BraveCo Podcast

Right now the best and worst things in my life are happening at the same time. My kids are growing up beautiful, and my wife's mother is in the last hours of a two year battle with stage four stomach cancer. I bring on my friend John Mark McMillan, the songwriter behind "How He Loves," who I first found during the worst season of my life, going through my own divorce, listening to his album on 5am walks because I couldn't sleep. We talk about how death and crisis have a strange way of contextualizing your life, and I share something I realized sitting next to my dying mother-in-law, the only thing that actually matters to her right now is the community she built and what she leaves behind, not a truck, not a vacation, not a bank account.

John Mark gets real about his own story, middle school bullying that felt like "blood in the water," the one friend who changed everything for him, and how he almost accidentally discovered songwriting while going through his divorce, writing songs at night on a porch for an audience of nobody but God and a speed hump in the road. He breaks down a framework he calls Category 1 and Category 2, Category 1 is what keeps you alive, Category 2 is the actual reasons to stay alive, and traces an entire generation of men's emotional suppression back to our grandfathers coming home from World War II and the Great Depression and being told to just pretend everything was fine. We talk about Victor Frankl, meaning versus pleasure, and the Oliver Anthony song that took a total stranger from 40,000 followers to a million in about a week because he said something people felt but didn't have words for.

We close on his favorite song he's ever written, "The Road, the Rocks, and the Weeds," about a God who doesn't just heal your pain but actually feels it with you, and why Jesus's vulnerability on the cross is the only reason any of us can have a real relationship with him. Then we get honest about something a lot of men carry shame over, their sex drive and temptation, and John Mark makes the case that Jesus being tempted in every way, including same-sex attraction, isn't a problem for faith, it's the whole point, because holiness was never about what you can get away with, it's about the joy on the other side of what you're willing to sacrifice. Thanks for listening, guys, stay Brave, and we'll see you next week.

Chapters:
00:00 – The Best and Worst Things Happening at the Same Time 
07:26 – What My Dying Mother-in-Law Taught Me About Success 
14:51 – Middle School Survival: "It's Like Blood in the Water" 
22:24 – Writing Songs for an Audience of One: God and a Speed Hump 
29:50 – How a Song Took Oliver Anthony From 40K to a Million Followers 
37:13 – Why Our Grandfathers Were Taught to Never Look Weak 
44:44 – Finding the Middle: Surviving Hard Things While Choosing Joy 
52:11 – Half a Million Monthly Listens: Keeping Success From Owning You 
59:32 – Inside "The Road, the Rocks, and the Weeds," His Favorite Song 
1:07:01 – Why Real Passion Always Requires Something to Suffer For
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ABOUT BRAVECO: We live in a time where men are hunting for the truth and looking for the codebook to manhood. At BraveCo, we are on a mission to heal the narrative of masculinity across a generation; fighting the good fight together because every man should feel confident and capable of facing his pain, loving deeply, and leading a life that impacts the world around him.

I don't usually lead with this, but most of you have heard pieces of my story and I want to give it to you straight. Real anxiety by age 10, medicating with porn and masturbation by 14. Married my high school sweetheart at 18, three kids by 24, divorced at 27, raising my kids as a single dad. At 29 I hit a full nervous breakdown, the kind where your life feels like it's on fire and you have no idea how to put it out. I got remarried at 31 and spent the next 12 years on medication just to regulate my own nervous system. Then at 35, my wife and I finally got pregnant after five years of trying, and at our 10-week checkup we found out the baby had already died. I'm telling you all of this because here's what I've come to believe: you and I were born into a war whether we agreed to it or not. And here's the part most guys miss, we were also created for it.

In this episode I walk through Ephesians 6 and the full armor of God, and I break down why the fight you're actually in isn't with your spouse, your kids, your finances, or the guy who cut you off in traffic, it's a spiritual one, and you can't win it by how much you bench press. I give you three keys to actually winning the war within. First, how you see the battle determines the outcome, and I'll tell you about my dad standing on the sideline of my soccer games, the story of the twelve spies who saw giants and called themselves grasshoppers, and Gideon sneaking into the enemy's camp the night before the fight of his life. Second, don't back down when it gets hard, because pain without vision is the worst pain there is, vision is what gives your pain a purpose. Third, the fastest way to lose a war is to fight one you were never equipped for, which is exactly what happens every time you compare your life to somebody else's highlight reel instead of staying in your own lane like David did on his way from shepherd to king.

I get real about the seasons where I wanted to run, where doubt crept in and told me I didn't have what it takes, and why I've made the hard call not to rescue my own kids from every struggle they face, because hard times make strong men and I refuse to raise weak ones. This one is personal, it's not a highlight reel, it's the real fight, and I hope it gives you a roadmap for whatever war you're standing in the middle of right now. Guys, thank you for joining me today. Stay Brave. If this episode hit home, do me a favor and rate the show, leave a review, and share it with a friend who needs to hear it, that's how we get this message to more men. We'll see you next week.

Chapters:
00:00 – My Story 
04:16 – The Dark Place You're Called To
08:29 – You're Not Fighting People. You're Fighting This. 
12:48 – The Doubt That Creeps In When You're Already Doing the Work 
17:06 – Why I Won't Rescue My Kids From Every Hard Thing 
21:13 – How You See the Battle Decides It 
25:32 – Gideon's Move
29:49 – Why I Get Up at 5:45 AM Anyway 
34:02 – Comparison Is a War You Were Never Built to Fight 
38:18 – Staying in Your Lane
CONNECT WITH BRAVECO
Join Our Free Community for Men (ladies, sign up your man): https://www.braveco.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/braveco.men
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/braveco.men/
Shop: https://shop.braveco.org/
ABOUT BRAVECO: We live in a time where men are hunting for the truth and looking for the codebook to manhood. At BraveCo, we are on a mission to heal the narrative of masculinity across a generation; fighting the good fight together because every man should feel confident and capable of facing his pain, loving deeply, and leading a life that impacts the world around him.

I brought my wife on to talk marriage, with a slight emphasis on the man's role. We've been married eleven years, going on twelve, and our story is a little unusual, she came into my life mid-hike, stepping straight into raising my three kids from my first marriage, and now we've got five kids between us. We use that story to unpack one of our favorite analogies: marriage is an empty box, and the only thing you can pull out of it is what you've actually put in. Most people think marriage is going to solve their problems or fix their loneliness, but the truth is marriage exposes whatever cracks are already in your foundation, and taking ownership of yourself is the first and most important skill for building something healthy.

We get really honest about our own early years, including the alarm I used to set on my phone that just said "the house has needs," and how I realized that if I didn't want my wife to feel like my mom, I had to take responsibility instead of waiting to be told what needed doing. We talk about how there's no universal standard of "shoulds" in a marriage, everybody's definition of responsible comes from how they were raised, and how learning to make what matters to your spouse actually matter to you is a skill, not an instinct. We also get into a striking statistic about how a husband coming to faith is far more likely to bring the whole family along than if a wife or child does first, which speaks to just how much of a catalyst a man is for the emotional and spiritual direction of his home.

We close out with practical tools for anyone who didn't grow up with a healthy model for any of this: get a counselor, get into a community of healthy men who will call you up instead of enabling you, and stop carrying secrets, because what you hide defines you, while what you bring into the light sets you free. I also bring in John Gottman's research on the "four horsemen" that can predict with striking accuracy whether a marriage will succeed or fail, and why resentment and unforgiveness are so dangerous once they take root. At the end of the day, the goal isn't just a peaceful marriage, it's a connected one, and that takes both people willing to take ownership. Thanks for listening, guys, stay brave, and we'll see you next week.

Chapters:
00:00 – Intro
04:50 – The Marriage Box
09:40 – Who's Better at Taking Ownership in Our Marriage? 
14:38 – "She Feels Like My Mom"
19:28 – The System That Never Gets Set Up 
24:20 – When Dad Never Showed Weakness 
29:11 – Why Counseling Isn't a Lifetime Sentence 
34:06 – The Pressure of Being the Only One Who Knows 
38:55 – The Man as Catalyst
43:46 – The Four Horsemen
CONNECT WITH BRAVECO
Join Our Free Community for Men (ladies, sign up your man): https://www.braveco.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/braveco.men
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/braveco.men/
Shop: https://shop.braveco.org/
ABOUT BRAVECO: We live in a time where men are hunting for the truth and looking for the codebook to manhood. At BraveCo, we are on a mission to heal the narrative of masculinity across a generation; fighting the good fight together because every man should feel confident and capable of facing his pain, loving deeply, and leading a life that impacts the world around him.

On this episode of the BraveCo Podcast, I'm joined by my great friend Cole Zick, director of Moral Revolution alongside his wife, for our monthly conversation about what it actually means to be a man. This time we're tackling a topic most guys avoid talking about out loud: managing your sex drive. Cole and I get into why so many men in ministry and in everyday life are frustrated by their sex drive and even afraid of it, and we make the case that God didn't give you that drive as a curse to manage but as a gift with a real purpose behind it, one built to point you toward your spouse, the one person in your life you actually get to choose.

We go deep on what it looks like to train that appetite well, comparing it to learning to manage desires for money, cars, and comfort long before marriage even enters the picture, and we get surprisingly direct about what the Bible does and doesn't say about masturbation, including an unexpected Old Testament verse that shows God cared enough about this appetite to draw hard lines around it a long time ago. Cole also opens up about his own story, ten years of a sexually active marriage followed by a divorce that took him overnight to zero, and the blunt advice a mentor gave him about staying clean until he remarried. From there we talk honestly about how much harder purity gets for single men, the loneliness that comes with it, and why setting your expectations ahead of time changes everything.

We close out with some of the most practical tools in the whole conversation: how a dopamine detox, through fasting, exercise, and real human connection, can reset a brain that's been leaning on quick hits for too long, why owning your insecurity out loud with the people you're dating matters more than hiding it, and why building a group of men who are actually pursuing strength alongside you is the difference-maker Cole keeps coming back to. If you've ever felt like something is wrong with you because of your sex drive, I hope this conversation helps you see it differently. Thanks for listening, guys, stay brave, and we'll see you next week.

Chapters:
00:00 – Why Men Fear Their Sex Drive 
06:15 – God's Vision for Sex: Your Spouse Is the One You Choose 
12:33 – Self-Servicing vs. Real Intimacy With Your Wife 
18:43 – Training Your Appetite Young: Lessons in Managing Desire 
25:03 – Does the Bible Talk About Masturbation? 
31:14 – From 10 Years Active to Zero Overnight: Cole's Divorce Story
37:31 – Fighting for Purity as a Single Man 
43:43 – The Dopamine Detox: Fasting, Exercise, and Connection 
49:59 – The Vulnerable Text: Owning Your Own Insecurity 
56:20 – Building a Brotherhood of Real Accountability
CONNECT WITH BRAVECO
Join Our Free Community for Men (ladies, sign up your man): https://www.braveco.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/braveco.men
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/braveco.men/
Shop: https://shop.braveco.org/
ABOUT BRAVECO: We live in a time where men are hunting for the truth and looking for the codebook to manhood. At BraveCo, we are on a mission to heal the narrative of masculinity across a generation; fighting the good fight together because every man should feel confident and capable of facing his pain, loving deeply, and leading a life that impacts the world around him.

This week on the podcast, I brought on my favorite guest of all time: my mom. I wanted to sit down with her and dig into some of the wildest stories from my childhood, the ones I've never really told on this show before, starting with the night a demon-possessed teenager showed up at our home group and my parents accidentally launched a deliverance ministry that would define our family for years. My mom walks me through it in her own words, along with the story of Tracy Evans, a missionary who survived being shot at, shipwrecked, and hunted in the Philippines, and who later brought a young woman, the spiritual daughter of Anton LaVey, to live in our house.

From there we get into some of the most intense moments of my upbringing: a manifestation that turned violent and sent my mom running for her life, my sister Jamie's terrifying medical crisis when she started having seizures as a kid, and the time my two older sisters, ages 12 and 14, were sent to smuggle Bibles into Communist China, one of them getting interrogated for hours and the other getting separated from her group in the middle of the night. My mom also opens up about the hardest financial season of their lives, losing their business, owing 1.8 million dollars, and watching God provide through a string of miracles that included a banker forgiving their debt in tears.

We close the conversation talking about her Parkinson's diagnosis seven years ago and how she refused to let it define her, choosing instead to go elk hunting at 500 yards, harvest a black bear with a crossbow, and keep showing up for life instead of shrinking back. This episode is really a tribute to her, to her faith, her grit, and the way she and my dad lived out the gospel in real, messy, unglamorous ways long before it was something either of them had figured out. If this episode encourages you, give your own mom a call, and if you enjoyed it, like, comment, subscribe, and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Stay brave.

Chapters:
00:00 – Meet My Mom 
06:36 – The Night Deliverance Ministry Was Born 
13:14 – Taking In Anton LaVey's Daughter
19:54 – Growing Up Surrounded by Angels and Demons 
26:31 – When "Susan" Turned Violent
33:13 – My Sister's Terrifying Seizure and a Demonic Attack 
39:51 – Smuggling Bibles Into Communist China as Kids 
46:28 – Leaving Weaverville and Losing Everything in Bankruptcy 
53:05 – The Miracle That Saved Us From $1.8 Million in Debt 
59:41 – Parkinson's, Hunting Adventures, and a Tribute to Mom
CONNECT WITH BRAVECO
Join Our Free Community for Men (ladies, sign up your man): https://www.braveco.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/braveco.men
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/braveco.men/
Shop: https://shop.braveco.org/
ABOUT BRAVECO: We live in a time where men are hunting for the truth and looking for the codebook to manhood. At BraveCo, we are on a mission to heal the narrative of masculinity across a generation; fighting the good fight together because every man should feel confident and capable of facing his pain, loving deeply, and leading a life that impacts the world around him.