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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.

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Sam and Cole talk sleep this week — one of the biggest challenges of fatherhood, and one where you lose a lot of control when kids arrive.

Most sleep optimization advice comes from people without kids, talking about perfectly controlled environments that just aren't realistic for parents. But the truth is, you still have control over more than you think. And improving sleep quality by even 20-30% — for you and your whole household — makes a real difference.

They break down:

• Circadian rhythm basics: morning sun exposure, cortisol spikes, and melatonin at night
• What they did wrong with their first kids (and how they'd do it differently now)
• Caffeine timing, meal timing, and why delaying caffeine 60-90 minutes matters
• Light exposure: LED bulbs vs incandescent, blue light at night, and simple changes that help
• Nose strips, mouth tape, and practical sleep hygiene
• Why natural sleep schedules work better than forcing rigid routines

Plus: practical tips like buying full-size beds for your kids from the start (you'll end up sleeping in them), coordinating with your partner so both parents aren't getting destroyed every night, and understanding that better sleep for everyone in the house creates more harmony overall.