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Most dads think about the physical side of being a good father — showing up, providing, being present. But there's a set of emotional skills that determine whether your kids actually want a relationship with you when they're adults. Cole sees it in his grief recovery work all the time — good dads, good people, blindsided by estrangement from their adult children and grandkids. It didn't have to happen. And it doesn't have to happen to you.

Cole and Sam break down the emotional tools that keep your most important relationships healthy over a lifetime — not just day to day, but decades from now.

In this episode:

• The emotional skills most dads were never taught and why it matters long term
• Why relationships fracture over time and how to stop the buildup before it blows
• The three things that keep any relationship emotionally clean — apologizing, forgiving, and saying the things that need to be said
• How to forgive someone without putting them on the spot
• Why your kids are watching all of this and logging it as the correct way to do relationships
• Why marriage is where all of these skills get tested the hardest

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Cole and Sam get fired up over a wave of mainstream articles — including a recent New York Times piece titled "I Regret Having Children" — and dig into what they see as a long-running cultural current pushing people away from family life. This one's less a how-to and more a rallying cry.

The guys talk about growing up in a culture that quietly told you kids were a burden, careers were the point, and big families were irresponsible — and how that messaging doesn't just stop when you become a parent. It targets your kids too.

But mostly? This episode is about the flip side. What it actually feels like to go all in on family. The Easter Sundays. The baseball games with your boys. The way becoming a dad can strip out the self-centeredness that was holding you back all along.

In this episode:

• The cultural propaganda machine and why it targets young people
• Why embracing "dad" as your identity is harder than it should be
• The creation analogy — why building a family might be the most meaningful thing you ever make
• Protecting your kids from messaging that chips away at their vision of the future
• Why staying home with your kids is not something to apologize for

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Sam and Cole are back after a few busy weeks with some major updates and reflections.

Big news: Sam and Raquel are expecting baby number four. Sam shares honest thoughts on how pregnancy turns everything upside down, what he's learned about identity and certainty through his thirties, and why having kids is the most profound change that can happen to you as a man.

Then they break down their kids' first jiu-jitsu tournament — the intensity, the tears, the wins, the losses, and what it actually looks like when young kids compete in combat sports.

Cole also shares his experience at a Shivworks self-defense course — two days of reality-based training on knife defense, entangled fighting, and managing unknown contacts. Not macho nonsense, but intelligent, evidence-based instruction from on how to avoid violence, deescalate situations, and survive worst-case scenarios if you have no choice.

They talk about why exposure to real violence (in training) shrinks the fantasy, why lifting weights matters for self-defense, and why being your family's protector isn't optional — it's what you signed up for.