Michael Foster on Masculine Maturity

We are live now on the conversation that matters podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. I hope everyone's doing well today.

Finally, spring has broken in New York. So I'm actually kind of happy. It tempts us, it goes back and forth, but it looks today like it's pretty solid.

So we'll find out in a minute how things are going in Ohio and other places. I heard Michigan just got like dumped on with snow.

So it's that time of year, but there's a lot going on, obviously in politics, in the world.

I guess there's not a time when there's not a lot going on, but right now in particular, there's maybe like three or four things that I've been thinking about a lot.

And one of those things has to do with masculinity. What does it mean to be a man? And more than that, what does it mean to be a mature man?

I think a lot of people have a very distorted view of what being a man is. They're kind of climbing out of a feminized culture, but what direction to go in is a bit of a mystery.

And to help us clarify some of that, I have probably the best guests that I can think of for the program.

We've had him on once before after he wrote his book, It's Good to Be a Man. He's a pastor at East River Church, the director at, a director at Maddox.

And his website is This Is Foster. You can also go to an event that he has scheduled

July 16th through 18th at East River Church in Batavia, Ohio. Find out more about that on his

Twitter, which is also at This Is Foster without further ado, Michael Foster. Michael, thank you for being on the podcast.

Yeah, glad to be here again. So yeah, it's been a few years actually since you were on,

I think like four maybe, because when did It's Good to Be a Man come out? End of 2021,

I think, November of 2021. Okay, so yeah, it's been a while.

That's crazy, because I feel like that just happened, but we're pretty downstream from that. And you've been,

I think, a really good, sane voice in the, I don't want to say manosphere, because you're really not part of that, but you certainly have focused on masculine things and helping guys avoid pitfalls and becoming men.

And I want to talk about that, kind of have an open -ended conversation about what you've learned, especially since publishing

It's Good to Be a Man. Is there anything that you would do differently if you were publishing today? Oh man, that's a hard one.

Well, I mean, I've definitely, I think the tools are available for people to self -publish very well right now.

And you can make a lot, it depends what your goal is with publishing. If your goal is to make money, self -publishing is the way, if you have an audience, right?

And I'm pretty good at marketing, it's part of my background, but I did build a lot of relationships through publishing through Canon, and I appreciate that.

So in terms of like the process, all my future books are the majority, like It's Good to Be Married, Emily and I are working on right now, which is a follow -up to It's Good to Be a

Man. We'll self -publish that through our publishing house, Family Crest. But I don't know,

I mean, 2020, I'd like to make more money, I'd like to work with my wife, but I'm also thankful that I got to build those relationships with other people in the industry, so.

Yeah, I was asking more about the message though of the book. Is there anything you would add to it or take away from it? Yeah, so at the very beginning of that book, we say our goal was to write a book that was timely, not timeless.

And we were trying to, actually, this is, I'll read this to you right here. I just read this this morning.

So this is a November 2018 report to my session.

So I was at a PCA church, I was working as a Director of Outreach and Discipleship, and I was explaining the different things

I've been working on. So one of them was a Christian Entrepreneur's sort of outreach, and the second one was,

I wrote, by the way, I'm happy to talk to you about starting a similar ministry. I got this idea from Joe Bailey, he says, go for the men and the women will follow.

This lands me on my second channel I'm developing. I don't have a name for it yet. Basically, I've come to realize that feminism has reached peak insanity, and men are finally waking to it.

This is what is behind the Jordan Peterson moment. There's an intense hunger for teaching on how to be a man.

Sadly, the pagans are leading the way. I've read their books, subscribed to their YouTube channels, and followed them on Twitter. These guys not only have a huge following online, but are organizing real life get togethers.

They're essentially fathering a fatherless generation. I put fathering in scare quotes. Their content is helpful in spots, but ultimately lacks what only

Christ can provide. I see an evangelistic opportunity here. I'm looking for ways to Trojan horse into these groups, such as Proud Boys, Red Pill groups.

I didn't know much about Proud Boys when I wrote this. And this is 2018, the world's changed quite a bit.

If that doesn't work, I'm considering how to create another third place for these types to gather. That's why

I'm suddenly active on Twitter. I hate Twitter, it's super gay, but it allows me to make contacts with this particular demographic.

This is why I started It's Good to Be a Man, which was just a Facebook page at the time, with my friend Non -Tenet. Expect more on this second channel in coming newsletters.

When I got involved in this, it was all about evangelism for me. Just trying to understand,

I guess it was two things. Why are the Christian men turning to this stuff? Why are they going here?

And then just seeing a real opportunity to preach the gospel. So I started interacting with people on Twitter, and they read my content.

And then I get a lot of invites to these secular ministry sort of conferences. And I went down there,

I never took money or anything like that on purpose. And I built a lot of low -end friendships.

We spent time together, we liked each other. It wasn't like we're best buds or anything. But some of them led to people converting.

And some of it led to this long -term friendships people

I'm able to minister to. And I wasn't, by the time

I was going to those conferences, I wasn't serving as a pastor. I was on a ministerial leave, just we took a break.

And I was a little more willing to take risk at the time because they were mostly my own risk, right?

I wasn't like at a church, there wasn't other elders that were gonna suffer too much. I mean, I was going to just as a member, but I wasn't on a staff or anything.

And so I got deeply involved in all that. And I wrote, it's good to be a man with none to respond to a lot of the claims and counterclaims.

So it's so funny, I hear a lot of people talk about it's good to be a man as if we just repackaged ministerial ideas.

That's not true at all. Actually, we reject and criticize them throughout the book on purpose. It really is a dialogue with the ideas and we're trying to speak to the need of the moment.

At that moment, people weren't saying words like effeminate all the time. People weren't talking about LARPing.

People were not talking about androgyny. If you have to get a look for someone really using androgyny as a category, you'd have to get a

Peter Jones from Truth Exchange. He wrote a paper on it years ago. The only person

I knew that I was talking about effemacy, like commonly Tim Bailey wrote a book called The Grace of Shame.

All that stuff was like deep niche. And so when we wrote, it's good to be a man, we just happened to publish that as that wave was, not as it was breaking, but as it was going up and building.

And so we're happy that we reached those men. And I do look in our book and see things that we confronted, like we confronted how angry men were at the very end of that book.

Be careful in partnering up with other men that are more angry than you. And I think we did a pretty good job on hope.

I do think we underestimated just how angry and disenfranchised, disillusioned men would be in the coming couple of years.

And if I could go back and add some sort of more hopeful message, but the way we looked at it was a way to get people just moving in the right direction.

And I don't think we understood how intense things would get. You know, like Andrew Tate's a big deal after that.

Before we did it, I knew who he was and we had spoken at similar events and all that. But things really,

I mean, it's crazy what's happened in the last five years. A whole lot's happened. And so I don't think we ever thought this would become as mainstream as it has.

It's still not that mainstream, but it's exponentially more mainstream. So I don't know how to really,

I don't think I'd change the core message. I believe in all of it. There's a couple of places in that book that need an adverb, a little qualification on it here and there.

But on the whole, I feel really good and stand by it. I just wish we could have kind of helped more men than we did.

I know we helped a bunch, but seeing some of these guys out there, now that I've turned to more and more intense things and really are pretty black belt is discouraging as a father and a brother and a pastor to see guys like that.

So anything we could have done to stop that. There's not a chapter in there on habits. That's one thing we should have had.

I don't know how we missed that, but there's kind of a jumble of thoughts, but there you go. Yeah, I think that's really great.

Actually, when you published, Jordan Peterson was, I think, the hot commodity in that space.

And now you're right. It's gone way past him. He's online. A lot of the guys who used to follow him think he's just compromised.

And I don't know that he changed his message really. He's saying a lot of the same things. I mean, he's said compromised things in my estimation, but what do you expect from him?

He's not like you are. He's not a Christian pastor or anything. One of the things that startled me, not startled, but it took me a little bit by surprise and maybe it shouldn't have.

But I remember maybe six, seven months ago that I had a tweet

I put out there about just trying to go find a wife and basically trying to encourage guys, like don't give up, keep going.

I know it gets hard. Like you get rejected. And I got so much backlash for it with people who were saying, and getting a lot of traction, by the way, that if you ask a girl out, you're gonna probably go to jail.

Which at first I was like, what are you talking about? And then it's like some circumstance that usually I can't verify, but where someone went to jail because they innocently asked a girl out.

From that all the way to just, there aren't any good girls. They're all, I'll spare the vulgar language, but they're spoiled essentially.

And I just was sort of like, what's going on? I got married, I guess, 10 years ago, our anniversary is coming up, and I'm in a blue state, and it was kind of rough just trying to find

Christians who were eligible and matched my values and all of that. But now guys think that was a different world and I'm coming at them like a boomer.

I'm telling them to do something that's impossible to do. And there's also voices that are encouraging, just don't even pursue a woman.

That's just not what you should do as a man because they're all terrible. And I'm assuming you've seen this online at least, and I don't know to what extent this is present in churches, but I know it is there because I've talked to guys who are younger who are under this kind of thinking.

And it concerns me a bit because it's just not taking into account the providence of God.

And it's, like you said, black pilled, but it's to a point where you're now denying the created order.

Like you're now looking at things and thinking, well, God made men and women to be attracted to each other.

It's not good for man to be alone. We need help mates. Like this is just baked into who we are. And now we're just denying that and saying that, no, actually, maybe the evolutionary scheme makes more sense.

Like men are just designed to have multiple partners. Women are designed to only for the top 1 % of guys, and that's it.

And so if you're not in that, you might as well give up. And for a guy to hear that message,

I'll just tell you on a personal level, I've seen where that leads, and it leads to like a whole bunch of pornography and viewing women in really terrible ways and not maturing, not becoming the man of virtue that you should be.

So that's a mouthful, but maybe address that a little bit. I mean, if you've seen this, what's your recommendation to guys who do legitimately feel discouraged?

How should they interact in the dating scene? What should they do if they think that it's just hopeless?

Yeah, it is a mouthful. So let me try to tackle just a couple of things. Part of the battle here is that there is a truth that wasn't recognized by the majority of the church and much of the culture for a very long time, which is there's a sort of misandry, sort of a hatred of man that did exist for a long, long time, and a coddling of women that existed for a long, long time.

And all the while, the looseness, the attitude in women has degraded from several decades ago.

That's like multiple decades ago. That seems to be very obvious.

Like you can just look at porn usage in women, right? It's gone up exponentially.

It's still not what it is in men, but that's like one easy way you can demonstrate that women are becoming more sexually perverse.

But it's also true in other ways. Dating apps, Instagram, all that stuff, we've always fed that.

So there's been an unwillingness to say, look, men are being demonized, they're being treated as masculine devils, feminine angels.

You have that sort of idea. And so anytime that you challenge, you push back like, yes, that's true, but also there's a

Holy Spirit, there's pockets of culture that haven't been affected by that in the same way, then people get really upset and they feel like you're acting like those who wouldn't speak the truth for a long time, that aren't

Redfield, right? The idea of Redfield is seeing the world for what it really is. And what these Redfield gurus were saying, hey,

I'm Morpheus, let me lead you in here. And you won't like what you see, but it's better to see the truth than to believe the lies.

So they would show people like, here's the truth of women, here's the truth of society. It's nihilistic and it's horrible and all that stuff, but at least it's the truth.

And yeah, I found a wife and she loves me because I'm awesome. So please don't stop subscribing, like keep subscribing to my

YouTube channel. Here's a PDF ebook you can buy for 40 bucks.

That'll help you get the most out of it. You know, something like that. But yeah, they really are against you. It's really that bad.

So those guys are out there saying that. And then anyone that pushes back on that, then is actually saying, hey, you're not seeing reality.

That Redfield moment you had wasn't as eye -opening as you thought it was. Then you look like the sort of people that are trying to stick them back in the matrix, right?

You're trying to put them back, pull the wool over their eyes. So we have this battle of unspoken truth, a bunch of different types of gurus that are trying to weaponize and monetize that truth.

Some start out really wanting to help people. I do think Jordan Peterson lost his way in a really big way, but I do think in the beginning there was a more sincere, anytime you see him talking to young men, like way back in 2018, 2017, he was very fatherly and warm and loving towards them.

He had those videos that did out. But he became much more of a personality to market and the persona became, you know, and then he went through his breakdown.

So I do think there are some guys out there that are trying to help these men. There's a lot that just saw this as a misery, miserable people, sick people, like are easy to make money off of.

Like if you're watching television, which I don't watch too much, but what's one of the most common sort of commercials you're gonna see?

It's gonna be commercials for medicine, right? And selling people make you feel better. These guys, they like to keep you sick so they can sell you medicine, right?

And they're doing that. And so we have the merchants of misery, is what

I always like to call them. We have an unspoken truth. And then we have people that are waking to those things, but also trying to pull those guys away from these gurus that are ultimately false teachers.

Not that they don't say some true things, but that they're not, they don't care about the soul, the person is a sheep to be, you know, pleased.

We're trying to pull them away. And that's the challenge. It's a challenge, because if you tell them something they don't want to hear, like yes, women are bad, right?

Some women are bad. And oh, so all women aren't like that? So they got this built -in sort of response.

Yeah, actually, all women aren't like that. Like, well, that's just a boomer idea. No, that's just a true idea.

It has nothing to do with boomers, okay? And no, there are good women out there you can marry. Well, no one's doing that, you just don't know.

I just married off, I don't know how many 20 -somethings in my church in the past five years, a ton of them.

Well, lucky for you, that's not here. And so you have to bring these people to confront that, yeah, while society has failed them, they've also failed in ways, too, and they have to take agency for themselves.

People, victim culture is really powerful right now. So then we have this sort of victim culture and these men that we're trying to rescue them from.

It's a very toxic mix that we're trying to solve right now. I mean, where it really starts the first battlefield for men isn't out there, it's inside, right?

And that's taking responsibility for themselves. You wanna talk about mature masculinity? Mature masculinity is where you take responsibility for yourself, and then you become so responsible that you have a surplus of resources to take care of a woman, to take care of a family, to lead a church, to lead a business, right?

But that all starts with you taking responsibility for yourself. And I always thought a lot of the

Manosphere stuff sound like little boys clinging to their mom's skirts, right?

They're like, oh, the world's so bad, and we don't wanna go out there, and you can't win.

And I just kept thinking, yeah, the world is full of challenges, but we were made for dominion. We're made to take over this stuff.

And guys, the reason I know you can do this is because you are a man, and God made men for dominion.

Go out there and get it done. Well, it's really hard. It is. That's the day you were born in.

Like, you were born in a difficult time. And so you have to really help a man start to take responsibility for himself to the extent that other people can depend on.

This is the battle we're into right now. And so, yeah. I do have some questions about maturity, because that's the topic, and primarily my audience is men.

I do wanna ask about women, though, real quick, before we get to it. Do you think that any Christian women who are listening, would you have a message for them?

Are they not giving guys a shot? Is there something that, in general, you think women should be helping out in the church, at least in ways that they're not?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, we're all being sanctified, and the culture is the air we breathe and the water we swim in.

You know, I do think that both men and women have unreasonable expectations for a spouse, and that's why many of them are not married.

And then they'll say, oh, so you're telling me to lower my standards? Yeah. Yeah, in areas

I am. I am, actually. And, you know, life, you should find your spouse sexy, right?

You should be attracted to them. They should make your blood pressure go up. And so, we're not trying to say, don't marry people you find unattractive.

We're not trying to say that people's past doesn't matter. It does matter.

But if you keep adding on these restrictions, you know, you're shrinking down the possibility of people you can find.

And like, you know, we're kind of in the Reformed world. That's a very small world. So if you want them to be exposed to Reformed in their theology, you've already cut out the majority of men and women, right?

And so, now if the guy's gotta be six foot, or the girl has to have this size breast or this color hair, or whatever sort of thing you come up with, you're just very, you're limiting your options.

So I tell people is, you know, so the three purposes of marriage in Protestant theology is helpful companionship.

So do you enjoy this person? Do you like being with them, right? For a woman, is she pleasant? For a man, is he respectful?

You know, all these sorts of things. Protection against sexual morality. Is this a person you wanna be sexually intimate with?

Are you attracted to them, right? Can you enjoy, you know, so that's one. And then helpful propagation, or that's helpful.

The godly, the propagation of a godly state, sorry. So is this a person that seems like they love children, that they wanna help build a household with you?

You know, those are three things. If you find that person, just get married.

Like, if they like you and you like them, you love her, she respects you, like, put a ring on it.

And so I would say, lower your expectations to exist inside those kind of three realms, right?

You know, do you enjoy this person? Are you attracted to this person? Do you see a future in raising children with this person?

You know, and ultimately, do they fear God, right? I mean, so I would just tell women that the whole world is making you hold out for things that don't exist.

Like a six -foot -one guy that makes six figures a year and is a romantic and can write you poetry and play a guitar and, well, that's bitter.

You know, it's just, it's gonna be hard. And I would say, life moves so quick and there's a future where you and your husband, you guys didn't know you're gonna be in love.

You liked each other and you got married and then you had children and you taught them and raised them and fought to get money to buy a house and fought to do this and that.

And then one day, you've been married 25 years and you're on the back porch, swinging on a swing, watching your children play with your grandchildren.

It's a pretty satisfying life. And love is something, one reason, so what's so funny about some of the

Red Pill guys is that they're clearly after romantic love.

And like, that's what they want more than anything. They really want to be enraptured in relationship, but they'll also glorify arranged marriage.

And that's because they want romantic love without risk. They want someone to put it together.

One of the reasons that arranged marriage has worked in the past, and I'm not advocating for that, but one of the reasons it's worked, it did work, is that their view of what marriage was was different.

Right, it was a, it served a purpose to continue the family line, to have children, to stabilize relationships.

So they're coming to marriage with a less -than -romantic ideal, and then they're growing into love with each other.

You can fall deeply in love with people through years and years of working towards a common goal together.

And so I do think there has to be chemistry, but some of it's a little, we've watched too many movies and read too many poems,

I think, or read the wrong poems, I guess, so. It isn't a bad thing to learn poetry or learn how to play guitar, though,

I will say. That does give you a little edge. Yeah. If you can. I'm not saying you have to, but character and virtue.

So let me ask you this, because I've been thinking about this. So three things, okay? You just gave me three things about marriage which

I think were helpful. Three things about being a mature man, in my mind, and maybe I'm missing something, but desire, competence, and virtue.

Desire, competence, and virtue. And I really started seeing this in biblical eldership, and then

I thought, well, this is everything in life, right? Because you've got to desire the office and you've got to have competence. Like, how are you managing your household?

What do your neighbors think about you? And then you need to have virtue. What's your life like when no one's looking? So I think that it doesn't just apply to eldership.

I think it applies everywhere. And this is sort of me going out on a limb here, but it seems to me like desire has been the main focus in gurus online who want to teach you how to be a man.

Like, hey, here's the ends that you were made for. You should be conquering. You should be going to the gym. You should be

A, B, or C. And the virtue aspect of it, and the competence aspect especially, seemed more lacking to me.

And that's a big issue. Because now we're entering a time when, I don't know if we know what leadership looks like anymore.

We're just picking people, at least in the online world, who show a drive of some kind, but they don't necessarily, they can be reckless.

Like, they don't have those standards. So do you agree with that critique? Do you think it really is those three things?

Would you add anything to that? Like, flesh out maybe what you see as a mature biblical godly man.

Yeah. So, yeah, we actually had a formula, and I'm trying to remember how

I said it. It was authority, responsibility, and ability.

And that you would, if you took any type, anything out of that formula, it would lead to some form of incomplete masculinity.

So, but I like the character side. So men are really concerned about authority, as they should be.

Like, hey, I've been called to be the leader of my household or whatever. And things like egalitarianism really deny the man as having headship.

Some forms of complementarianism do that, right? And then responsibility, those are the things, the duties that God has given to you that you use your authority for, right?

And so authority and responsibility should be kept at parity. So if you have more authority, let's say you're the manager of a store, that doesn't mean you have less responsibility, right?

You're given the authority to accomplish the duties that are your duties, right? So as a, it's bad when a guy has all the responsibility and none of the authority.

That's what you see in a lot of this sort of soft complementarianism, right? And egalitarianism all the more.

And then what you have in some forms of hyperpatriarchy, if you wanna call it that, is where the man's authority is absolutized, but his responsibilities, he doesn't, he hands them off to his wife a lot or to the children or to someone else.

He's not fulfilling his masculine duties to take care of those entrusted to him. So we talk about that a lot, but there's this other thing that's an ability.

The ability is like the actual capability to use your authority to accomplish your responsibilities.

And like learning how to talk to a woman, learning how to persuade a woman. You shouldn't have to persuade a woman.

You're the one in charge. Since when, since when do leaders not persuade the people underneath them?

Like they persuade, they inspire. And there's a certain time where you command people where you're like, no, we're moving, sweetie.

I listened to you, we are moving, we have to do this. I've laid it all out, right? There are times where you have to command, but the leader's always trying to get buy -in and trying to persuade people.

That's what pastors do. That's what any good manager or director does. And so you have to develop interpersonal ability.

That's really hard for a lot of these guys because a lot of them are kind of autistic in some way. I don't know what you want to call it, but socially obtuse.

They struggle with the inner workings of the human heart. And some of them are really sweet, sensitive guys and they know that's a problem and they're working on it.

Others approach the world as if it's like binary code or something, and it's just ones and zeros.

And then there's, yeah, yeah. And so that's why blue pill, red pill, purple pill, all of these like real clear labels and categories are very appealing to them.

Alpha, beta, delta, gamma. They love these sorts of really wooden categories where there are a lot of subjective things that you have to like, well, how do

I persuade her? How do I do this? Or how do I persuade this person? It's like a formula that you can figure out.

And it's more like broad principles that you apply and they just have a hard time with that. That's a whole nother podcast, right?

But so I think you're right. So I just want to say that what is downplayed is the importance of the person's character, like prudence, temperance, self -control, like to have emotional control.

If men are the leaders naturally, by God, don't you think that their emotional state leads people a direction?

You know, if you're really angry, you're gonna produce a sort of emotional atmosphere in your home.

And we were kind of, I've never been a super angry person, but there was a really stressful time, like several years back.

So that was like probably seven years back where I just decided I was gonna get my emotions under control.

I wanted to get my anger under control and I'm gonna pull my house with me. And I have, and I've watched my boys change and I told a story about breaking my, so that's my fingers broken right here because I lost my temper once and I punched the wall and it broke my finger and I decided not to have it fixed.

That way, every time I look at that crooked finger, I think about me losing my temper. And so it's like a memorial to what happens when a man acts like an idiot.

And now I really work hard to make sure that I can be scary.

Fathers should be scary sometimes. Well, you said what to your mother, you did what, right? You know, but you should raise, someone's like,

Bilbo bargains, you know, when Gandalf gets all big, right?

But Bilbo was never in danger. Matter of fact, he runs and hugs Gandalf.

That's actually not a bad picture of fathers and children. The children know that they actually can come to that father.

They revere him and know he's powerful but they love and trust him because he's safe, right? And so I feel like that the anger stuff is one of the great weaknesses of the guys you see online.

They clearly are easy to provoke. They react, they're always offended or wondering like if you're talking about them, you know, the whole like, what's it called?

What's the word? Subtweet, yeah. So I always have people telling me like, oh,

I know what you're subtweeting. See, the thing is, it's almost always from a sermon I just did or when

I was using Buffer, I had put that tweet in there like 60 days beforehand and I had no clue what was going on in this world or that world and they thought that I was talking about them.

I wasn't, not everything's about you, dude. Like, so. Yeah. Well, I don't wanna, obviously we're not just trying to like just critique online.

I just think it is important though for guys who are listening and there's many who will listen and are listening now to this podcast to kind of compare the crooked line to the straight line just so they know, okay, this is what

I should be doing and pursuing versus maybe what I'm listening to online that could be filled with certain lies.

I was blessed. I think I've told you this, Michael. I had a stable dad and my parents were married and the red pill stuff never appealed to me as much and I think it's probably because of that.

Just be like, I never looked at guys who would take their wives or their girlfriends and start behaving in ways that were like passive aggressive towards them or had like, let's do the night with the boys and like the girls and the sort of like act like they're in the

He -Man Women Haters Club or something. And then when they're with their wives, they act somewhere else. Like I always was repulsed by that and equally repulsed by guys who would try to do the trophy wife thing of like, look how much my wife loves me, therefore

I'm successful. It's always weird. Like, I don't know, it's just natural to, you like a girl, you get married, you're both human.

It's a blessing. I don't really wanna make more of it or try to suck out some kind of like a value from that to just uphold everyone else.

But I know that like a good solid stable marriage is important, obviously.

That's why you're writing the book you're writing. And I think like where you're going is kind of what

I'm seeing as far as the need of the hour. Like, okay, so men are being attacked. Now we're in this situation though, like we're,

I'm looking at guys in, from soft complimentary and egalitarian, but also to like strong, heavy patriarch.

And I'm seeing all kinds of warped views of what marriage is supposed to be. And that sort of tips me off to like, okay, there's something else underlying this though about an insecurity, about what it is to be a man or a misunderstanding about what your responsibilities are.

Like, I don't know if you've sensed any of that, but maybe talk a little bit about how to just be normal, be normal with pursuing and gaining and keeping a marriage and not trying to extract things from your wife or from others, like an audience online or a church that you shouldn't be.

Like, how can you be content and fulfilled in the natural way God made us to be? I mean, some big things that I think are being ignored is how long it takes to change things and turn things around.

And I think, so I gain and lose weight a lot because I actually can starve myself with ease, you know?

And I could lose 40 pounds in a month, I know I could. I was a wrestler,

I developed a bad habit with food from wrestling and boxing. It's 10 pounds a week,

Michael, 10 pounds a week, really? I've lost, oh, dude, like wrestlers listening, tell

John how much weight we can lose. I've lost 20, when I was cut, I would lose 22 pounds in a week.

That's crazy. Yeah, well, people were dying back in the late nineties, they had to change the rules. But yeah,

I played football at 205 and I wrestled 160. And didn't have much fat, but that was definitely not good.

And I've watched my kids with that. You know, what it really takes, like it's how many guys you know that lose a ton of weight or get real built?

And it's like, they focus on it for like four months or a year or something. And then something happens and it messes them up and they fall back into kind of like bad habits or whatever.

So what you really need when it comes to discipline is this measured, steady way of outshield.

Like you need to build discipline over five years, 10 years, you know, like you don't want it to be a trend in a flurry of activity that is not maintainable.

God has built us to live in 24 hour periods, in weeks and in years.

And you have to build a rhythm of life where, you know, it's like parents when you spank a kid one time or something like, spanking's not working.

You gotta do it 50 more times, man. You know, like you gotta do it a bunch of times.

You know, my wife's not responding. You just gotta keep going, keep going. And you have to do it for a long time.

Then you also have to do it because it's to glorify God. It cannot just be about the outcome, right?

It's like, I'm doing this not to get things from my wife. I'm doing this because this is what

God calls me to do and it glorifies him and it's good. And that way it's not purely transactional, but it's actually out of a desire to give

God honor, right? So you have to have the right motivation. That's that desire piece, right? Where 2

Timothy 2 .22, you have to flee youthful lust and pursue all of these things with those that call on God from a pure heart or a good conscience.

And so I think the time it takes to build good habits, good attitudes, good relationships is much bigger than what people wanna admit it is.

The motivations for it have to be the glory of God because you're not gonna see a lot of the changes right away. Or are you just gonna go through this like lifestyle version of yo -yo dieting, right?

Up and down, up and down, but in your relationships. And so I think that sort of steadiness is what we have to teach again.

So stoicism in a Christian sense where there is a control over your emotions, over your appetites, over your desires, not to the extent where you're like extinguishing these things, but pointing them towards good moral ends, right?

And one of the biggest or the most highlighted part in It's Good to Be a Man is a line we have in there about how there's nothing sinful about masculine desires.

It's always the number one on Kindle. And so guys have been made to feel ashamed of their desire and they're reclaiming it, but now there's such thing as being a carnal man who is controlled by their desires.

And I think it's good that we're talking about guys getting their health in shape or get their health in control, their appetites and all that sort of stuff.

But even that, we hear people talk about that. They're like, it's so funny, it's like with this guy, clearly he's terrible because look at him and I'm not terrible like him because look at me.

You know, that's not godly either. Like you do this to get in shape. You do this because it honors

God to keep the ax sharp, to take care of your body. You do this because it honors

God to treat your wife in a way that reflects Christ's love for the church. You do this for the glory of God, not to one -up your father figures online or anything like that.

You gotta get your motives in check. And then that's the sort of freedom where like, you know what, she might be kind of reviling or whatever, but I'm not gonna be that way.

I'm an honored God and I hope that this, that God will work through this. And you know what, God does, because God made men to rule.

It's inevitable, patriarchy is inevitable, there's no way around it. And when men are trusting

God's means and doing it for his glory, God does tend to give really awesome outcomes there.

Not always, but he does. And so that's why I tell a lot of guys is you're not, you gotta be in it for the long haul, right?

And that's why the internet part of this is not super helpful, is because the internet is such a cycle, right?

It's always something new. You've gone out here and taken it on the chin, pushing back on the obsession with Jews, right?

And - A little bit. Yeah. But I just tell anyone listening, remember guys, it wasn't always

Jews, right? We've gone through this with the Crusades, with Nephilim, with, now we're hating

Bonhoeffer, hating Kory Tembu, it's just whether any of these things are justified or not, let's put that aside for a moment.

It is a constant cycle of new thing to be all revved up about.

And so that really wars against building stability in your life if you take those things serious.

It's one thing if you pop on X and look at it and read about it and know about some of these things, but it's not like what you're always talking about or always thinking about.

It's one thing to be aware of that. I don't wanna shame anyone for that. At the same time, a lot of guys have a hard time, like I can't tell you how many people that were emailing me, what are we gonna do about the

L &T factory that blew up? That's 19 % of the world's L &G over, well, first off, it's not 19%, it's 19 % of 20 % is what it actually is.

And America produces 25%, which is 6 % more than what they do over at Qatar. Not that it doesn't matter, but like, hey, just Google it and look at it, man.

But I don't know what I'm gonna do. I don't know. I do know this much is that if I don't go outside right now and talk to my son around the fire, and if I go down this, it's gonna be yet another day

I miss connecting with my boy or whatever, or I'll tell you this much, if I don't go in and work hard and make money, if there is some sort of crisis,

I'm gonna be in a real jam. And so mature manhood is like really just clinging, like just grabbing a hold of that mission and not letting go of it and go, go, go, day after day after day for the glory of God.

And then one day you have things, you have respect, you have children, you have a house, you have a position and status and all the things that matter to guys.

But you have to be willing to not get distracted. And the world wants to distract you.

The devil wants to distract you. Your flesh wants to be distracted. One of the reasons we fast is to focus, not to be distracted by food, to focus on spiritual needs, whatever.

We are so distracted. And the formula to mature masculinity is not hard.

It's not at all. Just go to the

Bible, what does God call you to do? Do it. And do it over and over again for the right reasons. I mean, oh, is it that simple?

It is actually. It's just really hard. It's really hard. And these guys online are in the ad business, right?

It's the newspaper. And just know that you are being sold as an audience and know what you're getting into and don't take it too serious.

Plug down in a local church. What if the local church has problems? Well, it's like every other church you'll go to, right? Churches exist in different levels of purity and impurity.

Go to one that's basically biblical and plop down and then get involved and do that for 10 years and life will change.

That's just the truth of all this. So I wanna be respectful of your time because you do need to be out by the fire with your son.

We have a few questions. I have one more question myself though. And I wanna say sort of leading up to that question that some of the guys who are listening right now, you guys are doing such a good job and you are pursuing all these things

Michael talked about. And I just wanna say good job. That is exactly what you need to be doing. And maybe this was just a reinforcement and an authentication that what you're doing is actually worthwhile and positive.

You sent me something the other day though Michael that I wanna ask you about in the context of pastoral ministry. It was a video and I watched it and it shook me up.

And it was basically what I gained from it. It was a guy, some YouTuber, and he's talking about game theory and how you post like a picture online of a pretty scene in the forest or something.

And you think like this has value but you can't really put a price on it or there's no way to quantify. You just know intrinsically it's universally good.

You post it and then there's this value attached to it based upon how many likes and shares and money you might pull in.

And you start trading in that value system which is like a lot better and superior for this quantifiable lesser value system.

And the more you do that, the more you get hooked into basically a game. It's like a video game where you have competitors and you're trying to get more points than them.

And that's what Twitter is, that's what YouTube is and these places for some people. And it's hard not to fall into it.

And so this sparked a conversation with my wife and I'll tell you my wife, when

I don't listen to something she says, I get in trouble for it. So I have learned, and this is obviously

I'm the man of the house and all, but like I've learned I need to listen to my wife. And she's been saying to me, like, hey, just like be careful with the time you spend online, the things that you choose to go to battle over.

And I've been really like purposeful about, okay, I need to make sure my life, my church, my local community comes first and online must serve that.

And if it doesn't, then I'm in sin and I gotta stop. And that's like a firm like barrier in my life.

So as someone, I'm going up for ordination soon. So this is like a personal question for me to you.

As someone who's pastoring a church, when you have people under you who are caught up in game world, okay.

And they don't know how to get out exactly. It's like an epidemic. How do you lead them in your estimation from point

A to B, even though you just said it's gradual, but like at some point there's gotta be a turn where like they're jolted out of it.

And you're like, hey, here's what God actually called you to do. And the last thing

I'll say is, the challenge to all this in my mind is a scaling issue where there's just not a lot of chiefs and there's way too many

Indians or people who think they're chiefs and they're not, that are like, they're not fathers or older brothers.

They're just like court jesters and peers who are like, let's take the ship or whatever. In that environment, how do you pastor well?

The guys who need it. Well, first off, I was writing this article on,

I didn't publish it, it was too personal. Sometimes you write things and you realize, ah, this is like therapy, I shouldn't share this.

But I was thinking about one of the great regrets I have in the last five years, because in the last five years, my professional career has exploded where I work during my day job, is what

I call it. My church has grown and the book, all that stuff happened really for me in about five years.

And it was very intense. And I transitioned from more of the pagan manosphere stuff into the

Christian masculinity space that was starting. There were some rough characters in there, but I wanted to invest in them and hopefully turn this a good direction and really get the wind in our sails and point men towards biblical mature

Christianity, make these guys into church men and all that stuff. Well, it didn't work out. It just, in 2022,

I was seeing what was going down and I just recognized I really had to get out of it, but it was hard to give up because I like to win and I love to build things.

And all this stuff online post COVID really felt like we're winning and building all this stuff.

And so I was working with all these other kind of guys that now are in the masculinity, they're in that space, guys like Joel and Ogden and all these guys, some who

I still have relationships with, some that we've just kind of parted ways. But what happened to me is my mom died is what happened.

My mom, we had medical malpractice and they caused my mom to have strokes.

And this was in 2023. And I, is that right?

It's 2023. I can't keep straight. I think it is 2023. Yeah, it was.

So I had to pull out of the dual weapons conference for that reason.

And I was kind of thankful for it because I didn't really want to be involved in that space anymore. I don't really, I'm not a big fan of conferences, or at least not normal conferences.

I'd like it to be something different and interesting. But my mom, me and my wife had to fight to save her from the hospital.

It was, I could do a whole podcast on hospitals trying to kill people. Like you wouldn't believe it until you went through it.

You're like, I heard some of these horror stories before, but it's really hard to just know that, that they want to clear that bed as fast as possible, almost at any cost.

The doctors were fine, but the people that are in charge of who's in what bed are not fine. So it was super stressful.

And, and around that time, you know, I just couldn't, I couldn't do it anymore.

I didn't have the time. I was spending four hours a day at the hospital trying to save my mom's life for months.

And then we get her out and she dies, right? She dies. She looks like she's gonna, she's healing and all this stuff and have her at this place where we take care of her about four months, or not four months, four weeks.

And she just dies one night, I got a call at five in the morning. So I, all that effort, all,

I mean, I fought, like I'm really good at negotiations. I am a vigorous person when it comes down to stuff like that, multiple lawyers, whatever.

It was me versus the entire, the entire, they had like rooms full of lawyers and me going after these guys.

And so then I, so I lose, my mom's dead. And I look at my phone and I go to where, you can get to all the missed calls on the iPhone, right?

And, and there, there's missed calls from my mom before she went in the hospital. So so many missed calls, right?

And then I'm talking to these influencers online. How do I scale? How do I win? And you're like, what's wrong with me?

Like, what is wrong with me? What, what, what, how did I lose the plot? I'm not, I don't wanna build a media company.

I'm doing a publishing house with my wife, just cause I wanna, if I'm gonna spend all this time publishing books,

I wanna spend time with my wife and kids doing it and then get the benefit. But I'm like jolted out, like, and then

I happen to be moving out of that as the reform world is just like, oh, cats and dogs and fighting for all this.

And again, everyone wants you to take a side cause they're, they're stupid, right?

Like, which side are you on? Like, first off, man, stop trying to force the agenda. There's multiple sides.

There's things I like about both of these people or maybe I disagree here, but it's not worth me burning your relationship down online or in some cases, this guy was nice to me, was kind to me and you know what?

What does that buy him? That buys him just me, I'm gonna let it go and I'm just gonna be out and I disagree, but I'm not gonna get involved and because I can't save everybody, it's not my responsibility to police the entire internet.

I can't pastor the entire internet. I got into this by being like that. What I really need to do is make sure

I answer my mom's calls, make sure that I pay attention to my wife, make sure that I'm writing good sermons, not for people online, but for the people in front of me on Sundays.

I think that some people are gonna wake up and realize they've been drunk for years on, on, you know, breaking, breaking, this war, that war, this person, that person, the

Jews or it's the reptilians. Erica Kirk's a reptilian. That's right, you know, like what's happened?

What's happened to us? Not only are we ignoring things that matter, we're doing it for small trifles that don't matter, right?

And, and so what I, I think what it takes for a pastor is what is your priority? Well, my priority is

God, number one, God above all, right? Like I'm not, I'm not, I'm not denying

Christ for anything. And second, then my household, right?

How's my wife doing? Like, how are my kids doing? These, so many of these pastors are destroying their entire marriages and households and sacrificing the love of strangers or sacrificing the love of their family for the love of strangers.

You know, that's crazy. And then, and then take care of your church. And then out of the overflow, that what's interesting is when you're paying attention to your wife and your kids and your church, like God gives you real world examples and real world wisdom.

And you can write about that stuff and it blesses and helps other people that are out there living the actual life. And can you keep up with the people that are like producing dobs of content and just trend writing and the talking heads?

You can't, but those guys are gonna run themselves into the ground and at some point people get sick of it and they leave.

And so what I tell everyone just, man, first things first, like are you in the word?

Are you praying? Are you fasting, right? Are you praying with your wife? Are you doing family devotions?

Are you prioritizing Sunday service? Are you praying for the people that revile you?

Are you praying for the people that are your enemies so you can protect your heart from becoming embittered and so hard that you lose your sensitivity to what's going on around you?

Are you working to help your pastor? Like so much of what goes online is your wife's not good enough.

Your husband's not good enough, right? You're not good enough. You know what also? Your church, your pastor is not good enough, right?

It's just like totally making people dissatisfied with everything going on in their life.

That's what they're doing. And you have to pull away from that because the advertisers have to tell you there's something you don't have and we'll give it to you.

And you got to pull away from that and learn to enjoy real life, man.

Like, you know, sunlight before screen light, you know? And get out there and spend time with people.

And if you do that, make time to go spend time with some old people in your congregation.

You know, go hug an old woman or an old man that spouses that, you know how little they get touched?

Like, and just to feel like, hey, good to see you. How are you doing? What's going on? Go talk to the young men in your church.

Despite what people online think, there's young reformed men that aren't plugged into all of it.

They go to your church and they'll respond. So what I have to say that's, those are my thoughts on this whole space.

And pastors is we can use social media and media. I know that's not the main thing here.

But as a really powerful tool, if we have something to offer, and you only have something to offer if you're out there doing it in real life, and you will get mature.

People, knowledge is great, right? You need knowledge, but you go out there and apply knowledge, and that's how you get wisdom.

And you'll start to have wisdom to offer people if you're just going out and trying to do something. You'll be more patient.

Don't run for office, go build a chicken coop. You know, go teach your kid how to hit a ball or something.

And then you'll have something to offer to someone else. That's such a good reminder for me, and I think for a lot of people listening.

So thank you, Michael. Thanks. One of the really quick thought I had while you were talking is like how much of this does come down to an identity thing too, where I think if you see yourself as a husband, a father, a pastor, all the other things, like a musician, whatever

God's gifted you with, that kind of orders your life. And if you feel the need to like,

I'm not really living unless someone's betraying me and I'm raging at them, or I need some battle to attack that's cheap and not like really consequential, then it's probably like a good clue that you're out of whack.

Like you gotta look back to all these things that God's ordered in your life. I wanna just briefly, wow, we're almost at an hour.

All right, so you can give short answers here, Michael, if you want. I just got a few questions from the audience that I've highlighted here.

And anyone else wants to ask questions? Now's your time. So Cosmic Treeson asks, towards us two, okay,

I'm not sure exactly what, I'm gonna skip past the first sentence. How might young men, 25 to 45, who have learned from Michael orient themselves in the world so that they would respect them, not tentatively or without reservations?

So how can a young man get respect, I guess? I guess that's the question. How might young men learn from Michael?

Well, look, I'll tell you this much, is when I'm in a room with people I respect, I ask hard questions and I listen.

And so Chris Wiley is someone I look up to, he's kind of a mentor. George Grant's been a mentor to me.

Dr. Joseph Piper has been a mentor, and then a bunch of people no one would know. And when

I'm with those people, I ask them questions and get wisdom from them and I go and do things, right?

And what I would say, here, someone's calling me to my computer, sorry.

Oh, that's all right. I'm getting a call too. One second.

Take your time. Cosmic Trees, and thank you for clarifying to everyone that I do get sometimes confused by your two part comments.

If you put it in one comment, it's easier. Anyway, go ahead, Michael. Do you need me to fill time?

All right, I'm gonna keep filling time here. We have a number of other comments coming in and I'll try to address some of the ones that I don't think are necessarily unique to Michael, if I can.

Rock says, he's talking about parables, parables of Jesus and that Matthew 13 says, therefore

I speak to them in parables because while seeing they do not see, while hearing they do not hear, the only way to be redeemed is to be moved from the old creation and the new order to bear the image of the heavenly man.

I agree with that. I'm not sure what that is in relation to in the podcast, but that is spiritual. I'm so sorry, my music turned back on on my computer.

I was like, where's this coming from? Oh, okay. I don't know if you guys could hear it or not, but it was like blasting me.

And I was like, what's going on? I triggered something, sorry about that. No, you're good, you're good. You were talking about mentors, people you respect.

Oh, all I was gonna say is just like, you, if you want people to respect you, one, you listen to them and you go and do things.

And so like take mentors. The way mentors work is you call a mentor and say, here's my problem.

And they say, well, here's two or three things you could try to do. And then you go try to do them. And then you probably won't call them again for a couple of weeks or a couple of months.

And then you'll see them somewhere like, hey, what happened with that thing? And you tell them. And those guys start to respect and trust you.

And that's one way to build it with older men is be a guy that listens and gets things done.

I mean, really, or at least has an attempt, follow through. Follow through is like, if you follow through on things, if you execute on things, you will build a ton of respect wherever you're at.

So it's not being part of the gripper army and flattering people above you. That's not what it is.

Here's what I'd say. I would say, if you are one of those guys and you get things done, right, people will respect you.

I guarantee. Yeah, that's true. I guarantee within that organization, like whatever groups they have, there's people that actually follow through and lead the meetings or whatever, and people that don't.

And that'll be the difference between where there's actual respect and not, so. Yeah, yeah, very true.

Okay, so Hardboard says, when I see other parents in our church raising their children, I fear for my children's prospects.

Any advice on navigating that without leaving my church? I've heard this before too, like my church doesn't have anyone for my kids.

Well, it's probably true. I mean, churches, the average size of the church is 75 people.

So the odds that you're gonna find the right person for your kids in the church you're in, that's why you have to belong to the larger networks.

There's advantages in summer camps, church camps, Christian sports leagues, 4 -H.

So I think you have to be building networks where you can introduce your kids to multiple people.

I purposely wanted my son to go out with me to Battleground to meet some of these pretty girls out there that I knew about, they're about his age.

And I told him, I was like, look, I'm not telling you to marry these girls. I'm just letting you know that there's an ocean, don't settle for the pond here unless you're sure.

And he ended up marrying a girl from a youth group, which is fine, from our youth group. But I just wanted him to know there was options out there.

And so I think you have to get involved in more things in your community.

If you're gonna stay in your little tiny country church or your little tiny church, yeah, you're not gonna meet very many people.

But joining some sort of political action, biking club, you know,

I was thinking about Jiu -Jitsu, why guys love Jiu -Jitsu so much is because they don't have a friend group. And they go to Jiu -Jitsu and they find people that are interested in something that they are, and suddenly they have a built -in friend group.

But expand your network to meet people. And that's what we'll have to do, find really worthwhile networks and take a little risk.

I met my wife at a Bible study that was like an hour from my house that someone just invited me to one night.

I don't know, did you meet your wife at your church or was it somewhere else? No, I met her at a Bible study, actually, that was an hour from my house that I led.

I lived in Southern Indiana and she was down on the east side of Cincinnati. And yeah, you just gotta get outside of the four walls of your church and your house.

And that's hard for homeschool families. Okay, the Reformed churches seem to have a good grasp on what

Michael is describing here. Our experience in our Reformed congregation is a very special dynamic occurring that we've never seen before.

Thank you. Okay, I don't know if how this connects. Thank you, I'm one of those rare people that do not use social media.

Michael has a calm demeanor. This is a well -receiving, great message. I think that's just a compliment to you. Thank you, I really appreciate that, that's kind.

And Wendell says, many local church troubles are caused by YouTubers and ex -accounts.

Yeah, I think we've been saying that. Sam Treving says, may have been covered already.

Any advice on resisting pearl clutching from the weekly online emergency? I think you actually already addressed that like bullseye,

Michael, but - I think you should just, yeah, I think go build a nuclear shelter and get enough water and flour for 10 years and go down there and hide.

I think the real - Yeah. Here's what you need to do. You need to screenshot some of these things.

I have some of these in a folder from, and then screenshot the worry of every

March for years going, and put it in a folder, you know, insanity folder. And then go look what people are losing their mind about in March, or is it still going on?

Right. What were they, the year before, is it still going on? You know, like one of my favorite things,

I don't know if you guys have this, but I'll come back and check on YouTube. Do you guys remember where we were one week of running out of fuel during the pandemic?

I swear it was like seven months. In one week, all the diesel's gone. There's, I kept seeing that.

It never happened. And then after a while, I was like, yeah, I think the fuel's fine, I think. It's not real.

Just like remember this stuff and then come back and check on it, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that was one of many predictions that were gonna spin us out of it.

No toys for Christmas, remember that one? I remember that one. It did happen, yep. I mean, that's a little more minor than like this virus is gonna kill us all, or the government's gonna impose, like these restrictions will never end.

We will always be wearing masks and distancing. Let's see. Okay, so we already did that.

Bernard says, Bernie, Bernie. I think I mostly blame being single on myself, not the culture.

I think I've missed opportunities in the past where I didn't prioritize marriage or getting to know someone of the opposite sex.

So I actually know Bernie, and he's like from, I've known him for a few years.

He's a great catch. So I don't know if you wanna address that. There are like quality people out there and they wonder sometimes, like, is it me?

What, like, why is it, how's it gonna happen? Yeah, so one, it's good to take responsibility for where you failed.

It would be bad to ruminate on it, right? And to like just get stuck on blaming yourself so much.

Well, you can't correct things that already happened. You don't have a time machine, but you can start doing things now, right?

And then what I would tell you is, again, put yourself out there, get involved in different sort of social groups and whatever.

And one thing that single guys could do that would really help them is learn to enjoy women.

And I know that sounds crazy, but what I mean by this is learn to have a conversation with a woman and enjoy it.

Learn to enjoy the feminine perspective. It's not a male perspective. That's for certain a lot of times.

The things that my wife cares about used to seem so foreign to me. I've been married to her for a long time.

I understand now, not always, but mostly, right? So actually just learn to conversate with women without trying to convert.

So what I mean by convert, in sales, right, you start a conversation and then you try to move it towards an end.

What I think guys would do better is learn to just enjoy female interaction and not try to move it towards dating and let it blossom.

One, you come across very confident. And then also the fact that you're not desperate to make it into something makes women feel more comfortable with you, but also think, hey, maybe this is a decent guy.

Because nothing chases women away like being desperate. And that's like guys that over -text or like texting too much.

Like, how are you doing this morning? And the girl says, doing fine. The guy's like, whoop, hits this huge thing of text.

And the girl's like, oh, this is more than I can deal with emotionally right now. And so like put yourself out there.

Don't focus on yourself too much. Like just fall in love with good things. Learn how to woodwork, whatever it is you're into, right?

Like develop interesting hobbies and then learn how to talk to people and have a real back and forth, especially with women and see what happens.

Yeah, I think that's great advice. And growing up with brothers, that was something that I kind of lacked in.

I didn't understand the female side. And now that I'm married and I have a daughter, I'm like, oh my goodness, this is, it's so beautiful, but it's so different.

And, you know, some of my wife said, I don't know if this isn't really uniquely female, but she'll like say these profound things that just like wrap up four paragraphs that I'll say.

She'll just like give me a phrase. So when we were having our discussion, I mentioned the other day in reaction to the video you sent me that I was like, oh man, like this is what online's like, what are we doing?

My wife just goes, like I give her like this, you know, four paragraph rant of like, I don't know if this is worth it, blah, blah, blah.

And she goes, so what you're telling me is you're just going into a bar and telling people not to drink alcohol. And I was like, yeah,

I guess. She's like, yeah, that's what Twitter is. So like, why, what would you expect? Like, they're all gonna be, people are gonna be angry, obviously.

Like, it's not gonna be, like, what do you think the reaction's gonna be at the success points and stuff in that?

I'm like, oh yeah, like that's a profound insight, wife. So I think that's such a good point that you're making.

And - That's good helpmate. Good helpmate, that's right. All right, well, we've gone over the time I said we would take.

So I really appreciate it, Michael. You've been a blessing. I think it's been helpful for guys listening.

And again, I just wanna mention that if people want to check out, they go to thisisfoster .com or go to your

Twitter, the X profile if they wanna find out about this upcoming retreat.

So check it out, East River Church. And with that, Michael, thank you very much. God bless, take care.

By the way, I saw people drop some questions over here that I didn't get to. If they wanna