Nick Freitas's absence shifts focus to Michael's argument that modern sedentary lifestyles erode male strength, linking obesity and low activity rates to progressive political leanings. The hosts critique spiritualized masculinity, advocating instead for biblical roles requiring physical robustness, while warning against environmental harms from pharmaceuticals and aggressive doxxing tactics targeting dissenters. They further advise financial independence, marital fortification, and diets rich in fats to combat Alzheimer's, concluding that true manhood demands holistic discipline to resist cultural decay and protect families from systemic threats. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Why We Need Five Star Reviews00:06:21
Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
I get it.
It's annoying.
Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
I told you that the future of our nation depends on the strength of its young men.
Not just their moral strength, but their physical, mental, and spiritual toughness.
For decades, masculinity has been under attack, dismissed as toxic, treated as disposable, or outright vilified.
And yet, when danger looms, when families need protecting, when civilizations need building, it's strong men who answer the call.
Some might argue that traditional masculinity is outdated, a relic of a bygone era that needs to be reformed, tamed.
Softened, made more acceptable to modern sensibilities.
But reality tells a different story.
Our bodies are weaker.
Our testosterone levels are plummeting.
Young men are more depressed and directionless than ever before.
And yet, despite this, something is stirring.
Young men are waiting for the next.
To be ashamed of.
It's something to be cultivated.
Masculinity is not the problem.
Weak men are the problem.
And the way forward is not in suppressing the strength of young men, but in directing it toward what God designed them for leadership, protection, provision, and dominion.
The man who is strong physically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally that is the man who builds, defends, and secures the future.
For his family and his nation.
This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members and our faithful donors.
You can join our Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, or you can donate by going to right response ministries.com forward slash donate.
We're so back.
Welcome, GA.
GA.
Incredible things are happening.
Incredible things are happening.
Here we are.
One incredible thing that's not happening, though, that we need to announce right off the get go here is that we alerted everyone on Monday that we would have Nick Freitas joining us, and that's not going to happen.
Unfortunately, he reached out just about two hours ago and said that he was taking a last minute flight to D.C. for some things going down.
And so he's not going to be able to be on the show, but he said he would love to reschedule.
So.
We'll announce that whenever we get it squared away.
But we're going forward with today's topic.
Michael is the one who outlined it for us.
And so we have everything squared away to discuss the topic with or without Nick.
So we're going to do it without him.
And hopefully we'll be able to have him again in the future.
Real quick, while we have everyone's attention, just want to remind you that our conference is right around the corner.
We're about five weeks away.
Go to rightresponseconference.com.
Rightresponseconference.com.
We're really excited.
You can register now.
We do have a promo code that you can use, K I N G, King, all caps, and get 25% off of the conference.
We've got Steve Dace, we've got Calvin Robinson, Orrin McIntyre, Stephen Wolf, Andrew Isker, CJ Engel, Eric Kahn, John Harris, Dan Burkholder, Ben Garrett, David Reese, AD Robles, Dusty Deavers.
I think that might be it.
I think so.
I don't know.
A lot of guys.
It's all the boys.
So come and meet us.
We're, I mean, basically, it's just going to be a three day party where we're just getting to spend time together, a lot of relationship building, cohort building, conferences.
I mean, the content I think will be great.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I, you know, I picked these guys for a reason and their subject matter that we've lined out.
I think it'll be really good.
But you can always watch the content from conferences eventually when those things come out online.
The biggest thing I think is being there, if you can, in person, flesh and blood, making friendships.
Building networks and relationships and those things, I think, are priceless.
For those who can't be there in person, we are going to live stream the conference.
We're going to make that available for exclusively for our Patreon members.
So I encourage you to go over to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
Patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
And we are going to be live streaming the conference, but it's only going to be available for our gold members.
And, you know, for those who are like, oh, you're charging money, but here's the thing.
You can subscribe and you can cancel.
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So if you want to subscribe and cancel it right after, you know, the conference is done, no harm, no foul, that's perfectly fine.
If you want to support our ministry for $10 a month with a gold tier Patreon, then we appreciate it.
And I think you'll be blessed by it.
I think it'll be a fair.
A fair trade.
Okay.
So, all that being said, we're going to talk about manhood and Michael's going to lead us off.
Okay.
Great.
Well, excited for this conversation, gentlemen.
And it's a theme that we've hit a couple times already and always a lot of good engagement with it.
And it's a theme that we need to continue to hit going forward.
Bodiless Existence Before Resurrection00:14:35
This idea of manhood, specifically looking at physical fitness, I think is how we'll gear it.
Although physical fitness is Part of overall discipline, right?
And what we want is men who are disciplined in all the areas that God has called them to exert dominion.
So they need to be physically disciplined.
They need to be mentally disciplined.
They need to be spiritually disciplined.
They need to be emotionally disciplined.
Right.
So it all works together.
And we never want to treat a conversation like this as presenting the idea that the only thing that matters is your physical health.
We are unified beings.
We're body and soul.
We're body and spirit.
And so.
And just even body and spirit, I've thought about it in the past.
It's this.
Spirit just kind of inside the shell of a body.
Correct.
No, they're intimately integrated organically.
Yes.
So you could never separate the two of them outside of death and the Lord taking the spirit to him in the interim before he brings the spirit and reunites with the body back again in the resurrection.
It's one of the reasons why death is so unnatural, right?
When you think about the curse of death, the curse of sin is death, but the curse where God cursed Adam and Eve to eventually die, yes, they died spiritually on that day, but death is.
Is a curse and totally unnatural because it separates the body from the spirit, like you said, Wes, which is, we don't even understand how that could be possible if you understand that the human is an ensouled body.
Right?
To separate those two requires an act of God, which is another reason why God is sovereign even over death, which is a punishment and a condemnation and a curse.
And yet, even there, it's not just an egg breaking open and the yolk and the white leaking out.
It is a miraculous death, even is a something of a miraculous thing.
If a miracle is a breaking of the regular laws, right, to separate the soul from the body, even there is a supernatural deed that God does in the interim while we wait for the resurrection of the body.
Right.
In terms of personhood, you are not someone who has a body.
Right.
You are your body.
Like when we go to a funeral and there's an open casket and a loved one passes away, we're able to look at our children, you know, and say, That's grandma.
Right.
That is, it's not just, oh, that's, you know, that's not grandma.
That's just her empty.
No, that's her.
That's her.
And you don't just have a body.
You are a body.
Now, you're not less than a body.
That's what we're arguing.
But you are more than a body.
So, not less.
You are a body.
But you're also a soul.
Both of those things are true.
And we know from Scripture that to be absent in the body is to be present with the Lord.
So, we know that there will be an existence for all those who have fallen asleep in the Lord.
Before his final physical return, we believe that Jesus is coming back physically, that there will be a final culmination and end to all things, and that things won't just spiral forever and ever and ever and onward.
We're partial preterists and not full preterists, and so we do believe that there'll be a final end to human history, that Christ will return, and there'll be an interim period.
For all those who have fallen asleep in Christ, he hasn't returned yet, and so the resurrection of their physical body has not yet happened.
Their body is still here on earth.
It's either buried under the ground, being eaten by worms, or it was lost at sea and eaten by fish, you know, or whatever.
But that body, and we recognize it's a miracle, but we're talking about the Lord Jesus, and I think he can pull it off.
But that body, wherever it is, when he returns, all those particles, all those atoms, and it'll all come back.
And your body that you're living in right now, which is you, it's not just something you possess, but it's Who you are, a significant piece of who you are.
You will have that body, a physical bodily existence with the Lord Jesus Christ upon his return, resurrected, glorified forever.
And so to think that the body doesn't matter is to miss a significant piece of eternity.
We're not going to just be spirits floating around on clouds.
The most that you could even begin to argue that is, again, during an interim period from the point of death for those who are in Christ and the point of Christ's final physical return.
That to be absent of the body is to be present with the Lord.
So we would reject soul slate, is what some have coined the term.
So we don't think that you'll just be unconscious for the next 50, 500, 5,000, whatever it is, however much longer the Lord tarries.
No, we think that you will be in spirit immediately upon death, present with the Lord, with the conscience reality, with the Lord in heaven.
And The body's not yet resurrected, so at most, my point is that at most you could have a bodiless existence temporarily as we're awaiting the final physical resurrection.
But even that, there are arguments to be made of an interim, not this body waiting on that, and that would be a kind of a final and most glorious eschaton that we're waiting for.
But there could be some kind of temporary physical element of our existence with the Lord, and of course, there could not be.
I lean towards not because.
That seems to be the more orthodox position.
The point is that the physical body, our physical existence, is not just a vapor.
It's not just a moment.
It's an eternal reality.
And it's integral to what it means to be human.
Like we will.
So let's say that there is no intermediate physical state from dying and waiting for Christ in his final return to resurrect.
Our physical body and rejoin our spirit with that body.
Let's say there's no interim physical existence.
And so we are just our soul present with the Lord, bodiless.
Well, it's not going to be miserable because we'll be with the Lord.
And Paul himself says, you know, for me to die, I'm even now ready to be poured out like a drink offering.
He knows that his death is right around the corner.
And he recognizes and says that that would be far better.
So even that temporary bodiless existence is still an improvement from.
Our life here on earth as fallen creatures with the presence of sin and all these different things.
But there will be, I think, like a joyous celebration and even almost like a relief, a sigh of relief when Jesus does finally return, resurrect our bodies, and our soul is rejoined, re knit with our bodies, and we pick back up, we resume that physical now.
Now glorified, perfect physical existence with the Lord in eternity.
That will be even better.
So, better to be present with the Lord now than here on earth with the presence of sin and suffering and all these different things.
Better to be present with the Lord in spirit only for a time, temporarily, than to have the body here on earth, but with sin and suffering and sickness and all these things.
But even better to be present with the Lord and rejoined to the body, now glorified, that that will be an even greater eschaton, an even greater.
Celebration that people you can almost see, like souls that have been, you know, not certainly not miserable, nobody's miserable in heaven, but but um, joyfully and you know, enjoying the presence of the triune God in heaven and then rejoined to their bodies.
And somehow, some way, it's difficult to put words to.
Not all this is revealed exactly or precisely in Scripture, but it'll be even more joyful.
Right.
In the same way that we can say that a thousand, ten thousand years into the eternal state, we will be more joyful, more content than we were when we began, that is not to diminish the amount of joy and contentment and bliss that we had at the beginning.
And that's the same thing that you're saying there, Joel, where.
To become more real, as the way C.S. Lewis puts it in The Great Divorce, to be always becoming more and more real doesn't mean it's a weird, it's a paradoxical thing that you were not real in the beginning or not joyful in the beginning, but it just becomes more and more and increasingly so for all of eternity.
Yeah, that's right.
So, Wes, I was pretty happy with three kids.
Yep.
And then I was really happy with four.
Yep.
And even happier now with five.
Yep.
So it's not like I'm miserable now, but if the Lord is so kind and gives me a six, I'll probably have some moments where I'm like, I can't even.
It just felt like, what were we even doing when we had five kids?
Right, right, right.
We had two.
Megan and I, we'll look at each other all the time and we go back and forth between two thoughts.
One is we regularly will ask the question, we'll be looking at our five kids and they're all talking to us about their day and excited and jumping around and playing.
And we'll look at each other sometimes and we'll be like, when did this happen?
Where did these people come from?
How does this happen?
It keeps happening.
We haven't figured it out yet.
We don't know where children come from.
We keep trying to find the storks.
So sometimes it's like, how did this happen?
And not like a bad thing, but it was just like, it was so quick.
I remember it was just me and you.
And it felt like yesterday.
So sometimes it's like, how did this happen?
But then there's regularly also moments where the kids will do a date night or something, and the kids are with grandma and grandpa, and we're like, This is like, I'm enjoying it.
I enjoy taking my wife out on a date, but it's like, this is weird.
I miss our kids.
You know, like it just feels like you leave the kids to talk about the kids.
That's right.
Exactly.
It just feels empty.
So, yeah.
Yep.
Well, the reality is what we're driving at with all of these comments is God created us to be ensouled bodies, right?
And so we are to take seriously the idea of our fitness and our spiritual discipline and our physical discipline.
And the reality is, modern life, and I think this is how I want to talk about it.
It's easy to be extremely critical, but there are just realities of modern life.
And every generation, every time, every place has things that they need to think through uniquely.
That's why God calls us to be wise.
And one of the realities of modern life is that it tends to create environments, especially in well developed countries, it tends to create environments and Systems that lend to physical laziness and weakness.
We have a lot of modern conveniences.
We're not chopping wood.
If you have a fireplace, probably all you do is you turn it on.
It's a gas fireplace, right?
You're not having to chop wood for four months of the year to make sure you have enough wood to get through the winter.
Modern life, it's just one of the realities, tends to lead towards weakness and a kind of laziness that previous generations. Did not experience simply because their survival was attached to their physical activity, right?
And so that's just something that we have to say, okay, well, we can criticize all we want, but we can we we just have to say that is a reality of the modern times and it's something that we have to think about.
Just real quick, somebody said, Philip in the chat said, No lie.
I kid you not.
I had a good friend quote Paul one time saying, I count my weakness as strength, as a reason why he doesn't go to the gym and why he thinks that others shouldn't either.
Skull face, skull face, skull face.
That is the correct reaction, Philip.
Well done.
Your friend is a midwit, and we can pray for him and encourage him in loving ways and also in some mocking ways and say, Hey, that's a bad take.
Yep.
Let's not do that.
Go ahead.
So it's interesting.
Now, in high income countries, 26% of men and 35% of women are not getting the recommended amount of physical activity.
Did you see those numbers one more time?
26.
So this is something that I added, so I don't have a graph for it.
I'm sorry.
But in high income countries, 26% of men and 35% of women are not getting enough physical activity.
But when you compare that to low income countries, Only 12% of men and 24% of women are not getting enough physical activity.
The point being, modern society, that's just what I said, lends towards apathy, weakness, sitting around, sedentary lifestyles, all of that.
Which is a trend too, like in children, for example.
Individuals that are more wealthy and of higher socioeconomic status typically have less children, and those that are of lower socioeconomic status, generally not, of course, every single instance, typically have more.
And in a life that is high status, it typically has all the conveniences afforded to it.
It's tough for people to voluntarily take on suffering, to take the walk and then to say, we're going to go for four, five, six children.
This is a pattern that you've always had to deal with because you create a system of prosperity.
There's a lot to go around, there's a lot of convenience, but then that begets the softness and the weakness that leads to the difficulty and the lower status and ultimately takes you down a peg.
It's like a cycle that keeps going on.
Yep.
So, in comparison to other developed countries, America tends to.
Have much less activity.
Part of it is the size of our country, and most people live quite far from where they work or where they buy their groceries or where they do their activities, and so they drive.
European countries, since they're so much smaller, people tend to walk or they'll take a bus, and so there's just a lot more activity built into society in other first world countries than in the US.
I mean, here in Texas, we talk about driving 40 minutes somewhere, and it's like, yeah, it's not too bad.
The American Sedentary Cycle00:11:14
Not too bad.
It's not far.
That's what we do in Texas.
Like when I lived in Taiwan, driving 40 minutes was like a whole nother city.
Like it was, nobody would do that, like if you didn't have to.
So, in 1950, 30% of Americans worked physically demanding jobs.
So, this is just the last 70 years.
By 2000, that number had dropped to 23%.
And then low activity jobs in that time period increased from 23% of the work to 41% of the work available.
So, we've just seen with machines and modern life, Less physically demanding jobs and less people doing physically demanding jobs.
Right.
Nate, let's go to quote number one.
This is from Men's Health, and they're talking about modern life.
And they say, Modern life is less physically demanding for many.
This starts in school, where daily PE is no longer the norm, and continues in the workplace.
And then there's what I quoted.
By 2000, that proportion had dropped to 23%, according to research from the St. Louis University School of Public Health.
So there we go.
Modern life just lends itself to being less active and less productive.
And we can talk about how we should all go back to the good old days, but the reality is most people are not going to be chopping their wood.
Right.
Right.
It's just not going to happen.
And so we have to come up with Christian solutions to these problems.
American strength training is at an all time low.
Only about 30% of adults meet the recommended guidelines for resistance training.
And 57.8% of Americans get this 57% of Americans report no strength training of any kind.
At all, part of their life.
The risk ratio.
So, when you come, go to strength training and then all cause mortality.
So, that's cancer, that's car accidents, any cause of mortality.
And then, with strength training, the greater amount of muscle mass you have, they're called risk ratios in science, like the greater relative risk of dying to something.
The numbers are off the charts when it comes to muscle mass and strength, decreasing your risk of dying from anything.
So, it's not as though, like, well, if you have a lot of muscle mass, you'll avoid death from car accidents because you'll be able to survive them more.
No, it's cancer.
If you have to go through chemotherapy, you have more muscle mass that's able.
To endure through it, every single possible means by which you could die is aided and staved off at some level, the more within reason muscle mass that you have, which is built by typically strength training or a very active lifestyle.
Right.
Yep.
Okay.
So, just a couple more things here to round out this section of what the situation is in modern life, particularly in America.
Okay.
So, Nate, let's take a look at graph number one here.
So, this is average self reported weight among US adults from 1990.
To 2023.
And so, what's on the screen here is a graph, and it shows by year what people reported their weight being.
And so, the green one and the blue one are really the ones that are interesting there.
People are actually reporting that they're much skinnier than they used to and much fatter than they used to.
But the green one is really interesting to me because this is the number of adults who report their weight being over 200 pounds.
Originally on, that's 1980, 1990, that was pretty low.
And now by 2023, that line is just going up and up and up.
Like it looks like a stock line of a booming stock a little bit.
Here's the irony though.
Okay.
So as more and more people are actually overweight, over 200 pounds, and again, like, whatever, you could be very tall, fine.
For the average person.
Yeah.
But as that actual number has gone up, the irony is that.
Oh, where's my quote here?
Shoot, I lost the quote.
But the irony that the article reports is that people's perception of themselves as fat or thin has almost gone the exact inverse.
Really?
And so, as people are objectively more overweight, their reported identity of, are you obese?
Are you fat?
Would you consider yourself fat?
Would you consider yourself skinny? has almost gone the exact opposite direction in the last decade or so.
That's exactly like IQ.
It's having the studies show that, like, yeah, basically, if you have a lower IQ, you know, you tend to think, I have a really high IQ.
Literally, the Dunning Kruger effect has been studied of the lower bands of smart, of dumber people, and they think they perceive themselves, right?
People that aren't as good at driving, yeah, I'm a pretty good driver, I'm better than average.
Well, 70% of people are saying they're better than average.
That's right.
It's not quite possible.
Same thing with IQ.
Math doesn't matter.
And with weight.
Let me say this, too, on body fat percentage.
So, objectively, body fat percentage is.
Just a measure of the percent of your weight that could be attributed to your visceral fat, that is a huge marker again for health.
So, 20% is where you start getting into where it affects hormones like testosterone and things like that.
This is where, for some guys, you'll kind of look skinny fat.
So, you maybe would only be six foot, you'd be 210 pounds, but ultimately, like, you're just there's no definition to your muscle and everything like that.
So, especially if you're above 20%, we can get into some specifics later on.
You're going to want to be active and you're going to want to do things that are going to decrease that body fat.
That's part of diet, that's part of exercise.
It's also just moving generally more.
17, 16, 15, those are good ranges for males to be in.
Once you get lower than that, that's only you're maybe a bodybuilder, you're doing some type of competition.
You can also go too extreme on the other end.
Being 7, 8% body fat, your diet would be so extreme to maintain that.
It would not be conducive to life.
It's also not as good for you.
But generally speaking, as a man, just look up what does 20% body fat look like?
What does 25% body fat look like?
And if you're identifying with some of those higher metrics for your health, you need to bring it down for your testosterone, for your sleep, for your energy, for your focus.
Your body fat is.
Killer.
The more you're holding on, the more weight that's giving on your bones, on your structure, on your nervous system, all of that.
Yeah.
And so I'm working downwards right now.
And to be honest, you know, my wife's like telling me these kind of stats that Wes is saying.
It's like it's bad on your bones, it's bad on your joints.
Okay, great, great, great.
And then she says, fat is where estrogen is stored.
Oh, boy.
Five alarm fire.
That'll get you.
So, yeah, what Wes says is 100% right.
Yeah, and then literally just go Google and you will see like different comparisons 15%, 16%, 17%, because it costs a decent amount of money to actually get scanned, nor should you probably do that.
But generally speaking, if you can look yourself in the mirror or ask your spouse, honey, be honest.
And again, you're at some of those higher levels, that's the sign to go, eh, this needs to come down.
And then if you really care that much for a baseline, you can go to your YMCA or something and get an actual DEXA scan or something like that.
Yeah, good.
One last graph that I wanted to show, just kind of showing.
What is the trends in America?
So, Nate, this is that second graph that I texted in.
This is participation rate in fitness sports.
Now, again, this is not necessarily all a comprehensive picture of fitness, but fitness sports, people who do jogging or running or working out or biking or playing tennis or things like that.
And so, this is by generation.
So, the boomers, about 64% of them report some sort of fitness sport.
It's almost exactly the same with Gen X.
And still, millennials are the highest.
About 70% of them report some sort of fitness sport.
And then Gen Z is moving upwards.
Gen Z is, well, they're the lowest, but there's a caveat there in that I think that they're the ones that are increasing the quickest.
Gen Z and Gen X are quickly going to be overtaking the other groups in their fitness care and value of being fit and healthy with their bodies.
So.
That's kind of the picture of where we are now in the US in modern life.
And when we come back for our commercial break, we're going to talk about are there some signs of change?
And are there any positive steps that are being taken?
And then we'll hit section three where we'll talk about where we go from here and take questions.
I'll just add to that.
So, big picture for this segment you get kind of a pick three, pick two of them.
So, good eating, sedentary jobs, sedentary lifestyle.
And physical fitness, like actually going to the gym.
You can cheat on, you need to have at least two, as in you need to have some type of active lifestyle and eat well.
And say you do those things, you don't actually have to go to the gym.
Same thing if you go to the gym and you eat well.
Well, you could actually have a sedentary job, you work from home or whatever, but it's when you start to stack up all three.
I work a sedentary job and I don't eat well.
I work a sedentary job and I don't go to the gym.
Just eating well enough, if you're just not even burning that many calories, it's just, even if you're eating well, at the same time, it's just, I don't burn enough calories that that's actually not going to start accumulating to fat.
So out of the three, working out and going to the gym, being active daily as part of your job, being on your feet and eating well, you got to have at least two, broadly speaking.
And again, those are not clear, exact categories.
Sometimes you may move for your work more than others.
But don't start getting into, well, I only got one of these, or I have zero.
I'm sedentary, I don't go to the gym, and I don't even eat well.
That just mathematically, right?
Recipe for disaster.
Yep.
All right.
All right.
Let's hit our first commercial break.
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Gen Z Fitness and Conservatism00:15:09
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Reef Fund, Christian Capital, boldly deployed.
All right, welcome back.
We want to dive into not just doom and gloom, we try and white pill at every possible chance here on this show.
Especially on Wednesdays.
I was going to say, sometimes we're white pilling when maybe we should not be.
That's okay.
That's okay.
If you work with Joel at all, life is one white pill after another for Joel.
That's true.
So, a couple of things about Gen Z and even Gen X a little bit, but Gen Z mostly.
Are we seeing a shift?
Is America working on becoming more healthy, more fit?
I think, generally speaking, the conversation is much more part of the public conversation.
discourse, right?
Even with RFK and his Maha movement and him trying to work on diet and the things we put in our body, the chemicals, all of these things, it is definitely something that is more on the consciousness, the public consciousness, the public discourse than it has been in a really long time.
In fact, I remember I've traveled a couple times in my life as an adult, and I remember what a shock it was going to some other countries, both in Asia and in Europe, where people were very interested in health.
They were getting out in the morning, they were running, they were doing stretching, they were doing things like that.
Or in Italy, people just didn't want to drive places, they wanted to walk.
To me, I think that in the US, this is becoming more and more common, right?
The young people, especially, not just in the I'm going to be a 16 year old guy and I'm getting a buff to impress the girls, but just in general, it's more part of the public discourse.
So, like a great example is Andrew Huberman's podcast.
He started it around 2020, around COVID.
It's rapidly become one of the most well listened to podcasts in the world, under ours, of course, but literally, like people's interest, not in like 10, 15, 20 years, just in the last five, if not the last three.
I'm sitting there for three hours, a professor of neuroscience talking about getting sunlight early on in the morning and the effects of muscle mass.
That's where I've heard part of that.
Emotional regulation, hormone health.
People have gotten really, really, really into it, which I think is an awesome thing.
Some grounding.
Some grounding.
Touching grass.
Getting good sleep.
He gives a lot of great info.
I don't know if you guys know this, but the guy that goes to our church is writing a book on health and nutrition right now.
And I read the first draft, and it's got a lot of really practical things.
Like the sunlight thing in the morning, he really hammers hard on that.
Did I know that?
I don't know.
I don't think I know.
Kevin is.
Oh, nice.
Okay.
So cool.
And it's great.
It's really, really practical.
And when it comes out, you guys should get it because it's not long.
And I was just amazed at how practical it was.
So cool.
Yep.
Okay.
So what's going on with Gen Z?
Well, Nate, I don't have this on the screen.
So don't be scrambling.
I just added this when we found out about Mr. Freitas.
So this is a report from Fortune Magazine.
ABC Fitness says Gen Zers are more invested in their physical and mental health.
29% of new gym joiners are Gen Zers, and 30% of Gen Z respondents use traditional health clubs.
Gen Z is more apt to seek out personal trainers or coaches by 38% than the general population, though ABC Trainers has seen this particular group has seen a 78% increase in personal training clients year over year.
They also index higher in recreational sports and small group training.
However, and this is really interesting to me, the majority of Gen Z respondents, 68% of them, still opt to work out on their own.
So, it's not just they're doing it to be part of a club or to be with their friends or peer groups.
68% of them are just committed to doing this as a lifestyle.
And that is encouraging.
That is encouraging.
And the Gen Z cutoff, this is up to about 28 years old or so.
If you're listening and like, wait, what am I?
If you're 29 and older into your early 40s, that would be millennial, then Gen X.
But 28 and under, that would be Gen Z.
So, maybe a couple kids at most, but mostly younger individuals, newly married, et cetera.
Here's the only catch with that.
Um, one of the reasons why Gen Z is much more active is they're spending a lot more money on fitness products and subscriptions.
And so, Wes and I were talking before the episode started of if this is a chicken or an egg thing, it's not even really bad if it's one or the other.
Um, people are getting healthier.
Uh, but just the question is, is this a product of the market realizing people are interested in this?
So, we're going to make apps and podcasts and subscription services for them, or Did the people, did the younger generation become more interested in this?
And so it drove the market.
My opinion is it's a net win if people are getting healthy.
We are all susceptible to advertising.
We need to be aware of it.
But that doesn't mean that all advertising or even propaganda or colloquial sayings are necessarily bad.
Like I remember talking once with Stephen Wolfe about the fact that he said, we need to reclaim the aphorisms of the nation.
And it used to be the aphorisms were aphorisms of wisdom.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
And an apple a day keeps the doctor away.
And he said, Now, the popular wisdom of America is dumb trivialities.
Well, so maybe the market has convinced young people that they need to be healthier and fitter, and maybe there's some advertising or some psychology or some behind the scenes manipulation going on there.
I'm okay with that, right?
If we're getting healthier, we're getting fitter.
I would say it doesn't require rocket science, it doesn't require, you know, buying always the next latest, greatest thing.
Like, just be active, do strength training, watch your diet, eat healthy food.
There is a sense where people can go too far.
They can.
They can spend a lot more money than they need to on it.
But even if they are, like if they have the disposable income and they're spending it on that, honestly, not the end of the world.
Right.
Yeah.
We've talked about the studies before, too, though.
So they've taken control groups of different individuals across the political spectrum, very conservative, somewhat conservative, very progressive, somewhat progressive.
And an administration of testosterone in men introduced what the study author said was a red shift, that their policies became less progressive and leaned more, obviously, not from socialist all the way to the far right.
But inducing testosterone, raising a man's testosterone, literally affects his ability to go against the status quo, to question the zeitgeist of the moment.
It makes him more conservative.
So, if on average, take body fat for instance.
Like being strong makes him more conservative.
Being, right, being strong, being healthy, being a man.
On average, you take a man here and he gets healthier, stronger.
On average, every single case, like, well, I have a family member who's a bodybuilder and he's a lib.
In general, on average, if you take down men's body fat, Their average body fat percentage, and it's lower.
So their hormone health is better.
And so they have higher testosterone.
You introduce to them strength training, and on average, more than strength training.
You will see population and voting block shifts.
Like we know this.
And so we know if on average a group of people get healthier over a couple of years, COVID locks them indoors, they get fat, sick, and unhealthy, they hate how they feel, they hate the prediabetes, and they say, That's it.
I don't even care if I'm alone.
I'm going to the gym.
Like there's actually ramifications down the road of how those people vote and the things that they support, their willingness to say, Eh, The emperor has no clothes.
I'm not down with that.
Like, that's why this all matters.
And it's all interconnected.
This is not just an isolated bubble of, well, look better because maybe you'll find a more attractive spouse or look better because your clothes will feel better.
No, this is intimately connected because healthy people support healthy policies and healthier lifestyles and ultimately are better members of society.
I think that's a really good point that you bring up, Wes, because, you know, I try and give the benefit of the doubt.
I'm the one that's the closest to the boomers, right?
So I try and give the benefit of the doubt whenever I can.
Not that much closer.
But I think about like when my father grew up, when he was a young man, he didn't need a lot of training in masculinity.
He didn't need a lot of training in what it means to be physically fit.
He was very active just because that was life back then.
And men back then acted like men.
And so I think for a lot of boomers, when they think about working out or going to a gym, the only reason they can ascribe that someone would do that is out of vanity or to get the girl or that sort of thing.
And what we're saying is no, Like this is actually part of.
Being a robust person, being not just a slob and a cog in the wheel, but being, as the Puritans would have put it, like living in the freedom that the gospel brings us as Christian men.
Like, Christian men are called to be free.
And part of that, what we're saying is that means we have to take steps that previous generations didn't have to take.
We have to do things like work out and make that part of our routine or go to the gym or do some sort of thing, which in the past they would have said, like, well, you can be healthy just with life, right?
And maybe that was true.
But the point is, that's not the case.
And to Wes's point, I don't know.
It would be interesting to do an episode some week on this idea, Wes, of how much of the social programming that's gone on in America has been designed to make Americans fat and lazy.
I don't know if you've done any research on that.
If you have, you can talk about it.
If not, we'll save it.
But it certainly seems like, whether it was by design or not, the powers that be have the citizens of the US in a place where they are so apathetic and fat and out of shape that they can't imagine what life ought to be like.
If they were doing hard things and challenging themselves and active and full of the amount of testosterone that they should have, even for women, they should have a little bit, or full of the estrogen that women should have, not doing all the manly things.
It seems like what has happened, whether by design or just by happenstance and God's providence, is we have become a people who are so lazy and so fat that we can't even imagine desiring strong.
Nations, strong culture, godly practices and habits throughout our body politic.
So, I have an example of this that we're going to look at here in a minute, but any comments on that before we go to the example?
Just for men, we're talking about men this episode, it comes back to testosterone.
Like, that's risk.
So, like a man could imagine a world where he says, I don't want this in my town.
Like, I don't want this casino coming in.
I don't want this bar.
I don't want this, that, or the other.
I'm going to buck the status quo.
Those are risks.
And risk is a function at some level, not literally the only measure of it, but a It's a measure of testosterone.
Men with higher testosterone are then men that are more willing to take risks.
So you take a man that's placated, that isn't healthy, and that is a man who won't risk thinking, I should go against the status quo, or I think that's stupid and I should call it out.
Like at a biological, chemical level, he's less disposed.
And again, courage is also a spiritual component, but it's helped by, I mean, Richard the Lionheart.
He, of course, had a spirit and vigor and vitality, and he was trained in war.
And he had confidence and courage to do it.
And so you take that physical component out.
And you castrate men and you just sedate them.
And of course, they're not even going to imagine and think to the dreams and the risks that they could take, including like disagreeing with the government, right?
You know, like pushing back against elites and all those, you know, it's just like to pass laws where everybody, you know, gets high and everybody, you know, is just has a, you know, they're apathetic, they're not working out, they're not active, they're smoking marijuana, they're watching Netflix.
The water, you know, even our drinking water is like, is, you know, giving us more estrogen and all these different things.
And then, yeah, and then you can just kind of like force down policy, more and more progressive policy, and no one's going to push back.
Like we really were, like our whole society really was in many ways the frog that was slowly boiling for decades, you know, in the water.
And getting gay.
The frogs actually became gay and so did Americans.
But like, but the, you know, the water is slowly heating up and the frog is being, you know, boiled alive and doesn't even realize it because the temperature.
Changing ever so slightly.
And our elites were doing a pretty good job for the last 40 years and arguably longer.
And then their kind of quintessential mistake was in 2020, they got cocky.
And they said, all right, we're already at like 160 degrees.
Let's go ahead and just turn it up to.
Let's full send to 210.
Yeah, to 212.
And we'll get this done.
And it did work for about half the country.
Like the nerve endings were already shot, you know, and the frogs were just, you know, they were basically dead, anyways.
And so they put on, you know, three masks and, you know, got 17 different boosters and, you know, and, you know, they did the gay thing.
But about half of the country, to varying degrees, not all with the same, you know, measure of courage, but to some degree or another, about half the country said, wait a second, this is insane.
They still had some nerve endings and they actually felt that temperature bump, you know, from 160 to 212.
You know, I'm not saying like, like Wes has already, you know, we've given the disclaimers and the caveats.
We're not saying it's an exact science, right?
We're not saying you can't find one fat conservative.
And we're not saying you can find many, unfortunately.
Unfortunately, yeah.
But not unfortunate that they're conservative, but unfortunately that they're fat because we'd like them to be conservative and healthy.
And live long.
Because we'd like them to live.
Yeah, exactly.
We love them.
But on the flip side, you know, like you can find, you know, plenty of people who are progressive and they're in shape.
Maybe not plenty, but some.
Yeah, especially farther along than that.
Well, especially also, I think, for women.
Women and gay men tend to want to have that perception of being fit and worked out.
But what I was going to say for liberal women, it's almost like there should be a chart that shows with every pound added, another quarter inch of the hair.
Oh, is cut back.
Like, it's like, oh, yes, yes.
True Biblical Godliness for All00:06:40
The fatter a woman gets, the shorter her hair gets.
And then it also begins to turn like a bright, you know, orange, magenta, or green, or a purple, which I appreciate.
You know, that's even God in His, I think, His kindness and mercy in nature.
Like, poison dark frogs, you know, like they're really colorful.
And so you know that they're dangerous.
Well, liberals, likewise, you know, they put, you know, poison dark frog, you know, color in their hair so that, you know, I'm toxic, I'm dangerous, stay away, don't touch me because you'll die.
I appreciate that.
And overweight women do vote Democrat more often.
So, again, there are women that maybe, you know, if they're struggling with weight, but they would, they're conservative, and God bless.
But on average, women who are overweight vote for Democrat policy.
So that's what I'm saying.
Yeah, there are exceptions.
But on average, yeah, people who are healthy, healthy bodies tend to, you know, come in a pair with a healthy mind, you know, and that's the whole point that we're saying.
And the only reason we talk about these things, just for the record, because people are like, have you done like, A number of episodes on a similar topic, and the answer is yes.
And Lord willing, we'll continue to do so and continue to provide more and more information and get better and better and more compelling as we do it.
But the reason why we're doing this, like it was the 1950s, I don't think we'd be doing this.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Like we wouldn't be podcasting, you know, but there's a lot of things we wouldn't be doing.
But let's say, you know, like we were, you know, radio show host or something like that, we probably wouldn't be doing, you know, multiple episodes on this subject.
The reason why we do it is because.
Not necessarily among conservatives, but within the church, and especially for evangelicals, it's an epidemic of an overly spiritualized, pietistic, even smug kind of talking down to like attitude towards physical fitness.
Like you talk about, like, you say, hey, on average, just in a general sense, I think men should be strong.
And immediately you'll get backlash from boomer pastors who are 100 pounds overweight saying, well, a strong man, what masculinity and then what true biblical masculinity is.
And then immediately you can bet the house that what's about to come out of his mouth when he says true biblical masculinity is a definition that your Christian grandmother should embody.
It's a generic, ambiguous definition.
Self controlled, kind.
Yeah, true biblical manhood is that kindness and love.
It's like, yes, but also we're not androgynous creatures.
We're not just embodied souls.
God created a world with distinctions.
And there is a sharp distinction between male and female.
And both the man and woman are called to godliness.
What we're saying, though, is that godliness looks different.
This is why I love the last two chapters of Ephesians, the latter half.
Chapter five and then chapter six, especially.
But Paul, you know, we always say we need to think in categories.
Well, here we have in New Testament, you know, apostolic writing, we have the Apostle Paul teaching us in categories.
And so he's like, here's a category male, female, husband, wife.
Husband, godliness looks like this.
Wife, godliness, well, godliness is a one size fits all.
It looks exactly the same.
No, no, that's not what he, a godly husband, sacrificial love.
Laying his life down as Christ's willingness to do so, as Christ laid his life down for the church.
And then, you know, what does godliness look like for the wife?
Well, same thing, sacrificial love.
And so, a godly Christian woman, she, you know, she goes and fights a war in Ukraine.
You know, no, submission.
It's distinct, right?
It's both, in both cases, it's godliness.
But godliness, as expressed through men, has a different manifestation and different tangible applications and implications than godliness for a woman.
And then he talks about.
Children and adults, parents.
Then, you know, another two more categories.
And then he looks at slaves and masters, you know, and, you know, still, even with our culture today, we can talk about those who, you know, those who are the owner of a company versus employees, you know, or owner of property versus, you know, a tenant and like that nature of relationship.
But the point is that in each of these categories male, female, husband, wife, adult, child, parents, children, and Slave master or employees and you know, employers and employees.
Um, the apostle Paul, the general theme is godliness for all of them, all six of these categories godliness, and yet godliness in all six of these categories is distinct, it's unique, it's not androgynous, it's not just one size fits all.
And back to the point I was making today, um, I really think that not just among conservatives in a general sense, but specifically among the church and and especially older pastors.
I mean, the moment that you say that manhood has anything, anything to do with something tangible, something defined, something specific, and something physical in the physical world, something beyond just the fruit of the spirit in a general abstract kind of way, the moment you say, Well, I think it's good if a man knows how to change a tire.
And you say, Well, that's vain.
That's shallow.
That's.
True godly manliness is if you get a flat tire on the side of the highway and cars are speeding by, a true godly Christian man will open up his Bible app on his phone and begin to read scripture to his family.
You know, it's like, yeah, but it'd be great if he could also change the tire.
Instead of having to call AAA.
Yeah.
So, anyways, yeah.
I was going to say, like, on that, in the 1950s, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I remember talking to a guy from church and we were just driving.
He said, you know, I never really had anyone need to teach me, like, men are the head of their wives.
Like, there really is.
Time and place where you would not have to teach on patriarchy and you wouldn't have to teach on physical fitness.
The reason we're talking about them today is for all the reasons you just mentioned, Joel, in this particular time, in this particular place.
Not everybody, maybe not even the majority, but there's a good amount of individuals in the church somewhere along the line.
Mitigating Judgment vs Repentance00:05:57
It got missed.
And so you have to say, hey, 40 years ago, we did not have to tell anyone.
We didn't have to tell women or men.
Husbands are the head.
Wives are to submit in the home.
We didn't have to tell them, hey, you shouldn't be 40, 50, 60 pounds overweight.
Legitimately did not have to say that.
But today, there are those saying, It doesn't matter.
It's not a difference.
If you go back and you watch the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, it kind of startles me a little bit because I remember I'd watched that movie as a child.
And then a number of years ago, I played the movie for my two older kids.
And I had not seen the movie, I'd not even thought about it for decades.
And it shocked me that the kid that they have in the movie, who's the fat kid who can't stop eating candy, Looked like normal kids running around.
I know.
Right?
Like, I was like, oh my word.
And it was kind of that moment.
I was like, wow, we really do have a problem.
Yeah.
Every now and then you'll see, like, on social media or X or something, you'll see a picture of George Costanza, you know, and that's not even that long ago, like the 90s.
And they'll say, this was comically, comically fat in the 90s.
Right.
You know, yep.
Yep.
Yep.
Nate, feel free to go ahead and push enter on that comment.
You had a banger.
Yeah.
I thought it was a great comment, Nate.
Nathan's over there.
He's tempted to.
Address somebody in the chat, but I give you my full permission.
Let the lib know.
All right.
I'll hit this question just from Leigh.
She said, You should research the public water supply.
All of the pharmaceuticals, including birth control pills, abortive fashions, hormones, and essentially all drugs are too small to be removed.
That's absolutely the case in many ways.
As we remember with the Golden Gate, we talked about that with the hormonal birth control pill.
Our sin of hormonal birth control, which is a sin, the hormonal birth control pill, it often gets into the water supply through waste and also through being flushed down.
And it gets in and it's retaken back up.
And it's very toxic, especially to men, but also to women at a hormonal level.
And so it's a judgment for our sins that's coming back to us.
And the way to get around that, you should be filtering the water that comes in your home if you have any control of it at all, especially with what you drink.
We have three, four, five filters in my house.
I don't know.
Right.
Yeah.
That reference briefly that Wes made to the golden calf, for those who aren't familiar, it's the story where Moses comes down from the mountain and meeting with God.
He'd been gone for some time, and Israel got restless and gave in to their idolatry and said, All right, well, we need to pivot and go a different direction.
We don't know where Moses is, we don't know if he's ever coming back.
And so they go and put pressure on Aaron, and Aaron caves.
It's not just, he blames the people, but he willfully chooses to cave.
And they create, fashion this golden calf as an idol to worship and say, Behold, the God that brought you, part of the Red Sea, and brought you out of Egypt.
And so they're worshiping an idol, this golden calf.
And as a consequence for their sin, what Moses does is he actually grinds the calf into dust and then puts it into the water and makes the Israelites drink it as their consequence.
And so that's not a hyperbolic, like Wes is making, I think, a really insightful connection there and saying.
And thousands died.
And thousands died, right.
And so these days, like because of our sin of the sexual revolution and a hatred of children, the murder of children.
And sodomy and the LGBT mafia alphabet people with all those things.
And as a society, not everybody's gay, but so much of our society has celebrated these things.
And so, because of that, the embrace and celebration of abortion and homosexuality and these kinds of things, that God in His sovereignty has allowed the hormonal birth control pill to poison the water.
And so, it's like, well, you, instead of confronting and rebuking, Those who are sodomites and sexually perverse in society, you chose to celebrate it.
And now your punishment is that because you didn't rebuke the gays, now you're gay.
Yeah.
Wait, what?
How are you going to do that?
The water.
Yeah.
The hormones in the water.
It's going to poison you, make you more effeminate.
Yeah.
And I mean, it's funny.
Like Alex Jones, he's gotten a couple things wrong, but I think he's gotten a lot more right.
And that was one man.
I remember like all the memes of people making fun of him, you know, about the frogs.
He said atrazine, the chemical in the water, was inducing them to change from male to female.
Yep, he was right.
And it happened.
Now imagine what that would do in boys and girls about to go through puberty.
Right.
Ingesting amounts of that and drinking water and everything that they.
Terrible, terrible for your hormone health.
And all that's a chemical thing, it's a physical thing, it's a health thing.
But it's also, I praise God for RFK Jr., you know, and I think he's going to make some great, you know, Reforms.
But lest we forget, fundamentally, it is a spiritual thing.
It's not just like, oh, there's this chemical problem and food dies and all these kinds of things.
Yeah, and also, we have been rebelling against the Lord for decades and decades and decades.
And you could figure out how He's punished us, how He's disciplined us, and then try to mitigate.
There's a difference in figuring out the means of God's judgment and then trying to mitigate the means of judgment.
Versus repentance.
Mitigate, figuring out the agency of how God is disciplining us for sin and then trying to mitigate that agency is not the same as repentance.
And yes, I am also talking about trying to cure AIDS.
Vaccines and Divine Discipline00:04:34
Yep.
That's different.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try to help people who are hurting, even when there's sin.
I think that's what mercy dictates.
But also, lest we strain gnats and swallow camels, let's also as a nation repent of.
Sodomy and perversion.
Let's do both.
So, yeah.
Okay.
All right.
We'll go to our second commercial break.
And when we come back, we have two videos for you.
The first one will make you puke and make you angry.
And the second one has a little bit of hope.
This is your barf bag warning.
All right.
The clock is running out.
You need to go and register now for our Christ is King How to Defeat Trash World Conference.
It's happening the year of our Lord 2025, April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
That's a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
And by God's grace, we're able to provide for you.
An all star lineup.
We've got Steve Dace, Calvin Robinson, Orrin McIntyre, Dr. Stephen Wolf, Eric Kahn, David Reese, Andrew Isker, John Harris, A.D. Robles, Dan Burkholder, Dusty Devers, Ben Garrett, C.J. Engel, and yours truly, Pastor Joel Webbin.
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Go to rightresponseconference.com to register today.
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And then we'll get into the clips.
All right.
Just before we jump into the clips, Pastor Don Elborn, we got a chuckle out of your comment.
The cure for AIDS is to drink filtered water and heterosexual monogamy.
Yeah, we all had a good laugh.
Yeah, in that sense, we've all been vaccinated.
Yeah.
Against monkeypox vaccine confirmed.
You have a vaccine against AIDS?
Yes, it's called heterosexual marriage.
We've all received the vax.
We're safe.
Okay.
Okay, good.
So we're going to go.
We've been talking about is the tide changing?
We've talked about some statistics and just the general conversation going on in the nation.
It seems that people are more aware of these problems and working to try and alleviate some of them, at least with our physical fitness and our drive and our ability to achieve and create, which really.
If you want to talk about a decline in the nation, like we have been the most creative nation ever.
And that is what is missing.
And as Wes says, it's related to our self discipline, our testosterone, all of those things.
So there's another sign that maybe we are turning a corner a little bit on this.
And that is in military advertising and marketing.
So the first video that we're going to watch is a little bit longer.
It's a comparison of an ad from, I think, 2022.
Is this the American one versus the Russian one?
Yep.
That's a good time.
This one is an ad from 2022, I think, from the U.S. Army.
And then right on the heels of it, like without it's been merged into the same video, is an advertisement from the Russian Army, a recruitment advertisement trying to get people to join.
Then we'll all throw up for a little bit.
And then we have a second video that is new from the U.S. Army.
U.S. Army Ad from 202200:02:19
Yeah.
And that's your White Bill Winston.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's encouraging.
All right.
All right.
Let's take it, Nate.
This is the story of a soldier who operates your nation's Patriot Missile Defense Systems.
It begins in California, with a little girl raised by two moms.
Although I had a fairly typical childhood, took ballet, played violin, I also marched for equality.
I like to think I've been defending freedom from an early age.
When I was six years old, one of my moms had an accident that left her paralyzed.
Doctors said she might never walk again.
But she tapped into my family's pride to get back on her feet, eventually standing at the altar to marry my other mom.
With such powerful role models, I finished high school at the top of my class and then attended UC Davis, where I joined a sorority full of other strong women.
But as graduation approached, I began feeling like I'd been handed so much in life a sorority girl stereotype.
Sure, I'd spent my life around inspiring women, but what had I really achieved on my own?
One of my sorority sisters was studying abroad in Italy, another was climbing Mount Everest.
I needed my own adventures.
My own challenge.
And after meeting with an Army recruiter, I found it.
A way to prove my inner strength and maybe shatter some stereotypes along the way.
I'm U.S. Army Corporal Emma Malone Lord, and I answered my calling.
This is the first day of your new life.
Shattering Gender Stereotypes00:15:26
What was yesterday means nothing now.
Who you were before, no one cares now.
What's important now is who you'll be today.
What do you know about yourself?
What are you capable of?
Questions may remain unanswered, but can you sleep soundly later on?
Knowing yourself, knowing the limit of your possibilities, to hell with limits.
Are you ready to break yourself?
Every day, pain hardens you here.
It was you who decided to prove something to yourself.
The commander is here only for you to see an enemy in him because without the enemy, there is no battle.
Because without battle, there is no victory.
But in reality, the main enemy is you, the you of yesterday.
Your task is to track the enemy down, catch up to him, outperform him, become better than him, and return the victor.
Because tomorrow is the first day of your new life.
Sorry for that last part right there.
We did not know that that was in the video.
But you get the point.
And I will say this the video from the Russians, I kept thinking the whole time, yeah, that looks like a military recruitment ad for a Christian nation.
And then you see what it looks like from a gay nation like ours, that we hope by God's grace might be Christian again.
And then I just wanted to point out because I thought it was insightful.
Man in our chat, he comments on our YouTube channel fairly often and shares our material.
I know him personally, and obviously, I'm not going to say who he is, but he's a great guy and from time to time is a part of the church, a good Christian man.
But he had an insightful comment because we're about to show you know a more recent military recruitment ad for America that it takes a very different tune from the hey, both of my parents, you know, I have two moms, and I've been fighting, you know, fighting against hate, you know, by going to.
Gay pride parades where dudes have their dong hanging out in front of children.
I've been fighting for that debauchery and perversion my whole life.
And now the U.S. Army has lowered its physical fitness standards so that I can go and jeopardize men and get them killed because I'll be captured and abused and it'll put people in danger.
So you have that ad.
Tell us how you really feel, Joel.
That's how I really feel for gay America.
But America is getting a little bit less gay, at least in the military.
And Mollusk Man said the Army ads only show straight white men with guns when Israel.
Is in trouble.
I thought that was pretty good.
It's like when Ukraine's in trouble, let's run the gay girl ads.
You know, now that our greatest ally is in trouble, it's time to get serious and send some healthy men to go die.
Okay, hopefully not.
Lord, please, please don't let us go into World War III because of Israel.
In the name of Jesus.
Amen.
Okay.
Wes, you were going to say something about military women?
Yeah, so I did four years in the Marine Corps, 2013, 2017, and I was deployed once.
And of all the drama that would go on in units of things that had happened, maybe it was harassment or whatever, not every single woman, but 90% of the time, if there's some type of woman in the unit, just about of whatever rank it was, that woman in some way or another was sleeping around.
She was impacting mission readiness and just distracting men from the mission.
We were deployed, we were in the Middle East, and there were literally women who were married to men back home.
And there was all this drama about, well, we think so and so hooked up with so and so, and that's actually technically fraternization, and now it has to be investigation when you're supposed to be.
On mission doing actual things.
Same thing when we were back home.
I remember, well, there's this cute girl that works up at the admin shop, and it was all the rumor mill of like who was dating who.
It impacts mission readiness.
Not every single woman, but over and over again, this is not just my story.
Tons and tons of people have said this.
Whenever you have actually anything meaningful to do, having women in your unit distracts because men are attracted to women.
That's what men are.
And so you have, especially when it relates to combat and the military and all those different things, it is a distraction and it does not work.
Right.
Yeah, right.
All right.
Well, we do, we hope, we think that the culture is turning in this area.
We hope that the military is turning a corner in this area.
Mainmailer says, Do actual generals in our military meet the standards?
That's the real issue.
Well, Pete Hegseth certainly does.
I don't know if you guys saw that video of him doing the workout routine with the Marines in Germany.
That was pretty impressive.
And I've heard through social media that that has gone like wildfire through the troops almost immediately.
Texting their buddies, calling their buddies all through the armed services.
This guy can do the morning PT with us without breaking a sweat.
And it was really incredible.
So to that end, we have a more encouraging, very short, but pretty brand new Army recruiting video.
And this is hopefully not just the face of the military, but hopefully the face of what American men are wanting to be.
Not that we're all going to be as ripped as this guy, but the idea of being self-disciplined, strong, resilient, all of those things.
So Nate, let's play the second video of the new Army recruitment video.
Stronger people are harder to kill.
So, not a great actor.
Yeah, that's right.
But he says.
We don't need him to be a good actor.
We already have those.
We've got Zelensky over there.
Yep.
He's a great actor.
He says, Stronger people are harder to kill.
And I remember Eric Kahn has famously said, I think he's the one that originated it.
Part of being a man is being hard to kill.
Right?
Masculinity is being hard to kill.
And so, even the fact that that is now what the military is coming out with, I wish he would have said, Strong men are harder to kill.
But I suppose in general, it's true, even if you're a stronger woman, you're probably harder to kill, too.
Hopefully, you're not in the military trying to be killed, though.
So, right.
Yep.
A little encouragement there.
Seems like the tide is turning a little bit.
Yeah.
Definitely.
I think, too, the reason Gen Z men, so those younger men, are either really keyed into it, they're watching edits and masculinity stuff.
And that's because there is one thing that truly, at some level, cannot be bought, and that is a good muscular physique.
And it's not everything, but there is no shortcut to it.
You cannot purchase it.
There's no equipment or whatever.
Test or steroids obviously help, but there is no replacement for being in the gym consistently, eating right, sleeping well, not just for a week or two, for months and months to years on end to have a decent muscular physique.
And so, in a world where there's crypto and everything, and like what is wealth anymore?
What is cars and what are watches?
Here's one thing that you just, you for sure have discipline, and it's being decently in shape.
You know, taking care of yourself, looking composed.
You can't fake that.
You can't buy that.
And so, in a world of fakeness, I want to say a lot of young men say, Hey, here's one thing that if I get it, nobody will be able to discredit or take that away from me.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Want to deal with some questions?
Yes.
Yep.
So, we'll take a couple questions, Nate, if we have them.
And I'll just be Joel today.
I don't know.
I'm feeling I was in a mood for all my classes today.
I was in a mood for all my classes.
I'm still in a mood.
So, I'm going to be Joel today.
I will definitely.
Respond to the super chats.
Oh, there's no super chats.
Yeah, that's all right.
Call it.
There we go.
Question number one What's, oh, there we go.
What's Wes's workout routine?
Um, here's what I would just say so, uh, if people have asked, like, oh, like how much these guys lift or whatever, like, I won't speak for you, but I'm getting close to probably benching about 300 pounds.
That was one of my goals for this year.
Same thing squat and deadlift in the 300s, close to high 300s.
Uh, run under a nine minute mile, which isn't the fastest.
So, my individual workout routine right now, I'm doing five by five to work up my bench press.
So, that's five sets of five repetitions.
So, it's not as many.
You're not burning out.
You're not getting up.
Your heart rate is high.
But you're moving a decent amount of weight.
And what you do is you just incrementally increase it.
So, if you do 205 for five sets of five reps this week, the next week you do 210.
And the next week, 215.
It's a great way to not injure yourself.
As far as workout routines in general, what I would say is you don't help yourself if you can move a lot of weight a little distance and then you go 500 meters and you're out of breath.
Nor does it help if you can go 25 miles, you know, at seven minutes a mile, but also you can't pick up your wife on your back and carry her for 500 meters.
You have to be able to move weight and you have to be able to move.
And so, generally speaking, that would mean some type of strength, some type of lifting, actual physical weights, and then an ability to actually move your body with a decent bit of weight.
So, whatever workout routine you're doing, try to orient it around those things.
You got to move some weight if you're a man.
It's good for you, it's healthy, it builds muscle mass.
And also, at the same time, you should be able to walk to the end of the road at a decent, brisk pace with your kids, play football with them, chase them around.
And not be out of breath and winded for the next 30 minutes.
Pastor Don Elborn says, So, will we need to work out in the eternal state?
That's a good question.
I think the key word there is the word need, right?
Like, I think we will be.
First of all, there's quite a debate or an issue to think through of what it means to enter Christ's rest, right?
Does that mean a state of no physical exertion?
It could be.
It could be a state of no physical exertion.
Or does it mean no futile work like the curse has given to us?
And theologians have debated about that question.
Wes and I have talked about that quite a bit.
If we have physical tasks in heaven similar to what God gave us here on earth.
I think there will be a wisdom where we will live a lifestyle that is proper to keep our bodies at optimal condition.
I don't know that necessarily we would need to go to the gym any more than the man who is cutting wood for his family and farming his land would have necessarily had to go to the gym.
I think my personal opinion is I think there will be some physical activity and that we will steward our bodies perfectly in heaven because there will be no sin and there will be no cellular degradation.
So, I think that our lifestyle as we serve Christ in the new heavens and the new earth will be such that our bodies will be optimally healthy.
Yeah, that's well said.
Josh Rocha, he said, Sometimes I flirt a bit with the cute woman at my gym.
We talk about getting drinks together and then what we're going to do after we put the kids down for bed.
My gym is in my garage.
He's talking about his wife.
Well done, Josh.
Well said.
Yeah, that's good.
Let's see, real quick.
I can hit Neville's question.
I'll be okay.
Go ahead.
So, Neville said, Do you think that obscene material reduces testosterone and contributes to feminization and gayification of men?
I've looked at some of the literature on this.
It is not a direct one to one that when a man sins that, it just steps down, steps down, steps down.
You could almost liken it to smoking weed.
Like, it's literally not like you smoke one weed, you become gay or something like that.
One weed, just a single one.
That's a guy who does not smoke weed.
Your credentials are off the chart.
You wait for a second.
I was joking.
Smoking weed, just in and of itself, just it doesn't immediately have this mechanical, mechanistic effect.
And so too is this sin.
But what this sin does is it compounds over time and it creates a man that is pacified.
So, why would he have ambition?
Why would he go out and conquer?
Why would he strive?
Why would he discipline himself?
Why would he buffet his body when all the things that he's kind of striving after and looking for he has in his bedroom on his laptop?
And so, in and of itself, it's not this mechanistic means, but most certainly unleashed on a society.
It creates men that have no ambition to actually be men, which chicken under the egg, which comes first, definitely creates a mode of living that is conducive to lower testosterone.
And then with lower testosterone, you have less ambition and less drive.
You win less, which decreases your testosterone further, which then you're not winning and you continue to go back to at least that thing that will give you dopamine and reward.
And it's a self defeating cycle.
Watch Zealot, the Watch Zealot, he says, What are your thoughts, comments on Doug's?
New term, hatriarchy.
I did see that in my feed, um, blog and made blog video on the hatriarchy.
I think it was his take on the fiasco with uh, patriarchy Hannah, yeah, and that turning out to um, the problem though is uh, I don't, I did not watch it.
I don't really, I didn't watch it either.
I don't really uh, read or watch Doug Wilson anymore.
Uh, love him, still respect him, but uh, yeah, just uh, don't really follow.
His ministry much for the past little while.
And I think for those of you who have been following along for the last few months, probably know why.
I think it's justified and perfectly fine.
So, but from what I could tell, which is like the little caption, it basically seemed like Doug was going to do what you would expect these days from Doug that he was going to somehow tie a random person that none of us personally know and say that that somehow, I don't know, somehow means that Ogden and Eric Kahn and Joel Webbin and everybody else is.
The little bit of the caption that as I was just scrolling past it, it said, Something about egg on your face.
And I don't really know.
I don't know what that egg would be.
It's not like Hannah Patriarchy or Patriarchy Hannah.
You know, people were trying to say, well, you guys platformed her and said, well, we didn't.
I went on her podcast that she told me she had her husband's permission for, which that obviously turned out to be a lie.
I did that one time over a year ago, two years ago, something like that.
Eric did the same thing one time.
That's pretty much about it.
I mean, I don't see a whole lot of people picking on Michael Foster, but he did probably 20 different, you know, Twitter spaces with her.
He had far more engagement with Patriarchy Hannah than Eric or I did.
And if, you know, if just one time going on her audio only podcast to her audience of, you know, maybe 100 women is platforming her and I have egg on my face, then I guess Doug Wilson has egg on his face since he.
Helped build the platform of a re voice for Nazis, Joel Webbin, by speaking at our conference.
I never spoke at any conference of Hannah patriarchy, you know, but Doug Wilson, he's, I mean, I guess, does he have egg on his face for helping the Nazis out and all of the ways that he's partnered with us?
Dragons as Pets Not Enemies00:03:02
So, anyways, I just think it's a stupid argument, which sadly is what I've come to expect.
I think that Doug Wilson is still brilliant in many ways.
His contribution to Christendom over decades has been.
Incredible.
I've grown a lot from him.
And so I think he's a brother in Christ.
I still love him.
But yeah, his more recent commentary on issues like this seemed like, for the most part, it's just another video of how I'm burning bridges that in the video actually catch myself on fire and burn down both of the towns.
It was a really prophetic video.
That's what he did.
Or I'm writing blogs about young men.
And I'm closing the submarine door so that the young men drown out at sea without, like, if that's, you know, that's not always who he was, but that's the direction for whatever reason, in God's providence, he's decided to go.
He's made the calculus and cost benefit analysis.
We're always, you know, we're always concluding, we're always determining, making decisions.
And over the last six months, that's kind of the decision that he's made he's pretty much done with young men.
Young men are too much of a liability.
And he's in his 70s now.
He's got a 40 year record of a lot of really helpful things.
And I think he's kind of just ready to.
He fought dragons, he did.
And nobody can take that away from him.
And we shouldn't so quickly forget.
He fought a lot of dragons and he taught young men of the next generation how to fight dragons.
The problem is that he said, well, dragons look like this they have scales and they have claws and fangs, you know, and wings, and they have smoke coming out of their nose and they breathe fire.
And then me and the Ogden boys and others, you know, we just were looking, you know, surveying the land, and we thought we saw one.
And we're like, here's a dragon, let's slay it.
It's literally, it's the biggest dragon we've ever seen.
It has wings and it breathes fire and it's got scales and its fangs are huge and its claws are massive.
And, you know, like this is a dragon.
And then we were told, no, that's not a dragon.
That's our pet.
And of course, what I'm speaking of is Zionism and Israel.
I was taught to kill things that breathe fire.
And we found one.
We found a live one, not a dead dragon.
Those are easy, you know, not the dead dragon of, you know, racism and, Jim Crow laws that ended decades ago.
It's always fun to go kick the carcass of a dragon that somebody with courage has already slayed.
But living dragons are tough.
And that dragon, for whatever reason, has been declared to be not a dragon, not a threat, not an enemy, but a pet and a friend.
And so, long story short, to answer your question, the Watch Zealot, any questions about what Doug is up to, I'm probably not the best guy to answer them because I'm not really paying attention anymore.
Reformed Christians and Heresy00:10:42
Okay.
I am qualified to answer this next question.
How many miles a week, Wes?
Three.
I have a 1.5 mile loop that I've paced out around my house.
So I run that twice a week and I'm trying to decrease my time on it about five to 10 seconds each time with a goal of running about like a sub seven minute mile for that mile and a half by the end of the year.
All right.
Two super chats.
Thanks very much, Presbyterian on.
That's pretty much a great question.
Didn't he used to be the seminarian?
I think it was a seminarian.
Yeah, he was a seminarian.
And then when he graduated, he was like, oh, snap, I got to.
Changed my profile.
Yep.
Yep.
$2, thank you very much from Presbyterian on.
Here's a super chat for you boys.
Love you all.
Thank you very much.
And then he says, Pastor Webbin, what are your favorite commentaries?
And I think every member of Joel's church knows the answers.
At least for the book of Matthew.
Yeah.
So Matthew Henry is great.
Tony Evans study Bible.
No, but Matthew, oh, yeah, Presbyterian.
He said, I was a seminarian.
I thought so.
He's a great follow, by the way.
What's your handle, Presbyterian, on.
Presbyterian on X. What's your handle?
I'll wait for you to type it in real quick and we'll give you a shout out.
You can get some follows, some extra follows.
I think I follow you on X.
Yeah, I think I've seen him.
And you've had some good content.
We appreciate it.
All right, it'll be coming.
But in the meantime, I'll try to answer the question.
So, yeah, Matthew Henry is just, he's so accessible.
I mean, you just, the simplest of Google searches and you can get leather bound commentaries if you want to have physical copies, which I get, I think that's awesome.
But just, you know, there's only a few guys.
I mean, there are several, but by comparison, there's only a few guys that have a commentary of the entire Bible.
Matthew Henry is one of them.
Another one that, you know, for me being Baptist, I think he's kind of, you know, he's the quintessential, you know, giant of the Baptist is John Gill.
John Gill was a pastor of the same church that about 100 years later that Charles Spurgeon became the pastor of.
And John Gill, John Gill's great, like, because.
Oh, he is.
He, like, for instance, like he believed, you know, you can find all these quotes, like he believed that both tables of the law of God, the Decalogue, Exodus 20, not just, you know, don't murder and don't steal as it pertains to our love for our neighbor, but including our loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, you know, blue laws, Sabbath laws, you know, blasphemy laws, the first table of law.
He believed that that should be legislated and enforced by the civil magistrate in a society, in a nation state, that it wasn't just something that belonged, you know, to the kingdom of grace or the church, you know, but it also belonged to, To nature, and it was good for all people, even outside of the realm of the church.
So, John Gill and Matthew Henry give you kind of a little bit of the Baptist and the Presbyterian perspective, but both Reformed, both covenantals.
Covenant John Gills is covenantal as a Baptist could be.
Um, you know, and I, I know, you know, the Presbyterian, you know, is on here, and so he's like, that's not very covenantal, fair, whatever.
But, um, but yeah, those, I think those are just, and, and then again, accessibility in terms of just the ease of access.
Um, you know, if you, if you want to buy the copies, I think that's a benefit, but you could spend zero dollars and utilize both of those commentaries, every verse in the Bible, Baptist, Reformed Baptist perspective, Reformed Presbyterian, Puritan perspective with Matthew Henry, and, um, And it'll always, you know, pretty much everything to have a good take.
Yep.
Yep.
We got a couple more questions.
We're pretty early, so we can hit them.
Did he give us his handle?
He did.
What is it?
It's the same thing, Presbyterianon.
So at Presbyterianon.
So, okay, there it is.
At P R E S B Y T E R I A N O N. At Presbyterianon.
Presbyterianon?
Is that how you would say it?
Yes, Presbyterianon.
Yeah, give him a follow.
Do you remember Chris Pena?
Where he's in the chat, go back, Nate.
Oh, hey, I literally got doxed like a month ago.
Yeah, I know.
So, yeah, but here's the deal six months ago, they could have done something, now they can't.
Yeah, I'm untouchable in God's grace, in God's mercy.
My real name is out, my real last name is known, but uh, there's nothing they can do.
Yep, you were able to uh fortify yourself just in time.
That's that's a goal.
That's you know, that kind of brings up a sidebar, but part of my advice to every young man is um.
Don't be foolish, but at the same time, we need courage.
And in order to exercise courage properly without it coming at a deep cost to your wife and your children, every man needs to do everything he can to be bulletproof.
Like we're talking about the physical side of it today.
So, like being healthy, be hard to kill, bulletproof.
Well, also financially, like in every single realm of your life, economically and physically and spiritually, and like relationally, also, like at every single level.
But be bulletproof.
And the reason why, here's the reason it's not just so that you can be tough.
It's not so that you can look at yourself in the mirror or things like that.
You need to be bulletproof because we live in a world where people shoot bullets.
We live in a world where people hate you.
And you have to come to terms with that.
You can't kid yourself and be naive.
When I say people, I don't just mean libs and progressives, I mean Christians.
And some of them are Reformed Christians.
If they could, they would do everything they can to make sure, not just that you are disqualified from ministry or have to step down from the path, like they will make sure that your children starve.
They want your family to starve.
It's like, what are you talking about?
I don't even want to say his name.
There will be some stuff that will come out about this in the future, and we'll leave it there.
But there's a Reformed.
Guy fairly well known, not a huge name, but fairly well known, who a couple years ago got doxxed by Christians, allegedly Reformed Christians, and he didn't just lose his job that was kind of in the realm of ministry in a Christian vocation that I think may have made sense.
That might have been the right call.
I'm not privy to all the details, so I can't say definitively, but it's somewhat reasonable that he lost that job.
That's one thing.
But then, for the last two years, these people followed him around when he was working, you know, menial jobs outside, well outside of the realm of ministry, just whether it's, you know, like working a FedEx truck or whatever, you know, just normal jobs.
And they followed, they would follow him after doxing him and him losing his ministry job.
They would follow him months after the fact and find out where his next employment was in order to get him fired again.
And I'm talking about Reformed Christians.
I'm talking about people.
It's not just that, oh, well, we want to uphold the purity of Christ's church and biblical qualifications.
No, they want your kids to starve, guys.
You need to hear that.
These people want your kids to starve.
They hate you because you've embarrassed them.
You've embarrassed them by going back and doing the reading and realizing that all our Christian forefathers disagree with them.
And that the anomaly is not the new dissident right, but that the blip on the map, the anomaly is the 20th century.
Modern Christianity, modern liberalism is the anomaly.
You're not crazy.
You think like every single human being, Christian and even non Christians in many aspects, have thought since the beginning of the world, in every place, in every time.
And when you make those arguments and you dust off, right, you dust off these old writings, and then a lot of them aren't even that old, but just before 1945, things before the post liberal order.
And you start posting that publicly online, you start challenging the status quo and challenging the post war consensus and these things, you're humiliating people.
You are threatening entire, and it's all money.
Let's just be honest.
A lot of it is money.
You're challenging and potentially threatening and crippling whole Christian economies.
Like you think of what happened just in the last 10 years with a lot of the.
Exposing a big Eva with TGC, you know, and these kinds of groups.
And yeah, they're not going to go quietly, you know, ride off into the sunset.
Russell Moore's not going to do that.
It's life or death for him.
You are threatening his way of life.
He's got a scam to run.
You know what I mean?
He's got a good thing going.
And, you know, and you're ruining it.
You know, it's like the Scooby Doo episodes.
You know, you pull off the mask and it's like, and I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you pesky kids.
That's all you guys on X, you're the pesky kids.
And you're pointing out that the emperor has no clothes and you're pulling off the mask and showing, like, you know, that Big Eva is a joke.
And turns out most of Mid Eva is too.
And when you do that, even if you're doing it for righteous motives, it doesn't matter in the tangible sense, it is a threat.
It affects the bottom line.
And of these entities, these ministries, these operations.
And when you affect the bottom line of some of these communities, they don't want to just defend the purity of the church because they think that you're extreme or that you're heretical.
They know you're not heretical.
So they're not just going to try to dox you or to de platform you, defrock you.
They will follow you around for two years to every single job that you go to to make sure you cannot feed your wife and kids.
That's the type of people that we're talking about.
We're talking about wicked, wicked people.
So, all that being said, back to, you know, Wes, you know, being doxxed, by God's grace, they can't do anything.
And I'm just using that as an opportunity to give a little pastoral counsel here.
Building a Bulletproof Marriage00:02:12
You need to be working overtime as fast as you can in the grace and strength that the Lord generously provides in order to make yourself bulletproof, to fortify every aspect of your life, your family, your relationships, where you live.
You do not need to be renting.
You don't.
I know that it's hard, but as much as you can, like what Paul would say to slaves if you can gain your freedom, right, be content.
But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself to do so.
Dude, the debtor is a slave to the lender.
So, as much as you can, try to own a home.
Make sure that your marriage is rock solid, that your wife would not be able to.
The caliber of marriage and relationship that you have with your wife is strong enough to where she could not be manipulated against you, that she couldn't watch a video.
I don't know, this is hyperbolic or hypothetical, but for instance, she couldn't just find one video about.
About Abigail and Nabal, and be, you know, in a moment convinced that you're Nabal and then be persuaded to go against her own husband.
So, you need to be bulletproof in your marriage that your wife does, that the trust that she has in you, her husband, far outsets to where she can see a video like that online where they say, You need to be a Nabal because your husband's too far right wing, and that she would, without even needing any instruction, you've already discipled her enough to where she sees something like that and she just laughs.
Or, Gets angry because she realizes that it's actually wicked and it's wrong.
So fortify, bulletproof your marriage, bulletproof your finances.
If you can, be self employed or work for a trustworthy, conservative Christian.
Bulletproof yourself in terms of your housing and try to own your own house.
Bulletproof yourself in terms of physical fitness and health.
Make sure that you can't just kill over.
I mean, we can all get hit by a truck tomorrow.
God is sovereign.
He owes us nothing.
We're entitled to nothing apart from.
God's grace, we're entitled to nothing but hell.
Fortifying Finances and Health00:07:47
But as far as it depends on you, try to be in the kind of physical shape to where you wouldn't maybe have a heart attack if you had to go up three flights of stairs.
So at all these levels, physically, financially, relationally, be bulletproof because if you're going to be courageous, they hate you.
They hate you.
The world hates you.
And sadly, A decent amount of the church also hates you.
And if they can, they will ruin you.
And so you need to be in a place where you can't be ruined.
It's imperative.
Okay.
We have a super chat that came in right at the end there.
This is from Luke McLam.
He says author book recommendations for someone wanting to learn more about church history.
Luke, I have one that my disclaimer is it's been highly recommended to me.
It's on my list, but I have not read it yet.
But it is 2,000 Years of Christ's Power.
By Nick Needham.
So, people that I know and trust have recommended that.
High Leaf said it's really, really great.
So, that's one out there.
Awesome.
Church History and Plan Language is another good one.
That one's really good.
I've gone through that one.
Yep.
Is it true that beer has estrogen?
Yes.
I can hit, especially IPAs, right here.
You hit those at Upper Alley.
So, it's true.
They have a compound called a phytoestrogen, which is an estrogen similar compound.
So, it's not literally estrogen, but it is chemically similar, which activates estrogen receptor alpha and beta.
Which would then mimic the effects of estrogen in men.
Now, it's lower quantities with almost all of these things.
It's like, well, apple seeds have this, this has the other.
Okay, don't eat 100 pounds of them in a given year.
So, the same thing for beer, and it is especially a byproduct of hops.
If you drink a lot of beer, especially IPAs, for one, it's bread.
You're drinking a loaf of bread.
It's a lot of calories.
I've been saying calories.
Nathan, how long have I been saying drinking a loaf of bread?
15 years from you.
Okay.
Yep, yep.
Long time.
Porter is called that because it was so thick with the yeast, or not the yeast, but the wheat, that they would give it to the porters who were carrying.
Luggage off the ships because they needed the calories.
Right.
Yep.
San Diego has like, makes, you know, brews a lot of great beer.
There's a lot of great breweries.
And so we would, you know, we would go to like, there'd be, you know, like Pizza Port was a place that like they had good pizza and they also brewed their own beer.
And I remember like we would go all the time and it was fine when I was like in my mid 20s.
And then right around the time I hit like 27 years old, I remember it was just like, just the way I would feel was just like a cliff.
And I'd be like, I'm going, I'm going to Pizza Port to eat a loaf of bread.
It was like super thick crust.
With you know, yeah, so it's like I'm eating a loaf of bread and then thinking, you know, what really complement this loaf of bread?
A liquid loaf of bread, like, and you know, by the time it was like 27, especially like 28, 29, I was like, all right, like I can't do this anymore.
Yep, yeah.
If you are a man, and I mentioned earlier about body fat percentage, like I'm trying to get it down, trying to get it down, drink six to eight beers a week, like that is a great place to start.
You don't have to cut it out.
I mean, I love a good beer, but it like that's just a lot of empty calories, and there's some estrogenic effects, like you see.
Guys get man boobs, and that is a product of fatty tissue and estrogen like hormonal activity.
So, as much as you can, limit it.
Whiskey's great.
Is cholesterol bad or good?
Way bigger topic that we can get to, but I will say this cholesterol is a fatty substance that also helps make the myelin sheath in your brain.
So, Alzheimer's is a degeneration of the way that the axons communicate.
And when they communicate, they're supposed to be insulated by this fatty layer, and cholesterol is a component of that.
So, is it a coincidence that we pushed a low cholesterol diet for decades and decades and decades, and now we have Alzheimer's on the rise?
You deprive the body of one of the building blocks of some of the essential components.
Now, again, all things in moderation.
That's not to say that all types of cholesterol, low density, high density, they're all good.
But cholesterol is an important part of the diet.
And don't freak out if you're eating a moderately healthy diet and something has high cholesterol.
One of my friends, Stacey, who is a dude, dude with a chick's name, but great dude.
And we've been friends forever.
But I mean, he has talked to me and several times I have not wanted to talk because it's just.
So much conversation, and I've just not cared.
But he has talked to me for years, like for like sometimes, like we're hanging out, it's like a two hour conversation.
I was like, man, this is not what I imagined us doing.
But he was right.
But he taught for years, he was like, I can't say all the things.
Like he did so much research and looked into so many different things, and I can't repeat it.
Wes knows what he's talking about.
But in a nutshell, he said, Yeah, all this stuff about you're going to get a heart attack if you eat steak, you know, and bacon, and, you know, if you have eggs.
Eggs were a big one in the 90s.
Yeah, they were saying lemonade sugar.
Eggs are one of the healthiest things you can eat for your body and your brain.
But I remember, like, Stacy, he deserves the credit.
He told me, like, 10 years ago, he was like, it's sugar.
It's sugar.
He said, cholesterol is fine.
Stay away from sugar.
And he said, raw milk, eggs, steak.
You'll live forever.
Steak, even broadly speaking.
Yeah, absolutely.
I was like, okay.
He was right.
Yep.
Someone asked about intermittent fasting, especially for cellular muscular repair.
Yes, intermittent fasting induces a thing called autophagy, which helps to repair cellular mechanisms.
It's with everything I would say, like keto, intermittent fasting, carnivore.
There are some people, they literally have to do keto because they get some type of seizure or they react.
They're very sensitive to allergens.
And so they have to do carnivore.
Great, great thing to do for a little while.
Hey, I want to hit the reset button.
Hey, I think this would help me lose some weight.
But as much as you can, your workout routine, your activity, your fitness, and your diet, sustainable is so much better.
Something you will do for 10 years is so much better than the thing you do really well for six months.
So maybe it's not quite keto, but it is heavier on protein, heavier on the fats, less on the beer, less on the sugar.
Sustaining that for 10 years is better than you doing carnivore for one.
So, intermittent fasting is great.
Your life isn't really built around not eating until like, I don't know, like 10 p.m. or something or 4 p.m.
Don't necessarily have to start there or say, hey, I'm going to do it for two months with the goal of long term eating in this pattern in this way.
I will say, I saw a comment about that same question.
This is actually a whole other animal when it comes to women.
And if you're a woman jumping into intermittent fasting, it's actually, you need to be very careful.
Your wife's talked about that, like in the church, like, not for women.
It can be, just depending on the.
Phase in the cycle and what your very short term goals are.
It's a very short term tool that can have some benefits, but it can really mess up hormonal health long term.
Yep.
Yep.
So we'll end it with this don't do drugs, kids.
There's a real pipeline.
So it's kind of like three dots, right?
And they're directly correlated.
You drink too many IPAs, you will grow man boobs, and then you will find yourself, whether you like it or not, like involuntary, you will find yourself on social media trying to dox good men like Zach Karras.
Like, I mean, the pipeline is real.
It's one to one to one.
Man boobs, I'm now doxing good reformed men.
Like, it's, I mean, it's uncanny.
The pipeline's real.
Stay away from it.
I'm seeing a euro symbol in the super chat.
I don't think that money works for you.
That's pounds.
That's pounds.
Yeah, so it's probably, does that mean it's more money across the money?
It's more money.
It's more money.
It's more?
Yeah.
The pounds are more than pounds.
Pounds are more than the dollar, I think.
All right, you want to read it, Wes?
All right.
This is from Philip Modesty in the gym?
Obviously, women are dressed awfully.
Absolutely.
Even Christians, but men wearing tank tops and being topples, et cetera, in public gyms.
The Modern Home Gym Debate00:02:13
And just in public in general.
Yeah, you should be modest.
In my opinion, honestly, as much as you can, I think, like, I liked the comment of the guy who was like, Yeah, my workout partner, you know, this cute girl that I'm flirting with at the gym, and the gym is in my garage, and that girl happens to be my wife.
Yeah.
Like, I think as much as you can, work out at home.
I did exactly that.
I have a home gym because, like, Gold Gym, the brothel, like, it's corporate wants you to see the two pictures.
Oh, it's the same place.
Brothel, a gym, same thing.
I would say if you're in mixed company, though, like, I've even taken, if we go to the beach or something like that, I, I like wearing a shirt now.
So I think mixed company, yeah, like what's the point if you're at the gym as a guy of taking your shirt off or like you're there to work out?
If your shirt is off, you're probably communicating something else.
So I think there's a modesty principle for men and for women, obviously.
And you're talking in public, the homegym.
You and the boys at 6 a.m.
Yeah, I'm not even shaming.
You and the boys at 6 a.m.
Yeah, that's fine.
Yes, 100%.
Yep.
Okay.
You're body shaming at 6 a.m.
It's you and your boys squatting in the gym.
You're roasting.
You're just, that's what I'm doing at least.
I do, I do, last comment on this.
I do like the idea of going back to separated gyms by sex.
Yes.
And schools.
Yep, fair enough.
Wes and I were talking like in the modern world that we live in, men and women probably need a place to get that sort of exercise that we're not getting anymore.
Gym is not inherently wrong, but it would be great if we would segregate those again.
Civil Rights Act.
Yeah.
That's one of the reasons you can't do it.
I know.
That's right.
Yeah, the Civil Rights Act ruined everything.
Yep.
Okay.
All right.
Well, thank you guys for tuning in.
And Lord willing, we'll see you again on Friday.
Do we know what the topic is on Friday?
Oh, we do.
Yeah, it's JD Hall.
JD Hall is going to come on the show.
We're excited about that.
We're going to talk about, he's going to share some of his own experience with gatekeepers, especially within the reformed world, and how they're losing power and what we can do about it the gatekeeping phenomenon.