 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 to a couple years ago until I worked with this guy who on the weekends, you know, he would go jousting. He dressed up like a knight and get 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 click 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. Right? 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 the 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. And 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? 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 of 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 what's the connection there. Honestly, I read The Bronze 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 and 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.