Shownotes
Examining the challenges facing modern masculinity, Will Spencer and Steve Cruz engage in a thought-provoking discussion that spans issues from the impact of childhood upbringing to the responsibilities of adult men in society. Cruz reflects on the consequences of a culture that often undermines traditional family structures, advocating for a return to strong, moral leadership in homes.
The conversation weaves through topics such as the normalization of immodesty in contemporary fitness culture and the spiritual implications of practices like yoga, encouraging listeners to scrutinize their choices in light of their faith. Additionally, they address the political landscape, particularly the upcoming presidential inauguration, pondering the implications of leadership on societal values.
Ultimately, the episode encourages men to embody strength, virtue, and accountability in all aspects of their lives, reinforcing the belief that personal transformation is crucial for broader societal change.
Takeaways:
- The conversation highlights the importance of men stepping into leadership roles within their families and communities.
- Trump's administration is seen as a potential turning point for addressing moral and societal issues in America.
- The need for social media discipline is emphasized, encouraging men to focus on real-life responsibilities instead of online distractions.
- The discussion underscores the significance of local politics, particularly the influence of county sheriffs on community safety.
- Men are encouraged to engage actively in their families and churches to foster moral education and righteousness.
- The episode advocates for the restoration of traditional values in society, emphasizing the role of fathers in guiding their children.
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Transcripts
Foreign.
Will Spencer:Hello, my name is Will Spencer and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.
Will Spencer:This is a weekly show featuring in depth conversations with authors, leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world.
Will Spencer:New episodes release every Friday.
Will Spencer:I'll be out for the Christmas and New Year's holiday for the next two weeks, returning to brand new episodes on January 10th.
Will Spencer:In the meantime, while I'm gone, I've got some special pieces for you.
Will Spencer:First up is this episode, which is the audio from my recent live stream with Steve Cruz of the Regular Man Podcast.
Will Spencer:I'm a big fan of Steve and his work, especially because Reformed theology and culture can get a little ivory tower and high minded.
Will Spencer:That's not a bad thing.
Will Spencer:Theology is heady business, but it has relevance outside the ivory tower as well, in the lives of everyday men and women who are faithful believers but who don't have extra letters after their name.
Will Spencer:Steve does an awesome job of connecting those dots.
Will Spencer:He's sharp, relatable, and very clearly knows the blessings and struggles of working class believers in America.
Will Spencer:Our conversation is full of gems from him.
Will Spencer:I was enjoying hearing his takes, just like he enjoyed mine.
Will Spencer:And may this episode be an example of how different kinds of men, dwarves and wizards, let's say, can come together for common purpose in faithfulness and righteousness.
Will Spencer:Friends, we're not just recording conversations on the Will Spencer Podcast.
Will Spencer:We're part of a restoration project for Christian civilization in the west and I need you in this fight with me.
Will Spencer:When you visit Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please take a moment to write how these conversations impacted you.
Will Spencer:Your words might be exactly what someone needs to hear to give the show their first listen.
Will Spencer:Those conversations that shifted your thinking.
Will Spencer:Share those episodes because we're in a war for the soul of our culture and these conversations are ammunition for the right side.
Will Spencer:For those ready to go deeper, please visit willspencerpod.substack.com and become a paid subscriber for ad free interviews and exclusive content.
Will Spencer:And remember, our sponsors aren't just businesses, they're allies building Christian economic strength for generations.
Will Spencer:Supporting them isn't just spending money, it's investing in an American reformation.
Will Spencer:And please enjoy this live stream conversation with the host of the Regular Man Podcast, Steve Cruz.
Steve Cruz:Hello and welcome to Season two of the Regular Man Podcast where we celebrate God's gift of masculinity in the life of the Regular Man.
Steve Cruz:I'm your host Steve Cruz and my guest today.
Steve Cruz:Been all over the Christian reform circuit lately from conferences and podcasts, one on one sit down interviews and he was recently on Crosspolitik, and he's even been on TV shows.
Steve Cruz:He's a storyteller and adventurer who traveled his time from Stanford to over 30 countries and ultimately wanted to find the quest for truth, which brought him back to the States.
Steve Cruz:And he met the Lord at a very unlikely place and unlikely event.
Steve Cruz:He was gracious enough to me to be one of my first guests on my first interview.
Steve Cruz:And I didn't know what the heck I was doing when I started this podcast.
Steve Cruz:And now is the host of the Will Spencer Podcast.
Steve Cruz:Please welcome Will Spencer.
Steve Cruz:Will, my friend, thank you for coming on.
Speaker A:Great to be here, Steve.
Speaker A:Thanks for having me.
Speaker A:Again, congratulations on your second season.
Steve Cruz:Oh, thanks, Thanks.
Steve Cruz:I learned a lot.
Steve Cruz:A lot of things to improve on.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Oh, yeah.
Speaker A:I mean, I've been doing it for four years and I'm still learning new stuff all the time.
Speaker A:All the time.
Speaker A:And they say it takes 10 years to really get good at anything.
Steve Cruz:And that's.
Speaker A:Well, that's an exciting idea because I couldn't have predicted the things that I would learn this past year.
Speaker A:So what will I be learning at year 10, God willing?
Speaker A:I really don't know, but looking forward to it.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, I am, too.
Steve Cruz:Now, you've been all over the map.
Steve Cruz:Like I said in the intro.
Steve Cruz:You've been at the Fight Life Feast conference.
Steve Cruz:You were on Crosspolitik.
Steve Cruz:I even saw you on one of the news channels.
Steve Cruz:Was it Oan one News network or something like that?
Speaker A:Yes, one American News Network.
Speaker A:I had gone viral for a tweet saying that Christians shouldn't do yoga.
Speaker A:So they had me on for a 15 minute segment.
Steve Cruz:That's great.
Steve Cruz:That's great.
Steve Cruz:What kind of pushback did you get on that?
Speaker A:Well, a lot of Christians are very attached to their yoga practice.
Speaker A:A lot of Americans are very attached to it, frankly.
Speaker A:And I try to explain to them the origins of yoga as a practice, that it's explicitly Hindu in origin.
Speaker A:Now, that doesn't mean, if you're doing a few stretches over at the Y, you know, with your grandma, that you're engaging in.
Speaker A:In idolatry.
Speaker A:But, like, that's such a small sliver of what's going on.
Speaker A:So when I explain to people like this word yoga, the word itself means yoke, like means union with the divine.
Speaker A:That's what the word means in Sanskrit.
Speaker A:And so it all flows from there.
Speaker A:And when I explain that to people, they get pretty mad.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:So if I ever want to.
Speaker A:If I ever want to provoke people on Twitter, I just do one of those and for I, I don't do that, but I just posted that one and it went.
Speaker A:This would have been six months ago, probably more.
Speaker A:And went viral.
Speaker A:And so when America News had me on to kind of explain the origins of yoga, what the word means, what about it specifically is idolatry and false worship.
Speaker A:And so that was.
Speaker A:That was a lot of fun.
Steve Cruz:I remember that tweet, and it automatically reminded me of about a year, year and a half ago with Brian Souv and Eric Kahn tweeting about yoga pants and stretchy pants.
Steve Cruz:And they put on this, this, this meme of the idol when Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego not bowing down, but everybody else is band bowing down to this Nebuchadnezzar idol with.
Steve Cruz:That's wearing stretchy pants, just cracking.
Steve Cruz:And that went viral too, man, that.
Steve Cruz:That went over like a fart in church.
Steve Cruz:Because people, man, women love them stretchy pants.
Steve Cruz:Crazy.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Well, the two.
Speaker A:The two are related.
Speaker A:Yoga is a very sensual exercise.
Speaker A:There's something like.
Speaker A:I think a statistic that I had given was that 60 million people in the United States have done yoga.
Speaker A:That statistic was incorrect.
Speaker A:It was actually one sixth of the adult population.
Speaker A:There's 360 or so million people.
Speaker A:That includes kids.
Speaker A:16 of the adult population has done yoga.
Speaker A:And the vast majority of those, at least two thirds of those are women, primarily white and Asian women.
Speaker A: became popular, it was in the: Speaker A:So it's not a coincidence that when you fuse Eastern mysticism, which is what yoga is, with this very sensual form of exercising.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And then you throw yoga pants onto that, which are very revealing in terms of women's figures.
Speaker A:Like, all of these things, they all fit together.
Speaker A:It's not a coincidence.
Speaker A:They're all very much.
Speaker A:They're very much related.
Speaker A:And the arguments in favor are some of the same.
Speaker A:It's just stretching is what a lot of people say.
Speaker A:Well, maybe in some cases it is again, the why with your grandma.
Speaker A:It's probably just stretching.
Speaker A:But in most cases, I would probably venture a guess, conservatively, 80% of yoga classes in America, it's probably more than that, have religious overtones in terms of advanced postures, in terms of sequences and in terms of like Shiva statues and chanting and stuff like that.
Speaker A:That's the vast majority of yoga classes.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker A:And then also it's like, well, it's convenient for me to wear these stretchy yoga pants.
Speaker A:I understand, certainly understand convenience, but there's a higher, higher law that we're accountable to that asks us to do inconvenient things.
Speaker A:And so, and so there's a, there's a definite thrust in America right now, like, well, let's just turn a blind eye to a lot of these things and not ask too many questions.
Speaker A:But I think we actually have to start asking questions.
Steve Cruz:It's convenient for guys to be in whitey tighties all day and watch tv, but nobody wants that, Nobody wants to see that.
Speaker A:Right?
Steve Cruz:There's a certain level of self respect and then respect for other people.
Steve Cruz:You're certainly not loving your neighbor if you're doing something that causes them a temptation to sin or something like that.
Steve Cruz:For to touch on the modest aspect of the conversation of things like that.
Steve Cruz:You're going to the gym and you see these women wearing things that will literally accentuate every single detail.
Steve Cruz:And then they look at you when, even if you glance and then you're like, oh crap, I got, that's not right.
Steve Cruz:I can't be looking at that.
Steve Cruz:And you're on the machine that I'm trying to use.
Steve Cruz:So now I'm some weirdo waiting around for this machine or the, or the, you know, a bar bench or Smith machine or something.
Steve Cruz:And you're just, especially the ones who have like the lights and they're, they have their, their camera all set up and then they act like they're some, they're virtue signaling and you're some weirdo staring at, you're making a production out of this lady.
Steve Cruz:You're doing this on purpose.
Steve Cruz:You're, you're being that, that used mattress, as Eric Khan would call them.
Speaker A:Right, right.
Speaker A:I, I, this is thankfully at my gym.
Speaker A:I haven't seen anyone set up a phone yet, so I'm grateful for that.
Speaker A:But yeah, they're, they're girls wearing very revealing stuff and it's just like, oh my gosh, just, just make it, just make it go away.
Speaker A:You know, what are you, what are you doing?
Speaker A:Like, are you married?
Speaker A:You're married and you're showing off your body.
Speaker A:But you know, God forbid you say anything like that.
Speaker A:You know, are you unmarried?
Speaker A:Like, what is it, what is it that you're looking for at this environment now?
Speaker A:You know, I just, I just try to ignore it and get done what I need to, but it always stands out to me when a girl shows up dressed modestly, you know, whether it be, you know, in athletic pants that are less form fitting.
Speaker A:I don't know, they're like basketball pants or something like that.
Speaker A:Yeah, that clearly.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:This is someone who's here to actually get work done, and I really appreciate that.
Speaker A:And I think that one of the challenges we face today is there's such a.
Speaker A:There's such a push for women to behave in immodest ways.
Speaker A:Like perhaps you remember the Lily Phillips, you know, episode that happened last week about that girl who slept with a hundred men?
Speaker A:Now, like, I can confuse.
Steve Cruz:That's terrible.
Speaker A:It's terrible.
Speaker A:Well, yes, I agree with you.
Speaker A:And the only reason, and I'm not saying you.
Speaker A:The only reason why people got worked up over, rather than over the next day was that she regretted it.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:She gets on camera and she's very tearful about the whole thing, about how awful she feels, and then there's an outcry, you know, And I'm not saying in Christian spheres, I just mean in the public spheres.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:But if she hadn't been upset about it, would it have been okay?
Speaker A:Obviously not.
Speaker A:But the problem is people only got worked up on it about it, probably in the secular world is what I'm talking about.
Speaker A:When she regretted it, but it was wrong when she conceived of it, it was wrong when she executed it, and it would have been wrong no matter how she felt about it the next day.
Speaker A:But what was she doing?
Speaker A:She was doing what culture has told her to do, which is like, your body, your choice, you know, you own your sexuality.
Speaker A:You can do whatever you want with it.
Speaker A:God has nothing to say about what we do with our sexuality.
Speaker A:So go.
Speaker A:If you're going to sleep with 100 guys, go ahead.
Speaker A:On what moral grounds are you going to say that's wrong?
Speaker A:Is it like somewhere between 40 and 50 that we start to draw the line?
Speaker A:And that's the part of the dialogue that I'm not seeing anyone doing.
Speaker A:And I think the yoga pants and the.
Speaker A:And the working out at the gym, I think it's all connected.
Speaker A:She just took to the logical extreme what people are already doing, and only people are now only getting worked up about it now that she regrets it.
Speaker A:And that's, of course, not an objective moral standard.
Steve Cruz:Right, Yeah, I totally agree.
Steve Cruz:And I see this, you know, as a.
Steve Cruz:As a husband and especially as a father.
Steve Cruz:You know, I saw that.
Steve Cruz:That short interview, and I saw her break down, and I saw, you know, her kind of go over the events very briefly, and I'm thinking of my kid.
Steve Cruz:You know, I'm thinking of my daughter.
Steve Cruz:I'm thinking.
Steve Cruz:I'm like.
Steve Cruz:Like Every piece of me is, is, is heartbroken for this girl right now who clearly has, you know, bad dad issues.
Steve Cruz:You know, clearly she.
Steve Cruz:Nobody's going to sleep with 100 men in one day who doesn't have a father issue.
Steve Cruz:Like, those are some scars that have, that have gone deep over years and years and years.
Steve Cruz:Possibly she.
Steve Cruz:She was molested or abused, raped, didn't have a father figure.
Steve Cruz:These are constant threads that, that run through a significant amount of this kind of behavior.
Steve Cruz:That's not just.
Steve Cruz:It's not conducive to society.
Steve Cruz:It's.
Steve Cruz:It's degrading society and it's degrading the family.
Steve Cruz:It's degrading the individual themselves.
Steve Cruz:But to your point, the whole culture is saying, yeah, go sleep with as many people go, because that's how you find fulfillment.
Steve Cruz:Go do drugs, do whatever you want, try to change your biology and pretend that you're a woman if you're a man, because, hey, whatever makes you feel happy, that's what you should do.
Steve Cruz:And the things that make you, you know, sin is usually pleasurable for a short time.
Steve Cruz:I think the Bible even says sin is pleasurable for a short time.
Steve Cruz:But it's.
Steve Cruz:Poison kills you.
Steve Cruz:It's, it's.
Steve Cruz:And it just doesn't just kill you.
Steve Cruz:It kills every part of the world that you are part of.
Steve Cruz:Everybody who loves you, everybody interacts with you.
Steve Cruz:And I see that to your point, it's just a logical conclusion.
Steve Cruz:If.
Steve Cruz:If ice cream is great, then have a gallon of ice cream.
Steve Cruz:And if having a gallon of ice cream is great, then have two and have it every day.
Steve Cruz:And it's killing you.
Speaker A:Yes, very much so.
Speaker A:I think you're probably right about her father issues, but I don't know for sure.
Speaker A: t I can say is that since the: Speaker A: s, since the: Speaker A:And again, sorry, you can go back to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and you can see the active attempt to subvert what you might call family values happening way back.
Speaker A:So this is not new.
Speaker A:What you see is, in our society is the flouting of all sexual morality.
Speaker A:It all just goes right out the window.
Speaker A:The idea that you will sleep with just one person for life and that's your spouse, and that you won't do it before you get married.
Speaker A:I think that might be one of the most forbidden ideas in America right now.
Speaker A:But it's the Handmaid's Tale, you know.
Speaker A:And the thing is, what we see, not just Lily Phillips onlyfans models et CETERA what we see is increasing intensity of attempts to just throw that out the window.
Speaker A:So transgenderism is part of that.
Speaker A:Gay pride parades are part of that.
Speaker A:The idea that, you know, it's not your body, your choice, maybe God has something to say about what we do with our bodies.
Speaker A:That is a forbidden idea.
Speaker A:You are not allowed to say that idea.
Speaker A:And that God has something to say about what both men and women do with their bodies, both of them, it's an equal standard.
Speaker A:And so we don't actually see anyone talking about that.
Speaker A:The idea that, for example, woman's sexuality and a man's.
Speaker A:But sexuality is for.
Speaker A:To enjoy in the context of marriage, not just for having children, obviously, but that's a big part of it.
Speaker A:And when you take that and you strip sexuality from its sacred component, meaning enjoying the context of marriage and having kids, and you just give it away to everybody, what you're doing is you're saying, like, oh, God doesn't get to tell me what to do with my body and with my.
Speaker A:With my private parts.
Speaker A:That's.
Speaker A:That's what people are essentially saying.
Speaker A:And that is maybe that might be the.
Speaker A:The biggest unspoken value in America today that is shared all the way up to the level of the White House and the incoming administration.
Speaker A:Let's not shade things.
Speaker A:But to say that, no, actually God has something to say about what you do in the bedroom.
Speaker A:He has a lot to say about that.
Speaker A:In fact, that idea, I think, could not be more foreign and alien to the United States and to the west today, and more confronting.
Speaker A:I think it's maybe our universal pet sin of the United States today.
Steve Cruz:So to your point earlier, I mean, if you do confront that, you know, one of the reasons I like some of the people I've mentioned before and really this.
Steve Cruz:And we're going to get into kind of this cultural shift that we've seen, like a vibe shift in the Christian church these days.
Steve Cruz:But one of the things that I really appreciate, because it's just kind of in my nature, is confrontation.
Steve Cruz:People are.
Steve Cruz:Nowadays, I'm starting to see an awareness, not just an awareness of that sin and those things, but they're willing to confront that.
Steve Cruz:They're willing to say, no, this is wrong.
Steve Cruz:And I don't think that the squishy, big evangelical kind of milquetoast churches of modern America that have been prevalent over the last couple generations have done that.
Steve Cruz:I just don't.
Steve Cruz:I think that they've been comfortable in their pew.
Steve Cruz:They've been comfortable in.
Steve Cruz:And just, you know, sit there on your hands.
Steve Cruz:And don't worry about what you're.
Steve Cruz:What the world's doing around you, because you're going to be whisked away and saved the day.
Steve Cruz:And who's flying the plane?
Steve Cruz:Oh, no.
Steve Cruz:A pile of pants?
Steve Cruz:Oh, no, nobody's here.
Steve Cruz:But recently I've seen a change in that.
Steve Cruz:And I wonder what you contribute that to.
Steve Cruz:Do you think that that's.
Steve Cruz:Do you think that's explicit?
Steve Cruz:Or maybe there's a combination of.
Steve Cruz:Do you think that's explicitly because of the.
Steve Cruz:This red pill kind of, you know, they say an awakening.
Steve Cruz:Really it's just an aversion of feminism, which every man should be.
Steve Cruz:Averism is evil.
Steve Cruz:Or do you attribute that to guys like the biblical masculinity?
Steve Cruz:Guys like Michael Foster and Eric Kahn and Doug Wilson, who've been doing this really for a long.
Steve Cruz:A long time, promoting that biblical masculinity and patriarchy for years.
Speaker A:So I think the vibe shift.
Speaker A:I'm going to put the vibe shift squarely on the men who are engaged in it.
Speaker A:And I can do this because I've been in the manosphere.
Speaker A:That's how I found my way, in some sense, into the Reformed church.
Speaker A:Sort of all happened at the same time.
Speaker A:But one of the things that I saw in the manosphere, again, this is the secular manosphere, is I saw men that didn't have brakes on the train, right?
Speaker A:Like, they just.
Speaker A:They were going full speed in a particular direction along our trajectory of ideas.
Steve Cruz:And like Rola Tomasi, Andrew Tate, those kind of guys that are, yeah.
Speaker A:Elliot Hulse, Jack Donovan, Brian McClure, all these guys.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So fresher fit, Rolex, Mossy.
Speaker A:Those are the guys that have cracked the mainstream.
Speaker A:But they were much smaller, smaller time comparatively.
Speaker A:They were still very successful men, but smaller time, comparatively.
Speaker A:Men who composed the manosphere.
Speaker A:So I watched this movement from the inside, and you can see a train that's going in a particular direction.
Speaker A:You say, hey, guys, that's the direction your train is going.
Speaker A:Like, look out up ahead.
Speaker A:There's a bridge out, right?
Speaker A:And one of the things that I've been disappointed to see is that, you know, I was in that world and I could see that.
Speaker A:I could.
Speaker A:I could see the trajectory of the ideas.
Speaker A:And I'm like, well, I don't agree with that.
Speaker A:So I'm not going that way, right?
Speaker A:Like, because I can see where.
Speaker A:I can see where this leads.
Speaker A:If it's taken to its logical extreme.
Speaker A:I could see how it leads to, quote, unquote, hyper patriarchy.
Speaker A:I can See how it leads in all these bad directions?
Speaker A:Those are not my values.
Speaker A:That's not the direction I'm heading.
Speaker A:So I'm going to adjust my trajectory a little bit to make sure that I don't go over the side of the bridge, which is the direction this is going.
Speaker A:So that's how I've always engaged with those ideas.
Speaker A:Meanwhile, other guys, either they denied the trajectory of the ideas or they were in favor of them.
Speaker A:Who knows?
Speaker A:But with masculinity and particular.
Speaker A:Particular, a lot of men get very excited when they begin to discover these values, in part because they feel a sense of personal power overcoming apathy, and also because it's socially transgressive against, like you said, a feminist kind of culture, which I think we live in.
Speaker A:And so that's a heady mix.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And I don't think there's necessarily anything intrinsically wrong with that.
Speaker A:But unless you make sure to cut it off, then the trajectory of ideas goes in a very bad direction.
Speaker A:And so that's what I watched happen in the manosphere.
Speaker A:Guys who didn't accept that the trajectory of their ideas, like, the ride has to end.
Speaker A:You have to be accountable to a standard, a universal standard, or you're just going to drive it straight over the cliff.
Speaker A:And so I don't put, you know, I don't put responsibility for the train going over the cliff.
Speaker A:I don't put responsibility on the guys who scheduled the train, who got the train going.
Speaker A:I think every man is responsible for his own train for recognizing that there have been warnings, for recognizing that, for failing to acknowledge, again, the trajectory of ideas.
Speaker A:I'm not looking at that.
Speaker A:I'm not looking at that or it'll be fine.
Speaker A:Don't worry about it.
Speaker A:No, guys, the bridge is out.
Speaker A:I put responsibility on the individual.
Speaker A:And just real quick, because I think you asked about pastors and stuff like that, so I've been working through with a client, this book, Pornography as a Suicide of the Soul by Dr.
Speaker A:David Edgington.
Speaker A:He would be a fantastic guest for your podcast, by the way.
Speaker A:He's primarily known for his book the Abusive Wife, which is about women who revile their husbands.
Speaker A:So he also wrote this book about pornography.
Speaker A:It's excellent.
Speaker A:It's just like 70 pages.
Speaker A:It's not much.
Speaker A:It's not.
Speaker A:It's not a.
Speaker A:It's not a weighty, heavily researched, you know, social, socially scientific study.
Steve Cruz:It's not systematic theology.
Speaker A:Yes, exactly.
Speaker A:So I.
Speaker A:This book, there's a statistic early on, I don't.
Steve Cruz:I won't.
Speaker A:Flip around and find it that says that something like one sixth of pastors have, like, anonymously admitted to engaging in pornography.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And so, and that data is old.
Speaker A:It goes like.
Speaker A: In the: Speaker A:So they didn't specify what that was or whether they'd repented for that behavior.
Speaker A:But I think the moral compromise that has been part of American culture, particularly with regard to sexuality, has been a big problem.
Speaker A:Why A lot of people have turned a blind eye because they recognize that he who is without sin cast the first stone and then everyone turns and walks away.
Speaker A:I think that there's been a lot of.
Speaker A:A lot of that.
Speaker A:A lot of probably more than we realize.
Speaker A:So just wanted to touch on that as well.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, I'd love to have him on.
Steve Cruz:We can Talk later in DMs and you can give me his contact info if you've got it.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, yeah.
Steve Cruz:The.
Steve Cruz:I really want to go over.
Steve Cruz:I know we talked about a little bit, and it's.
Steve Cruz:I think it's really obvious just in how you speak, but you're not like.
Steve Cruz:You're not like me, and you're not like one of the red pill guys, and you're not, you know, you have a very, very unique way about you, and I think that's attractive to a lot of people.
Steve Cruz:I think a lot of people are attractive to.
Steve Cruz:You're well spoken, you're articulate, you're intelligent, and you have substance behind what you say.
Steve Cruz:You're significantly more polished in the way that you say that than I am.
Speaker A:I think we have more in common than I may recognize.
Speaker A:But thank you very.
Speaker A:I understand what you're saying.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Steve Cruz:But that's just a way of.
Steve Cruz:I'm just saying I appreciate your podcast, appreciate what you've done over the years.
Steve Cruz:It's awesome to see you have the success that you've been having.
Steve Cruz:And I want to talk about your.
Steve Cruz:You rebranded.
Steve Cruz:You used to be.
Steve Cruz:You used to have the, the, the podcast, the Renaissance of Men, and now you've rebranded to the Will Spencer podcast.
Steve Cruz:What was behind that?
Steve Cruz:Tell me the reason.
Steve Cruz:And then is there.
Steve Cruz:Are there changes in how you're going to do interviews, or is it just going to be topics or what's that going to look like?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A: ce of Men, which I started in: Speaker A:It didn't start out as a Christian podcast.
Speaker A:Actually, it was a conversation.
Speaker A:It was a podcast about this.
Speaker A:Excuse me.
Speaker A:This global rebirth of masculinity and.
Speaker A:Are you still there, Steve?
Steve Cruz:I am, yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Oh, okay.
Speaker A:Got it.
Speaker A:Sorry.
Speaker A:The thing went full frame for me.
Speaker A:Sorry.
Speaker A:It's my first time.
Speaker A:So this global rebirth of masculinity and.
Speaker A:And during the course of recording that podcast, I was working on a documentary about that, and the documentary ultimately failed.
Speaker A:I was unable to get funding for it, which turned out to be a great blessing, thanks be to God.
Speaker A: manosphere, subsequently, in: Speaker A:Like, the bottom just fell out from under it.
Speaker A: xit into reformed theology in: Speaker A: ical world in many cases from: Speaker A:But I realized that the title, the Renaissance of Men, I didn't really see this global rebirth happening in quite the same way that I did before I became a Christian.
Speaker A:There had maybe been, you know, some sort of belief that masculinity was going to save the world.
Speaker A:And I came to realize that Christianity, Christ is the one who's going to save the world.
Speaker A:It's his job, not masculinity's job.
Speaker A:And the Renaissance, of course, had a lot of occult themes going on.
Speaker A:And so I recognized that the Renaissance of Men as a title was no longer appropriate for me as a Christian, and it no longer reflected my interests.
Speaker A:I just wasn't interested in this conversation anymore.
Speaker A:And so I decided to rebrand the podcast.
Speaker A:And I was thinking about different names and the Will Spencer Podcast.
Speaker A:Well, first of all, it's the name that's least likely to change.
Speaker A:So there was that.
Speaker A:There's no risk that I might get tired of it in a couple years, but really, I was talking with friends, and they let me know that what they found compelling about the podcast was not necessarily this global idea of masculinity or reform theology specifically.
Speaker A:It was the approach and the attitude and the intention that I brought to the interviews.
Speaker A:So they weren't necessarily listening for me, but they're like, for the things that I have to say, because I do a lot of listening on my podcast, but I love it.
Speaker A:It's that they were there to see the people that I found interesting and the questions that I would ask and the things that I would surface from their work, whether they're authors or content creators or influencers.
Speaker A:So the podcast Very much was, was like, okay, this is for the guest.
Speaker A:You're coming into my house and we're going to sit and we're going to have a conversation for 1, 2, 3, 4, even 5 hours, and we're going to find, I'm going to find out who you are and how it's relevant to people out there.
Speaker A:So it really was very similar to Joe Rogan.
Speaker A:Like, the Joe Rogan podcast is not about him, you know, so much.
Speaker A:It's about his guests.
Speaker A:It's about the conversations.
Speaker A:My podcast essentially had taken on a very similar character for a Christian audience.
Speaker A:So for that reason, I thought the Will Spencer podcast was a better.
Speaker A:Was.
Speaker A:It was a better name than anything else that I could, that I could come up with.
Steve Cruz:That's awesome.
Steve Cruz:I agree with you about the renaissance of men.
Steve Cruz:The first time I ran across it, I was like, huh, okay, Renaissance.
Steve Cruz:All right, let me, let me listen to it.
Steve Cruz:And then you end.
Steve Cruz:In your time on your podcast, you've had some really big names on there and you've had some, you had some long form content that I was like, I really like that.
Steve Cruz:I know I'm not the TikTok person, you know, I'm not the Instagram person.
Steve Cruz:I frankly, I think Instagram is like for fish face, Fish face, lip ladies and navel gays and dudes that, you know, they just, they're out there just wearing their stretchy pants and filming themselves in the gym.
Steve Cruz:You know, that's honestly what I see in Instagram and then animal videos that.
Speaker A:Get suggested to me.
Steve Cruz:So I was gonna say, so for Facebook, it's like cat videos and it was like the, the Diyer.
Steve Cruz:You know, this is how to make a furnace out of a clip.
Steve Cruz:You know, toothpick.
Steve Cruz:There's some weird stuff.
Steve Cruz:But I really appreciate X.
Steve Cruz:And you know, rumbles, there's.
Steve Cruz:There's nobody there.
Steve Cruz:There's like two people that watch rumble.
Steve Cruz:But X.
Steve Cruz:I really appreciate X, because although Elon Musk isn't, it appears to me, and I think he said it before, that he's not a Christian.
Steve Cruz:He does value some of the things that we as Christians value in freedom of speech.
Steve Cruz:You know, being able to not be constrained in the freedom that God's given mankind.
Steve Cruz:Like, our country only gives us freedom because God himself gives man freedom.
Steve Cruz:That's the purpose.
Steve Cruz:That's the purpose of our existence, is to choose God in his sovereignty.
Steve Cruz:Simultaneously, the same thing.
Steve Cruz:It's weird.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, jb, I like to get the chats on here.
Steve Cruz:JB says the word of God is everything, not some book or bestseller.
Steve Cruz:Go see Jonathan Kleck.
Steve Cruz:He is an angel of the church of Philadelphia, is appointed by Jesus Christ.
Steve Cruz:All true.
Steve Cruz:Okay.
Speaker A:Cool story, bro.
Steve Cruz:Yeah.
Steve Cruz:All right.
Steve Cruz:All right.
Steve Cruz:So is your show going to be more based on interviews like you have been in the past, or are you going to have solo things?
Steve Cruz:Are you going to have it scripted, just an outline, or is it just going to be flying by the seat of your pants?
Steve Cruz:Kind of like what I do.
Speaker A:I'll continue doing interviews primarily on the podcast, but I'll do more solo content on YouTube.
Speaker A:I started the podcast on YouTube because I realized when did I do that?
Speaker A: Would have been early: Speaker A:Because I realized that a lot of people were going to be listening to podcasts on YouTube and that was a good decision.
Speaker A:You know, like, I have a episode with Rachel Wilson that's going to crack 70,000 downloads.
Speaker A:70,000 views on YouTube.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's awesome.
Speaker A:But like my most downloaded episode doesn't even have an audio format like Spotify.
Speaker A:Apple doesn't have even close to that probably because audio podcasts have very low discoverability.
Speaker A:So you go to YouTube and you watch a video and you get another video suggested to you because they have all that.
Speaker A:But like podcasts are so wild west.
Speaker A:You have Spotify and Apple and neither of those are particularly like podcast centric social, excuse me, social platforms.
Speaker A:So YouTube, when something does well, it does really well and it gets suggested by the algorithm to new listeners.
Speaker A:Podcast growth, audio podcast growth.
Speaker A:I.
Speaker A:I don't actually know and I don't think a lot of people have a good idea how that happens.
Speaker A:There are top 10 charts, but to get on the top 10 chart, first you have to have a top 10 podcast.
Speaker A:So Google, you know, are other ways to grow people just searching for podcasts.
Speaker A:So SEO.
Speaker A:But honestly, like the way that I see audio podcasts going, I'll keep doing it because I love it.
Speaker A:But the way that I see audio podcasts going is I think now that Covid is finally over, I think the election of Donald Trump signaled the end of the COVID era.
Speaker A:Finally, thank God.
Speaker A:But people are going back to real life.
Speaker A:And so what people want to see is interviews on YouTube where two people are sitting in the same room together.
Speaker A:High production value in person conversations, I think are where it's very, are very much where it's at.
Speaker A:The problem is that's very expensive.
Speaker A:You need equipment, you need a producer, you need lighting, you need to get the person out there.
Speaker A:So there's A high, high bar to really do something like that.
Speaker A:I think that there's still a future for audio podcasts, but I think the emphasis should be on video especially.
Speaker A:So that's my take.
Speaker A:Going forward in the future, the audio only podcasts will probably struggle a little bit as people just go back to real life.
Speaker A:That's my guess.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, I think I agree with you there.
Steve Cruz:I'd really like to see some changes in YouTube for, I mean I'm really, really hard on YouTube.
Steve Cruz:I'm on my fourth YouTube account because it keeps shutting me down.
Steve Cruz:Because I don't mind, I don't mind talking about what COVID 19 or.
Steve Cruz:But you know, because I don't.
Steve Cruz:I shoot to.
Steve Cruz:I, I'm as authentic as it possibly can, can be and I think people appreciate that and I know that my listeners and viewers, they don't beat around the bush.
Steve Cruz:They talk very directly.
Steve Cruz:I see it in my emails and I love it.
Steve Cruz:Exactly, exactly.
Steve Cruz:And that's, that's who I, that's the whole reason that I started this podcast was, was I didn't feel like anybody was talking to me.
Steve Cruz:I'm a knuckle dragon guard.
Steve Cruz:I'm a wrench turner.
Steve Cruz:I'm a blue collar guy.
Steve Cruz:I'm a guy who, you know, I can talk about, you know, if I really, really try.
Steve Cruz:I can pretend to be really articulate, but I'm just not, I'm just not a real, I'm not a salesman, you know, I can scale it down or scale it up, but I just like people just being real and I think that's an attraction that people have to Joe Rogan and, and it's just we've been so starved for authenticity.
Steve Cruz:Just we as people, as human beings have been so starved for authenticity and everything is curated for TikTok and for Instagram and for, for all these things with, with the lighting and with all this stuff that I want, I want to say and, and ah.
Steve Cruz:And have that weird silence in between because, because I think that that's what people want.
Steve Cruz:I think that's real and that's a real conversation that people have.
Steve Cruz:I just wish that there was some changes to YouTube specifically where they didn't censor the crap out of me and anybody else who doesn't mind talking about COVID and trans delusions and gay mirage and all those things that you can't say in polite society.
Steve Cruz:But the truth is the truth.
Steve Cruz:I don't, I'm not gonna not say it if it's true.
Steve Cruz:And if you want to suspend me and you want to ban me, then I'll.
Steve Cruz:Fine, I'll just say I have like 51 followers on my.
Steve Cruz:My newest YouTube account because I'm on my fourth YouTube account.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Steve Cruz:So being constrained by that kind of pressure and that restriction of I just.
Steve Cruz:It's antithetical to everything that I'm about.
Steve Cruz:So there might be wide success on YouTube.
Steve Cruz:There might be.
Steve Cruz:That might be the wave of the future or something.
Steve Cruz:Maybe.
Steve Cruz:But if it is, I don't want to be a part of it because I don't want to go the way of bowing the knee to Caesar.
Steve Cruz:I just don't.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:YouTube is tough.
Speaker A:I mean, for all the progress, I think X has created a sort of a little bubble that the dialogue is so freewheeling on X.
Speaker A:Almost.
Speaker A:Almost to a fault.
Speaker A:I think it is to a fault at this point in some place.
Speaker A:But yeah, one way or another, like, it's very freewheeling.
Speaker A: gave and it must have been in: Speaker A:Got got flagged for a warning on a clip that was 2 years old.
Speaker A:And so I just think that they haven't updated their algorithm to match.
Speaker A:Maybe they will, maybe they won't.
Speaker A:But yeah, it's very odd that in a social media environment where you have X just lapping everybody in terms of how fast information travels, that YouTube is still stuck censoring the same old topics that I thought we resolved those.
Speaker A: That's what the: Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Was we're going to resolve whether or not our society wants to go in that direction.
Speaker A:We answered that question.
Speaker A:And so my Hope is that YouTube will ease up on some of that because we should be able to talk about this now.
Speaker A:And I don't know why they haven't.
Speaker A:Maybe because Twitter is not as enjoyable a video watching site.
Speaker A:That's not its primary function.
Speaker A:It's trying to be everything to everyone.
Speaker A:It does have videos and I think their video integration is very good.
Speaker A:But I think YouTube understands that it still has a monopoly.
Speaker A:I think I heard that YouTube is the largest search engine in the world, which makes it.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So they understand that as as much of a dangerous upstart as X is.
Speaker A:And I think it is.
Speaker A:They understand that they're still in the leadership position, for better or worse.
Speaker A:So my hope is that they.
Speaker A:My hope is that they catch up and make some of these topics more open.
Speaker A:But, you know, it's not like the trans discussion really happens here.
Speaker A:It happens on TikTok anyway, so.
Speaker A:But yeah, I feel you on that for sure.
Steve Cruz:Elijah Ellis says X has become the new free speech platform.
Steve Cruz:I agree, and that's kind of.
Steve Cruz:My point is YouTube isn't YouTube.
Steve Cruz:You have to fit inside their box and they genuinely don't want people like me in their box.
Steve Cruz:And that's fine.
Steve Cruz:I'm okay without that.
Steve Cruz:I'm not going to change who I am because of clicks.
Steve Cruz:I think that's, frankly, I think that's super gay when people do that.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:It's odd what gets censored and what doesn't get censored on YouTube because I remember a couple years ago I had a friend who was going to start a platform for Christians because he was worried that Christian content was going to get censored on YouTube and it was theological content.
Speaker A:I'm like, I have not seen any Christian explicitly theological content censored.
Speaker A:It's just not.
Speaker A:You can talk all day about soteriology, baptism, minionism.
Speaker A:Just dive deep into whatever explicitly theological topic you want.
Speaker A:As soon as you start touching on morality, moral choices, that's when YouTube has something to say.
Speaker A:And I think that there's more wiggle room in there than might be obvious.
Speaker A:You know, you don't have to be dropping hard facts about the jab or abortion or whatever.
Speaker A:I think that there is an evangelistic moral case to be made from theological principles that doesn't come across in an accusatory or transgressive way.
Speaker A:And I think that there's a real opportunity there.
Speaker A:Now, that's a subtlety of language approach.
Speaker A:You know, that's a.
Speaker A:We have to conduct an infiltration operation into unfriendly enemy territory.
Speaker A:And so that's a job for certain kind of people.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:The job of the knuckle dragger, the bruiser, the wrench swinger.
Speaker A:That's a different.
Speaker A:That's a different sort of thing.
Speaker A:And I think that there's room for that.
Speaker A:And so, you know, there was a.
Speaker A:There's a dwarf and there's a wizard, and they're both part of the fellowship of the ring.
Speaker A:You need both of them for different purposes.
Speaker A:And I think that that speaks to something that's very powerful and very true about men, is that you have men that are more aligned with dwarves or More aligned with elves or more aligned with wizards.
Speaker A:Like not for nothing, men like to play RPGs and they like role playing games.
Speaker A:They enjoy that because there are different personality configurations that make them suited to different kinds of combat.
Speaker A:And so, and so if we're going to be running a spy operation, we need insiders to be infiltrating these platforms versus that more confrontational, hard nosed approach.
Speaker A:There are probably other platforms that facilitate that.
Speaker A:YouTube being.
Speaker A:Sorry, Twitter being a good example as well.
Speaker A:That's probably the best one that I could recommend.
Steve Cruz:Yeah.
Steve Cruz:We need some hobbits to jump in the gate and open the gate so that we big fat dwarves can come in and swing some axes and the.
Speaker A:Elves can stay on Instagram.
Steve Cruz:Yeah.
Steve Cruz:And they, and they can just shoot their arrows from afar in their high towers.
Speaker A:Exactly.
Steve Cruz:Talking about their, their theology from ivory towers.
Speaker A:Yes.
Steve Cruz:I really appreciate you with the flowy hair.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, I like that, I like that.
Steve Cruz:I'm going to use that later.
Speaker A:Please.
Steve Cruz:I like your, your Lord of the Rings analogy.
Steve Cruz:Excellent.
Steve Cruz:Now switching gears.
Steve Cruz:I'm hesitant to bring this up on, on my show because I'm not a news show, you know, at all.
Speaker A:Sure.
Steve Cruz:Even, even politics.
Steve Cruz:I'm, I'm much more, I'm not nuanced whatsoever.
Steve Cruz:But we just had another, another school shooting today at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin with about, they had about 400 kids that attended that school from all the way from infants, infants to 4 and then from K through 12.
Steve Cruz:Like it's the same kind of school that my kids go to.
Steve Cruz:And so when I saw it on the news, it just hit me right between, right in the heart, you know, and it sounds like there's five kids, including the miner who is the shooter, who was attending that school, are dead and five injured.
Speaker A:Oh, wow.
Steve Cruz:And emotions like this always run really high.
Steve Cruz:Like they're, they're, they're always 100 miles an hour.
Steve Cruz:And for me, like the first thing that I always feel with a school shooting, with a church shootings, anything like that, somebody comes into a business and just blows everybody away is rage.
Steve Cruz:I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm.
Steve Cruz:What's his name?
Steve Cruz:Gimli.
Steve Cruz:I want to just destroy everybody.
Steve Cruz:I want to chop some heads off.
Steve Cruz:I want to go burn it down.
Steve Cruz:I want to find whoever's responsible.
Steve Cruz:But when the cowards shoot themselves or someone shoots them, I don't have that opportunity.
Steve Cruz:And I feel like, you know, everybody feels things a lot differently.
Steve Cruz:There are people who can identify with me that the first thing Mostly men, I think usually first thing that we feel is rage.
Steve Cruz:But there's heartbreak and there's emotion and there's regret and there's this, this hole to try and fix that, to try and fix the problem.
Steve Cruz:And, and it really pisses me off when people use awful tragedies like this and manipulate it for a power grab to stoke division and to try and to blame inanimate objects for something that's a deeper, deeper problem that, that, that they're used for to, to accomplish their, their evil end.
Steve Cruz:The problem is never the tool, right?
Steve Cruz:It's never a gun, it's never the, the a knife, it's never a brick.
Steve Cruz:It's never.
Steve Cruz:It's the evil inside the demonic murderers that's the problem.
Steve Cruz:Unfortunately, it sounds like the shooter's dead.
Steve Cruz:And I've got to say thank God for all the courageous police officers who run towards gunfire using the same damn weapon that evil people use for evil so that they can go and protect people.
Steve Cruz:So police, fire, corrections, EMTs, all the first responders who keep us safe and deserve our respect and admiration.
Steve Cruz:I love you.
Steve Cruz:Thank you.
Steve Cruz:Thank you for doing what so many people won't do.
Steve Cruz:But people look for a short term answer that's not even an answer to satisfy their emotions.
Steve Cruz:Like confiscating guns and banning guns and writing more laws and more legislation when you already have.
Steve Cruz:A school is already a gun free zone.
Steve Cruz:Airports are already gun free yet.
Steve Cruz:But yet people who were bent on, on murdering other people a laws, they're already going to break the law by murdering people.
Steve Cruz:How is making another stupid law going to help them?
Steve Cruz:A gun is a tool, just like a knife or just like a brick.
Steve Cruz:You can kill somebody with a brick or you can build a hospital.
Steve Cruz:You can kill somebody with a gun or you can use it to protect another person.
Steve Cruz:What, what do you see?
Steve Cruz:You know, I'm asking a rhetorical question because we both already know, but what do you think the answer to all this is?
Steve Cruz:And do you think we have.
Steve Cruz:What do you think about the possibility of posting armed guards at all the schools in America and all the churches and to protect the people who should be.
Steve Cruz:I mean, these are soft.
Steve Cruz:These are kids, man.
Steve Cruz:These are little kids.
Steve Cruz:Men are supposed to protect women and children, not freaking shoot them up.
Steve Cruz:And I'm not seeing enough men stand up with their own concealed, carry their own.
Steve Cruz:I don't carry a knife.
Steve Cruz:Dude carry pocket knife, do something, jump on him and slit their throat.
Steve Cruz:I don't care what you do, but do.
Steve Cruz:If you, if you're a man.
Steve Cruz:You should be protecting these kids.
Steve Cruz:What do you, what do you think?
Speaker A:Well, I was.
Speaker A:While you were talking about that, I went over to.
Speaker A:I went over to Twitter to see if I could hear.
Speaker A:Here we go.
Speaker A:Finally just showed up.
Speaker A:Shooting occurred in Abundant Life Christian School 12.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Mass shooting.
Speaker A:This is not getting.
Speaker A:It's not getting a ton of play, which is very odd.
Steve Cruz:Yeah.
Steve Cruz:Because it's a Christian school.
Speaker A:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker A:So what do I think about all this?
Speaker A:Well, it's really easy for people to try and make laws that change people's outer behavior.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:It's very difficult to say that the only thing that truly changes our character is the Holy Spirit.
Speaker A:That's hard, right?
Steve Cruz:Yeah.
Speaker A:And what everyone.
Speaker A:This relates to the yoga conversation, the yoga pants conversation.
Speaker A:You know, we want to control people's behavior by outer.
Speaker A:By outer laws, as opposed to having a pro moral society where people within themselves constrain their own behavior.
Speaker A:We don't want that because we want to be able to say, like, well, I can do the thing I.
Speaker A:I can do the things that I want to do because I'm not doing anything illegal.
Speaker A:Right.
Steve Cruz:Because we want to be our own God.
Speaker A:That's right.
Speaker A:That's right.
Speaker A:And that's where America is at right now.
Speaker A:And we haven't just, we didn't just get here overnight.
Speaker A:It's the long, slow degradation of a society that has abandoned its commitment to moral virtue.
Speaker A:And so like the school shooting, all of these shootings, there are many things, their expressions of rage.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:They're expressions of revenge.
Speaker A:They're deeply sinful, incredibly wicked.
Speaker A:To take the lives of innocent people for whatever your agenda is universally.
Speaker A:And they're symptomatic of a society that has essentially given up on training kids up in righteousness.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And by training kids up in righteousness, a lot of people will say, oh, that just.
Speaker A:That goes straight into tyranny.
Speaker A:And sure, there, there are plenty of fathers and families that teach that with a very heavy hand.
Speaker A:For sure there are.
Speaker A:But that's not righteousness.
Speaker A:You know, training in righteousness does not mean tyranny.
Speaker A:That's somebody doing something wrong.
Speaker A:And so what we have is.
Speaker A:What we have is a society that's gone schizophrenic.
Speaker A:You have people on one side that have.
Speaker A:That are completely anti.
Speaker A:Naomi.
Speaker A:No man, no one can tell me what I.
Speaker A:What to do.
Speaker A:My body and my choice.
Speaker A:I have my personal relationship with God, and that's all you need to worry about.
Speaker A:And then on the other side, you have sort of hyper legalism hyper patriarchy, you know, controlling kind of instinct that's coming as a response to all that, as opposed to what actual fatherhood and discipleship looks like.
Speaker A:America gave up on those ideas decades ago, literally gave up on those ideas.
Speaker A: And you could see that in the: Speaker A:A 50 year old something woman lawyer.
Speaker A:Never, never been married.
Speaker A:Sorry.
Speaker A:She was married.
Speaker A:She never had kids.
Speaker A:Far as I could tell from having lived in California, she failed upwards and she was handed her nomination for the presidency, for the candidacy without it earning a single vote.
Speaker A:She was the most, the least popular vice president in history.
Speaker A:And like she just happened to be standing there when Joe Biden, you know, essentially had a, had a brain malfunction on stage.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And so it's, it's, it's culture, civilization that are just handing this woman up the chain and that a lot of people are like, yeah, that's totally fine.
Speaker A:Versus a man who, Donald Trump may not be a virtuous man.
Speaker A:I don't think that he would call himself a virtuous man.
Speaker A:He certainly does have virtues, many of which are admirable.
Speaker A:You know, I think his commitment to sobriety is incredibly admirable, especially considering how old he is and the circles that he runs in.
Speaker A:I think that's very admirable.
Speaker A:I think he's very much a family man.
Speaker A:He's got a bunch of kids, bunch of grandkids, he's built businesses.
Speaker A:He knows what it is to fail.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:He's lived the high life and now he has.
Speaker A:And he survived an assassination attempt and I think it truly did shift his character too.
Speaker A:Yes, exactly.
Speaker A:I don't.
Speaker A:Was the, was the second guy even really trying?
Speaker A:Like, what was that guy?
Steve Cruz:Yeah, he popped a bunch of shots and he, and, and the FBI agent or this or the Secret Service or whatever shot like seven times and missed him every time.
Steve Cruz:That's the caliber protection that we have.
Steve Cruz:He, he drew down.
Steve Cruz:And the FBI agent that was supposed to be protecting, or one of the FBI agents or the Secret Service rather, he shot like five or seven times and he or she missed every single time.
Speaker A:They're gender.
Speaker A:Don't assume their gender, Steve.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, I guess, I mean, who knows?
Steve Cruz:Could it be they.
Steve Cruz:Them.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So he survived two assassination attempts and I do think that meaningfully shifted his character.
Speaker A:I would be very curious.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:I don't.
Speaker A:I think maybe at the end of his life he'll write a, he'll write A memoirs and we'll get into, you know, what this past summer was like for him, surviving assassination attempts and how it shifted his outlook on life.
Speaker A:And I think that's been very good.
Speaker A: more like a wrecking ball in: Speaker A:But here's a man who's built, you know, who's grown, who's, who's fathered kids and grandkids, I think possibly great grandkids as well.
Speaker A: And so what we had in: Speaker A:Legacy, family, you know, business, growth, prosperity.
Speaker A:So we made, we made the right choice collectively as a nation, I think we made the right choice.
Speaker A:And there's a place past that of, you know, sexual fidelity, chastity, modesty, all these, all these very present relational things that everyone doesn't really want to look at.
Speaker A:Because that is where you get into true, like virtuous, righteous patriarchy.
Speaker A:That's where you truly put feminism away forever.
Speaker A:That's where men and women truly accept into their God ordained roles.
Speaker A:And to do bow the knee to Christ and God's word.
Speaker A:And people don't want to do that, but that way is the only way that we can get rid of things like abortion.
Speaker A:That's the only way that we can truly get rid of school shootings, unfortunately, is by recognizing how essential oral education is for people and that it needs to come from a transcendent foundation.
Speaker A:And we're just not there yet.
Speaker A:We're just absolutely not there yet.
Speaker A:Maybe we will get there in our lifetimes.
Speaker A:And I think the way we can do that is we embody that in our lives as men and hope that our witness tells the story.
Speaker A:I don't know if we'll ever have a position on the world stage that we get to do that from.
Speaker A:Maybe, God willing, we will.
Speaker A:But that's where the rubber truly meets the road of building a just society.
Speaker A:Inner transformation of the hearts of Americans.
Speaker A:If, God willing, chance to do that.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, I want to be fair to all the families of this horrible tragedy too, including it sounds like, it sounds like the shooter was also part of this school.
Steve Cruz:So I want to be fair.
Speaker A:I know details about it.
Speaker A:I know no details about it at all besides what you've told me.
Steve Cruz:I want to be fair to their family as well.
Steve Cruz:But the influence that we have on our Kids.
Steve Cruz:And I say this as a guy who's been a single income family, who's led a single income family for years and years and years until just recently when my youngest is out of diapers and was attending a school and now they're all three in a private Christian school.
Steve Cruz:I've got to say that there are so many detractions from your family in your pocket every single day that Christians and non Christians alike are so wrapped up in this stupid phone, in social media, in a nicer car, in a nicer house, in a bougie purse, in a $200,000 Maserati or Benz or, or whatever.
Steve Cruz:You're missing out on what matters.
Steve Cruz:And what matters is those kids.
Steve Cruz:And even, even to the families of kids who are struggling.
Steve Cruz:Take their stupid phone away, okay?
Steve Cruz:Take their phone away.
Steve Cruz:Focus.
Steve Cruz:Get in.
Steve Cruz:Get into church.
Steve Cruz:Read your Bible with your family.
Steve Cruz:Have a family devotion time.
Steve Cruz:Have family worship.
Steve Cruz:Sit at your table and eat your dinner together.
Steve Cruz:Your phone can wait.
Steve Cruz:Your tablet can wait.
Steve Cruz:Your, Your business phone call can wait.
Steve Cruz:I don't care if it's a merger.
Steve Cruz:I don't care if you're going to lose.
Steve Cruz:If you're going through bankruptcy, that bankruptcy will be there in 10 minutes, 20 minutes.
Steve Cruz:Your kid might not be so for, for everybody through all the distractions that life has to offer.
Steve Cruz:And, and, and your, this even envelops people who have the, the good and right and true and glorious call to, to be productive and to be, to take dominion of the, of the world and to be successful in this world.
Steve Cruz:To be the 10 talent servant, to be good at what, what God's called you to do, that still pales in comparison to your primary duty, which is your family.
Steve Cruz:And, and your family needs you first and foremost.
Steve Cruz:And if you need to put barriers up and you need to take those, those phones away, you need to take the tablets and turn off the phone.
Steve Cruz:And maybe it's you.
Steve Cruz:Maybe you're the problem.
Steve Cruz:I don't know.
Steve Cruz:Maybe you are.
Steve Cruz:Then stop it.
Steve Cruz:Stop it.
Steve Cruz:Focus on your family.
Steve Cruz:Focus on your marriage, focus on your kids, Focus on your church.
Steve Cruz:Focus on being a good man for, for the individuals, the lives that God has entrusted to you.
Steve Cruz:You're the husband.
Steve Cruz:You're the father.
Steve Cruz:Be a man and do your job.
Steve Cruz:Turn everything off and be present for your family.
Steve Cruz:And I don't know anything about this, this family.
Steve Cruz:You know, I'm just speaking generally to everybody because the same problem is heard around the world that you're not.
Steve Cruz:Men typically are too exhausted, exhausted from their, their job to play with their kids, or to take their wife out on a date, or to sit and do their homework with their kids, or to, or to eat dinner together.
Steve Cruz:And those are the most important things to do because that's what God has given you.
Steve Cruz:Your primary duty, your primary duty is to teach your kids, teach your wife, protect them, and to bring them up in the Lord.
Steve Cruz:And if you're not doing that, if your kid is a rebellious kid, you need to focus more on your kid.
Steve Cruz:You need to turn off all the distractions.
Steve Cruz:Maybe they're so rebellious because you haven't given them something to do.
Steve Cruz:Maybe they're rebellious because you haven't given something productive to do.
Steve Cruz:Go cut the grass, man.
Steve Cruz:Go find a hobby.
Steve Cruz:Go do something, start a small business and make it your kids.
Steve Cruz:Give them something to invest in.
Steve Cruz:You know, again, I'm generally, I'm generalizing for everybody, but over and over and over I see this, this thread that, that continues through secularism, through Christian circles, through everybody.
Steve Cruz:And it's just men's abdication of their role, of their duty, of their responsibilities.
Steve Cruz:It was there in the garden with Adam.
Steve Cruz:He abdicated his duty.
Steve Cruz:He was supposed to be there to protect his wife from the serpent who deceived her and he wasn't.
Steve Cruz:He sat there and let his wife be molested.
Steve Cruz:He let his wife be deceived.
Steve Cruz:He let his wife to commit sin and then he joined her in that sin.
Steve Cruz:And I might be taking this bridge too far, but I see the same thing going through generation to generation.
Steve Cruz:And I see if you're too busy with whatever you have going on and you're letting your family be deceived, you're letting your family sin, you're letting your kids be absorbed in this horrible, horrible culture, that's your fault and you need to repent and you need to make it right and you need to get off your ass and you need to be a man, you need to be a husband, you need to be a father who invests in your kids, who invests in your family, who invests in your wife, who invests in your church and lead them the right way because that's the first step of protecting them.
Steve Cruz:You protect them from the evil that seeps in around you under your nose.
Steve Cruz:And you could be the biggest, baddest dude in the, in this town.
Steve Cruz:You could be the, the best marksman you could be able, you could, you could be a three time black belt, Brazilian jiu jitsu guy.
Steve Cruz:But if you're allowing your kids and your, and your wife to Be deceived.
Steve Cruz:You're allowing your wife to go to the gym and yoga pants where everybody can see her stuff.
Steve Cruz:You're allowing your kids to go pick up a weapon and blow somebody away.
Steve Cruz:That's your fault.
Steve Cruz:That's your fault.
Steve Cruz:Anyway, I'll step off my soapbox.
Speaker A:No.
Steve Cruz:What do you have to say to all that?
Speaker A:No, I agree.
Speaker A:I agree with all of it.
Speaker A:I think that there was a nationwide abdication of fatherhood following World War II.
Speaker A:And there are many reasons, many reasons why.
Speaker A:You can chalk it up to, you know, extreme shell shock from, from the war.
Speaker A: erican GIs coming back in the: Speaker A:What do we have to pass down?
Speaker A:You can, you know, you can chalk it up to Billy Graham, who knows?
Speaker A:You can chalk it up to the sexual revolution.
Speaker A:You can chalk it up to drugs like they're.
Speaker A: at happened between the years: Speaker A:We would spend our entire lives unpacking it.
Speaker A:And it's probably a worthy endeavor.
Speaker A:And whatever, whatever specifically went on, there was a big break that happened in terms of what fathers believe their responsibilities were and what they carried through and what they passed on.
Speaker A:And so what we have now 80 years on is we have at least three generations of fathers.
Speaker A:So you have the baby boomers, we'll say the greatest generation, fought in World War II.
Speaker A:You have the baby boomers were their kids.
Speaker A:Generation X of millennials were the kids of the baby boomers, Right?
Speaker A:And then the millennials kids are Gen Z, right?
Speaker A:So the first Gen X and millennials, their kids are Gen Z.
Speaker A:So you have four generations now where you don't have fatherhood.
Speaker A:Fathering, father leadership as an American cultural value.
Speaker A:I mean, righteous fatherly leadership, as in, I, your father had something to say about this, and I'm going to intervene and you are not going to like it.
Speaker A:Everyone's going to call me names and I'm going to do it anyway.
Speaker A:Because the Bible says this, that kind of fathering and not do it in a tyrannical way.
Speaker A:You know, because on the other side of abdication, it's like, ah, well, whatever.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:Everyone else is doing it.
Speaker A:That's abdication.
Speaker A:On the other side, there actually is abuse.
Speaker A:Abuse is a very real thing where, you know, you're, you're carrying out discipline, but there's too much of you in it, like I'm going to get my frustrations out of life.
Speaker A:I'm going to vent them through this situation.
Speaker A:That is a very real, that is a very real thing.
Speaker A:And I don't mean to make light of it, but in between abdication and abuse, you have absence, single motherhood, fathers taken off, or mothers divorcing the men and alienating the fathers from their kids.
Speaker A:That's a very real thing.
Speaker A:Where women will take advantage of no fault divorce.
Speaker A:They'll, they'll enter into the divorce industry, the meat grinder, they'll make false accusations against their husband, take their now ex husband for half of his wealth and then alienate the kids, poison the kids against their own fathers.
Will Spencer:There's that.
Speaker A:And you have fathers who just take off.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So what we have over.
Speaker A:And when you really look at it without emphasizing any one of those application, abuse, absence, when you don't emphasize any one of those as being anyone's particular fault and you just pull out to the 50,000 foot view, we don't need to assign blame.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:When you look at that and you see the percentage of families and fathers in America that lead righteously, it's vanishingly small.
Speaker A:Vanishingly small.
Speaker A:So many problems are being ignored, missed.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Dismissed or just, you know, encouraged.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:All because, and you're right, it does tie to gyms and yoga and yoga pants.
Speaker A:All because fathers decided or were taught or whatever that they're not going to intervene.
Speaker A:And a big part of that, unfortunately, is that the good men who would be great fathers don't trust themselves.
Speaker A:And that that's a problem that I've dealt with a lot of my men's mentorships is good and righteous men who have a genuinely good heart see what the word of God says.
Speaker A:They're so afraid of becoming the tyrant that they don't take action.
Speaker A:And I think that that's a big subsection of men who listen to content like mine.
Speaker A:Content like yours, probably more.
Speaker A:They're very quiet because they don't want to be the abusive dad that they had.
Speaker A:They don't want to be the caricature of the oppressive.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And so that's very, very difficult.
Speaker A:And my advice to those men is usually it's like the sword and the stone.
Speaker A:If I pull the sword from the stone, will I become a tyrant?
Speaker A:So many good men worry about that.
Speaker A:And the reality is if you're worried about that, you're probably not going to become the tyrant.
Speaker A:Right, Right.
Speaker A:And that's what's really needed, is men to courageously Step into leadership and recognize that, yeah, you might get it wrong, but getting things wrong with a sincere heart is a very different thing than getting things wrong from a malicious or sinful intent.
Speaker A:We have to be more forgiving of ourselves, of stepping into leadership and recognizing that we will get things wrong.
Speaker A:We're going to think things all the way through and we're still going to come to the wrong conclusion because there was a piece of data that we didn't know.
Speaker A:Okay, welcome to Earth.
Speaker A:We do the best we can with what we have.
Speaker A:And so what I try to encourage men to do is to step into that leadership and accept, like, do their absolute best.
Speaker A:If you do your absolute best, you know when your conscience acquits you, when you've done your best, you know when you've done.
Steve Cruz:And.
Speaker A:And even if it goes wrong, like, well, I know that I did my best.
Speaker A:I'll still repent, I'll still apologize, I'll still fix it, but at least I can sleep it knowing that I did that I did my best.
Speaker A:And I think we need more men to do that.
Steve Cruz:And that really goes to exactly what you said.
Steve Cruz:Like, the intent, even the law.
Steve Cruz:It's the intent behind the law.
Steve Cruz:It's the spirit of the law.
Steve Cruz:You hear all these phrases about, about laws where.
Steve Cruz:And Jesus talked about this with the Sadducees and Pharisees, the teachers of the law, where you might be, you're changing the law, you might be trying.
Steve Cruz:You're telling everybody to wash their hands, and they go up another inch, another.
Steve Cruz:Go up another inch until you're washing the whole body and you're.
Steve Cruz:You're taking this money and calling it Corbin and dedicating it to the temple, when you should be taking care of your primary responsibility, which is most important, your intention, even if you're technically following the letter of the law.
Steve Cruz:Sabbath.
Steve Cruz:When Jesus himself heals on the Sabbath, and the Sabbath is.
Steve Cruz:You're not supposed to do any work.
Steve Cruz:Well, is healing work, or is healing a human being more important than the law?
Steve Cruz:Is the intent behind the law more important the law itself?
Steve Cruz:And I would say the intent behind the law is more important than the law itself.
Steve Cruz:And I will prove that with Jesus's words when he said the Sabbath was made for man, not man made for the Sabbath.
Speaker A:Right?
Steve Cruz:And I think that with everything that we're talking about, the intention is the most important thing.
Steve Cruz:The.
Steve Cruz:The intention behind somebody doing something evil or good, even if it's the same thing, your intention is what matters.
Steve Cruz:And if your intention as a man is to do the right thing and to stand, to start a family and to be.
Steve Cruz:You're going to screw up, dude.
Steve Cruz:I screw up every single day.
Steve Cruz:Every day.
Steve Cruz:Whether it's at work, whether it's at family, every day.
Steve Cruz:But my intention is to be a good man.
Steve Cruz:My intention is to be a good husband.
Steve Cruz:And sometimes that pisses my wife off.
Steve Cruz:It really does.
Steve Cruz:And sometimes she needs that.
Steve Cruz:And sometimes she needs that corralling and she needs that.
Steve Cruz:Oh, this is getting a little emotional right now.
Steve Cruz:I think we should, we should revisit this maybe in a couple of minutes and then just walk away.
Steve Cruz:You know what I mean?
Speaker A:This moment right now.
Speaker A:You mean the moment in your house?
Speaker A:Go for it.
Steve Cruz:I'm just, yeah, I'm just saying that the most important thing to consider when you're making a decision, whether it's something professionally, something that's personal, something that's really, really close to you, like your family, like your wife and kids, your intent is the by far, by far the biggest weighing standard of your future actions.
Steve Cruz:So if you're intent behind getting married and doing all these things, if your intention is to be a good, righteous man, is to be a good dude to your wife, is to be a good person, that weighs heavily and that's extremely important.
Steve Cruz:And I think pulling the sword from the stone, if your intention is to be a good righteous king, then pull away, man, pull away, wield that sword and be the righteous king that God has sovereignly decided that that's the position that you're going to be in.
Steve Cruz:Whether whatever position in this world that you find yourself, if you're in a leadership position, your intention is to be a good leader, then do it man, own it.
Steve Cruz:Step into that role, be a good dude and be a good leader and own that and maintain that right intent.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, I'm just thinking of Hebrews 4:12.
Speaker A:The word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing ascender of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Speaker A:Right, that's.
Speaker A:There's your tool right there.
Steve Cruz:Right.
Speaker A:To know your thoughts.
Speaker A:Yeah, there it is.
Steve Cruz:Now, Daniel Morgan asked, can you touch on current split and reformed camp and ons and a lot of stuff.
Steve Cruz:And I respectfully, Daniel, I'm not going to.
Steve Cruz:And I don't want my guests to either.
Steve Cruz:And I don't mean to be, certainly don't mean to be rude about this, but I think what's happening with a couple people in the Reformed circles isn't something that needs to be addressed out here.
Steve Cruz:It really doesn't.
Steve Cruz:It needs to be addressed on a phone call with people privately, because that's what Scripture says to do.
Steve Cruz:And putting it on social media and putting it on interviews and putting it doing all these things is actually violating what Scripture says.
Steve Cruz:You can find that in Matthew 18.
Steve Cruz:Jesus gives very, very clear examples of what you ought to do in these situations.
Steve Cruz:And even though many of the men that are wrapped up in this current Reformed spat, I respect the hell out of them.
Steve Cruz:I really do.
Steve Cruz:I love them, but I'm not going to wade into who's.
Steve Cruz:Who's at fault for what.
Steve Cruz:And.
Steve Cruz:But the truth is you just need to pick this stupid thing up and make a phone call and be a man and.
Steve Cruz:And handle it like men.
Steve Cruz:And whether they come to an agreement or whether they come to.
Steve Cruz:Or they don't.
Steve Cruz:Right.
Steve Cruz:You still have to obey Scripture regardless.
Steve Cruz:And if they read and then apply Matthew 18, I think all that would go by the wayside.
Steve Cruz:So, Daniel, I appreciate your comment.
Steve Cruz:Unfortunately, I'm not going to address it, and I don't want Will to either, because I think it's detrimental to the church.
Steve Cruz:And I think that the parties involved need to.
Steve Cruz:They just need to do it.
Steve Cruz:They just need to pick up the phone and talk to each other.
Speaker A:A counterpoint, rather than picking.
Speaker A:Picking this thing up, you should put it down.
Speaker A:Which is to say that.
Speaker A:Yeah, no, I know it's a joke.
Speaker A:Because one of the things that's definitely true is that whatever is happening on social media between two men that aren't you is a distraction from the things in your life that are.
Speaker A:And for myself personally, and I'm not the only one who's talked about this, I have a podcast coming out this week with Matt Reynolds from Barbell Logic.
Speaker A:Yeah, he has a new book coming out called Undoing Urgency.
Speaker A:It's a great book.
Speaker A:And one of the things that's really clear about this moment is that we as Christian men have a unique opportunity to build right now, and whatever that way that means anything to us, whether that's building, you know, a podcast, whether it's building a business, whether it's building, you know, shed Outback, or whatever it is, we have an opportunity to really build something that will contribute to our families, contribute to our prosperity, contribute to the effective running of our household.
Speaker A:Picket.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And one of the things that's definitely true is that whatever is going on on social media will not add to your ability to build.
Speaker A:And so the time, the energy and attention that people have been putting into the discussion without taking any position on it, I'm not taking any position on it, but that time, energy and attention can go for the individuals who are not involved, can go to so many other places.
Speaker A:And I really would encourage men to take advantage of that perspective.
Speaker A: hat the election is over, the: Speaker A:It's about a month so, about six weeks in the past 36 days.
Steve Cruz:I'm one of.
Steve Cruz:One of the guys literally counting the days.
Speaker A:That's good.
Speaker A:No, that's great to know.
Speaker A:Like, it was quite a night.
Speaker A:Now that that's in the past, we need to be focusing on the future and it being face down into your phone, whether it be on X, whether it be on TikTok or Instagram or whatever.
Speaker A:Or chess.
Speaker A:I don't play.
Speaker A:I love chess.
Speaker A:I don't play online chess because I don't want to have my face stuck in my phone all day trying to analyze a chest position.
Speaker A:So put the phone down, delete the apps, say what in front of me can I focus on now that I have this opportunity in sunshine?
Speaker A:And I think that that.
Speaker A:May that bless you because that's my approach to all of it.
Steve Cruz:Daniel says respect both answers, gentlemen.
Steve Cruz:Appreciate it.
Steve Cruz:Thank you.
Steve Cruz:Thank you.
Steve Cruz:Um, I.
Steve Cruz:I agree completely with you, Will.
Steve Cruz:I think that you're the.
Steve Cruz:The more time that you spend on things that don't involve you and yours, the more time you're wasting.
Steve Cruz:And.
Steve Cruz:And God's going.
Steve Cruz:God's given us a finite amount of time and you don't know how much time you have.
Steve Cruz:And when.
Steve Cruz:When we even as Christians, right, If you're not a Christian, you're gonna have a bad day, bro.
Steve Cruz:You're just gonna have a bad day.
Steve Cruz:It's not gonna, like, like every day of your life is gonna be bad, and then every day of your forever is gonna be even worse.
Steve Cruz:So.
Steve Cruz:So that really is even.
Steve Cruz:Like before, like that's over here, before you even get into the club.
Steve Cruz:Like, that bouncer's not letting you in, you know, like this whatever crap you're dealing with is the best your life is ever gonna.
Steve Cruz:Ever going to be.
Steve Cruz:It's all downhill.
Steve Cruz:And then for a Christian, conversely, this is the worst it's ever going to be.
Steve Cruz:Like whatever you're dealing with right now, whatever your.
Steve Cruz:Your stuff, the.
Steve Cruz:The worst, even the most atrocious things like that.
Steve Cruz:Like that.
Steve Cruz:The Covenant shooting and this one in Wisconsin, like these.
Steve Cruz:This is the worst that it'll ever have in your life.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Steve Cruz:All it is is uphill.
Steve Cruz:All it is is going to get better.
Steve Cruz:And if you're not doing something with.
Steve Cruz:When you are called as a Christian now, when you're called to account for every single day and every word that comes out of your mouth, and the boss is staring at you like, all right, I give you 10 talents.
Steve Cruz:What'd you do with them?
Steve Cruz:And you're like, oh, I scrolled on TikTok.
Steve Cruz:Oh, I went and did a bunch of yoga.
Steve Cruz:I wore stretchy pants in the gym and made everybody look at my hoo hoo while I recorded them.
Steve Cruz:That's what you're gonna tell the boss.
Steve Cruz:That's what you're gonna say is, I got a bunch of clicks.
Steve Cruz:I virtue signaled.
Steve Cruz:I tried to ban a bunch of guns that have no bearing on.
Steve Cruz:It's what the best answer is.
Steve Cruz:Put the phone down.
Steve Cruz:Put the stuff down.
Steve Cruz:Act like a man.
Steve Cruz:Go build.
Steve Cruz:Go build.
Steve Cruz:I had Matt on last.
Steve Cruz:Last year also.
Steve Cruz:Phenomenal guy.
Steve Cruz:Amazing guy.
Speaker A:Love that dude.
Steve Cruz:Love him.
Steve Cruz:And again, DM me his book stuff.
Steve Cruz:I want to buy that too.
Steve Cruz:Hopefully have him back on because he.
Steve Cruz:I love the simplicity of Go do hard things.
Steve Cruz:There's a bar that's cold.
Steve Cruz:It reminds you of wielding a sword.
Steve Cruz:Put a bunch of weight on it and go lift it.
Steve Cruz:Go lift it with something that requires you to expend your strength and to quit.
Steve Cruz:Do the most that you can today because you'll be able to do more tomorrow.
Steve Cruz:And I really do feel like all of life is that way.
Steve Cruz:I really do feel like God designed our human body to reflect our spirit.
Steve Cruz:And I.
Steve Cruz:I think that if you don't embrace the hard things in your life every single day, then you're just weak.
Steve Cruz:You're just a weak dude.
Steve Cruz:And.
Steve Cruz:And you're gonna get weaker.
Steve Cruz:And doing the hard.
Steve Cruz:Doing the right thing is always the hard thing.
Steve Cruz:So if your intention is to do the right thing, you're gonna have a rough life, bro.
Steve Cruz:You're gonna have conflict.
Steve Cruz:You're gonna have people.
Steve Cruz:You're gonna have people who don't like you.
Steve Cruz:You're gonna have YouTube banning you from three different accounts.
Steve Cruz:And.
Steve Cruz:And you're just gonna have to keep doing it until they stop, because you're not going to.
Steve Cruz:And I'm not trying to make myself part of this do hard things thing, but Forge and anvil.
Steve Cruz:Oh, my.
Steve Cruz:Guys, I hear Will has mastered the sword.
Speaker A:There's a rumor we have unconfirmed reports.
Steve Cruz:Okay, we'll have to talk about it.
Speaker A:Miss you Connor, but miss you.
Steve Cruz:But men are supposed to do hard things and, and I love Matt because he, he just embraces that and he says that about everything.
Steve Cruz:And then he proves that when he coaches guys and when he tells you how to do, how to be a better man, not just in your physical body and your physical shape, but just you as a man.
Steve Cruz:He does a lot of life stuff just for free for people.
Steve Cruz:He impacts people on, on a daily and I respect the hell out of him.
Steve Cruz:So if you guys aren't following Matt Reynolds at barbell logic, you definitely should look him up, check him out.
Steve Cruz:Dudes a stud.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I think that he, he has a good example of what a lot of us men can and perhaps should be doing.
Speaker A:He's not super active on social media.
Speaker A:He will post from time to time, but in general he's busy building his multimillion dollar company and he has been for 15 years.
Speaker A:And so it's just a known thing.
Speaker A:You only have so many hours in the day, you only have so much attention to give.
Speaker A:And so whether the drama is in global politics or whether the drama is in the reform world or, or whether it's in the sports world, doesn't matter.
Speaker A:There's no shortage of drama that we can all choose to spectate in.
Speaker A:The reform stuff is a little closer to all of us, probably because it involves growers, we have online, people we know in real life or both, or ministries that we're personally attached to versus something happening in Congress, for example.
Speaker A:Maybe it's not happening with our congressperson, but it's sort of a couple degrees removed.
Speaker A:But no matter how far the degree is removed from you or how close it is participating in drama, that doesn't actually, and I don't mean to be dismissive about it by calling it drama either.
Speaker A:That's not my intention for saying that.
Speaker A:Participating, let's call it conflict.
Speaker A:Participating in conflict that doesn't immediately involve you does two things.
Speaker A:It doesn't help.
Speaker A:Absolutely doesn't help.
Speaker A:And it risks getting you involved in it.
Speaker A:And that's the worst thing that can happen because once you get involved in it, you're in it until you can exit.
Speaker A:And so a casual comment made about something on social media, you know, especially, especially X can go viral and then you can be dealing with it for the next 72 hours.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And so.
Steve Cruz:Or two years or two years or more.
Speaker A:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker A:You know, like that's a very rare case, right, the that you would be dealing with something for two years.
Speaker A:But we have to be mindful about.
Speaker A:Well, if I'm going to.
Speaker A:This is how I choose to use X.
Speaker A:Every time before I hit send, I ask or post, I ask, if this tweet were to go viral, would I be willing to stand in the public square starting right now to defend it until it dies down?
Speaker A:Because there's always a curve.
Speaker A:Even my biggest Tweet that did 23 million views, even that fell off after about five days.
Speaker A:But like, for example, over Thanksgiving, I put the phone away, I had something to say about, but I was like, you know what?
Speaker A:No, because I don't want to post this right now and then be responsible for it while I'm with family, while being distracted, like, oh my gosh, who's saying what about where that I have to respond to.
Speaker A:And that's how I choose to engage with social media.
Speaker A:And I do that to protect my time, to protect my attention.
Speaker A:Now, I'm a pretty public guy.
Speaker A:I have a lot of followers, right?
Speaker A:And so I recognize that I can, because I have.
Speaker A:I can post things that take on a life of their own.
Speaker A:And, you know, for better or for worse, I've done it many times.
Speaker A:And yet still.
Speaker A:So it's an imperfect process no matter if you choose to do it.
Speaker A:And yet I have so many tweets in my drafts folder, both on my web browser, Twitter and on the phone where it's like, I don't know that I want to deal with any blowback from this right now.
Speaker A:I might be 100% behind the thing that I'm going to say.
Speaker A:And I'm like, you know what if this upsets the wrong person and it makes it all the way up to wherever and I get the blowback from either former friends or future enemies or whatever.
Speaker A:It's like, I got other stuff I want to do today.
Speaker A:And I know that that idea could be considered controversial in the sense of we're in a clicks and attention driven culture where everyone's trying to get attention for what they're doing.
Speaker A:And I think that attention can be a positive thing if you have something helpful and healing and potentially even profitable to speak into it, by all means, if you have an offer, coaching program, a book that you're trying to sell, start a podcast, start up drama and sell the thing.
Speaker A:It's a very well traveled business model right now.
Speaker A:So that's a way that attention can be used positively.
Speaker A:Of course you have grifters and stuff like that who create negative attention.
Speaker A:Don't do that.
Speaker A:But in general, if that's not you if you're just trying to get attention for your edgy tweet, recognize that if you succeed and you get all that attention, you will then have to manage that attention.
Speaker A:And the attention that you're giving to the attention could be spent on reading a book, going to the gym, playing with your kids, focusing on your work, doing something for the future.
Speaker A:Because I can tell you, 23 million views on Twitter.
Speaker A:That's cool.
Speaker A:That was a pretty wild day to watch a tweet literally go viral around the world.
Speaker A:And did it meaningfully improve the quality?
Speaker A:And I'm grateful to God for it.
Speaker A:Did it meaningfully improve the quality of my life?
Speaker A:Yeah, I got a nice check from X for it, but that hasn't continued on since then.
Speaker A:And so there's a temptation and X Twitter has always been good at this.
Speaker A:It's even better at now.
Speaker A:But this is not new.
Speaker A:This is pre Elon.
Speaker A:X has been very good at the hot take thing.
Speaker A:You have a thought, bang, you post it, it goes send it.
Speaker A:And Twitter is very good at that.
Speaker A:And that can be great for, for a political dialogue.
Speaker A:That can be great for sharing news like the first assassination attempt.
Speaker A:Twitter had gone around the horn three times before the mainstream media, even before CNN even said Trump falls down and hits self or whatever.
Speaker A:You know, I had already looked all the way through, like, oh my gosh, bullets literally were in the air.
Speaker A:This just happened before CNN even posted about it.
Speaker A:And so Twitter's great at that, right?
Speaker A:It's fantastic for that.
Speaker A:But there are consequences in our use of it that I think men, particularly today, now that we live in a more conservative friendly environment, have to put on their training wheels and understand that now that you don't have to worry about getting kicked off the platform for your pace and as you take now, you have to worry about the opposite, which is what if it does well?
Speaker A:Which is just gets eyeballs and traction and you get sucked into something that you can have a better spending your time.
Speaker A:You can spend your time on something better.
Speaker A:And I think that's the lesson that a lot of men are having to learn the hard way right now is not just social media like doom scrolling, but like based and edgy takes that generate attention that keep you stuck to the phone.
Speaker A:And I think that that's something that everyday regular men need to worry about.
Speaker A:Now that might be new because a year ago pre elon Twitter was your doom scrolling Instagram TikTok, you're just scrolling, just passively consuming.
Speaker A:And now those same guys, you know, they won't get censored for the things that they say.
Speaker A:So now they say them.
Speaker A:But that's equally keeping you hooked into the algorithm.
Speaker A:And we need to pop out of the algorithm and get back into real life.
Steve Cruz:That's grass, man.
Steve Cruz:Go do something.
Steve Cruz:Go do something productive.
Speaker A:I include myself.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, me too.
Steve Cruz:Like it's hard.
Steve Cruz:So I, again, I genuinely feel the burden that a lot of people have.
Steve Cruz:This is, I don't get paid for this.
Steve Cruz:I just do this.
Steve Cruz:I do this because I think it's important.
Steve Cruz:I think that there's a need for it and people haven't stepped in the gap.
Steve Cruz:And so if there's a gap, I'll step in.
Steve Cruz:I don't care.
Steve Cruz:I would say that I'm a natural born leader without trying to sound arrogant, cocky.
Steve Cruz:And I think that, I think that people need to gravitate towards those natural born leaders and offer them support wherever they may be, whether it's your personal life or professional life.
Steve Cruz:You see those people who are genuinely trying to, whether they're perfect or not.
Steve Cruz:Nobody's going to be perfect, but at least they're trying.
Steve Cruz:And I think if people are trying, then you should offer them your support.
Steve Cruz:And that leads into the next thing I want to talk about.
Steve Cruz:I think it was the last thing I want to talk about.
Steve Cruz:We're getting kind of long in the tooth here.
Speaker A:Cool.
Steve Cruz:January 20th.
Steve Cruz:Donald Trump is going to be sworn in.
Steve Cruz:Huh?
Speaker A:Got it.
Speaker A:That's inauguration day.
Speaker A:Got it.
Steve Cruz:Yeah.
Steve Cruz:Donald Trump is going to be sworn in as only the second U.S.
Steve Cruz:president in all of U.S.
Steve Cruz:history to serve two non consecutive presidential terms.
Steve Cruz:The first, of course, being Grover Cleveland.
Steve Cruz: th president from: Steve Cruz:What do you think about Trump's first presidency?
Steve Cruz:And what do you, what do you expect to see in his second term?
Speaker A:More assassination attempts, probably.
Speaker A:I'm so stoked that you asked me this question because I think it's so interesting.
Speaker A:So I think Trump, I don't know if Trump expected to win the first time.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:One of the reasons behind his victory was 4chan meme magic.
Speaker A:I think there was a significant portion of the American population, particularly young men, who they didn't care what Trump's policy proposals were.
Speaker A:Maybe he didn't have any.
Speaker A:Who knew?
Speaker A:They just knew that he was a brick thrown through the window of the establishment, which he was 100%, which he was right.
Speaker A:And, and, and one way or another, he provided four years of air cover to Let men build.
Speaker A:Under a Clinton administration, for example, there would have been no manosphere.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A: scovered reformed theology in: Speaker A: So: Speaker A:So one thing we can say for sure is that Trump absorbed the fire from the media, whether he Russiagate hoax or whatever, that no longer got focused on individual men.
Speaker A:And that's why you had a lot of growth and prosperity in the economy.
Speaker A:But he was a bull in the China shop.
Speaker A:I think he himself would admit that he was naive.
Speaker A:I think he's confessed, he's made bad appointments, he trusted people who knew where the bodies were buried, who stuck a knife in his back like he, he probably was.
Speaker A:He didn't understand the level of blood sport that he had signed up for.
Speaker A:And in fact, he actually said a lot of people missed this.
Speaker A:It was during the convention, the Republican National Convention.
Speaker A:It was after the assassination attempt.
Speaker A:He was on a couple different interviews.
Speaker A:I want to say it was Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn.
Speaker A:Definitely on Joe Rogan.
Speaker A:It was, it was a talking point that he had for a while.
Speaker A:He was talking about, you know, there's some really.
Speaker A:I'm not going to try to do a compression.
Speaker A:There are some really lean.
Steve Cruz:Andrew Isker does a really good jump.
Speaker A:Does he really?
Steve Cruz:Yeah, it's great jobs.
Speaker A:He's like race car drivers, 0.1% or something, boxers, you know, bull riders.
Speaker A:Like, he talked about these deadly jobs and he's like, you know, the presidency is a deadly job.
Speaker A:He said that on a couple different very high profile podcasts.
Speaker A:And that was very interesting to me because I don't think he had previously recognized that it may be true.
Speaker A:It may be true, God forbid, but it may be true that like if he really wants to create the change, that he believes it.
Speaker A:I believe he's.
Speaker A:I believe he's a good hearted man and he cares for the United States.
Speaker A:He's not a redeemed man.
Speaker A:He's not a Christian, not a believer yet.
Speaker A:He may get there or the time is done, but he's not a believer.
Speaker A:But I believe he genuinely cares about America and Americans.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:He may have recognized once the bullet grazed his ear that to truly create the change that he wants, it may cost him his life.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:It just may.
Speaker A:There's precedent for that.
Speaker A:Plenty of assassination attempts on US Presidents trying to change things.
Speaker A:Kennedy probably being the most famous one.
Speaker A:And I don't think Donald Trump had ever considered that, that he would be in that category.
Speaker A:We're all just going to make a whole lot of money, right?
Speaker A:It's all good, right?
Speaker A:Like, no, it's not all good.
Speaker A:It's not about making a whole lot of money.
Speaker A:It's about making a very specific changes to the world to bring about this kind of globalist kind of thing.
Speaker A:So he may have recognized that this job that he signed up for, the President of the United States, an actual change agent in the presidency, may cost him his life.
Speaker A:And I think that he has conducted himself very differently since that realization.
Speaker A:I think he's become more grounded, I think he's become more fatherly, more grandfatherly, brought that side of his personality forward quite a bit more.
Speaker A:And I think when he gets inaugurated, if I had to guess, if I were the guy who got elected, I would have two things in mind right now.
Speaker A:My plans, my actual plans would be so deep secret buried.
Speaker A:Like, you're coming into our no cell phones lockdown.
Speaker A:There are five people in this room only kind of skiff secure, confidential environment, I think is what.
Speaker A:It's something like that.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And like, five people know what we're actually doing, and that's it.
Speaker A:And these are, like, these are true bros.
Speaker A:And such an intense campaign of massive shock and awe behind the scenes that you hit the ground absolutely running as fast as you can in the first hundred days.
Speaker A:And I think.
Speaker A:I think we're going to see.
Speaker A:And I think that's how I would handle it.
Speaker A:Like, I wouldn't be a consensus builder.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:We're going to spend a couple of years getting to know everybody, and we're all just going to do this big kumbaya, like.
Speaker A:No, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker A:You're.
Speaker A:The bullet grazed my ear.
Speaker A:I felt it.
Speaker A:I felt it hit my ear that we're.
Speaker A:We're in a different.
Speaker A:We're in a different category of violence now.
Speaker A:And so I think what we're going to see leading up to the election, and we're seeing it now with this, your drone thing and, you know, the conflict in the Middle East.
Speaker A:And I think that there's an attempt to throw sand in the gears.
Speaker A:And so far, Trump seems to be unflapped, you know, sort of unflappable about the whole thing.
Speaker A:But I think once we hit go on January 20th and 21st, we're going to see like 90 crazy days.
Speaker A:I think it's going to be absolutely wild.
Speaker A:Buckle up.
Speaker A:You know, I don't think we're going to see societal collapse, but I think it's going to be a wild ride.
Speaker A:And I think the wild ride will be less time than to get to the midterms.
Speaker A:I think the midterms is too late.
Speaker A:I think they will probably have to go as hard as they can, as fast as they can in the first 60 days before the news cycle has a chance to catch up.
Speaker A:And I think that the elite, the establishment, whatever, the regime, whatever you want to call them, I think that they recognize, perhaps only too late, they recognize that their media apparatuses that they have meaning, the mainstream media, cable news, TV news, stuff like that, are way too slow.
Speaker A:Way, way, way too slow.
Speaker A:I think they screwed up so massively big time by selling X to Elon.
Speaker A:I don't.
Speaker A:I think they're now recognizing the giant mistake that was.
Speaker A:So they're at a disadvantage in terms of the news cycle.
Speaker A:The news cycle can't turn over fast enough to stand up to a shock and awe campaign being conducted through X.
Speaker A:And so just to go back for a second, this makes discipline with social media and devices even more important for men because the massive temptation will be to be stuck to her phone all day watching and commenting on all the headlines.
Speaker A:That will be the massive temptation.
Speaker A:I'm sure that I will face it, right, because it's fun.
Speaker A:There's a fun component to it.
Speaker A:And, and every bit of attention that you give to these things will detract from the things that you can be doing in your own life that I think are very necessary.
Speaker A:So I think between, I think, I think once Christmas and New Year's are over, I think all bets are off for the first three weeks of January.
Speaker A:I think January 20th, we're going to see a lot of craziness.
Speaker A:And I think the craziness that we see is going to be the tip of the iceberg for a whole bunch of craziness.
Speaker A:We are not going to see, like, as the FBI offices on January 20th and 21st are going to be insane.
Speaker A:They're going to be insane.
Speaker A:We may never hear about it.
Speaker A:The CIA, we may never hear about it, but it's going to be absolutely wild.
Speaker A:We'll feel it.
Speaker A:We'll feel it in the rattling.
Speaker A:The ship's going to be rattling and shaking as it's going over, going through turbulent waters.
Speaker A:But it's going to be really important for men to have social media discipline in terms of their use of devices so they don't get too caught up in the headlines of the day.
Speaker A:And they keep their focus on their businesses, their family and their faith.
Speaker A:And that, I think is going to be the real challenge for Christians over the next couple of years is the men who are able to maintain discipline in the face of constant headline distraction, like head down focus, what are you building?
Speaker A:The men who are able to do that.
Speaker A:And it's going to, you know, I think it's going to be an even harder discipline.
Speaker A:There's a lot of talk and we've talked about porn and all that.
Speaker A:And so I think that that is a very well traveled set of ground for men in the Christian faith.
Speaker A:Right now there's still more work to do, but I think people are familiar with the nature of the challenge.
Speaker A:What we haven't yet discussed yet is the distraction of social media in general and the need to be truly disciplined in how we use that to make sure that it doesn't become a distraction of the godly activities we could be doing in our lives.
Speaker A:And the men who are able to succeed at that, like Matt Reynolds, shut it off, go away.
Speaker A:Stay focused on the mission.
Speaker A:We'll see the next two years be massively profitable for them, profitable in terms of their faith if they invest energy in that, profitable in terms of their family, profitable in terms of any growth of business or effort.
Speaker A:Because while everyone else in the world is going to be so fixated on the headlines, if you're sitting at your desk and you have your head down and you're getting your job done, you will outpace everyone around you, liberal and conservative.
Speaker A:And that, I think, is the opportunity that's ahead of all of us right now.
Speaker A:So January 20th, buckle up for a wild ride.
Speaker A:But like, remember, you can turn it off and you probably won't see it.
Speaker A:I can close my laptop, turn off my phone.
Speaker A:And things are pretty chill here in my studio.
Speaker A:And I think every man needs to be reminded of that in his everyday life once we do actually get to inauguration day.
Steve Cruz:I agree with you 100%, man.
Steve Cruz:And you said it way better than I could.
Steve Cruz:Thank you.
Steve Cruz:You hit on a lot of points that your focus as men still needs to be.
Steve Cruz:Go build.
Steve Cruz:Go take dominion, go focus on your family.
Steve Cruz:These things are going to.
Speaker A:It's not as if the things don't matter.
Speaker A:I want to say, it's not as if the headlines on social media, they do matter.
Speaker A:These things do matter.
Speaker A:The things that we're seeing in the reform world, they're important.
Speaker A:And you still have a life to lead.
Speaker A:Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you.
Steve Cruz:Off no, that's great.
Steve Cruz:I don't mind it at all.
Steve Cruz:I appreciate your perspective and 100% man, the headlines matter.
Steve Cruz:They do.
Steve Cruz:But similar to the organizational structure of the government, the president really doesn't matter all that much to you and yours today.
Steve Cruz:It really doesn't.
Steve Cruz:Your senator really doesn't matter.
Steve Cruz:The one person, then, the one elected representative that matters the most to.
Steve Cruz:Where it matters the most to you is the sheriff.
Steve Cruz:Your local county sheriff matters the most.
Steve Cruz:He can literally tell the president, yeah, I don't care.
Steve Cruz:We're not doing that here.
Steve Cruz:And there's nothing they can do about it.
Steve Cruz:Nothing.
Steve Cruz:During the COVID shamdemic, I was praying that are sheriff or sheriffs around the world, around the country would just say, yeah, no, no thanks, you can do that.
Steve Cruz:We're not going to.
Steve Cruz:But they didn't.
Speaker A:Right?
Steve Cruz:But the sheriff in your county has more power over you than literally anyone in the country.
Steve Cruz:That's the person that you need to focus on your local politics.
Steve Cruz:And this is where Michael Voster gets it so.
Steve Cruz:Right.
Steve Cruz:And Michael Clary and all these guys who focus on local elections.
Steve Cruz:Your emphasis that what matters to you and yours and your family, what impacts you every single day, your grocery bill, your local laws, your local magistrate, as it were, your regulations, your taxes, all that's counting, man.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, so.
Steve Cruz:So all this stuff might be happening with Trump and with the, you know, whatever, and that's cool, that's great.
Steve Cruz:But it's.
Speaker A:It.
Steve Cruz:The amount that that's going to affect you is minuscule in comparison to what's happening every single day in your county, in your local jurisdictions.
Steve Cruz:That's what's going to matter to you the most.
Steve Cruz:So if, if you really do care, you really do want to sit on here and go scroll and tweet and, and boast and whatever the hell they.
Steve Cruz:They call it these days for, for whatever you do on.
Steve Cruz:Get your voice heard and do it locally, man.
Steve Cruz:Go.
Steve Cruz:Go to your city council, go to your, your local sheriff.
Steve Cruz:Go, go talk.
Steve Cruz:They have to talk to you.
Steve Cruz:You, you're part of the, you're part of the county.
Steve Cruz:They have to talk to you.
Steve Cruz:So the.
Steve Cruz:If you want to be involved in your elected conversation, your sheriff should be your, your first and foremost.
Steve Cruz:Stop that.
Steve Cruz:That should be top of your mind because it's what's going to impact you the most.
Steve Cruz:And then speaking of what's going to impact the most, the president, the president's picks and their nominations for, for cabinet, that's what's going to matter the most to his presidency.
Steve Cruz:Because the President doesn't make all the people, all the, all the decisions for all the things.
Steve Cruz:There's just too much.
Steve Cruz:So the cabinet members who are going to be leading in this area, in that area, the FBI and the CIA and then the nsa, and I really want to talk to you, I want to see what you think about his cabinet, potential nominees.
Steve Cruz:Cash Patel for the FBI.
Steve Cruz:Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Cabbard, jfk.
Steve Cruz:I mean, these are some pretty conf.
Steve Cruz:You know, they're confident, confrontational or controversial people that a lot of liberals really, really liked before and they don't like now.
Steve Cruz:And I want to get your perspective on that.
Speaker A:Yeah, I'm not a super political guy, so I don't keep up with the headlines.
Speaker A:I mostly get secondhand information.
Speaker A:But it seems to me that the people who Trump has nominated, they genuinely want to change things and that they're committed to it.
Speaker A:And I think the one thing that Trump learned, excuse me, after his first go round, is that a lot of people talk a big game about change.
Speaker A:Very few people have the spinal fortitude to pull it off.
Speaker A:And I think Trump was one of those guys.
Speaker A:I think his first administration, he talked a lot about change.
Speaker A: final analysis, at the end of: Speaker A: election of quote unquote, of: Speaker A:And so I think that if we're.
Steve Cruz:Taking whatever went on there at 2:00 in the morning with a bunch of buses pulling up with, with 100% ballots for Biden, Harris, whatever happened, whatever, whatever happened there.
Speaker A:But actually, but it doesn't matter.
Speaker A:Let's just say, let's just say, let's.
Speaker A:We're going to go into fantasy land now.
Speaker A:We're going to ride our unicorn into the magic fairy kingdom and say that it was a legitimate election.
Speaker A:I know, I know.
Speaker A:Just.
Steve Cruz:That's too much, Will.
Steve Cruz:It's just too much, man.
Speaker A:I believe in fairy kingdoms.
Speaker A:Well, let's say, right, like, we're gonna ride through the Candy Kingdom on our unicorn.
Speaker A: And in the Candy Kingdom, the: Speaker A:We got four years of untrammeled And Trump went away.
Speaker A:Trump vanished.
Speaker A:Like, he did not maintain his place on the world stage.
Speaker A:Commenting on the behavior.
Speaker A:He wasn't a commentator.
Speaker A:He didn't show up on TV news programs.
Speaker A:He was kind of invisible.
Speaker A:He started Truth Social, but he didn't.
Speaker A:He wasn't really a major political figure.
Speaker A:He just disappeared.
Speaker A:He was out there.
Speaker A:He would comment from time to time.
Speaker A:So he wasn't even on the stage.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So you had four years of the Democrats, and then what happened at the end of four years of the Democrats is that even the Democrats were like, hey, yeah, so, yeah, this.
Speaker A:This hasn't been awesome.
Speaker A:There is no measure at which it's been awesome.
Speaker A: id when we came around to the: Speaker A:You had an election that was too big to rig.
Speaker A:And it was too big to rig because a lot of Democrats, a lot of the liberals woke up and they recognized the trajectory that their party was going for, and they're like, we don't want to have any.
Speaker A:Any part of that.
Speaker A:And so there's a providential component of, like, okay, like, even if it was, again, in the magic fairy kingdom, a legitimate election, which it wasn't, it was still became a very powerful teaching tool.
Speaker A:And so I think that there are a lot of people who are like, okay, yeah, we don't like the direction the Democrats are going.
Speaker A:I think the disaster in Afghanistan was a big deal.
Speaker A:The border crisis.
Speaker A: lking about build the wall in: Speaker A:And now you had a bunch of liberals like, wow, this illegal immigration is a real problem.
Speaker A:You know, it's funny thing about that.
Speaker A: do something about it back in: Speaker A:What was that guy's name again?
Speaker A:So, like, a lot of people reluctantly woke up.
Speaker A: And the four years in: Steve Cruz:That's fake news.
Speaker A:Fake news, right?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A: Well, the four years of: Speaker A:What are you seeing here that you like?
Speaker A:Nothing.
Speaker A:So it did allow for more of a mandate to be given to Trump.
Speaker A:And it did also show who was willing to break ranks before it was popular.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So that, I think, probably has given Trump a good salt.
Speaker A:Like, Elon Musk is a good example.
Speaker A:Like, Elon Musk is like, hey, he was talking.
Speaker A:Elon Musk was talking about crashing birth rates years ago.
Speaker A: they're still in this kind of: Speaker A:Like a population explosion is the biggest problem.
Speaker A:Elon Musk was on stage at some big tech conference and was like, actually, I think population collapse is the big problem.
Speaker A:He was way ahead of the curve on that for a lot of people.
Speaker A:So it's given Trump the opportunity to form alliances with people who, I think that they're ambitious.
Speaker A:I think that there's a godly form of ambition.
Speaker A:In fact, there's a new sermon from Doug Wilson about godly ambition.
Speaker A:Well, it's new to me.
Speaker A:It's a couple years old.
Speaker A:It was served to me on YouTube algorithm.
Speaker A:I think there's a godly form of ambition that wants to create change.
Speaker A:And I think it's an ungodly form of ambition.
Speaker A:That's about self glorification.
Speaker A:And I don't ever want to say that there's a politician out there who only has godly ambition.
Speaker A:I think to even succeed as a politician, period, you have to have some self glorification be part of your makeup.
Speaker A:Otherwise I just, I literally don't think you can make it in that world, period.
Speaker A:That doesn't mean that the person is like this irredeemable kind of individual.
Speaker A:It just means that it's the nature of the beast.
Speaker A:So I think you have a lot of people who, they want to create change.
Speaker A:I think they have the spinal fortitude to do it.
Speaker A:I think they have the mandate to do it right.
Speaker A:But will they see it all the way through?
Speaker A:Will they wrestle the thing down to the ground and hog tie it?
Speaker A:Will they really, really do that?
Speaker A:And will they be protected enough from the, from the consequences and all?
Speaker A:But this is a standard problem that men face every human faces.
Speaker A:You can say that you want to be the righteous godly leader in your home, great.
Speaker A:And I want that for you.
Speaker A:But are you willing to be the righteous godly leader who tells your daughter who you love, who you've been lax about this with?
Speaker A:I'm sorry, you can't go out of the house looking like that anymore.
Speaker A:Like, when that is rubber meets the road and when your wife's like, oh, really?
Speaker A:You're like, yes.
Speaker A:Are you going to stand up in that because you've been lax before?
Speaker A:Are you really going to take it all the way down to that level?
Speaker A:Well, what about that one time?
Speaker A:Like, you're right after.
Speaker A:Repent for that.
Speaker A:And you still have to hold up your godly authority.
Speaker A:A lot of men will break.
Speaker A:It's a very common thing.
Speaker A:Men and women will break off the sharp point of true conviction of change when it starts to get really painful.
Speaker A:And sin is painful.
Speaker A:Moral shame is very painful.
Speaker A:The conviction, moral conviction is very, very painful.
Speaker A:That's its purpose.
Speaker A:That's our conscience waking, like, ow.
Speaker A:And so the question ultimately will be, how down for how down for it, how up for it are the people, our Trump and the people on his side?
Speaker A:Like, everyone wants to be the God emperor until it comes time to do God Emperor stuff.
Speaker A:Everyone wants to be the patriarch until it comes time to do patriarchy stuff, when it gets really unpopular, when everyone starts screaming because it's so alien to our culture today.
Speaker A:And that will be the big question.
Speaker A:And so we're going to watch that play out in Trump's cabinet appointments, we're going to watch that play out in Trump's administration, we're going to watch it play out in the mainstream media.
Speaker A:And I think we desperately need it to play out in the everyday lives of men.
Speaker A:And again, I don't mean to keep beating the dead horse on this, but it will be a very, it will be very easy to be distracted from being living righteous lives by watching other men fight righteous battles online.
Speaker A:Same temptation of sports.
Speaker A:We can get secondhand glory by watching the guy break free for a 50 yard touchdown to win the game.
Speaker A:Amazing, right?
Speaker A:But like, are you going to break free or a touchdown in a way that's meaningful within your life, Are you going to fight for your own, not necessarily your own glory, are you going to fight for your own victory in your life and stop watching the other man do it?
Speaker A:And so what I hope happens is that we see so much victory, so much winning, you get tired of winning that seeing Trump and seeing his administration rack up some quick wins, I hope it doesn't inspire men to merely be cheerleaders for the quick wins.
Speaker A:I hope it inspires them to go get wins in their own lives and then we will really see change in America.
Speaker A:Because you're right, the president, he can crush it at his highest level, as cabinet members can approached it at his highest level.
Speaker A:Will that percolate down into your weekly productivity, your weekly to do list, will that percolate down into your family worship?
Speaker A:Probably not.
Speaker A:You still have to lead in that.
Speaker A:So if every man that his own level of influence, whether it be around his dinner table or in the office of the President, takes this on and goes to win in the ways that they can, then we will see change in the United States.
Speaker A:If we're expecting Trump and his cabinet picks to do all the work for us, we will be disappointed.
Speaker A:But if we take advantage of their wins to inspire us for wins in our own lives, I think we'll be very happy.
Speaker A:And that's what I ultimately want to see for America.
Steve Cruz:So really it comes down just like in the church.
Steve Cruz:You know, you can preach theology all day long or in the White House you can talk about policies all day long, but really once you put them into practice, once you actually use application of what you're learning and what you're saying you're going to do, that's when you get the resistance, that's when you get the, the, the, the hard fought battles that you need strong Gimli's for guys, guys who are willing to swing the axe.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Steve Cruz:So once you put it into practice, when you're, you're, you were talking about if you're willing to stand there in front of your wife, in front of your daughter and say you're not, you're not going to leave this house wearing that, looking like that.
Steve Cruz:You're not going to talk to your friend like that.
Steve Cruz:You're not going to talk to your mother like that.
Steve Cruz:You're not going to talk to me like that.
Steve Cruz:You're not going to talk to whoever you don't.
Steve Cruz:Exactly, exactly.
Steve Cruz:Once you actually live out those biblical principles, once you actually see the cabinet members put into practice these things that we've been promised, the result is the same.
Steve Cruz:You're going to get massive resistance.
Steve Cruz:Because it's one thing to say something, it's another thing to do something.
Steve Cruz:And the doers are the ones who, yeah, they get stuff, they just have done.
Steve Cruz:They're the builders and the shakers and the movers and the shakers and they build empires.
Steve Cruz:But they also have the biggest amount of resistance in their life.
Steve Cruz:The ones who just go with the flow, the ones who just talk, you know, they want to talk about it and not be about it.
Steve Cruz:There's no resistance to them because they're not actually impacting other people's lives.
Steve Cruz:If you want to impact other people's lives, be about it.
Steve Cruz:Don't just talk about it.
Steve Cruz:Live with the application, don't just talk about theology.
Steve Cruz:Live it out in your life, in your, in your daily life.
Steve Cruz:And I think you're right.
Steve Cruz:I think that once, I think the cabinet members that, that Trump has, has slotted for those positions, once they start actually acting out those policy changes, there's, there's going to be some massive resistance to them and that's fine.
Steve Cruz:They're going to write in Chicago and Frisco and Portland and la.
Steve Cruz:Cool.
Steve Cruz:Burn it down, man.
Steve Cruz:Burn it, baby, burn it.
Steve Cruz:Because personally, I want it to burn.
Steve Cruz:I do.
Steve Cruz:I want these crazy Sodom, Gomorrah cities who have rejected Christ for generation after generation, and they're living in their sin, and the sin that they live in is their judgment on them.
Steve Cruz:And they're going to burn themselves down in that judgment.
Steve Cruz:And I want that to happen.
Steve Cruz:I want judgment to come.
Steve Cruz:So that's a long way of saying, I'm excited about what's happening.
Steve Cruz:I'm excited about the next couple.
Steve Cruz:Couple years.
Steve Cruz:He's not a perfect president.
Steve Cruz:I really, really don't like his position on abortion.
Steve Cruz:I really, really don't like that he's moved the whole Republican Party to the left.
Steve Cruz:But I really do like that he's a.
Steve Cruz:Okay, you don't like it.
Steve Cruz:Cool story.
Steve Cruz:Do something about it.
Steve Cruz:I really like that he's the bull in the China shop.
Steve Cruz:I really like that he's the guy who's going to flip you off and not apologize.
Steve Cruz:I really like the fact that he's just going to take names, kick down doors, bag them and tag them, and then see what happens when the dust settles.
Steve Cruz:And I think that we've been sorely, sorely, we have needed that for so long, and we haven't had it.
Steve Cruz:Because before Trump, there really wasn't much of a difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Steve Cruz:They, they say something, they don't live out their platform.
Steve Cruz:They don't believe.
Steve Cruz:They don't believe what they say.
Steve Cruz:And they're not answerable.
Steve Cruz:They're not.
Steve Cruz:They're actually not answerable to you and me, to their constituents.
Steve Cruz:They're answerable to the lobbyists and to the big corporations who pay for their next election.
Steve Cruz:And I really like the fact that it's not everything that I want to see in an elected representative in the president, but it's better than what I had been getting.
Steve Cruz:It's better than what I.
Steve Cruz:And he's going to knock down a whole bunch of nonsense that drain a bunch of the swamp that I have hated for my entire life.
Steve Cruz:So I agree with you.
Steve Cruz:I think, I think there's a lot to be excited about the next presidential for the Inauguration Day.
Steve Cruz:I think it's going to be fast and furious.
Steve Cruz:I think it's going to be no holds barred.
Steve Cruz:I think it's going to be breakneck speed.
Steve Cruz:But I think you're wise to give people that caution to say, don't get wrapped up in all these things that are happening because you still have a job to do.
Steve Cruz:You still have to go take dominion you still have to go build your business.
Steve Cruz:A good employee, be a good husband, a good father, a good.
Steve Cruz:Whatever you have, you still have to do all those things for the Lord.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I just want to offer a bit of encouragement, you know, to you, Steve.
Speaker A:Like you and I, as you said, we're two.
Speaker A:We're two very different men, right?
Speaker A:We come, we come from different worlds, we have different backgrounds, different approaches, but we're both valid versions of what it means to be a man.
Speaker A:The kind of man that you will reach is different from the kind of man that I will reach.
Speaker A:Not that there isn't plenty of crossover, because there is.
Speaker A:But I want to offer an encouragement to you to keep speaking in the ways that you have.
Speaker A:Because men like you need.
Speaker A:Men like you, they need that reminder.
Speaker A:They will hear those reminders differently from you than they will for me.
Speaker A:That's just one of the natures of what it means to be a man.
Speaker A:Different kinds of men listen to different kinds of men.
Speaker A:And that's absolutely fine.
Speaker A:So I want to encourage you to keep doing what you're doing and to stick with this and to keep speaking into the lives of men and keep encouraging them in the way ways that you do.
Speaker A:Because I think they will be needed, I think they are needed very much so for men to look when they feel like, whoa, okay, I'm lost right now, swimming.
Speaker A:What do I do?
Speaker A:Who's a man that I respect that I can turn to, who I think would get me?
Speaker A:And I think that you offer that to so many men.
Speaker A:And so I think there's a big opportunity for the working class regular guy out there to find a country that is much more friendly to him than it has been probably for the past 50 years.
Speaker A: Even as early as the: Speaker A:Big disaster, huge portions of the American population.
Speaker A:And I think we're seeing a shift back to valuing working class middle class values, valuing men who think with their hands, who don't just think with their minds.
Speaker A:There's nothing wrong with either one.
Speaker A:You actually need both to build a functioning civilization.
Speaker A:You always have.
Speaker A:Civilizations go wrong when they forget that, when they forget that they need wizards and that they need dwarves.
Speaker A:You know, if we want to get fantasy about it, right, the role playing.
Speaker A:Fantasy, role playing about it.
Speaker A:But the reality is there are so many different kinds of men that can speak into the lives of different kinds of men.
Speaker A:As long as they stick with It.
Speaker A:So I just massively appreciated everything you've had to say and the way in which you say it.
Speaker A:And so I just want to offer my encouragement to you as we go into this next phase of American history, that may God bless men like you and the men who work with their hands and speak truth.
Speaker A:And even if they get kicked off of YouTube for speaking truths in a gruff and uncomfortable way, like, we need men like that.
Speaker A:So I'm very excited about that.
Steve Cruz:I appreciate that.
Steve Cruz:And if that happens, you know, then I'll make a fifth and a sixth and a seventh YouTube account, and I'll have 40 or 30 or 20 people have.
Steve Cruz:I'll have, you know, grandma or whoever watching me is still rooting me on, because I.
Steve Cruz:I do.
Steve Cruz:I do think it's important, and I do think that men, they just need that straight, give it to me.
Steve Cruz:It's the coach mentality.
Steve Cruz:You know, it's the drill sergeant mentality.
Steve Cruz:It's the way that I think that most fathers, when they're in their corrective measures, when they're in that phase, you really need to be, just give me the boundaries, tell me what to do, how to do it, and then if I screw up, I'll dust off, I'll do it again.
Steve Cruz:You need those men who are hard.
Steve Cruz:You need those men who are strong.
Steve Cruz:You need those men who are going to tell you, you're fine.
Steve Cruz:Get back in there.
Steve Cruz:You're fine, you're okay.
Steve Cruz:It's gonna hurt tough.
Steve Cruz:Wrap it up, tape it up.
Steve Cruz:You can ice it tonight.
Steve Cruz:Now go make that play.
Steve Cruz:You know, you need those guys who are.
Steve Cruz:Who call you into that because that's virtuous, having men to take on that while you're.
Steve Cruz:While you're in pain, while you're injured, while it sucks.
Steve Cruz:Embrace the suck.
Steve Cruz:Embrace and go finish the job.
Steve Cruz:And even if you lose, you finished the job, man.
Steve Cruz:You made the play.
Steve Cruz:Even if you didn't.
Steve Cruz:Even if you didn't score the touchdown, well, you finished the game.
Steve Cruz:You finished the play.
Steve Cruz:You did what coach said to do.
Steve Cruz:I just really think that if we had more men who would do that, if we had more men who were less white collar, more blue collar.
Steve Cruz:I really think that if we had more.
Steve Cruz:More trades and less academia, we need both.
Steve Cruz:That's true.
Steve Cruz:But right now in this world, we need men to shut up and do work.
Steve Cruz:We need men to shut up and lift.
Steve Cruz:We need men to shut up.
Steve Cruz:Stop talking.
Steve Cruz:Stop scrolling.
Steve Cruz:Stop.
Steve Cruz:I don't care about your opinion.
Steve Cruz:Do something.
Steve Cruz:We need.
Steve Cruz:We just meant people.
Steve Cruz:We Just need people to shut up and do something.
Steve Cruz:And I think that, again, it's important that we have various different perspectives.
Steve Cruz:But empires are built for men.
Steve Cruz:Working families are built.
Steve Cruz:They're maintained, they're groomed, they're cultivated for men working and doing their job.
Steve Cruz:So if I could offer anyone, including Trump and his presidential nominations, including the amazing cops who are out there protecting ourselves, protecting us, the military, the first responders, EMTs, the firemen, the corrections officers, everybody who do, who run towards the bullets while we run away, anybody listening who does pipe fitters, H vac, electricians, mechanics, the people who make this country run, those are the people who we need to respect because those are the people who just shut up and do their job and they make empires.
Steve Cruz:They're the ones who have the family members at.
Steve Cruz:When they're 80, 85, 95, they're 100 years old and they're dying.
Steve Cruz:It doesn't matter if they're a senator, it doesn't matter if they're a sheriff, they're a father first, their husband first, they're.
Steve Cruz:They're a church member first, they're a community member first.
Steve Cruz:And the lives that they impacted, they ran into that building.
Steve Cruz:The kids that they saved will remember them forever.
Steve Cruz:Those are the people that you want on your deathbed.
Steve Cruz:Those are the people that matter.
Steve Cruz:So build that.
Steve Cruz:So build those relationships.
Steve Cruz:So build what matters.
Steve Cruz:That's my two cents.
Speaker A:Amen.
Speaker A:100% with you, Will.
Steve Cruz:Where can people listen?
Steve Cruz:Watch your podcasts, your interviews, your topics.
Steve Cruz:What do you have coming up?
Speaker A:Yeah, I'm actually really excited because tomorrow I'll be interviewing a man named Carl Teichrib who wrote a book called Game of Gods.
Speaker A:It's a big 550 page book about the history of the progressive spirituality in the new age.
Speaker A:So it's the world that I found my way into, which ultimately led me to Christ.
Speaker A:And I was leaving a voice note for him today, and he's done is.
Speaker A:It's like I got on board a little boat, you know, in a stream somewhere in Northern California, and the boat just carried me downstream to a river, to a tributary, into this big ocean.
Speaker A:And so I didn't know that when I was setting out and I found my way through it.
Speaker A:And so I'm reading this book and it's like, oh, wow.
Speaker A:Like you've just articulated for me everything that I saw, but from the outside and from a Christian perspective.
Speaker A:So I'll be interviewing him tomorrow.
Speaker A:We'll probably talk for four or five hours.
Speaker A:So I'm really looking forward to.
Speaker A:I'm really looking forward to that.
Speaker A:And one of the things that I'm going to be doing with the rebrand is focusing a lot more on that, you know, sort of aspect of my background, so time in the new age psychedelics.
Speaker A:Because unfortunately, one of the things that we're going to see with Kennedy, I think he's the director of the FDA or Health and Human Services, something like that.
Speaker A:You know, he's, he's made psychedelics, you know, a.
Speaker A:Top, top of his priorities as part of the FDA's war on public health.
Speaker A:He said they've been suppressed as part of the FDA's war on public health.
Speaker A:So psychedelics are incredibly dangerous substances and to the spirit as well as to the mind, to the body.
Speaker A:And so I will have a lot to say about that.
Speaker A:So that's kind of the direction that I hope to go with the Will Spencer podcast is speaking into more of those global spirituality issues to find me and everything that I do.
Speaker A:You can go to Will Spencer co links and that'll take you to my Twitter, my Instagram, my YouTube substack.
Speaker A:It's all, it's all at Willspencer co links and then.
Steve Cruz:Are you going to go to the next fight Laugh Feast?
Steve Cruz:I know that you went to the last one in Fort Worth.
Steve Cruz:Are you going to go to the next one in 25 in October?
Steve Cruz:I think it's 16 through 18.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's, that's the current.
Speaker A:That's the plan.
Speaker A:I'd love to be there.
Speaker A:Like, you know, as soon as I saw the way like Joshua Hames did all of his podcast booth set up, I'm like, oh my goodness, I gotta, I gotta throw a whole bunch of like cameras and stuff into it, into a great.
Speaker A:And just like, oh my gosh, we have my little microphones and he's got like lights and cameras and that's just incredible.
Speaker A:So, yeah, it's an amazing opportunity.
Steve Cruz:Opportunity?
Steve Cruz:Dude, you're telling me like I was all the way at the end, like all the way in the darkest recesses of Fort Worth and like I could see like the, the background, the backdrop was the, the stage, which was cool.
Steve Cruz:But I'm trying to talk to, you know, Chance Summers and Joe Morris and Dusty Devers and all the guys I'm trying to have a good interview with.
Steve Cruz:And then like by day two, I was like, dude, this sucks.
Steve Cruz:I don't, I don't have the lights.
Speaker A:Huh?
Speaker A:All the clapping and all the cheering interrupting you.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, I couldn't hear anything.
Steve Cruz:There was all kinds of technical difficulties I had.
Steve Cruz:And that was my fault.
Steve Cruz:You know, I didn't bring, you know, I have a small little, I do all this stuff for free, so I don't spend thousands of dollars on stuff.
Steve Cruz:And it was like, dude, I'm so out of my league right now.
Steve Cruz:All these people with like $30,000 cameras and these lights that are like, they should be in a studio, like in a movie, on a movie set somewhere.
Steve Cruz:You got the big old, like 3 foot, like dome light or whatever it was.
Steve Cruz:I was like, I'm so out of my league right now.
Steve Cruz:But Josh does it right, man.
Steve Cruz:At Red Pill Reformation Reformation.
Steve Cruz:Red Pill Reformation, Red Pill.
Steve Cruz:Yeah.
Steve Cruz:Josh does it big.
Steve Cruz:And Parker too.
Steve Cruz:Parker Brown Watchwell podcasts, dude, they go all out.
Speaker A:These guys got in the car and threw a bunch of stuff in the back of an SUV and drove down and they have the whole big booth set up.
Steve Cruz:Like you guys, me again, Greg Moore from Dead Men Walking, he had these lounging chairs that were super comfortable, the leather chairs.
Steve Cruz:And he had all the booms, the microphones, and you guys did it, right?
Steve Cruz:I have a phone.
Steve Cruz:I have a phone and a blue Yeti.
Speaker A:Better than nothing, man.
Speaker A:Honestly, like just setting up the phone and recording and just syncing the audio to the video, that's better than I just did.
Speaker A:Audio only.
Speaker A:And just because I had had a crazy month of travel and I was like, I just don't want to deal with the camera right now and leaving it all set up, I guess.
Speaker A:So I, but I wish I had gotten video.
Speaker A:I wish I had just, you know, gone instead of doing everything at like this elite level.
Speaker A:Like, it would have been sufficient for me to just set up my phone and record the audio and sync the two.
Speaker A:But, you know, you live and you learn.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, yeah, I'll do that next.
Steve Cruz:I'll bring a little bit more next time, but I'll certainly not have the same audio, video problems that I had this last time.
Steve Cruz:I'm excited to see you there, man.
Steve Cruz:And next time we're good, we're going to have to do a live, a live live stream while we're there.
Speaker A:Let's do it.
Speaker A:Grateful too.
Steve Cruz:Well, let me close this out and then make sure everything gets uploaded and I'll let you go.
Speaker A:Cool, Sounds good.
Steve Cruz:Thanks, everybody for listening, man.
Steve Cruz:I, I, I so appreciate you as always.
Steve Cruz:Written and review the podcast, wherever you listen.
Steve Cruz:Try not to watch it on YouTube.
Steve Cruz:There are a bunch of commies.
Steve Cruz:I'm not a fan as always.
Steve Cruz:Go to regularman stuff.com check out the mean offensive.
Steve Cruz:Tweets, mugs, other stuff on there.
Steve Cruz:This hat.
Steve Cruz:This pretty nice hat.
Steve Cruz:I'm not gonna do it.
Steve Cruz:Yeah, nice camo hat.
Steve Cruz:Flex fit.
Steve Cruz:Just don't wear it to church.
Steve Cruz:You'll have to answer some questions.
Steve Cruz:Might offend the pastor's wife.
Steve Cruz:While you're there, you can also sign up to be on the regular minute wall right here.
Steve Cruz:Five bucks a month.
Steve Cruz:Will, I still need your signature?
Steve Cruz:I haven't got it yet.
Speaker A:It's actually.
Speaker A:It's actually right above your head.
Steve Cruz:What?
Speaker A:Yeah, it's that one that's got the big loopy thing.
Speaker A:Yep.
Steve Cruz:Now I feel like.
Steve Cruz:Now I feel like I retard.
Speaker A:That's okay.
Speaker A:The signature looks absolutely nothing like my name, and it's completely silly, and I should learn a new signature that looks like an adult.
Steve Cruz:All right, well, I'll hound the next guy.
Steve Cruz:I'll hound my next interview for it.
Steve Cruz:Until next time, be on alert.
Steve Cruz:Stand firm in the faith, act like men, and be strong.
Steve Cruz:Thanks for listening.
Steve Cruz:Well, that was great, man.
Speaker A:That was awesome.
Speaker A:I really enjoyed that.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Steve Cruz:Sa.