AD Robles and Andrew Isker expose the isolation of young Christian men, who face digital substitutes for "flesh and blood" bonds amidst fractured families and atomizing societal designs. They critique modern church introspection, urging a shift toward building, fighting, and restoring Christendom through physical relocation into tight-knit "platoons." While acknowledging online tools like Twitter as ally-finders, they insist on creating local, defensible communities to counter government control strategies that keep men alone. Ultimately, the hosts promote their 2025 Christ is King Conference, urging immediate action to rebuild social capital before marriage or aging parents make connection impossible. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
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A typical day in the life of the young man in the modern world is to wake up, leave home, sit in a car for part of an hour, arrive at work, interact with people from whom your existence is nothing more than a means to a paycheck.
He drives home alone in his car for part of an hour.
Even the brutalist architecture. That surrounds him is designed to make him feel alone.
He goes home alone, maybe to interact with virtual friends on social media or video games, maybe to consume entertainment and pornography alone.
He is isolated.
He is distant from his family, a family that has been fractured since his parents split up when he was very young.
Every waking second of his life, he is confronted with the fact that no one really cares whether he exists or not.
This may seem hyperbolic.
It may seem like an exaggeration, but these are the conditions that many young people live in today.
It's time that Christians learn this lesson.
It is not possible to understand the spiritual miasma of our current era without recognizing how extraordinarily lonely most people are.
You are utterly alone.
Alone.
Utterly alone.
It's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, it's not necessarily true for the Christian man who is working.
To turn back the tide on Trash World.
But for a lot of people, women, but it seems like even maybe disproportionately more so men are incredibly alone.
This part really, you know, it kind of spoke to me in a certain way because when I, before I became to Christ, I lived in New York City, which is one of the largest cities on the planet.
It's just people on top of people.
You know what I mean?
They're everywhere.
You can't get away.
But I was pretty, you know, I was pretty good at isolating myself and I was able to do it very easily.
You know, I'd commute about an hour to work because, you know, even if it's a mile away, it takes an hour to get there in New York, you know, and I'd pass by just tons of people.
I had no idea who they were.
And then I'd go to my room and, you know, whatever the night brought, whether it was drinking, whether it was drugs, whether it was video games, whether it was pornography, whatever it was, I would do that alone.
And then on the weekends, I'd get together my degenerate friends, but like, My life was lived pretty much alone.
Nobody really knew what was going on.
And we even had, I worked in a very high turnover kind of sales environment, and we would make a joke of it.
People would just vaporize.
And I had, I would say it was an index card.
I had like 10 index cards with tiny writing of names of people that had come and gone.
And we had no idea where they went, why they went.
They would just be gone.
But things just kept functioning.
And it was a high producing office too.
It was an office that generated a lot of cash.
And these people would just come and go, and nobody really even knew.
Nobody even really knew where they lived.
And it was just an isolating type of experience.
And again, I had friends, so I wasn't totally alone, but I could live my life for a long time.
If I didn't see my friends for a few weekends in a row, it could be a month, and I was alone basically the entire time in a city full of people.
Right, right.
Yeah, and you're completely alone.
And I think the city exacerbates that feeling of loneliness.
It's harder to feel as alone if you're living out in the country.
Yeah.
Even if you're totally alone, you are totally alone.
Right, you're actually alone.
It's way more intense because you see people all day.
And they don't care about you at all.
No.
Right.
Right.
If you just dropped dead right in front of them, would they even stop to help you?
I've seen people that may or may not have been dead on the side of the street before I was a believer.
And I just keep walking.
Just keep walking right by them.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And so that, that, and that's in your, like, you know this, like, you know that this mass of humanity that surrounds you does not care about you at all.
You're just one face in a sea of faces.
And, you know, that hits you pretty hard.
Yeah.
Right.
That, that, oh, I don't have anyone.
I don't have a people.
I don't have a community.
I don't have family or real friends.
And that's the existence that most people live under today.
Yeah.
And it's daunting.
It's terrifying.
And for the Christian, it shouldn't be that way.
Even some Christians have life that is this way.
Even if you live in a big city and you go to a large mega church, you're just a face in the crowd there too.
If you go to a church that has 15,000 people, well, you can go there for years and never know anybody.
And of course, a lot of people like that.
Like, that's the draw.
Yeah, that's the draw.
One of the main attractions, I think, for a lot of mega churches is the lights.
I mean, literally, the lights are turned down low.
The music is loud, so I can't see you.
I can't hear you.
I can come in a little bit late and I can leave a little bit early.
And it's just an experience.
I don't have to actually be accountable to anybody or know anybody, meet anybody.
Like, that is.
It's like going to a movie theater.
Right.
That's not the bug.
That's the big thing.
You don't make any friends in the movie theater.
Right.
You just hope they stay quiet.
Right.
Yeah.
And people like that.
It seems like we're such a lonely society today, and the church sadly is.
Well, I think the church probably does better on this one.
The church, in many cases, is kind of like, here's the culture, here's the church.
And it's like Pam from The Office, it's the same picture.
Yeah, same picture.
But I think that the church.
On this, the church generally does better.
Yeah, generally does better.
In fact, there are people who aren't even Christian who will still go to a church just to try to make some friends.
Yeah.
That is one of the draws.
And so praise God for that.
But even within the church, though, there still is a lack of friendship that I think, you know, prior generations experienced, and especially for older men, to where, like, I think for men, the only relationships they have at all is with their wife and children.
Yeah.
You know, like, where you hear the language of, like, my wife is my best friend, you know, that kind of language.
And she's my only friend, the only one I have.
Yeah, she's my only friend.
You know, it's like, you know, but, Meanwhile, she has lots of friends.
Yeah, she usually has lots of friends.
But a lot of guys, it's like your wife is your only friend that you have.
And so, really, what we're talking about, I think, in this episode is brotherhood.
And anytime you see deep, profound brotherhood, it's rare.
But when you do see it, even the church thinks it must be gay.
Yeah.
So, David and Jonathan, there's no way that those two guys could actually just be friends.
No, they must be gay.
They must be gay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, I mean, that's what the world does with any close friendships.
And you see this like Reddit idiots, you know, like they try to imply that two characters in a TV show, they're secretly gay.
Right.
All the time.
That's all they do.
And really, I think.
Well, and most TV shows, they turn out to be that.
Yeah, the writers eventually reward them.
I don't watch these gay shows.
I don't know what you're talking about.
But I think it's part of a people that simply do not know what male friendship looks like, entails, they've never experienced it before.
They don't know anything other than, you know, this like the lust and sexual desire.
That's the only thing they can comprehend.
Eroticism.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's like, so of course their mind goes that way because that's the only form of relationship between two people they can even comprehend.
And I think with that, the church gears towards it, does a better job in the world in facilitating relationship and community, but primarily for women, not for men.
And I think part of the reason why is because back to the whole Gnostic thing that we've been talking about, but Gnosticism, Pietism, this whole thing, this world is not my home.
So if the world's not your home, if Jesus is coming back next Thursday, if things, if God is ordained, it's actually spelled out.
That things must get worse and worse until Jesus comes back and he's coming back relatively soon.
And this world is not our home and the world is going to dissolve like snow.
And we believe we take that in a literal sense, you know, it's going to be burned with fire, you know, like all these kind of things, you know.
And for the record, we don't believe any of those things that I just listed, but that's what a lot of people do believe.
If you believe those kinds of things, then building doesn't make much sense.
And here's the problem the essence of, in my experience, the essence of male relationships, male friendships, has always been around fighting and building.
Whereas the essence of female relationships, part of the reason why Christian women in the church have more relationships than Christian men is because the church itself, what it focuses on is introspection, it's sharing, you know, and divulging.
And, you know, these guys, so like DNA groups, gospel groups, confessing your sin, these kinds of, you know.
What's your anagram?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And so those kinds of things.
Whereas, like, for men, there's such a de emphasis.
On building and fighting and restoring Christendom, mission, and right, yeah.
But for like the best friendships I've ever had in my life is because we were building something together, yeah.
And if we're not, the moment that the project stopped, here's the iron the moment that the project stopped, then the relationship it did get gay, like not now, it didn't get like super gay.
I don't have something to confess it, you know, like I'm not in the literal sense, you know, this is not a confession, but you know, but in the metaphorical sense, it got like it's like.
Hey, dude, how are you doing?
How are you doing?
Hey, yeah, uh huh.
You want to go do something?
Like, this is weird.
Yeah, let's go do something.
Because if we weren't building, if we weren't making something or fighting something, like right now, like all three of us are on, we have all these different things that we keep up with, with friendships and stuff like that.
But it's all circulating around building and fighting.
Yeah, there's a particular mission that we are all aligned on, and we have this vision and goal that we're all striving towards together.
And that's.
Yeah, all the close male friendships I've had, it's been the same way.
It's like there's a reason why men in a locker room or young men in a locker room on a football team are really tight, really close.
And this is like the strongest bonds that they have.
Or men that were in the military, the closest friendships they ever had were those ones where you were literally in a foxhole with another guy and facing death.
Well, you're going to have a strong bond with these other guys.
But even going back, I will.
You know, attend or do funerals for like elderly, you know, men from, you know, two or three generations back.
And you see, you know, on the program, well, this guy was a member of the Lions Club and the Elks and the Rotary and all of these different, you know, he was in everything.
And on all these, he had tons of relationships with all these people in the community.
And it's because all of it was centered around different types of mission, different things they were trying to build and do and accomplish together.
That's what men do.
And you see that, like, and you see, you know, if you go on like the Facebook page of your local Rotary Club or whatever, something like that, or Lions or any of that, and it's all.
70 plus year old men.
They don't have any young men involved in those things anymore.
There's all sorts of reasons for that.
We've talked about many of them in this series here.
But men, I think, are conditioned to be alone and expect to be alone and don't go and join things, don't participate in things because they want to be alone.
They want to be isolated.
They don't want to have someone involved in their life.
They go to the big mega church where they can be anonymous because they don't want somebody.
Watching over them.
I mean, so it's a kind of a two way street.
Like they're very isolated and they're depressed and anxious and life is miserable because they're isolated.
But at the same time, they don't want to not be.
Yeah.
Because that's costly.
It's a trade off.
That described me, you know, to a T. Because like I said, I had degenerate friends and we would do degeneracy, you know, all the time together.
That was the mission.
But that's true.
But, you know, to be honest, there were things that I didn't want my friends knowing what I was up to.
Yeah.
You know, I didn't want them to know that I was drinking as much as I was or doing whatever it is I was doing.
Like I kind of wanted to be.
Like, I could have hung out with them every day if I wanted to, but I chose not to.
You know what I mean?
I wanted to be alone.
And I think one of the things I found so interesting in your book is you mentioned at one point, it was just like a line about how they've been tricked into thinking they're introverts or something like that.
Yeah.
Or something like that.
Because people talk about that all the time.
All the time, right?
I'm an introvert.
Exactly, exactly.
And I've said that about myself before.
You know, when I go to an event like the Fight Laugh Feast Conference, I'm always dreading it going up to the event, but I always have a great time.
You know what I mean?
You heard it here, everyone.
Yeah, no.
I've said this many times.
Yeah, I've said this many times.
Um, yeah, this is no secret, but I always have a great time and it doesn't feel stressful for me to talk to people.
I always have a great time.
Um, but you know, I do feel like I was almost like not maybe not programmed to be think I was an introvert, but to almost wear it as a badge of honor, yeah, you know, almost that I can be alone, I'm okay with that.
I don't need to have these friends and things like that, yeah.
And like, well, in the whole like concept of introversion, extroversion is really just what is the thing that drains you, yeah, right?
Uh, Is being alone make you tired and wipe you out, or is being with people?
You know, and I always thought, like, oh, Andrew, you're an extrovert.
Like, you love being around people and talking with people and hanging out with people.
And I do, I love it.
But things just like that, going to conferences and talking to people all day, like, I come home from it, I am exhausted.
Yeah.
I am so tired.
And I need like a week to just lock myself in my office and read and think.
And it's like, oh, maybe I'm an introvert.
I don't want to be because of this like Reddit concept of like, oh, I'm an introvert.
And that means I can just watch video games or play video games all day and I'm good.
It's like this badge of honor, like you say.
And I didn't want to wear that, but it's like, I think I am one.
Yeah.
Right.
But you, at the same time, like it's this culturally and socially conditioned concept where you should exult in your own loneliness and your own isolation and your own kind of weirdness.
The Loneliness Defense00:02:41
Like people want to be super weird on purpose and off putting because then they have an excuse.
Then it's kind of a cope.
Like, well, my loneliness is people's.
They won't get me.
You know, they won't understand me.
Not just because you're a freak.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to do this deep, spurgy dive onto every facet of Star Trek information.
And then I only talk about that.
And then that's why I don't have any friends.
And it's like, no, no, it's just because you're weird, man.
And you want to be.
Yeah.
And I think deep down, again, I think that I was ashamed of some of the stuff I was doing.
And I wore the badge of introversion as a cope, essentially, because really what I didn't want is people to know what I was up to.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a defense mechanism, really, more than anything else.
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In this day and age, living in the trash world, like one of the things that I want young men, especially to realize, and I say young men, that's a relative term, 30s, 40s.
We're young men.
Yeah, yeah.
But what I want them to realize is like, no, but you've got to touch grass.
You have to actually have some real friendships that you live nearby.
So, like, that's part of what I want to get to.
Oh, yeah.
Because, like, I think a lot of us, it's like, oh, I have friends.
I have 30 friends on Twitter.
Yeah, you know, we're on a group chat, you know, on Signal where we, you know, we're formulating our Twitter strategies, you know, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, okay, that's great.
That's fine.
You know, it's even that, it's relatively, I mean, those can be real friends too.
You're not saying that's not, that's not, it can be.
Yeah.
But what I'm trying to get at is it like, but when it rains, it pours.
And when, you know, when the next thing, because there will be a next thing, you know, whatever, you know, if it's World War III, you know, God forbid, or COVID round two, or, you know, whatever, something we can't even think of.
It really helps.
When you know someone who's within a 10 mile radius who can be at your front doorstep.
Who are your people?
Who are the guys that you would call to check on your wife if you were away?
Exactly.
You know what I mean?
Exactly.
Yep.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So having, and really what we're getting at is like you need a church, like you need a local church.
I think there's still a lot of, because what you're getting at in that chapter, Andrew, is the atomized man, you know, like that man right now, like again, you know, trash world has, you know, it has rulers in this regime and they want people who are easily manipulated, people who are easy to control.
So, okay, like we've talked a lot about the physical, but like, okay, let's make sure they're fat.
Let's make sure they're sickly.
Let's make sure.
Let's definitely make sure that they're chemically castrated, that they have low T levels, you know, they have low testosterone, they're not very aggressive, all those kinds of things.
But in addition to that, let's also make sure that they're lonely.
Like, you know, let's make sure that they don't have households, they don't have capital, they don't have property, they don't own anything, they don't have a wife, they don't have children.
Let's keep them single and let's keep them lonely.
And if they do somehow, you know, end up with a wife and end up with kids and end up owning a home, well, at least.
Let's make sure that the only friends they have are in the comment sections on YouTube or on Twitter.
Let's make sure that they don't actually have brick and mortar, flesh and blood friendships within proximity because those are defensible.
That's defensible.
Like when you have a local church with real people who think the same way, who all own property in the same town, and some have run for local office, and you have this and that.
Now we're talking about something that actually is.
Not just spiritually a threat, but it is spiritually and literally a threat.
Politically, culturally, all of this.
Like, I mentioned this in the book.
You know, it's funny.
You know, I will talk to very conservative boomer generation relatives about things going on in politics and how bad stuff is and things like that.
And, you know, they will always eventually, at some point in the conversation, go to, well, if it gets bad enough, we still got all the guns.
And, like, I mean, I'm sure you guys have all heard this kind of stuff before all the time.
And I always just like laugh at that because it's like, okay, you've got guns.
What are you going to do?
Like, what are you going to do?
And like, they're chopping off the genitals of little boys, taking them away from their parents.
Right.
Is it not bad enough yet?
And no one's doing anything.
And so it's the interesting thing there is like, you know, they'll talk about, well, yeah, we could fight the U.S. government.
They lost to the Taliban and they're just a bunch of goaters.
In Afghanistan, like, uh, we could win, and it's like, no, you couldn't because you don't have like you would be alone, you're not organized, you're not like, and and again, we're not trying to foment you know violent revolution, absolutely not, we're against it completely, yeah, yeah, totally not.
I, I, uh, reject all, all violence, um, most violence, no, you don't, most violence, uh, I reject, I reject that idea, right, of a violent, you reject the being the initiator, yeah, yeah, don't, I'm not gonna feel it, yeah.
Yeah, I will.
Then we will.
I'll protect my family.
Yeah, exactly.
But, right, they say this kind of stuff and they do these kind of like verbal Fed posts all the time.
And it's like, no, you don't get it.
You don't have a community.
You don't have people.
You don't like if the governor of your state just unilaterally banned guns and was going to come confiscate them and you said, I'm not taking this.
I'm going to fight.
Like you would be alone.
A SWAT team would come and they would kill you.
Yeah, you're done.
You're not going to call, you know, 50 friends and set up an ambush for the SWAT team.
They're not going to.
Go die for you.
Right.
And you don't have anybody you're going to go die for if the roles are reversed.
Like that, that world does not exist, but it did.
If they tried to do it in like 1945 with all the GIs that came back from the war, they would never have been able to do it because these guys actually would have done that stuff.
And they had communities and families and extended networks in their localities where they would easily do that.
And we have an example of it.
There was, I believe it was in Tennessee, I mentioned in the book, yeah, Athens, Tennessee, where there was a most secure election of all time that happened in their county where.
The corrupt government just like stole all the ballot boxes and started stuffing them.
And all of these GIs in like 1946 came back and they just grabbed their M1s and they laid siege to the county courthouse and won.
And nobody went to jail, none of this.
They got the sheriff kicked out and all this kind of stuff.
They won it.
And it's like something like that is totally inconceivable today.
Right.
So when I hear the people talk, well, if it gets bad enough, we got all the guns, like you don't have that world at all.
What the Viet Cong had, like the social capital.
That existed in Vietnam fighting the US military or the social capital exists in Afghanistan.
That does not exist anywhere, maybe in some Amish communities.
And that's about it in the entire US.
It does not exist anywhere else.
And that's by design, it's not by accident.
They want people to be isolated, they want them to be spread out.
They want kids to grow up, and one kid lives in Washington, the other kid lives in Florida, the other one lives in Texas.
And they don't want family living near each other where it's like, Yep, there's my second cousin, and there's my third cousin once removed.
And you don't want to live in a community where you're related to half the people.
They don't want you to have that.
They don't want you to have men that are part of every civic organization in town and have deep connections to people.
They want you to be alone.
They want you to just pull into your cul de sac, not know the first names of any of your immediate neighbors, and go in, watch TV, leave the cul de sac, go to work, and then come back.
And that's your life.
That's what they want.
That is by design.
And so, How do you overcome that?
How do you get over that?
Well, one very first step is like knock on your neighbor's door and introduce yourself.
Right.
One, like get to know people in your neighborhood.
Maybe, maybe even have a block party and invite them into your house and like actually build relationships with people.
And join different organizations in your local community.
Like join, there's all sorts of different clubs and things that you have interest in that you can be part of that always need people to volunteer and help out.
There are all the civic organizations that are graying and about to.
To die, you could, you and like five buddies could take over your local Lions Club.
Or even if you want to join the American Legion, right?
You could take that organization over in your local town.
Like things like that.
Like it's so, it would be so easy if you just do it.
But it takes work, it takes time.
But you begin to have these deep roots in a place.
And all of a sudden, right now, the social capital doesn't exist.
You're slowly rebuilding it.
And it is the thing like, yeah, the cathedrals burned down.
It took, Centuries to build and it burns down in a day.
Well, you're not going to build the same kind of social capital, even in like one lifetime, that took your ancestors generations to build.
But you can at least begin to slowly stack that up and then have your children add to it and so on and so forth.
And it has to start with someone consciously doing the opposite of what the regime wants you to do and going well out of your way to do that.
And the men who do that will be king.
Right.
Nope.
COVID was helpful in that regard.
It was, you know, again, it was a mercy from the Lord because it did allow, at least temporarily, it allowed for people to become mobile.
People who ordinarily, you know, they were stuck.
They had to live where they lived because of their job.
And then all of a sudden they were able to work remotely.
And a lot of businesses, you know, lots of them have gone back to, you know, people coming in, but a lot of economics has forever changed since COVID.
You know, some of it's not going back.
You know, stuff has gone back, but some things will never go back.
And a lot of the places only went back because they're locked into a commercial, real estate deal where they have an office and it's just empty.
So, like, well, you better come back so we can justify having it.
Right.
But most places.
There are plenty of places that didn't.
And to remain competitive in the labor market, they have to allow that.
Right.
You know, so that's been, that's probably been like the biggest boost for like, you know, this is not a communist DSA podcast, but like the biggest boost for like labor and workers is work from home.
Economic Shifts Post-COVID00:04:24
Right.
That's like the first gain we've made in a century of like life getting better is now you can work, you don't have to commute anymore and you can live wherever you want.
Like that's a huge deal.
And so with that grace from the Lord, now is it like, I mean, that's, Probably the most common email that I get is Do you know of a church in my area?
Do you know of a church?
My like people are churchless, yeah, you know, because um, what we've seen, you know, when the veil was torn back in 2020 as it pertained to evangelicalism was that uh, a lot of our leaders were corrupt and a lot of them were you know, they kowtowed to you know, everything that Caesar said and quickly you know, immediately gave it immediately, yeah, and were very hesitant to take a stand.
I mean, they're very slow to you know, you know, I mean, there are certain churches that didn't gather for a year.
You know, longer, you know, yeah, yeah.
So, anyway, so all that being said, you've got a lot of uh de churched uh Christians right now, but you have a lot of de churched Christians right now who who are actually able to move if they wanted to.
And I'm not saying it's easy, right?
Like, I mean, maybe that maybe they're locked in with a really low interest rate if they moved and bought a house, you know, seven percent interest rate or whatever, but um, but it's be more it'd be more doable a geographic move across the country than than any time previously, absolutely.
And that's, I think.
When we talk about, you know, friendship, particularly male friendship, that's, I think that's part of it is actually being physically in the same location to where you can be building together in a literal sense and not just virtually.
Yeah.
And it might mean like getting the guys in your group chat to like move to where you are or vice versa.
Vice versa.
You know, like, I mean, if you really are on the same page with all these guys, like, and these are your brothers that you love and care about, like, all right, go to the same place.
Well, could you imagine?
Like, and that's where I feel like that's, again, where we, That's like the line where we're like, okay, we're going to be serious and we're going to put dents in the gates of hell to a point, but we can't be too successful.
I mean, we wouldn't want to win after all.
We lose down here.
That would be cultural Christianity.
So we're like, we find each other through YouTube and Twitter and this, that, and the other.
And then we start our chat, and you got 30 guys who really agree on 99.9% of things, and guys with spine and with courage and all this kind of stuff.
Yeah.
But then, but then they you don't go the extra step, you don't go the extra step and say, like, like, what if we teamed up?
And part of it's because guys have responsibility, these are men, they have wives, they have children, they have schools you know, I'm not talking about public schools, but you know, but Christian schools and they have churches and they have uh, they have aging fathers and mothers, so that's I think that's part of it, oh yeah.
Um, but but if it's at all possible, I think the way that God has designed a man is just duty after duty after duty, right?
Authority flows to those who take.
Responsibility.
And you just, the responsibilities keep coming.
And I'm not saying that as a bad thing.
Like, no, it's a good thing.
It's an honor.
It's an honor, a glory for a man.
And so he just gets stacked and he can carry that weight and some more weight and progressively throughout your life.
And by the end, you look back and you're like, you're carrying a mountain by the grace of God, strengthening you.
But the point is that guys have so much responsibility and duty that's progressively, gradually hoisted upon them.
I think that's what roots them there.
And so I guess I'm not saying it's impossible once you're a little bit older in your 30s and 40s, but if anybody's listening to this who's younger, Like, one of the biggest things that I would like to grab a guy in his 20s by the collar and say is, Okay, so you don't have seven kids yet.
You know what I mean?
And your parents aren't 70, you know, or whatever in aging, and you haven't bought a house yet.
You know, and I feel for you because it's going to be really hard, if even possible, to do that when it comes.
But my point is, right now, like, this is it.
This is the moment.
Find those 15 based dudes that you're talking to and, like, you know, and move right there.
Yeah.
And set up shop, you know, because later on it becomes increasingly hard.
All right, that's it, guys.
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But you got to have friendships in person.
Oh, yeah.
It can't just be online.
That's my point.
It's got to be flesh and blood in person.
And it's not to say, like, I mean, there are.
Friendships that I have online with guys that I've known for years and I talk to every day that I've never met in person.
You know, and it's, I mean, it's a different world.
Than ever before.
But you can have these deep, intimate connections with guys and not have ever encountered them in flesh and blood.
And it's even weirder now with AI because maybe they're fake.
I don't really know.
Well, if you met them 10 years ago, you're probably.
Yeah, probably okay.
Yeah, exactly.
Some of these guys break the mold, though.
I know who you're talking about.
I don't think they make AI like that.
No, not yet.
Not yet.
When they do, then we're in trouble.
But yeah, so it's like, These are real friendships, and I would love it if we could be in the same place together.
That would be awesome.
And the older you get, the harder it is to ever bring anything like that about.
But especially when you're younger, you should be in your 20s, you should be thinking, okay, what are my duties and responsibilities, and where can I go to build with other men that want to build as well?
And that should be the priority in your mind thinking, okay, what's going to occur?
What's my general idea of the direction and trajectory of everything over the next 40 or 50 years?
And where should I be to accomplish the things that I think God can use me to do?
That's how you need to be thinking right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is going to look different in, like you guys have seen in saying, different situations call for different things.
I mean, you might live in a town where your family's well established and you know everybody, you're related to half the people.
And you may want to go out as an outpost and meet up with some 15 other base guys, and your town's going to be just fine.
Or you could be in a town where things are precarious, like you're saying, you have an older relative and things like that.
And it wouldn't make sense to move.
It actually would maybe be an abandonment of your duties if you moved.
So these are things that, like, there's no band aid answer for everybody, it's the same answer.
Here's what you should do, every single one of you.
Right, right.
But I think the point of this is understanding the fact that we collectively have been atomized to the point where they want us to be alone.
We are alone, many of us.
And so, making decisions on where you live, where you work, what you do, knowing that that is the current situation, and we want to reverse that situation.
We want to end that.
We want to destroy that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I think, you know, like I said it, you know, earlier in one of the previous episodes, but church planting has followed this same mode that people got spread out.
They got, you know, isolated.
We got spread too thin.
And I think the name of the game right now, and that's part of why, you know, I wrote the little fight by flight book, but I think part of the.
And it's not to flee to avoid the battle, but it's to run to the mountains, run to the defensible ground, turn around and start fighting, and then slowly, progressively take back the land.
But all that being said, I think we spread our troops too thin.
And the name of the game right now is like, I know it's not the best example, but I think of like The Avengers.
It's like, not just, I know the movies are the epitome of faking gay.
But I'm just saying, as a principal.
I can't believe we're going there.
As a principal.
So I don't know, whatever kind of team.
But my point is, like, teams, I think, right now are the name of the game.
Like, Avengers Assemble.
Yeah.
Like, instead of isolated, you know, isolated little, you know, renegade, you know, factions.
Yeah.
But, like, no, actually, instead of guerrilla warfare, actually having organized platoons.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Like, that's a lot harder.
And the internet is a double edged sword.
You know, it gives you these relationships that.
Have the facade of being real, but they're really not real.
But then again, you can also use it as a tool to create these real relationships.
I was just talking to our producer backstage about video games, and we were talking about in the old days when we used to play GoldenEye together, right?
Yeah, in the living room.
We would all be in the same living room.
And so we could actually play the game.
We're all together, you know, and I'd punch my brother, you know, from doing something and stuff like that.
For screen watching.
You know, things like that.
Yeah, for screen watching.
You knew I was there.
And that was a lot of fun, you know?
Oh, yeah.
And so video games now, you know, I don't play them anymore, but when I did, they're all online.
And so I'm still playing with people.
But it's just not the same.
It does not create the bond.
That being said, my biological brother, we would play Madden back when I was in college, and it would just be like for us, it'd be a phone call basically.
So that's how we talked on the phone.
We would play Madden together talking.
And that was useful in that way, but it does not replace when we used to play together in the same room.
You know what I mean?
Absolutely.
Yeah, I never got to the online.
The furthest I ever got was Halo 1.
LAN, you know, yeah, LAN party, yeah, bunch of nerds, yeah, yeah.
That was my in high school, we would stay, we would pull all the oh, yeah, I did it in high school, yeah, yeah, and then I did it in college, yeah, it was great, and then I did it after college.
Fist also, yeah, I can't like, like, I think what Halo are they on at this point?
Six, six, okay, so I was playing Halo One, I think, when like the fifth one came out, and it's like, and everybody's like, could we please play a different Halo?
They've got new weapons now, man, I was like, yeah, like, I never even got to dual wielding, it was just Halo.
One.
That's the point.
Man, this is old school.
Yeah.
So, but the point is the kids don't even do it in person, flesh and blood, with your friends.
Because what would happen is like, all right, you finish that game and now everybody's going to get up and you're all going to grab a drink together, you know, on the back porch or whatever.
And then you're going to come back and you're going to play another game.
Let's order a pizza, you know, or like, and you're going to talk about how you sniped your buddy way across the screen.
And there's camaraderie.
But like, you actually can pat a guy on the back and you know where he lives in real life, you know, not, you know, like, this is a real person.
And so, yeah, you need that.
I think the name of the game is, um, It's funny, but like I really think the church planning thing did a number on evangelicalism.
I think we spread ourselves so thin, and now what you have is you've got a bunch of people who are just lonely, and the bar just everything went down, you know, to the lowest common denominator to where you've got all these guys who went through some church planting assessment that aren't really qualified.
Um, but could you imagine, like, I mean, Moscow is you know the quintessential example, but they're not the only ones who are doing it, there are other people, you know, like.
Apologia is doing a good job.
The Ogden guys with Brian and Eric, you know, and Dan, they're doing a good job.
And like when you get like, it doesn't take a million guys.
Yeah.
I think three is a magic number.
When you get three high value, godly men, like, and they're in the same location, then it just snowballs.
People just come.
People keep coming.
They're attracted to that.
And then you can form a school with ease because you have resources and you start buying land.
As individuals, not as a church institute, but individuals that make up the church and starting businesses.
And then, you know, 40 years ago, it took Doug 40 years.
It doesn't have to take us 40 years.
Because he was the only one doing it.
It took him 40 years because, yeah, exactly.
That's not his life.
They had to make all the mistakes and everything.
And they're inventing the wheel.
Well, the wheel's been invented.
We should be able to do it.
Exactly.
So, yeah, it took Doug 40 years, not because he's a dope, but because he's the only one who was willing to do it.
He's a champion.
Yeah, absolutely.
But.
Uh, the guys, our generation looking to that champion, uh, it doesn't have to take us 40 years because of his hard work, we can stand on his shoulders.
And I think if guys right now would say, hey, you know what?
Instead of all three of us getting to be a church planter, why don't we be willing to be bivocational, at least for the foreseeable future?
And we'll take, you know, maybe we take a housing allowance and we plant a church together, three high value, you know, caliber guys.
You do that, it starts attracting people.
Then you have those resources.
And it's like you got to skip the first 10 years of the Moscow project, you know, and now you're into like 10, you know, year 11 and 12, even though you're technically only on year three or four.
And it just, It builds and it builds and it builds.
And I think that's what we need right now.
And the cool thing about that is not just that those guys, you know, the leaders, that they can have that camaraderie and that male friendship together, building and fighting together, but it attracts a certain type of person.
And then all those people, they find each other too.
Yeah, everybody in the church has the same kind of bond.
Exactly.
And like the feeling that you get when you go to like Fight Laugh Feast or something, the feeling you get for a week at a conference becomes just life.
Yeah.
Your whole life is like, yeah, our kids all go to this school together.
Like, yeah, like, The feeling of Fight Laugh Feast for a week for most people is a feeling of Christ Church people's normal life there.
Normal life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it could be normal life for a lot more people.
Yeah.
I remember that.
I mean, we lived there for three years and that's what it was like.
It was just people everywhere.
There's always things to go to and do and be involved in.
And, you know, you go to Psalm Sings and it's all the people, all different people that you know from church and you're out there.
And then, like, yeah, when I see the video of like Gabe getting arrested, you know, it's like, I'm looking at the crowd.
I'm like, I know like 80% of those people that are there with him.
And it's like, They're all there, and I can just imagine like the thrill of that happening, right?
And you're confronting something that's totally wrong, you know, to not allow you to sing and worship.
And you're fighting together, and you're, you know, it's like, oh, and it doesn't just have to be there, it can be in all sorts of different places, you know, and you can build that.
And that's what we need.
It's not that, you know, it's no one is ragging on Moscow at all, at least not here in this room.
Right.
And plenty of people are.
Yeah, plenty of people are, but not us.
And the question is not, you know, well, can we make, you know, is Moscow good?
It's like, well, yeah, it is, but there should be a thousand places like Moscow.
Is all the world to become Moscow?
I would say we can only hope and pray.
I hope so.
I hope so.
It sounds great.
Except for the U of I. Get rid of that.
So, all right.
Well, I feel like that's a good episode, but just friendship matters.
The virtual thing, finding people online, that's a great social media is a great Twitter.
It's great.
The fact that we can find people and there is a sense of warring and fighting and building online.
So it's, you know, the whole expression, Twitter's not real life, is true, but it's also not true.
It's real life, but you need to take the not real life, the virtual reality part of it into real life.
Yeah, exactly.
So do those things, but then use that.
That's why we're all here in the same room, by the way.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Because we found each other in this thing that's not real life, but it turns out it is somewhat real life.
Yeah, yeah.
Because we're all three real people and we're sitting in a real room.
You know, and so it's not an AI construct.
He's a real human right here.
So, do that.
You know, partner with those guys.
And especially if, you know, if you're young and you haven't really rooted yet, the cement hasn't dried, find some people flesh and blood.
Absolutely.
And then, two, if you're older, but you're in that transition period where it's like maybe you're like super discouraged and you just lost a job, take that as like God's providence to say, okay, maybe let's, let's, this time, let's, We have a moment right now.
Maybe we move to Ogden.
Maybe we move to Moscow.
Maybe we move to Georgetown, you know, and because I think God's doing that.
And I don't think 2020 was the only time to rearrange the chairs.