Shaun Newman Podcast - #1043 - Alan Hahn

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

Alan Hahn, Ed.D., is the founder and CEO of Iron Academy, a Christian boys’ school in Raleigh, North Carolina, that uses a countercultural, all-male model to forge young men into biblically grounded leaders through rigorous spiritual, intellectual, and physical formation. A former teacher at North Raleigh Christian Academy with a Doctorate in Education from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Hahn brings over a decade of experience in boys’ education. He is also the author of The Iron Academy: Forging Young Men Who Fight for the King, which details his vision. Under his leadership, the academy emphasizes strong Christian faculty, character development, and preparing students to lead faithfully in their families, churches, and society.Watch the Cornerstone Forum 26’https://shaunnewmanpodcast.substack.com/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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I know I've had a few fun conversations with kids about it just recently and we're going to see how that goes. You know, we're cleaning out of the house. I've been saying this. I think we've got a garage sale coming up this weekend as we sell off some of the stuff that we're not going to put in storage so lots of things happening on the back end here and looking forward to, well, targeting July.

5th folks on heading out, starting in Alberta and then heading east. So that should be a ton of fun. If you're listening or watching on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Rumble, X, Facebook, Substack, make sure to subscribe, make sure to leave a review and make sure to share with a friend. If you want to pay more attention as we get closer to departing, substack will be your place to find out all the ins and outs of us getting ready and getting on the road and all that good stuff. All right, let's get on to that tale of the tape. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of Iron Academy. I'm talking about Alan Hahn.

So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Alan Hahn. Sir, thanks for hopping on. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Now, first time on the podcast, I feel like I'm getting old and repeating myself. Maybe I've got to find a better way to introduce it, folks.

But tell us a little bit about yourself, and we'll go from there. All right. I am a man who grew up in a John Wayne household. I started to raise my kids like John Wayne would raise his kids. And then I became a Christian. And I had to change a few things up and tried to figure those things out. And eventually came to start a school for young men, six through 12th grade. It's been the most iron-sharpening iron experience.

of my life. It has completely changed who I am and made me a much better husband, a much better father, a much better shepherd in my community. And these last 13, 14 years since I started the Iron Academy has made me a better man, but it's also aged me at twice the rate. So I'm 26 years older after 13 years. All right, we got to go back. Okay, a John Wayne household. You know, you were just, I was saying folks to him before we started, Han reminds me of Amelia, or sorry, Mighty Ducks. And then we got talking about different generations. I'm like, what person in my age demographic would go, I live in a John Wayne household? I can't think of any.

I know exactly who John Wayne is. But when you say a John Wayne household, you were raised in one. You started to, what do you mean by that? Okay. Well, so going back, so I'm 56. So when I was a kid, Westerns were what you watched on Saturday mornings. and John Wayne was all over the place. Clint Eastwood was starting to get all over the place.

But John Wayne really set the American culture early on to be stoic, to practice equanimity, not be too emotional one way or the other. It taught a couple other things not to express yourself too much physically. For instance, you don't dance, you don't sing, you don't get too angry, you don't get too joyful. And so I grew up like that. And I'm in many ways trying to overcome some of those things. But that was the expectation of my grandfather. That was the expectation of my father. And I started hearing this in my son when he was about two years old.

And he's starting to say things. I'm saying, wow, he sounds just like me. And this is entirely unacceptable. What was it? Well, walk me through that. You got a two-year-old son. He's starting to sound like you. And you go, oh, this is, what was he saying?

Yeah. So like I imagine most fathers are like this, when you hear your son or your daughter start saying things that you say, you realize that, okay, there are things that I don't want my son or daughter to hear or say that they're obviously hearing in my household or in my speech. So I had to correct some of those things. But I knew that if I wanted to raise my son in a more, well, in a different way, then I had to start being very intentional right then and there. He helped me realize that I was going to raise my son just the way I had been raised, just the way my father had been raised by his dad. So I'm curious then. What did you start changing?

Like you got a two-year-old son. You're like, oh, something. Hmm. What did you, you know, like being intentional and trying to change things? I completely get that. Mm-hmm. But John Wayne, there's some things there you were talking about that I'm like, well, I actually I've really enjoyed, you know, like the story.

part, right? Not getting too far too right, or too far too emotional or too, you know, you don't react to anything. There's some things about John Wayne that you absolutely can resonate with. I think a lot of young men or men in general will resonate with, but the no dancing, the no joy. I think, you know, when you say those things, I'm like, oh, yeah, well, that doesn't make any sense to me. So when you're talking about watching your son and the John Wayne part, I guess, what is it that he was saying to you or, you know, you're kind of like, oh, wait, he's going to turn into me. Yes. So it's not all against John Wayne because I actually think I agree with you that much of John Wayne manhood would be extremely good for modern North American manhood.

But what struck me was that my son was saying things and doing things that look just like me, that looked just like my dad, that just like my father, some of which are wonderful. but there were definitely things that I don't want my son to be like me. And so I had to be really intentional and start thinking about, all right, who am I as a dad? Because I'm no longer just a man, a single man. I'm married. And now I've got a son that is going to do the things and say the things that I do and say. So I've got to be very intentional about that.

So that really started a life of looking at what does it mean to be a man, one, and what does it mean to be a husband and a father, two and three? And so it just, it opened up a decades-long time of reflection and intentionality on who I was becoming. Forgive me if I'm beating a dead horse here, but what things? I don't know if I've, like, you got a two-year-old and what, what things was he reenacting to you or mimicking you? you that you're like, oh, something, I'm, I don't know if I fully understand, I guess. It could have been little things like maybe how he responded to my wife or, or how he responded to something I asked him to do, or his, his reflection of, of somebody else in the world,

he, where he would observe them like I observed them. And these weren't all terrible things, but I saw the beginnings of, uh-oh, my son is becoming me. we've got to do better than this. So when you go into your decade reflection, where does that take you? Well, I will say a pivotal part of my life since then has been daily reading the Bible, which is as our source of virtue and truth and how we understand that. But there was a lot of reflection in, frankly, the Stoics, which in some ways I was trying to get away from John Wayne,

because I would have called him more stoic than anything else. But I like that philosophy of life in many ways. But just being more intentional about who I was and therefore who my son was becoming and the choices I would make and how I would correct him and how I would teach him. I agree with you on reading the Bible daily. That's been something that I've changed in the last four years. And there's a lot of wisdom in those pages. Uh, the intentionality. I, I guess I'm curious and I keep probably saying it in different ways.

You know, like when you start to look at the things you were doing, what did you change? Like what did you like the Bible to me is like world shattering in the best possible way when you start actually reading it and being like, oh man, if I'm going to okay, then I got to sit there and think on this. I just think it's a really, I'm asking a really deep question now. And I don't know if there's a, I, I don't know if there's a, I, I'm just curious on, you know, when you get intentional in your life, you know, to the point of starting an all-boys school, I'm like, man, you must have ran into some things when you went looking. Yes. And that has continued. It's it's even morphed into studying neuropsychology in the things we've learned about our brains and how we were designed to actually be spiritually transformed. We have so much research even in recent years that tells us how we were built that way, where we couldn't even know that before because we could only study brain that were dead before, but now we can see what's going on live.

And I will say that if we are going to be spiritually formed, then there are four things according to the research that we must have present. The first thing is joy. And this was a, I consider my, a joyful person. I told my wife this and she laughed at me, Sean. So, all right, I've got something to work on here. I need to be able to express my joy better, especially to her. So you have to have joy. You have to have community. And community is something that has, we've seen a downward trend in the quality of community since COVID and probably since the iPhone and

smartphones came out. You have to have accountability. If you don't have accountability, if there's not some level of what we would call healthy shame versus toxic shame, there's no growth. And the fourth thing you have to have is identity. And identity is a big one because we have to know exactly who we are. Often when we get corrected or the world teaches us, it teaches us a false identity or a new identity that's not the way we were originally created. So we have to learn what those identities are. And so that began a series of books that I read and thinking and trying to to figure out, all right, what is the identity that we were created to have? One, as men, and two, and most importantly, just as followers of Christ and people who are

meant to walk this earth and love other people and love God. If I go through the four, it's not that they don't make sense, but like community, you know, I'm like, yeah, you know, grew up in a time of no iPhone, no social media, essentially technology you know I think living on the farm I'm like yeah we had technology but we were outdoors a ton you're around other people a ton because you know we were just joking about it actually a couple days ago it was with a few of my friends I graduated high school with and we were talking about the time before the phone like the cordless phone the cell phone when we were kids and what you had to do in order to get a hold of your friends and just different things like that you

had to interact with people all the time to track down a friend and how that's changed. And it's going younger and younger. Kids are getting cell phones younger and younger. And, you know, so like the community, I think makes complete sense. And through COVID, they destroyed that. And we've started to see, I think, more and more people opting into that idea and starting to grow their communities. I guess the one that sticks out is joy. Can you walk me through joy? Why spiritually forming someone, joy has to be one of the four? Yeah. So according to the research, what we're seeing is if you have two people, one of which is in a high joy environment, one of which is in a low joy or just a normal environment, you will find that there's a correlation

between growth and the person in the high joy environment grows where the person in the low joy environment does does not and we see this as early as a newborn coming out of the mother's womb this starts to happen right away when a newborn is the mother is responsible one of the biggest things that a mother does is teach a child how to go into joy and to how come back to rest and how to do both things you've heard of attachment theory no fire away here okay i'm a blank slate i'm i'm like i even look I'm like, I know what joy is, but I even looked up the definition of joy, the emotion of pleasure and happiness. All right. So one of the most powerful forces in our lives is something called attachment theory. And years ago, there were some Canadian geese. They were on a farmer's property.

The male and the female get killed, I think, by a German shepherd. The eggs hatch. And they see the first thing these Gosling see is the farmer. They start following them around. He feeds them. He takes care of them. He protects them. And he actually has an ultra-light aircraft and he eventually teaches them how to fly too. And they make a documentary out of it. I tell you that because that's kind of a goofy illustration of what attachment is. We attach to the things in our lives that protect us, that nurture us, and also that show joy when they see us. We can understand that very early. Even as an infant, we understand the joy that a mother has. And that's one of the most important. things she can do is show her joy to her infant. And then dad comes along in about eight months and is able to do that and the baby's able to bring that. But we attach to the things that show joy when they see us. So if we put this in the context of young men, this is not uncommon that we're 13 or 14. We're looking around at the females around us. One, we're scared, but there are some, I wouldn't date her. No, she's not interesting to me. But then that young lady shows

interest in the young man and all of a sudden she's the best thing since sliced bread. So attachment is something that we do naturally to people and it bonds us together. And when we find our true identity, what we are trying to find is the identity that was created us from the very beginning. It's knit into our DNA. We can't escape it. But the world, and we would say a sin marred world, leads us in one direction, whether it's culture, whether it's imperfect parenting, whether it's imperfect friends or schooling or whatever it is, or our own sin nature ourselves. We become something other than what we were created to be. But if we are going to do something that it says in Romans chapter 12, verse 2, it says, do not be conformed to this world.

but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And renewed to what? Renewed to the identity we were originally supposed to have. And I think as a means of communicating what it means to be a godly man, we have to bring our young people and our friends or our older people back into the identity they originally created to be. Interesting. Well, I know I can already hear a couple of listeners.

where can they find the research? Because they're going to want to go read it now. I can already feel it coming in the text line. When you talk about different research or books, what has been most impactful, even the Canadian Geese documentary, if you could, just rattle them off. Okay. Let's do Jim Wilder. His research has been pivotal with this.

Jim Wilder, he wrote several books. The first one I would start with about one of your readers would be the other half, of church. That's a great place to start. Alan Shore, he was a researcher at UCLA. He's got tons of research on this, much more difficult to read. So start with Jim Wilder. And I don't know the documentary, but I'm sure if you do a Google search on that. I'm sure if you do a Google search and put in what you've said, I'm sure something will for sure pop up. So after it, if I'm jumping not ahead, just walk me a bit more through the story. You form Iron Academy. Is that after the decade of like introspect, you're like looking and you're going, oh man, I got to change some

things. You start to change some things. Then you start to identify, wait a second, it isn't just my son. It's a whole bunch of young men that are struggling with a lot of different things. And that's where Iron Academy comes from or am I? Yes. Fast or slow? Over a long period of time. So I started working soon thereafter, maybe three years after Nicholas, I noticed these things in my son Nicholas. I started working in a Christian school, high school, and very quickly I noticed that we were graduating boys from this school. And the truth is, I don't know of high schools that aren't graduating boys. In fact, most colleges are graduating boys. It's up to the young man at that point. And even worse, most women are marrying boys hoping they'll become men. And unfortunately, that's what we're

what my wife had to do. And so that was the first impetus. So like this, we have to change this. When a young man graduates from high school, he should know what it means to be a man, how to love other people, how to be a shepherd. The second thing was our classrooms are set up better for young ladies than they are for young men. Generally speaking, a young lady can come in at the beginning of the day. She can engage intellectually with a class. She cannot fidget and poke and do the dumb things that guys do. She can go to the next class and do the same thing. And cognitively, she doesn't decline.

A guy, however, comes in, if he's awake in the morning, and he does this due to day until I have lunch, and he's down until recess. But the classroom model that we have is, it's more industrial in nature. You sit in your desk, you pay attention, teacher talks, you don't participate, don't do anything stupid. And as a result of that, young ladies are,

way more often likely to be the valedictorian. They're more like, we actually have affirmative action just to get guys into college right now because they are so underperforming compared to the young ladies. Our grad schools are the same way. So something's wrong there. So the first thing was how do we make these guys into men? And two, how do we train them in a way that works best with how men learn? And that's, that was the basis of Iron Academy. But instead, of doing that, I said, well, who am I to start a school? I don't have money. This is not what people do. So I said, all right, all right, God, I'll get my doctorate in education, then we'll start at 15 years from now. So, you know, semi-obedient, which is the same thing as disobedient.

But eventually we did it, and we were actually studying, it goes back to the Bible again, but in Numbers, Chapter 13, they're coming out. of Egypt and they send the 12 spies into the promised land and they say yes it's the land flowing with milk and honey it's everything god promised but the sons of anok are there the giants are there we were as grasshoppers in their eyes and at that moment i was thinking every time i'd read that i was like you you stupid Israelites why are you like this god has just done all these miracles for you and you're scared. And except for Kevin in a small group, he says, well, that's the grasshopper complex. And as soon as he said that, I knew it wasn't about those stupid Israelites. It was about me.

And so the next day, I asked one of my friends to be the board president and we started Iron Academy. You're going, well, I got to get a little more educated before I can actually take on this huge endeavor. You read the Bible. It does what the Bible does. And you go, oh, All right. Let's get to it then. Yeah. And who am I to start a school on biblical manhood? You know, that doubt, and there's plenty of reason for doubt there. But I love the saying that God doesn't equip the called. He calls, no, he doesn't call the equipped. He equipped the called.

And he did call me. He did equip me. And I often think he asked me to do it. One, I will say yes, but two, I think he has a sense of humor. When you say he thinks he has a sense of humor, is because of your upbringing and everything? I can't blame this on my upbringing. I blame this on who I was. And my view of women and my pursuit of women

and my lack of biblical manhood and who I was. So there was a dramatic transformation of who Alan Hahn is. is over the course of many years. So yes, that's why I say a sense of humor. Like if anybody from middle school, high school, college knew that Alan Hahn started a school for biblical manhood, that would be a joke. Well, that's, I think a lot of us can relate to that, though. Yeah.

But if I'm being honest, like, I chuckle sometimes. I got buddies who still text me from time to time, so they're obviously listening. And I'm like, well, they grew up with me when I was definitely not a Christian man. And so they probably, I assume, are sitting there going, what has happened to Sean? Right? And I'm like, oh, that's a long story. And I'm assuming you're alluding to the same thing, which is back in your younger years,

you did some things that, you know, shaped who you were and you found a different way by introspection and digging into things. Then you form a school around the idea of how do we graduate? men, not boys. Yes. Yes. And perhaps naively, and I never would have said this out loud, but I guess my thought early on is we're going to graduate fully formed young men ready for the world, ready to be husbands, ready to be fathers. And that was ridiculous.

What we do graduate is young men who know what it means to be a godly man, know where to return to when they mess up because they're still got mistakes to make. They've still got life coming, but they do know what it means to be a godly man. So we've had some students who did some, they had some consequential errors in their lives and they paid for those things, but they came back. And I love that we still have great relationships with them. I still see them. They still text me. They still come by the school.

But it's not because they were fully formed, but they knew what it meant to be a godly man. And when they did mess up, they came back to it. Well, I think, isn't that all of us? Like that thought process, we're going to screw up. You need to know where to go back to. Yeah. But a lot of, there are a lot of environments that don't allow you to mess up and come back.

That you get shamed, especially if you can be in too much of a legalistic Christian community or in any religious community, I would assume, that if you do too wrong, then you can't come back. And that's not the way it's supposed to be. How do you prepare graduates to be closer to manhood than just graduating boys? We give them a lot of responsibility. We have a mantra here that if a student can do it, have them do it. We involve them in the disciplinary process. So we have something called a roundtable here.

And if we have a young man who's messing up our honor code pretty bad, we'll have an all-campus meeting, every student, every faculty member's there. We get together. We talk about the issue. And then we all get one vote. Every young man, every teacher, they get one vote. Are we going to hold them accountable? And if so, what's its consequence going to be?

So one of the things that's unique about our school is everybody has a say in the outcomes. And they own the honor code as a result of that. So it's not just what I say the school culture is. They have a say in that. and their one vote can counter my one vote, any students. So you could probably think of a dozen reasons. This is a terrible idea. This wouldn't work.

But it works for us. We maintain an intentionally small school, a very tight discipleship environment, and it works for us. When you say small school, how big? We limit our entire grade to 15 per grade. Jesus did it with 12. We can't quite afford that, so we said 15. Okay. I want to go back to responsibility.

I feel like the stories of my ancestors, even my dad's age, but like you go back to the people, you know, like I live in Alberta now, but grew up in Saskatchewan. And, you know, a ton of the early settlers came in 1905, right? I mean, there's more that came before that. But Alberta, Saskatchewan become provinces 1905. And so you can go back and read the stories of that generation and what they went through and how much hardship they had to do. But what do they, their kids had responsibility at a insanely young age, right? Malking cows, bringing in the eggs, you know, all the things on a farm, right? Which, you know, as we become more urbanized, there's less and less responsibility.

You're not sending a kid to the supermarket to go get eggs, right? And there's tons of people that still get eggs from the farming, et cetera. But like there's just, I guess responsibility. I'm very curious about this. What responsibilities you put on boys or men in your school? All right. So a couple of things. One, we don't have a janitorial staff.

They clean the entire school every day. From the urinals to the toilets to the weeds outside to the classrooms, everything. That's awfully helpful because we do get guys that come in in the sixth grade. And you can let a sixth grader sweep a classroom for 45 minutes and he'll do it. But it'll just be redistributed. So you have to teach some of these things. We also, when a young man shows us that he's trying to live up to the honor code to the best of his ability, usually by 10th grade, he's starting to earn his challenge coin.

That's just a marker that he's doing those things. Once he earns that, he can be something that we call a keeper. And that comes from Genesis chapter four when God asks Kane. Kane, where's your brother? And Kane says, well, am I my brother's keeper? But we say, yes, you are your brother's keeper here. So he's responsible for one, two, or three other guys. They'll clean together every day. They'll do discipleship together three times a week. They'll eat together once or twice a week. They handle small disciplinary matters together when they come up. So our guys have to practice being the man that they say they're going to be. And much like when I noticed that

that Nicholas was hearing me and repeating me and becoming more like me. And I had to change some things about myself. Well, these keepers are so responsible for these younger men that they see what they're becoming and they have to change some things too. So it's much like I learned as a young father that they're having to do as keepers. And that has been one of our best leadership training tools that we have. Yeah, you're creating a culture. I'm curious, you know, how many years have you been doing?

this? 13. I assume that the first year, do you have all grades in year one? Sixth. No, we started with sixth grade. Sixth grade. Yeah, all right. That makes sense because I'm like, you know, you have somebody in there for six years from grade six to grade 12. I assume they've become, not all of them, but there would be some people that have become the leaders of the school, right? And then you see how they operate in the school. There's responsibilities given to them. And now they're almost, envy's the wrong word,

but I actually don't know of a better word right now because they're just like, I kind of want to be like that guy in six years. Well, how do you become that? Well, you got to start taking on responsibility and you got to, you know, like you think cleaning the urinals or cleaning the toilets,

nobody wants to do that. And yet, it would be a, if this is what it takes to get there, all right, then I'll sign up and I'm going to take care of my part. And over the course, now you have this culture when you walk in in grade six.

This is how it operates because the people at the top, which would be your grade 12s, would be doing that, I think. Yeah. Yeah. There's no avenue to say, I'm not cleaning a urinal. It's a matter of course. There's no argument because you know everybody before you and everybody around you has done it. And I think this is indicative of our male culture overall.

We used to have rights of passage where we have. had we had some Algonquin Indians in the 1600s and 1700s that when they came of age, they had to go slap a bear. The Maasai warriors had to go spear a lion. The Messiah Indian, or the, there were Indians in the Amazon tribes who had to stick their hand in a banana leaf glove woven with bullet ants. And they're called bullet ants because it feels like you got shot when they bite you. And you have to let them bite your hand over. and over and over again and not react or you don't become a man in that culture. Well, we don't have very high expectations for our men in today's culture.

In fact, I have a buddy who has been counseling men for decades and he's asked all of his men three questions. One, are you a man last time I checked or you get all kinds of responses? Yes. Two, when did you become a man? when I joined the Marine Corps, when I had sex the first time, when I bought my first car, when I got married, you get all kinds of answers. But for the third question, he's never had a good response or even an answer. He'll say, all right, what does it mean to be a man?

And if we don't know, we're going to become something and we're going to learn our manhood from somewhere and somebody. But if we're not teaching it specifically, they're going to learn it. from the wrong source. So that was one of the impetus behind Iron Academy is to teach them what it meant to be a godly young man. Curious what your thought is on when did you become a man? Me? Yeah. Yeah. I would say it is after I started realizing that I couldn't just be like my dad and like my grandfather, both of whom are wonderful people, but I had to take ownership of that myself and start studying what it meant to be a man. And I had to figure it out. So I would say early 30s,

I would answer that in the affirmative, not just obviously physically, much earlier, but to really embrace the challenges of being a godly man, 32-ish, which is really sad. That's a sad admission. Yeah, but I mean, it's a sad admission, but on the flip side, it's an honest one. And you're like, This is actually when I started, I would say it was, I'm later than you. And the thing that came to me when you, when that question's asked, when do you become a man? Like when I started taking responsibility for my life. Like, and that is rewarding and difficult all at the same time. And I would say I was probably closer to 35, Malin. And I go, that's a sad mission. But I think of all the things I did up until that point. I'm like, man, alive. You know, when I look back on it, I, I I'm like, you know, like bringing kids into this world and everything else. And, you know, there's just a lot of responsibility. And for a while, I think I thought I was taking responsibility. But when I'm honest with myself, I was probably far from it.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the good news is as fathers, as community members, we get to change that for the next generation. The other one that you mentioned was involvement in discipline. So it's not a group of five of you at the top of the school board administering discipline. It's something you've built into your culture all over again, which is we want the kids to be involved. What is involving them in the discipline showing you? When we get to participate in the outcomes, let me take this all the way back to the Tocqueville.

He wrote a book back in the 1832 era. democracy in America. And it's one of the greatest observations about North American culture back at the time. But he said one of the reasons that the United States was so different is because the juries, the communities themselves got to judge their neighbor. And as they got to practice that, one, they learned that if I offer this person who has done a harm to our community, something that is too lenient, our entire community is going to to suffer from that leniency. If I, if I participate in something that punishes this person too much,

well, that's, that's not fair and it hurts our community in that way too. So we have to take responsibility for that. So when we do this all together as staff and as students and everybody participates equally, everybody gets ownership and outcomes so that it's not a system of morality that's imposed upon you, but that you get to participate in. And I think that's the biggest difference here. I guess just my curiosity again, when you have a disciplinary action, okay, and everybody gets to vote, do you find over the course of, you know, the years you've been doing this that it's split like 52 to 48? Or is it like, no, everybody kind of knows what the disciplinary outcome is going to be relative. I'm not saying 90 to or 99 to 1. Just like, you know,

the reason I ask it is, you know, I stare at politics. And let's just, take Donald Trump being elected the last time, right? It wasn't 70% were in favor of Donald Trump or go back to Joe Biden. It wasn't 70% were in favor of Joe Biden. It's always the split of like 51 to 49 or 52 to 48 or whatever the exact numbers were. But it's close.

It's like, wait a say. Very close. Actually, Americans don't agree at all. When you are doing something on discipline, has it been, I guess, is it more like, Now, once you've been in this culture, it's a higher vote goes to a similar idea, or is it spread kind of more even? Almost universally, it is unanimous.

But we encourage disagreement. And so we always ask when we vote for it, we first ask, does anybody disagree with what we're proposing? Because if we ask, does everybody agree, then it's overwhelming and you don't feel the freedom to disagree. So we always start with the disagreement. But one of the things even before that is, so at Iron Academy, we have three tribes that everybody's in one of those tribes. So we have Yoshio, Eliezer and Shama. And then we split apart into those three tribes. And then the staff forms the fourth group with the elected school leader.

We all talk about it separately about whether we're going to hold this young man accountable and what is consequences are going to be. And this is, it's going to sound like I'm making this up because it seems. too fabulous to believe. But when we come back from those four groups, it blows us away every time how close each group is to the other and what they propose for consequences and what their, what their votes going to be. For instance, whether if let's say somebody cheats and we know they're going to get suspended for a day. Well, they the every tribe will know, all right, if this guy gets suspended and he does it at home, he's going to play on his computer. Peter all day. So he needs to be in school suspension. Or they'll say, oh, his dad is going to work him

so hard he needs out of school suspension. And all of all four groups know exactly this. So it's amazing. We come to the exact same conclusion. And it's, it's remarkable. And I know it's, it sounds too good to believe, but the, there's only been one instance in 13 years where we had a round table and the young man left that round table, not feeling good about what just happened. Every other one, and 13 years, we end, we put the young man in the middle, we lay hands on them, we pray over him, and we go out, and justice has been done. And justice, gosh, this is something that almost feels arrogant to say in our society right now,

but if I'm saying, Sean, you need to do justice. It sounds like, how can I do justice? But even the Bible tells us, we, mankind, what is it that God expects? of you if not to do justice, to exude mercy and to walk humbly with the Lord your God. We are to practice it. And because we don't practice it or we allow government only to practice it, now we have a disconnect from what justice actually is. When I come back, well, just a real quick question, because I thought you said three tribes, then you said four groups. Yes. So we have... What's the fourth group? You had the three tribes and

What's the fourth? Well, that's where, so the students will be in their tribes, the three tribes. And then the fourth is the staff and the elected school leader. Okay, okay. So the fourth is the, okay, fair, okay. So when you talk about the disconnect, one of the things that, you know, you go back to your spiritually formed the four things, the second one's community. And I'm like, well, what is community?

Community, you know about the other person. And so what I hear is when you're giving discipline to a student, student, it isn't just a numbered student. It's like, no, we know John quite well and we know who his dad is. Or we know that Bill is going to go home and play video games all day. That's intimate, like, that's a tight community. So when you go, it almost seems too good to be trying on. I, to me, it just sounds like you have a very tight community. Yes. That knows everybody intimately and wants the best for everybody. So it's like, we're not going to take justice to the nth degree. You know, he, he cheated on a test. he's expelled from the school. It's no, there's a standard that's been set. Now we just have to tailor it to each individual because of who they are and where they come from. Yes, but you have with that community,

and you can have community in a prison, or you can have community in a Soviet-era orphanage. Sure. But if you don't have the joy, the spiritual formation actually breaks down. And if you don't have the appropriate accountability, because there has to be some level of shame involved. And I'm not talking about toxic shame, not the shame that we all think of when you hear the word shame. But as humans, we don't naturally want to fix the things that are wrong with us because we like who we are and we want to do what we want to do.

So you have to be able to call the crime or the issue out or the thing that they did so that they can fix it. And with the accountability, one of the things that we've learned, if we're going to do it in a way that accords with the research and how the brain actually is transformed or malformed, is you have to show your love with your eyes. You have to show your love with your face. You have to keep your voice from being angry. You have to call out what the thing they did that was wrong. And then you have to walk them back into it into their appropriate identity. So one of our, we have these 10 statements that these are, these are the 10. 10 things that say who we are, what our identity is.

And the first one is, we are men who leave people and places better than we found them. So what that might look like is if I am correcting young Sean who's out at lunch, he's at the picnic table and he sees the guys over there playing basketball, he leaves his lunch, trash is blowing all over the place to go play basketball. An inappropriate way to correct young Sean is, Sean, I saw you walk away from your lunch table. You left trash all over the place. You're such a slob.

You don't care about anybody but yourself. Here's detention for you. Not healthy because young Sean and said, all right, I'll take that. That's unjust. I'm not learning from you. I'll take whatever you got. But if I do it in the way that we do it, I'll say, Sean, I know you were at lunch, eating you at the picnic table.

You went over to play basketball. I know that's fun. But we are men who leave people. in places better than we found them. Your trash blew all over the place. I'll go help you pick it up. But tomorrow, before you go off to play basketball, can you remember you're going to leave that place better than you found it?

Now, young Sean is like, okay, I see it. I may not win that battle that day, but I'm going to win that war because young Sean, when he becomes a father, he's going to be telling his kid, son, daughter, hey, we are people who leave people in places better than we found them. We got to do better. So I'm calling him back into his real identity, not into his sin marred slob, don't care about anybody else identity, because that's not who he was created to be. And I don't know if I'm going to say this right, but instead of shame, I don't know why.

Well, I actually probably do know why. Shame just feels like a negative word, doesn't it? Yes. Oh, it does, especially the way we use it. And I, you know, like when you tell the story of the, of the. the garbage, the trash, it's taking ownership in a very respectful way. I mean, even the fact in your analogy or your example, you go and help clean it up, you know, like that's showing the way. Yes. Yes. You think there's a way for this idea to spread? Like, are you trying to build

20 iron academies or are you like, I can only handle one? I would love for there to be iron Academy's all over the place, but we have to make sure that we have our ducks in a row here first. I sometimes wonder, well, I'll put it this way. One of the difficulties about a school like Iron Academy is the students have more say-so in whether we succeed in what we say we're going to do than anywhere else. Because if they don't own the considerable weight of pursuing biblical manhood as we define it, then it all falls apart. And because they are young men, we see fluctuations in their commitment to, because the world has so many things for them to be distracted by. It is so hard for the Bible or to kill a mockingbird or any number of things we study to compete with these

dopamine drips that they get instantly when they hook into a digital world. So there's a lot to compete with. And Sean, the crazy thing is how much more this is going to increase and get worse over the next five years. There's going to be more change with AI-driven dopamine manipulation than we've seen in the last 100 years. And if our young people don't have a firm identity in who they were created to be, they're going to be toast. They're going to be, and I don't have a better word for this, but losers who get their meaning and their existence through these digital world. And I'm not optimistic about the future, but I'm excited to be a part of it. I never got to fight in the military. I always wanted that adventure growing up, but I had asthma.

I couldn't find a way to sneak in. But I feel like I'm more in the battle today than ever before. And it feels good because I have to believe that our young people were created for just such a time as this. And so were we. We have to prepare them. And if we don't, I don't know whether we're going to be Terminator, the Matrix, or Wally, but the future is going to be interesting. You know, forgive me, folks, as I look this up, you know, in Lord of the Rings,

Frodo, not Frodo, yeah, Frodo has a line where he says, I wish I wasn't, I wish the ring had never come to me. Forgive me, folks, as I look it up. Although I always know that, you know, in a podcast, it feels like I'm looking for 10 hours and it's, you know, been seconds. I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. So, so, and then Gandalf says, so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide.

All we have to decide is what we to do with the time that is given to us. And to me, we are born for such a time. Now, the thing about it is, though, you said, you know, with the AI and everything, the, the dopamine drip and all that the last hundred years, I would actually contend that and say, since you started Iron and Cat, which I'm doing my math correct is 2013 correct yeah 2012 was we started in August yeah so you go 2012 to now the pace which the digital world has been formed has been insane now take the next 10 years as AI starts to take over more I actually I'm kind of like I'm like I don't know where it

goes to but it doesn't go good right like I'm right I'm watching parents in general give kids access to something that I'm like, I as an adult struggle with, right? Like, you know, in 2013, actually 2012 is when I was coming back. I'd just gotten back from Finland folks. And up until that point, I didn't even have a cell phone. I was my then-girlfriend, now wife, I was sitting in Finland using an app called Magic Jack. It allowed me to call anywhere free in the world as long as I had Wi-Fi. That's how I was talking about. to her back that because I didn't have a cell phone all through college. I didn't have a cell phone. My wife makes fun of me all the time, Alan, of, you know, back in college, people want to get a

hold of me. They'd call her because they had no idea where I was. And I kind of liked it that way. I didn't like having everything be able to just get to me any single day of the week. So you go forward in your 13 years, your 14 years. The digital world has been changing at a rapid pace, and you've got to witness that pace. And it is. It's alluring to adults, let alone kids. I mean, and now you think of AI. I mean, I just used it to look up the quote from Lord of the Rings. It's become a very useful tool.

Very useful tool. And that's in one sense good. On the flip side, it's like, where does this take us? And I guess from a school standpoint, what have you seen with kids in the digital world? So the changes we're seeing over time, and I'm not even talking about just our students, but universally, we're seeing that their most significant relationships are thumb-based relationships on screens. They haven't had to overcome difficult obstacles.

They haven't had to make significant decisions. Their public speaking skills are going downhill. Their capacity to engage in deep work over extended periods of time is diminishing. Yes, it's remarkable. Their willingness to come. to class prepared to add value has gone down dramatically. So some of the things that we're doing in anticipation of a 10x increase in all of these things is we're focusing more on writing.

It could be that adults in the near future don't write, but we're using it as a means to learn how to think. We are doing more public speaking. We already probably read three times as many books as other schools, but we're going to read more books. But we're also, we focus on the interprofessional. personal skills because one of the things we see with young people is they can't have that eye to eye face to face face to face conversation especially with old people right and we're also doing more

high adventure trips our ninth and eleventh graders just came back from time on the appalachian trail next year our juniors will be canoeing uh probably 177 miles from one lake all the way to the coast and it'll probably take eight days but the reason we're doing that is not that it makes them more manly, but it gives them stories to tell. It gets them time out in nature to talk and build community and maybe we'll read Old Man in the Sea together, but we'll really talk about meaningful things. And I want them to go into the world with the capacity to exist without this little tool, let it be a tool, but to exist and to be able to have those conversations, to be interesting people to have overcome significant things, to make significant decisions.

Our seniors, when they do their senior trip, they have to tell us where they want to go. They have to plan out the entire trip. They have to raise all their money. They have to make all the reservations. They are 100% in charge of the trip. So class of 2024, we went to London for three days, Paris for three days, Munich for four days, and Florence for four days. we fly into Heathrow and Cadman is responsible for day one. He says, all right, we go through customs.

We need to go to the tube. We take it to Piccadilly Circus. We get off there. We look for the big white travel box. Get your travel card. Put this much money on it. It leads us to the double-decker bus that we need to get on. We take it the route.

He gets us off at the right place. He walks us to the Airbnb that he reserved. And those were his responsibilities for that one day. And we always tell them, I say, look, if you mess it up, it's okay. I don't have anywhere to be. Figure it out. You got it. So they're doing those things that mom and dad typically do.

We want them to do adult things, to be responsible men, to learn how to shepherd one another, to love one another well, and to be different. And we always tell them, if the stereotypes about young people are true today, and stereotypes are generally true, right, then all you have to be is a little bit different, as a minimum. them. Now, that's a low standard for biblical manhood, but if you're just a little different, you're going to thrive. And that's what we want to build. I think the confidence you're instilling. I know you already know this, but I just, from an outsider sitting there thinking about that, I traveled with my, well, now 10-year-old son,

at the time he was nine, we flew into Minnesota where my wife's from. And I was getting him to, like, navigate the airport and I was standing beside him just being like there's no stress here but where would you look to find and it was simple baggage claim he's like I don't know and you could tell he was getting all worked up I'm like just take a breath just look around look up down this place is designed to get people who don't know where to go to where they need to be and I started doing that one trip and by the time we were coming back the next time he's like oh dad baggage claims that way I'm like, oh, that's how quick it is. And what you just said about, you know, like they got organized.

That's, heck, I've been to a lot of different places. And there's the same fear or paralyzing emotions of like, where do I go? And then you got to take a deep breath and you got to look and you're like, no, I'm not the first person to come through here. Let's just take a second. Nothing's got me. And to watch kids do that, I would think it would be a very cool moment. Yeah, this has been a blessing for me. I would say discipleship is really difficult.

It's exhausting, but it's been hugely rewarding. Any final thoughts before I let you out of here? I'm like, it's a really interesting idea. And even just some of the things, you know, if you don't run a school and you're just a dad, you're like, you know, Troy community, accountability, identity, you know, getting them to take a bit of responsibility. in life are really simple yet important ideas. Yeah, I would say for the families out there, find your defining identities, the things that

you must build into your sons and daughters and that you want to enforce as husband and wife. So I told you one of ours, we are people who leave people in places better than we found them. That works for a lot of things. But if you say we are people who always tell the truth, or we are people who love people better than they love us or whatever you might want to say. Figure out what those things are for your family and then reinforce those things. Actually, first, live those things out and then reinforce those. And what do you call those things?

Sorry, governing principles. We call them forge point identities, but we're Iron Academy, so everything has to do with the forge or manly stuff, right? But forge point identity statements is what we call them. that's um i don't know i guess this morning i sit here and i go this has been a very healthy conversation when you talk about young men and uh um you know like things that we can all do better i think yes yeah uh but we have to think and be very serious about who we are uh we have a mantra here that biblical manhood is never an accident and it's not we have to be

diligent, persistent, and gritty about this, because if we aren't forming our sons and daughters and to be the men and women they were created to be, somebody's going to... Step into the role. Yeah. And whether it's the digital world or, you know, my kids play a lot of sports. And what I always, you know, like lots of people have probably, I don't know, is it hopes or dreams of their kids going off to like the NHL, NBA, MLB, take at the highest level. I'm like, yeah, sure, that'd be great, I guess.

But I'm like, when I look for is a coach who has a good set of values, holds kids accountable, can control the room, teaches them the right way. And I got to give a shout out to football. My son started playing football. Here in Canada, we got a little short window where we get to play football, Alan. It's a little different than where you're sitting. and 50 kids for a team of 11 this past year. And my son was a first year,

which means he didn't play a whole lot. And I was like, good. I think that's good for him to have to cheer on his teammates and be a sidelineer and then have to go and pick up the everything after a game and really enjoy that and be rewarded for that. I was like, that's a cool lesson. You know, so many of us get him, you know, he's got to be playing every second shift,

or he's got to be a, it's not fun for him not to be a part of it. I'm like, ooh, there's, there's lessons happening here that are really good and beneficial. And I saw as a coach who was coaching him in hockey, things that happened in football started to transfer over to hockey where he was the guy picking things up. I'm like, oh, this is cool. He would, I feel like he would never listen to me when I would say those things. And yet another, another individual by instilling in it, he just naturally did it. And then I got to encourage him on it because I'm like,

This is really cool. Yeah. So I don't know. Yeah, the things that we see in sports, sports is often the easiest and most effective way to do discipleship, whatever we're trying to build into the young person. We get to do that every day, every class here. Even we do it with sports as well. But it's just such a liberating environment to be able to build into young people.

That's very rewarding. Well, I appreciate you hopping on and doing this today. And, well, I don't know, keep doing what you're doing. It sounds like very fascinating if I'm being honest. Well, thank you, brother. If your parents have questions, this is a shameless plug for the book, but it was meant to help parents be able to do this on their own, not necessarily recreate the school, but to recreate a lot of the things that we do and the why behind it is very instructional

for how do we build men. Well, don't be, it's not a shameful plug. You're on a podcast. What's the book called? Where can they buy it? And yes, all the information. It's called The Iron Academy, Forging Young Men Who Follow the King. And it's by Alan Hahn.

It's available on Amazon. Well, I tell you what, I'm kind of curious now to go read it myself. So I appreciate you hopping on and doing this. And I don't know. I don't know what the future holds, but I appreciate you hopping on today. Well, hey, Sean, keep up the good work.