living room in the middle of the day watching a clip. And the whole premise of the clip is that this guy's a business exec and he's really busy with his work and his wife and his kids and he can't get it all done. And he's bailing and he's looking for some way to get ahead. The common Hollywood trope, right? And so he comes into possession of this remote control that could augment reality. So he could fast forward it, rewind it, he could put it in slow-mo, pause it and all that stuff. And so he uses it to help him get through life. And one thing he does in particular is so fast forward through things that he doesn't enjoy. Right? Like kids, I just keep talking, my son came and I played this game to see how long I can listen to him before I tell him to be quiet. And one day he wanted to talk about Pokemon. And he was like walking me through like all the different Pokemon and all those things. I made like 15 minutes ahead. I know this kind of goes against Zach's thing. But I was like, all right, no more. But I can't take it, no more Pokemon. But so he starts fast forwarding through those things and the remote control kind of has an AI function to it where it starts to predict what it doesn't, what you don't want to experience. And so he starts sticking through huge portions of his life and then he finds as he moves into the future he's more and more alienated from his family. He comes divorced and he loses his son or his daughter and there's this huge scene in the movie where he's finally at his son's wedding and he's seen them all grown up and he's not really clicking with his son. They drifted apart and then he's out there dancing with his daughter. She's beautiful. She's a woman. He's blown away by her and he's enjoying that. And then as he stops dancing with her, she walks away and she calls this other man. She says, oh, hi dad. And it's not dad. It's her stepfather. Her stepfather to her is her real father, God Adam Shamba. And that moment was like a Mount St. Helen's moment in me. There was like a motion that exploded out and I didn't even know where it came from. I just started crying and sobbing. I'm going to talk about little like Indian tears coming down here. I'm like moaning, sobbing, middle of the day, beautiful day, nothing's wrong and I'm crying and it happened out of nowhere. So my wife runs in and she's like, what's wrong? You know how I cover my face? I was like, hey. And because I obviously didn't understand. So I like run upstairs and she takes it after me and I'm like, no, I don't want to, just give me space, right? So then some years later, I'm talking to a friend of mine and he's actually not from America. Was it a Christian? I was like, come on about this experience. And he said, I totally know what you're talking about. I took my son. This son was like 12 at the time. This he lying kid. This man's very dignified, lack of manners, carries himself with power. And he said, when start, the boss up, right? The boss falls down and it's really dramatic. He said, he started just crying in the middle of the theater, right? And so like 16 year old kid with a flashlight on his sir, you got to stop, you got to stop lying. That's everybody here, you know. And we're going to have to leave. And he said it was so bad, he had to leave the theater. And I was like, yeah, that's what happened to me. What? What is this man? What's wrong with us? Why is this happening? And he looks at me and he says, Michael, we're a nation of bastards. You know that thing? It's a phrase that sticks with you, right? And I didn't really know what he was talking about, but he had gone down the opening up about our humans and crying hard enough for me that morning. And I just kind of eternalized it. And I went home and I started reading up on what it meant to be a bastard, right? The dictionary definitions, not difficult, means you're illegitimate. You're born out of wedlock. But if you dig a little deeper, what it really means to be a bastard is to not bury your father's name, right? You have a different name. You grow up without a father. And we don't think about names the way we ought to. In the ancient world, a name is everything. It's your reputation, it's your skill, it's your vocation. It's all tied up in your name. Probably something closer to a name today would be a brand, right? So you have people that talk about a personal brand, or if you work in corporate America or anywhere, you know that the brand represents the company. Everything is tied up in the brand. You don't want to sully it, because it's what gets you ahead. If you're going to do something, you do it on your name, right? And Scripture talks about this a lot. You guys are going to get a lot of Bible. This is how it works when you have, you let a pastor into this. Proverbs 22 1 says, a good name is to be more desired than great wealth. Favor is better than silver and gold. So the name is everything. And a pastor doesn't have his father's name, which is to say a pastor doesn't have an inheritance. He doesn't get all the things that come with a name. It's your history. It's your background. It's all that. That's what it means to have your father's name, to be his son. And Hebrews 12, well, before I get to that, I'll say this, is that a company doesn't just hire anyone, especially if they're going to be representing our work in business development. And we have to think very carefully when we have big meetings, because we represent everybody. So you've got to hire well, and you've got to train well, because if they're going to represent your brand, they have to embody it, right? If a child is going to carry your name, if he's got your last name, he must be in the embodiment of that name. Fathers care deeply. And this is what Hebrews 12 says. It is for discipline that you endure. God deals with you as sons for what son is there whom his father does not discipline. But if you are without discipline of which all have become partakers, then you are bastards and not sons. Furthermore, we have had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not rather be subject to the father of spirits and live? For they discipline us for a short time as seen best to them, but he disciplines us for our good so that we may share his holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful. Yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. So a father, a father disciplines his son, he wants his son to represent him. When we hear the word discipline, we think of it merely in a corrective sense. Punishment, spankings, groundings, whatever. That's mostly how we think about it, but it also has a formative sense of how you shape someone. You might recognize the word disciple hidden in the word discipline. And so a father, when he raises up his son, like no son of mine does that. You're a foster. Fosters don't do that. That's what a father's supposed to be doing. He's supposed to be disciplining his son. And so to be a bastard is not to have the loving discipline of a father. Right? That's what it means to not know how to be a man. And why this matters is that the way you're taught by a father is not in a classroom. It's not like this. We don't sit the kid down and we're going to talk. The classroom is everyday life. That's how a child learns. How a son learns to be a man. He watches his dad fix the car and this and that. I remember I used to have my own business. And when I had to go make deals, I'd take a couple of my sons with me and they'd listen to me like haggle these people and make all these agreements and sometimes push on a deal and sometimes not. And then afterwards, sometimes I'd ask them, like, hey, why did I not go along with that? Or what was I doing there, son? Or sometimes I'd say, dad, why did you say that to that guy? And then I would explain to them the art of the sale, right? The art of negotiation. But masculinity is caught more than it's taught. And you feel that if you're here, right? You come, you take your notes. You listen to all your podcasts and stuff. And that's great. But there's a reason Tanner's saying like the real value isn't us up here on the stage. It's time spent together, right? That's where that stuff really starts to gel. And I used to run a lot of youth conferences and I would always tell speakers, I do not want you just to stand up on stage and speak. I only will invite you in if you promise me you'll spend time with the kids, right? You'll talk to them, you'll hang out. Because I'm looking for people that I want to replicate in these kids and the stage is not enough, right? Podcasts are not enough. Books are not enough. You have to have someone in your life. Manhood is a baton that's handed from one generation of men down to the next. And this is why I am quite sympathetic to video gaming and LARPing, right? I didn't really know what LARPing was a couple of years ago until I worked with this guy who on the weekends, you know, he would go jousting. Dressed up like a knight and getting on his horse and they would joust. And then he introduced to me some of his friends who were elves on Thursday sometimes. They'd go around frolic in the woods. And I was like, yeah, that's not really my speed. If that's your thing, that's okay. But as I thought about it, it makes sense to me that a generation of bastards would be in the LARPing. Because LARPing is what it is. It's a world where your place in it is well-defined. The rules in the world are defined. The mission of the world are defined. What it means is defined. They're looking for tradition, right? To be a bastard is not to be just fatherless. But since the father hands down the tradition, the meaning of the name, to be a bastard is to be without a tradition. And that's why people like love video games and they love LARPing. And that's why people are always all suddenly getting back into ancient, got all these people misquoting Cicero to me all the time. People are into this stuff. And it's because they're trying to figure out what their place in this world is. What's their role? What are they trying to do? And those are the sort of questions that linger in the back of the mind of a bastard. And that's what I was. That's why I had that emotional breakdown watching quick and why my friend is crying about Mufasa dying. It's because we're at the crux of our fatherhood. He's there with his son. My wife's pregnant with my first-born son. And these are movies about the failure of a father, the loss of a father. And it triggered something deep down in me. I didn't even know it was there. I didn't think of myself that way all the time, but it triggered it and it revealed to me like there's a real problem. And this is a crazy thing about how it works is that a lot of us become husbands and fathers before we even know how to become men. And it's when it's time to hand off that baton to the next generation. We look down in our hand and nothing. There's nothing there. We're like, oh crap, what am I going to do? And I was feeling that. It was hitting me very, very hard when it happened. And why? Why is this happening, right? Why are we a whole generation of fatherless people? Well, you're at the 21 convention. Even this is your first time. You've watched the videos. There's no need for me to walk you through all the sociological, anthropological, and political factors. I dilute model, yada, yada, yada, all that stuff. Like you've heard it before. You don't need to hear it from me. But has anyone talked about the spiritual dimension behind this? What's happening behind all the scriptures says that our battle is not against flesh and blood, but principalities and powers and spiritual witness in the high place. But all the physical things we see, there's a spiritual reality behind it. I see this happening right now in kind of the men's movements area. People are getting deeply interested in the spiritual world. They want to know, like, what's the connection there? Honestly, I read the Brian's Age Mindset by Bap. I read that the book is a real trip. But what I liked about it, I liked it way more than Jordan Peterson, but I liked about it was that he connects the spiritual and the physical. Even though he's a pagan and I'm not, we might get a war, you know, whatever. That part, I agreed with him. I thought it was quite good. So there is a spiritual war. And this is a guy that I want to quote to you right now. J.C. Ryle. This is from a book called Thoughts for Young Men. I wrote an introduction for it. You can find it on Canon Press. If you want to go buy a copy, it's free online, though. And he says this. Ryle, by the way, he's like 6'4", supermanly guy. You don't see pastors like this much anymore. Big old beard. He gives George a run for his money. He says, Young men, this enemy is working hard for your destruction. However little you may think it. You are the prize for which he is especially contending. He perceives you must either be the blessing or the curses of your day. And he's trying hard to affect the place in your heart early in your life in order that you may help advance his kingdom each day. Ryle's talking about the devil. And you are. You are the prize. Because as men go, so goes the household. And as the household goes, so goes society. Society is made up of households. Right? Anyone ever seen Patriot? See that movie with Mel Gibson. So he's trying to get his one son back. And he tells all the boys to shoot all the officers right first. And then chaos breaks down. And that's what happens. If you take men out, you create chaos. Jesus says, how can someone enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds a strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house. Yeah. Get in my house. You got to get past me before you take in anything. Right? But what happens in a culture where all men are bound, where they're shackled? What happens then? Well, then the house that is society can be plunder. And that's exactly what's happening right now. The spiritual battle is real, guys. The devil is real. You feel, I know you've felt darkness before. This is actually happening. This isn't just Illuminati or QAnon or whatever. So there is an actual spiritual power at work trying to destroy you. Because as men rise, culture rises. And as they fall, culture falls. And this is not something that hasn't happened before. If you think of authority, you can think of it as energy. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, right? Conservation of energy. Authority is the same way. Authority is distributed by God through three institutions, the home, the church, and the state. And if a home doesn't exercise authority right, then the church or the state has to get involved. And what happens is that authority is removed from the church or the family, and then it ends up with the state. And that's what's going on right now. All the authority that should be distributed evenly among people is getting concentrated in this paternalistic nanny state. Like this tyrannical government we're dealing with right now. They're getting all the authority. And the only way we can take them on, I'll get to in a second, is that we have to take it back, right? We have to be patriarchs again. And this happened in the Exodus. You can read the first couple chapters of Exodus, one through about 14, that the Israelites end up down in Egypt and they have a good relationship with this one pharaoh because of Joseph. But then that changes over time. Another pharaoh rise up and he's not super keen on the Israelites. The Israelites, they like to make babies, right? I enjoy that. It's fun to do and they're wonderful, right? And so there's all these Israelites are filling up in Goshen all around Egypt and it's making them nervous. He sees them as a threat, a threat to his reign. And tyrants always see young men and men as a threat to their reign. So what does he do? He does three things. And these are the things that we see repeat throughout history. He first tries to pacify them. Then he also tries to re-educate them. When that doesn't work, he kills them, okay? So first with pacify. Remember this, you grew up in the 90s. You saw Prince of Egypt, whatever, or the Ten Commandments, right? He makes them work really hard. He enslaves them to build the different monuments and whatever. And when they're still not really listening, he takes away straw and all this. And he's trying to pacify them to the grind, break the men down. That wasn't enough, right? And so there's a sense where he tries to re-educate them. If you go to the book of Acts in chapter 7, you find out that Moses, when he was brought into the household of Pharaoh, he was actually public school. That guy learned all the Egyptian stuff. And he went through all that training, but it didn't take with him. And in Israel, as you follow them through the Exodus, you find that they've imbibed the culture. So it's re-education through culture. They've absorbed it. They have the same bad ideas about God, the same idolatrous tendencies, and all that. So much so when they get, when God delivers something that splits the Red Sea, they get out in the wilderness and they still don't believe them, right? Like the whole Red Sea split and flaming ice falls from this. It's crazy. And they're like, hey, we're thinking about going back to Egypt. And that's how powerful the culture was. So he tries to re-educate them. And then if that doesn't work, he kills them, right? He kills the firstborn sons, not the daughters, the sons, who the name continues through, the patriarchal line that keeps on going. He wants to have them killed. And that happens over and over again throughout Scripture. It's a recurrent theme. The Philistines sought to pacify Samson through Delilah, right? That always happens. So you've got Satan uses Eve against Adam, and then the Pharaoh tried to use the Hebrew midwives against the Israelites. So they're always trying to pacify you in some way. And then you've also got the Babylonians. So it's called the exile. Israel ends up in exile on Babylon. And one thing they would do back then when they would capture a nation, they would take all the best young men, and then they would raise them up to serve whatever king, whatever emperor there was. And so they'd take these young men, and they would put them through all this training in the book of Daniels all about that, about how he was trained, and he served Nebuchadnezzar and some of the other Babylonian kings. So that happens there. And then you've also got Herod, right? Herod tries to kill Jesus. Remember, oh, silent night, the night that Christ was born? Like, we're talking about dead babies, man. It was a real intense. He tried to kill them. There's a localized slaughter of the innocent. So these are things that happen over and over throughout history. You know, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And these things happen over and over again. And we see these methods at work right now in the war on men. There really is a war on men. It's a war on sex. It's a divided house. The house will fall if it's divided. It's a turning men against women's part of the strategy. But in particular, you want to take down the patriarchs, the captains. And we're seeing it where we pacify our boys through what? Medication, right? Adderall or whatever. These little kids are jumping around everywhere and like, oh, they're not behaving like girls. Let's drug them up. There's nothing wrong. That's what it means to be a boy, right? I was so bad that in second grade, they had to put tape around my desk. This is their compromise. They put tape around my desk and said, look, if you stay in this circle, it'll be all right. It really helped me. In other words, she was giving me space to be a boy. And I actually started to do quite well from that point on. And then we pacify them through pornography. Look, man, you're a beta as they come if you're watching, if you're looking at porn. You're like, you're weak. That's just true. You may be disagree with me. That's what the time between these things are. But you're taking your masculine strength, and you're giving it away, and you get a nothing back. It's not producing anything. So every time we have sex, you have to have babies? Well, that's one thing. But also, when I have sex with my wife, we are kind of renewing our vows. Remind yourself what our covenant is. So we're connecting. That's very, very productive. But we're tossing it away. Why do porn is a strategy to get you, to keep you weak? Because sex drives you. It used to be really hard to get illicit sex. You had to go to the bad part of town. And then you had to get a catalog, and come in a brown bag. You had to find a way to pay for it. And then you had to download stuff from some Russian server back in the early days of the internet. And then it's HD and free on your phone. Why? Why does the government allow this to happen? It's a terrible thing to keep you beta, to keep you weak, to not threaten them. That's exactly what's going on. You can read E. Michael Jones on that if you want to go down a crazy rabbit hole. And then video games. People I see, video games aren't manly. What the hell are you talking about? Video games are the essence of manliness. That's why they're so dangerous. What do men want? They want to conquer. They want to win. They want to develop skills. And they want to do it with other men. That's what video games do. But they do it in a virtual realm that doesn't affect the real world. It keeps your throwing away that energy there. Recurational from time to time, whatever. I still can hang with my son on halo from time to time. Just a little bit. It's pretty good. But that's just here and there. I'm building things. I'm busy. And thank God that my son's pretty busy building things right now, too. But this is a way to pacify young men and keep them weak. And that's not the only thing that's happened. We're re-educating our young men through egalitarian curriculum of our governments, our schools, our churches. This is a battle I have as a pastor. Evangelicalism is wretched. It's horrible. I believe everything in scripture is inerrant. You should believe everything. I want you all to convert. That's who I am. That's what this is about. I'm not ashamed of Christianity. I am ashamed of evangelicalism. I do not blame men for checking out. You should not have to leave your balls at the door of a church. It should not be happening. God made men and women. He said it is good, right? This is good work. But we're watching men put aside their masculine drive for sex, for ambition, to do well. All for the glory of God. You have to come and be weak to be in a church. And we're destroying everything good about men and the world needs men. So we are re-educated in that way and through some of the stuff you see on YouTube. On YouTube, if you're a dad, right now we're having battles with screens and YouTubers. My kids don't care about TV. They don't follow anything. When I was a kid, I had to sneak to watch Fresh Prince of Bel Air. And then my kids are watching all these crazy YouTubers. Some of them are interesting. Some of them I would like to meet in person. And then we kill men via abortion. America is built on the backs of a mountain of dead babies. Blood. That's our country. We deserve to be judged. Millions and millions. These people talking about 200,000 COVID deaths. Give me a break. Compared to what we've done. And we kill men that way. But we also kill men through this culture of shame. Now, shame's good. If I step on a nail, it hurts. It's my body saying, don't do that. And when you feel ashamed for something that's immoral and bad, that's your soul saying, don't do that, okay? But I shouldn't move my hand in a natural way and it hurts. But something's wrong if I'm moving my hand. Something's broken. And if you act like a man, you feel shame for that? Something's wrong. That's an evil shame. And we are shaming men for being masculine. Little boys. You guys read the APA standards that came out a couple years probably. How they define toxic masculinity. And it's just masculinity. We just hate men. And they want to change little boys. And that creates this culture of depression and hopelessness. Are we surprised that male suicide rates are crazy high? Just this past weekend, I was out at a church conference because that's what I do. I go to a church conference one weekend and I go to a conference like this the next. Life is grand. But we're out there and they're talking about the 16-year-old that shot himself and they're describing that the family was a good family. They moved around a little bit because of the pandemic. This kind of been stuck in house. This is like really hard as a dad. I can only tell my kids to use their imagination until like I'm sick of me saying it. Like, yeah, it's pretty boring. But this kid's stuck in the house and he just kept watching YouTube and playing video games and we're different like Discord servers or whatever and just it's all hopeless. So hopeless. Young 16-year-old man blew his head off and mom and dad walked in there to find that mess, right? And the pastor comes and they're covered in the child's blood. This is America. This is the real systemic problem that no one seems to be talking about. What's up? People like you. People like the 21 convention and a few Christians here and there. So it's still going on. The war on men is it's still happening. It's very depressing, right? It's as widespread and intense as it's ever been. But I want to remind you of something. So Pharaoh, he tried to kill baby Moses, right? Tried to kill that generation. Didn't work. Moses ends up, right? The baby he tries to kill raised a manhood in his own house, right? It's one of these beautiful ironies of scripture. Tried to re-educate Moses. Tried to train him. Make him into Egyptian. But that doesn't take either, right? And they tried to pacify him and that didn't work either. And so Moses ends up being the one to destroy Pharaoh. Moses is a normal guy, right? He started out as a normal man. God loves to use normal men to destroy tyranny. He loves it. God loves to use the foolish things of the world. I always tell people God is a great comedian and I'm one of his jokes. I've had a weird life. I've been a professional card counter. I've written a blog post that I won't tell you the name. Well, I will tell you this blog post, actually. I started a viral media site with a friend of mine and we learned that millennials were really easy to troll. And so we found out if people click on this, we made a lot of AdSense money. And so I created a post on how beautiful Disney princesses are if they're overweight. I've paid someone to draw all these fat Disney princesses and that thing still gets comments on it today. It's like six million views when it first went out. But I got to do that. I get to do this. You know, life's been really crazy and cool. God uses people like me. There's nothing very great about me at all. There's nothing really that impressive. So God likes to use normal men. Men like you. Men that are waking up. Men that are just sick of the games. And I think one reason I'm getting so much traction online right now is that a lot of Christian men are like, is this it? Is Christianity really this egalitarian and feminist? Because when I read the Bible, it doesn't seem like that. God, the father, Christianity is patriarchal to the core. Mary Daly, she's a feminist scholar. I love radical feminists. They're like my favorite people in the world. I can't stand Christian feminists. And here's why. Christian feminists, they just lie through their teeth. You have to to make the Bible sink to feminism. But radical feminists like Shilma Firestone or Betty Frieden or whoever you want to go through, they just hate Christianity. And they just like, we got to get rid of men and we got to get rid of the womb. They just say all those things. And they're so refreshingly honest. And these guys are starting to realize that egalitarianism is false and it's not true. And they're waking up. And guys like me, they're just tweeting out really simple things. It's kind of funny, you know, that that's catching fire. And that's very encouraging to me. That's telling me that the reason these little sparks can create a fire is the ground's dry and ready. And they're ready. They're ready for folks to start taking charge. And this, you know, I'm not a migtail guy. I got a lot of migtail guys that follow me. I sympathize with them. But you know what? No. I'm not going to let the pharaoh destroy me and destroy my generation. It's not happening. I am not checking out. I'm going to war. Absolutely. I might lose. I might. I don't know. I wouldn't be the first guy that tried to go to war and lost. But I'm going to go down on my shield, okay? And I want to tell you guys to do the same. I want you to go down on your shield. Go down fighting. Are you going to let these people do this to our kids? Are you going to stand for this? You're just going to enjoy the ash heap that's society right now. You're just going to enjoy this. The little bit of shining pieces, the corn and the pile of crap. No. Now we're going to do something about this. And the thing is, if men will become fathers, boys will become men. The world needs men. God made this world for men. Six days, he makes this world. And on the sixth day, he puts man and woman in it to rule and reign over it. As a royal priesthood. This world was made for us. Not for the animals. For us. The animals are made for us. That's why they taste so good. So I want to challenge you men to be patriarchs. And let me give you just a couple practical things to think about. I want to use the model of the great father. Besides Adam, Abraham is perhaps the most well-known patriarch. Father Abraham had many sons. Many sons had a father. This song, if you grew up in the church, which I didn't, but my kids have, you'll learn. God does this in Abraham's life. Before Abraham was Abraham, he was just Abram. And he calls him. He says, now the Lord said to Abram, go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house to a land which I will show you, excuse me, and I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great. So you shall be a blessing and I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I will curse. And in you, the families of the earth will be blessed. So Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken to him. There's three things I want to pull out of this that are big. First off, leaving, this is something that folks are starting to understand, but leaving your nation and your father's house is a big deal, right? If you're just like thrown into, I don't know, the Philippines right now or somewhere in the middle of Africa where people don't speak English. You're not familiar with the culture. You don't speak the language and all that. It would be very difficult on you. And especially if you have a decent amount of inheritance and connections. When I moved back to Cincinnati, it was wonderful to be in a town where I just know everybody. I ministered there as a youth pastor from 99 for many years and I just know everybody. It's nice to have that network. When you're removed from your father's land, you lose that. You lose all that advantages. And so Abram's called out of that land. He's willing to break away from it. And that's the land that was idolatrous. It was a pagan land. God wasn't okay with the way they did things. You can study all those old false gods and the sort of crazy things that went down. And Abram obeys them. And this happened to me. God plucked me out of the world. I did not grow up in a Christian home at all. I became a Christian when I was 17 years old. It was really simple. A friend tricked me. That's how it happened. I went to this basketball tournament. And then we were playing basketball, you know. And then someone's like, all right, everybody gather around. And this guy walks up on stage and gives a preach as a message. It was like total sneak attack. If you're a Christian, don't do that to your friends. That's super lame. But in this particular case, it worked. The guy preached the gospel and I believed. So one day I was an atheist. The next day I was a Christian. That's how it happened. That's all there is to it. It wasn't any particular argument. The word of God breathed life into me. And then I started to break away from my family. Because, as I said, we're fatherless, but we also lack a tradition. And so, if I can give you a little family history, my dad, his father, wrote two books on the occult, right? He was into, like, you know, some spirit told him to come back and tell us how to, like, live a good life and you have to do things through crystals and all this sort of nonsense. And that man, my grandfather, he got married, like, five times. And I actually just, like, a month ago was with my secret aunt that I found out about ten years ago, which was from one of his marriages. We were trying to debate which marriage it was. It was really hard to figure it out. But so this guy has had all these marriages and then he divorces my dad's mother and my dad's raised by a stepfather and he's not raised well at all by either parents. It's all broken down. And then on my mom's side, she descends from my grandmother, who was a World War II survivor. You know, Hiller tried to kill her and she came over here and she married a guy and then he divorced her and then married my grandfather, who's Irish Pony, you know, like some weird mix. I always tell people my relatives slept with everybody. And then he dies when he's, like, 33. And my mom is left without a father. And then my grandmother marries a couple people and it doesn't work out either. And my mom goes through all of that. And then she goes to a disco and she meets my dad and then they make me. That's my heritage. It's all over the place. People ask, like, what was your religion? What were you raised? American, potluck, right? It's all mixed up. I didn't believe any of this stuff. I just thought of it as mere culture or tradition. And that's why when I'm watching click I'm having an emotional breakdown. I don't know my place in the world or whatever. But then it all started for me with being converted and realizing that I had to break away. Now, some of y'all don't agree with me on this stuff. Here's something for you. I'll throw you something. It's that you need to look at what you've got to break away from. Right? There's alternate histories. You got to choose, like, do I still want that heritage to be my heritage, my kid's heritage, and my grandchildren's heritage? And you have to break. I had to do that. It was very difficult. My brothers both have struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. Matter of fact, my youngest brother had disappeared for five days. We figured he was finally dead. But we discovered the hospital he was in recovering from yet another overdose. It's amazing how people can run and lift weights and just die one day. But crack heads just keep going, right? At Latimore. But anyhow, I had to break myself away from that. I had to not take phone calls. And one of my brothers used to be homeless all the time. And he's my brother, right? He's blood. So if there's a snowstorm or whatever, he could call me and ask me to pay for his hotel room. And I would do it. And eventually my wife was like, you got to stop doing this. I was like, he's my brother. You don't understand, right? Just like freaking out on her. But she was actually right. I had to break free from that. I had to be willing to start a new family line. And it's very difficult. It is very difficult to start from kind of nothing and even from within a hole sometimes. But I have a wonderful wife. I have seven kids. It's been a bumpy road. I'm doing it. And again, there's nothing about me that's not true about you as well. Just don't buy it. I'm not up here to sell you that I'm this impressive person and something different from you. I don't believe that. We've made different choices, but I think you can do it, right? I think you can break away. Instead of having a heritage of hell and of confusion and chaos, you can have a heritage that's heavenly and orderly and beautiful and leads to something wonderful. So break away. That's one. The second thing that I want to pull out of this is that Abraham, he had this multi-generational vision given to him by God. I'm going to make you the father of father of father of fathers, right? And that was really hard for Abraham. He was old as dust. Scripture says that. He was as good as dead, right? He was like almost 100 years old and the idea that he's going to have a son and then it takes 25 years for God to fulfill that promise and he had to wait. But Abraham had this vision that was bigger than himself. I see this happen in marriages all the time. The reason marriages fail at about, you see these 20 to 30-year-old marriages fail and the thing you'll find that's a common denominator in most of them is that the last kids get ready to leave the home, right? Get ready to graduate school and leave the home. That's what happened to somewhere along the way. The kids became the mission of the marriage and that held the marriage together. But it's not big enough, right? My wife can't satisfy me. It's impossible. And I can't satisfy her. We have a vision for our life for a household that's bigger than most of us. I can't do my vision if my kids aren't successful. If they don't carry it on, it won't happen, right? You got to think big and if you grew up like me, I grew up above a bar, right? The prostitutes would take their johns out back. Late at night, all the guys would come out and fight in the parking lot, you know, drunken idiots. And I would open up my window because I was on the second floor and I'd shoot them with my BB gun, you know? Bam! And they were like, oh, who's did that, you know? And that's what I grew up in. My dad struggled with alcoholism and he was a gambler and there was times we didn't have rep money and it was hard to... it was hard to eat. And so if you're coming from something like that, having just a clean apartment where you pay your bills on time, that seems like a really... you've made a jump, but it's not enough guys. Like, I'm almost certain that your problems you lack ambition. You don't have enough, right? You have to think bigger. You have to think in such a way that it takes children to get it done. It takes heirs to carry on your name, to carry on your mission. Memory said to Abram, I will make your name great. And here I am. How many thousand years talking about him? It's been a while. I'm one of his children. Because I had the same faith that he does. Not true God. So you have to have a vision that's bigger than that. We don't understand what a household is anymore. So a household is not just a place that you sleep at night, right? Netflix and chill. A household is everything. The property, the influence. Abraham's household was so big that he went to war with four kings and defeated them. He had that many servants. And so his household is a place of productivity. And one of the things that we're struggling with right now is that the Industrial Revolution gutted the house. It used to be that the way you got something done was at home and the women and the kids were involved. People always ask, should women work? Absolutely. But the work is supposed to happen in the household. Men and women are supposed to work together. Men and children are supposed to work together. But it was in the home. And that got removed out of the home into the factories. And then that work became something that happened out there away from home. And so home used to be a place of productivity, of hospitality, of training. It's where we disciple our kids. This is how I do ministry. Like I teach, but a big part of our ministry is we just bring people over. This is what a Christian home looks like. This is a normal husband, normal life. Yeah, my kids sometimes are jerks, right? We just show them the real thing. We draw them in. We disciple. My wife is affecting seven people in a very big way. She educates my kids. I depend on her for hospitality. I'm really good at offense with money. I'm good at making money, defense. I'm not a defensive player. So she's the one that does our budget and all that. We've worked that out. We're a team. We're building something together. A household that will produce households. Your vision is too small. You got to want more. You know, not to count. I mean, ah, you know, yeah. But want more, want more, that's what I would say. And then the third thing, the third thing is start where you're at. Father, where you're at. You've been divorced, right? You woke up to how to be a man and your kids are much older. There's no time machines, right? You wasted some decades of your life. You don't have a time machine. Control the controllers. You can't go back. You can't change it. You don't like the world you live in too bad, buddy. This is where you're at right now. 2020. I'm excited about this, right? At the fracture in history. This is a really major time we're living through. You know, barbarians are around Rome. Crazy things are happening. The internet is like the Industrial Revolution on steroids, right? I'm excited that I get to be alive when things are in play again. The overtune window in the last like nine months had like shifted big time. And I'm able to talk about things like this and not get tired and feather too much, right? I'm really excited about this time. So you're born now, you can't go back. So father, where you're at? Who can you father? It blows my mind how lonely men are. We are, we run in packs. It's the very beginning of problems. King Solomon tells his son, hey, don't run with blood thirsty men. They're going to tell you to come. And the reason he's saying that is that we want that. We want a crew to run with that has a shared mission. And a lot of us don't have that. So we're turning, you know, to Netflix and to streaming and video gaming and other more destructive things. You need people and people need you. I think about my advantages. My biggest advantage is for whatever reason after I converted to Christianity, a lot of men took interest in me and spoke to me and helped me. And a lot of them weren't great. I remember one guy, I don't know if he's still alive. He was a big man, right? Like 400 pounds, big guy, owned his business. And he was like, so Michael, are you reading the Bible? I was like, are you supposed to read the Bible? I didn't know. And so he started teaching me how to read the Bible and it was nothing mind blowing at all. But it changed my life, you know? And I had a guy that introduced me to G.K. Chesterton and then to the Puritans and then I started reading all these books. And these guys just gave me what they had. I think about my father. My father was beat by my grandfather. My grandfather was not a good man. And my dad didn't have a lot to give me. But he gave me what he had. And he's recently told me that he loves me and he's proud of me. He gave me this little flame, right? A little flicker and I'm making it bigger. Give them what you have, right? Get your eyes off yourself. It's such a narcissistic culture, right? When you start building up people, it changes you. And so that's what I would say, father, where you're at. Make disciples where you're at. If you don't, I know right now, finding a woman that's good wife material, I am very well aware how difficult it is. That's how this started for me. How I got involved in this. I had all these young men that were like in their late 20s and 30s that couldn't find a wife. And some of them are like really handsome, well to do guys. And I'm like, this guy can't. And then they would finally get a girl and she was like, you know, like not very attractive and not very good. And then she would dump the guy. And I think, why in the world is she dumping this guy? He is like so above her, but they've been so, their vanity has been inflamed so much that they don't understand that's quite the catch. And it's a really hard time and I wanted to understand how to help these men. And you know, clicked on the YouTube and here I am a couple years later. So I know, I know that's difficult. But you can start building your household right now, right? Get really skilled in one thing and competent in a thousand others. Surround yourself with men. Pour into other people, right? Be patriarchs. That's what this is about. I am happy. I am very happy. I don't care if I get canceled from Twitter, it doesn't matter to me. I'm pushing the boundaries all the time trying to figure out how far I can, how far can I take this thing, you know? But I love my wife. I love my kids. I love being a father. I've been there for their births. I've watched their first steps. It's watching, it's crazy how you can take genes and mix them together and get all these different people, right? Like my daughters are very different and I'm watching them grow and I'm seeing their potential. Hudson is my, my odyssey is very type A and clean. Athanasia someday will be your emperor, right? This kid is like intense and always wants to fight and no one can stop him and he's the one that I think will make America into a Fausteria eventually. That's the goal. But that's a joke. Anyhow, you never know with some of these. But guys, there's hope, right? God can make ashes into beauty. He can rebuild things. He can work in and through you. The world needs men, not men out there, right? You guys right here is where it starts. So that's the challenge I have for you. Thank you. Got nine minutes. Anyone have any questions? Hey, first off, I want to say excellent speech. Like it a lot. Thank you. As a believer myself, I've been following Dowl Rock until he recently stopped posting and having church shots for lack of a better word. I see this encroaching cuckoldry for lack of a better term everywhere. I see it in hard line Baptist churches. I see it in the Catholic church when I'm gone. What is your plan of action for men that want a traditional Christian relationship, traditional Christian masculinity but are literally running out of space to go? Yeah, it's a real problem. You know, once upon a time, the church was, you know, 100 people in Jesus. And then we took over the world, right? Took over the Roman Empire. And so a lot of movements start small. So it's a snowball. So be willing to be the person that's going to take up that cause and fight it. And guys quit too early. War is bloody. When you're going through hell, keep going, right? Win. Because you want to win. A lot of guys don't want to win. I'm in this to win. That's what I want. I'm going to change it. Or I'm going to die trying. So I think first off, just commit yourself to the goodness of it. If it's true and you're committed to the church, then you better not leave, right? Or your life is a lie. And so you have to work towards this. That's the first thing. Commit yourself to the battle. The second thing is slowly find like-minded people and be willing to help people get there. You know, where you're at now took a while to get there probably, right? You didn't get there overnight. Things are very incremental and help people see it and help them for believers. I would say help them see it from Scripture. I mean, Scripture is absolutely patriarchal, right? There's no way to deny it. You know, it's insane that they try to. But help them see it from Scripture. And then also be positive, man. Like divorce yourself from the cynical death cult. You know, you get into some of this stuff. It's so negative. And that's why I try to emphasize, you know, my hope and joy. And the Christians should have joyful swagger. You know, you should walk around like you're in control and happy. And then people are going to start to ask you like, what's going on with you? Why are you different? And so be the change. That sort of idea of being compelling. The other thing I'm doing, I'm starting a church, right? So I'm planning a church on the east side of Cincinnati. And I want to encourage you guys, a lot of pastors are fighting the good fight. But think of it this way, okay? Let's say you want your wife to stay at home. But you both have this mortgage that depends on two incomes. And she's got student loans, okay? Well, you want to get her home. But if you take her out of her career right away, you're going to have to file a bankruptcy. You might lose your house. There's a lot of things. And so we have to work in imperfect situations a lot, right? And you have to start taking steps. So if you're in a church that has problems, you're going to have to work that imperfect situation. And I know a lot of pastors that are waking up. They've been red-pilled, so to speak. And they see the problem. But the church they've created is kind of egalitarian. And they're trying to turn a cruise ship. And those guys, you could say, oh, they should be bold. But whatever. You ever been responsible for 400 people every week and have your vocation tied up in it? If you have, then okay, whatever. I'll hear what you have to say. But it's really hard to turn a ship like that. If you find a man like that, you discover that's who he is. Get in his corner. Get his back. And pump him up and tell him, you can do this. I'm with you, right? And help that guy raise up leaders to the elder board. The leadership of the church can take on feminists. I have had to go to battle with feminists in churches. And I have a really high threshold for conflict. And even for me, it's been exhausting. So those are some things to do. Pray to God that we give us a revival and a reformation. It is a hellish time. It's very challenging. But we can come out of this. What else? Any other questions? I have a fantastic talk. Someone to inquire more. Come a little closer to the mic, please. Better? Okay. Thanks. Yeah, fantastic talk. So I want to inquire more about your perspective on porn. Okay. So there's an expression like confidence comes from evidence. And men, they when faced with like, well, it's either porn or I play all these games with the war between men and women going on, got rank hypergamy, birth control. There was like that thing where some class did their DNA tests and a third of them weren't, you know, related to their father. Yep. You got, you know, you're hit with like, even if you do get in a relationship like you talked about, you got like an epidemic of narcissism and like social media like plague. So it's either fight through all that. Sure. Or porn. I think it's a false dichotomy. It's a good question though. Okay. So just one last thing. Yep. I think the fear is that you look down the tunnel of time and I don't know about the average amount of women, the average guy meets, but hypergamy is at its max right now, in my opinion. And I think that number is super low. So you kind of like picture like you're living your life through years and years, like working on your purpose, doing quote unquote everything, right? And then maybe not watching porn, you know, not singing the level and then you get hit by a bus. In the afterlife you're like, did I make the right call? You know, so, yeah. It's a good question. And I guess my answer, so my perspective on it is, so I think lust is a sin, right? So the lust in your heart to create that thought, I would look at that as a sin. But sins aren't just a thing of being wrong, but also the idea of good versus bad, right? So there's like negative consequences attached to bad behavior. Like we all believe that. I mean, why is it a problem with women being sluts? What's your moral standard? How did you get there? Where are all these ethics sneaking in from? Where are all these presuppositions and can you defend them, right? And so that's the question you have to ask. But what I would say with pornography is that it's one thing to stumble into it because you're struggling in life. It's another thing to normalize it, right? And so first of all, I could say to young men who are struggling with it, you have my, I'm in your corner. I am. If you normalize it, I'm not in your corner. I'm not with you. I think you're making a huge mistake. I think you're giving away your masculine strength, your energy. The queen mother in Proverbs 31 says, the Solomon, do not give your strength to women, right? And that, she means that in a lot of ways. And the women, she's talking about there are whores women. Scripture talks about whores a lot. It's not a shame to bring that up. But don't give your strength to women. You're giving your strength to women and what are you getting back? Where are you getting back from pornography? What I would argue you're getting back is stress release, dopamine, relaxing, right? That is, you can even look at just from a design function, like you think that's the only thing this is for, vaginas, secrete, liquids for a reason. And there's a reason that's enjoyable. So I would say don't normalize it, even if you struggle with it. So that's it, man. That's my perspective. I'm very sympathetic. But porn is a way to keep you passive. Don't be passive. Fight through it. I would say with pornography, if you want to overcome it, look at times and triggers. So there's times you're going to tend to go that way. Usually like for me, I'll tell my wife, hey, I'm going to speak at a conference. We should have a lot of sex this week, okay? So I come chill and ready. And she's like with me. But if you know you're going to go into a really hard time, then you need to be like plan ahead. And so when I'm out of town, if I think I'm going to be stressed out, like I wake up first thing in the morning, take a cold shower, and then I'll go walk a couple of miles and listen to something. If you can masturbate in a cold shower, man, like that. I mean, that's pretty intense, you know? So times, triggers, what triggers that desire to go there? Do you feel like pornography is you being a man? Does it feel like a success? Does it feel like a win? Do you feel more manly after that? Or is it just burping? Is it just like trying to deal with a biological function? Ask yourself. And the reason it doesn't feel good is because it's not good. And that's one thing as a Christian. I'm always trying to stress to people is things aren't, it's not just, God has, it's not arbitrary rules. There's a reason that the West came out of Christianity is because it's true and it's good. So, but it is a very good question. I don't remember what I said. If I overstated hyperbole is something you would do as a preacher, but I do sympathize with anyone struggling through it, okay? Sure, yep. Well, we're going down an interesting path now, aren't we? I mean, I look at masturbation as kind of a homosexual act, honestly. A monosexual act. So, well, that's my time. So I can't get in that much trouble. No, I'm joking. But I would say, my answer real quick, I would say that when I want to have sex, I either redirect the energy towards something productive or I have sex. And that's the ideal we want to work towards. There's ideals. Guys, we don't live in a world of ideals. Build where you're at, get done what you can get done. I really appreciate this. I look forward to talking to you guys more, all right? Yeah. What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men, as patriots. There's nothing more natural than being a father.