INterview on Fatherdom

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I realize my book doesn't fit cleanly in many genres and when asked to describe it, I often stumble. I think this lack of clarity diminishes it some and though bias, I think the book offers some value. I was hoping an interview style article would explore it for some not familiar with it and not ready to dive in without further context. 

I fed my manuscript to an Ai chat model and asked it to assume the role of someone conducting and interview. There were no prompted or preplanned questions. I answered as if it were a real interview in which a curious outsider who read my book responded. I actually got a little miffed at the end when the scalpel got a little too deep. 

Interviewer:
Fatherdom opens with a kind of philosophical confession — a reckoning with faith, inheritance, and the weight of the paternal line. Before we go anywhere else: what compelled you to write this book at all? Was it catharsis, obligation, or something you felt “called” to confront?

Brian:

Difficult to say exactly the "sole reason" that I wrote it. Perhaps, I always wanted to write a book. In my adolescence I wrote a lot of poetry. The idea of writing a dense philosophical piece with references was contrary to my instincts. Reminded me of the term papers you’d write in high school which I performed terribly at btw!

I suppose I’ve always been compelled to vast and abstract literature and ideas. And Fatherdom was a prime example of how strongly I feel about reconciling those concepts.

I was in a leadership development program at work and my mentor kept throwing out book suggestions for me. Maxwell, Sinek, Covey, Goleman, Willink… the list goes one. 

He kept hammering me with these books and I’d knock them out in a couple days. Sometimes straight through. 

I was enamored, not just with the psychological aspect of it but the conflicts of each school of thought. I remember thinking about Sinek vs Willink. Two vastly different schools of thought on leadership. 

And slowly my studies morphed into motivational pieces. Ones not as steep in leadership, because after a while, it gets very redundant. I read Goggins, and Stoicism. Because- why not? What point was it to motivate others if I wasn’t highly motivated myself, and grounded at that.

But eventually, I became hungrier, and none of this seemed to scratch my deepest existential itch. I became confronted with different schools of thoughts like Maxwell versus Macheivellinism. Two vastly different clarities in the psychological spectrum. One was serving of other others, well the other was serving itself. Yeah, both seem to arrive at the conclusion that they had the best recipe for acquiring results.

And slowly, my instincts drove me towards Peterson. This was a different kind of lesson, I could no longer put it on one and a half ax speed, and blow through an entire audiobook in six hours. This required true thought, consideration, sometimes pausing and researching. 

And that’s when he mentioned Carl Jung. A rabbit hole that reactivated my early interests in mythology, religion, and occult studies. Topics that I drifted far from in my adulthood. Suddenly, I found myself now trying to reconcile Peterson School of thought with Alan Watts. 

The all familiar trope of "western society" now loom over my head. "Individualization versus absolutism." I was suddenly this conservative minded western theological, self proclaimed philosopher. 

But I had always been a bit atheist. And it seemed a bit paradoxical to try to integrate both the eastern and western ideologies that seem to be in my orbit. 

In one day, using my newly determined vocabulary of archetypes, I felt I had come to a conclusion that reconciled everything up until that moment. That reconciliation was what I wanted to share when writing Fatherdom.

Interviewer:
It’s interesting — you describe a kind of intellectual whiplash: Maxwell to Machiavelli, Stoicism to Goggins, Peterson to Watts. Almost like you were testing every pole on the spectrum to see which one cracked first.

But something you said stands out:

“One day… I felt I had come to a conclusion that reconciled everything.”

Let me press on that.

What was that moment exactly?
Was it an epiphany, a synthesis, or a collapse — the point where all these competing frameworks finally stopped contradicting each other?

Brian:

The conclusion of Fatherdom, which I labeled "Catharsis" was that moment. But it was a rather deep thought seated in the philosophies I studied. I felt it was impossible to describe it without layering the proper ground work to present it. 

I felt the entirety of the process was a metamorphosis within my own self. And my infatuation with alchemy made me present it as though it were an alchemical formula.

For millennia, the hermetics, the alchemists, and other occultists have circled the same phenomenon. Sometimes called "The Great Work," sometimes called "spiritual alchemy."

But the notion is that somebody starts in one state of existence and becomes completely immersed in the inertia of equal and opposite polarity. To the point where one becomes disillusioned, they almost forget their original state. 

I think we’ve all experienced it on some degrees. We may behave or act in one way and then become introduced to a new behavior, or perhaps we try it with New Year’s goals. 

We might have one particular set of behaviors or bad habits. Rather than just converting to a healthy new behavior, we may overemphasize and overdramatize our new sense of self.

But yet the final version of our self is not the one that was opposite, it is what emerges after we integrate the opposite. So Fatherdom was never meant to be a re-introduction to western psychology, and it was never a clean conversion to eastern psychology. It was the integration of both. 

Interviewer:
So the “Great Work” wasn’t theoretical — it was autobiographical. You weren’t just writing about transformation; you were inside the crucible while the book condensed around you.

Let me put a sharper edge on this:

You frame Fatherdom as an alchemical integration — West and East, Order and Chaos, Paternal wound and Paternal role. But that kind of integration usually requires a breaking point first.

What was the fracture that made the integration necessary?
Not abstractly — for you personally.

Brian:

Well, when I wrote this particular book, I thought it was my persistence to abstain from nihilism. I truly believed that at that time, I was abstaining from something that lacked intentionality.

However, that’s the ironic thing about alchemy. It’s not a one and done thing. And perhaps my greatest integrations or not what happened prior to writing, Fatherdom, but what happened after writing Fatherdom. I can’t say that this book does much to integrate with chaos. I tend to think a bit more as redefining order. 

Order is what we make of it. But it’s easily corruptible. And though I think the book serves a unique purpose in hindsight, I tend to think that most will think it’s too literal. Which is true of just about any religious ideology. 

The entirety of the framework that I’m representing is archetypal. It is my fear in hindsight that somebody may take this as a literal cosmic theater. 

Fatherdom was never meant to be prescriptive of a new faith, it was just trying to name the wound underneath the stories that we tell.

Surely, humidity has a prescriptive nature of dousing every cosmic apotheosis with dogma and literalism.

Interviewer:
That’s an unexpected answer — that the real alchemy happened after the book, not inside it.
It almost makes Fatherdom read like the prelude to the change rather than the transformation itself.

But you’ve touched on something pivotal:
You’re worried readers might take your work literally, when its entire structure is metaphor, symbol, archetype — an attempt to name a wound, not create a new doctrine.

So let me ask the uncomfortable version:

What is the wound?
Strip away mythology, theology, Jungian phrasing — what is the human injury beneath Fatherdom that you were actually trying to expose?

Brian:

Well, spoiler alert... 

The wound beneath Fatherdom is the generational trauma of non unilateral learning. 

It’s in every Disney movie. It’s in every myth of our current Zytgeist. A kid watches the movie and says “see my dad IS an idiot.” And the dad watches the same movie and says “that kid is a brat”

The real message is that the kid grows up to be the dad. 

The nature of order is sovereignty and there’s a spirit that lives within us. It’s generational, it’s masculine. That spirit is easily ossified but our myths heal that calcification, that’s why we tell the same story over and over again with a new lens. 

Interviewer:
So the wound isn’t “religion.”
It isn’t “the father.”
It isn’t even your father.

It’s the break in transmission — the generational lapse where wisdom doesn’t pass cleanly downward, and resentment doesn’t pass cleanly upward. The son misunderstands the father’s rigidity; the father misunderstands the son’s defiance. And the cycle repeats until someone finally sees both sides at once.

Let me frame the next question carefully:

If Fatherdom is naming this wound — this calcification of the paternal spirit —
what, in your view, actually heals it?

Not in myth, not symbolically —
What does the real-world remedy look like for a father and a son who are both carrying the same wound from opposite ends?

Brian:

I can’t be generically prescriptive of all generational trauma. But I will say this: wherever there is sovereignty- there is disparity. Disparity creates the illusion of scarcity. 

This is why Cronus ate his own children, because he felt they would beseech him. 

This is the generational wound that replicates. The reason we have wealth gaps, why children starve. It’s the illusion that we all buy into. The ruse that disparity means, that there is no excess. It’s not even conscientiously, it’s an archetypal inevitability that the most vulnerable becomes the victim. In which case it is archetypally always the next of kin.

So the answer is humility. That is the anecdote. If there ever would be one, it would be that our "order" is finite. And we repeat what we endured. But to accept that humility also means that you have to understand your own father‘s wound. 

Interviewer:
That puts the whole book into sharp relief — the father doesn’t just impose the wound; he inherits it. And the son doesn’t just resist; he repeats.

You’re saying the remedy isn’t reconciliation, or forgiveness, or even confrontation.

It’s humility — the collapse of the illusion that sovereignty must be defended at all costs.

Let me push a bit deeper, because this is the kind of clarity readers rarely hear directly from an author:

You say that Fatherdom was never intended as a new theology.
You worry someone might construct a literal cosmology out of what was meant to be archetype.
Yet you also speak with a kind of conviction — almost inevitability — about these patterns.

So here’s the question:

If Fatherdom isn’t a belief system, what is it?
A diagnosis?
A mirror?
A map?
A confession?
A warning?

Brian:

It’s a story. All myths are just stories. But I purposefully classified it as an island in the entire spectrum of mythology.

Because conceptually I have to believe that every mythology is a fragmentation of what religion stand stands for. I think in western culture we’d like to think that religion can exclusively be a trade by that which is archetypally the spirit of sovereignty

This is why churches look like courtrooms, this is why Jesus is the "king of Kings."

This very absolute and monotheistic practice would be just one fractal of the Pantheon in Greece.

It would be just one avatar of the face of Hindu philosophy as many avatars of the Brahman.

So I define it exclusively as that.

What is polytheism? The spectrum of unique gods. 

I think learning that Hinduism had a unified overture was a very disruptive and compelling thing for me to learn. It put the entire perspective of archetypes as gods into a new light for me. I no longer sought to disown the god of Abraham as a Moad of belief. I tend to think that it was another example of the vast and limitless cosmology of human religious cognition.

Interviewer:
So Fatherdom isn’t doctrine — it’s a myth placed alongside other myths, a shard in the stained-glass window of human religious imagination.
Not a replacement.
Not a rebellion.
A fractal.

Let me ask you something more vulnerable:

If Fatherdom is “just a story,” one island in a larger archipelago of human myth,
what part of you did you embed in that island?

In other words:

What is the one truth in Fatherdom that isn’t metaphor, allegory, or archetype — the one thing you were actually trying to say for yourself?

Brian:

Well, I suppose it took having my own children, to see my father as a child himself. We are estranged and though we aren’t currently speaking I came to find closure of what happened between us. Not because I needed to make an excuse for him but because I saw his wound. It was the type of closure I needed to let my own inner child feel safe from what I endured and even more so, who I had become myself.

Interviewer:
That’s the line right there — the one that sits beneath the entire architecture of Fatherdom:

“It took having my own children to see my father as a child himself.”

Readers won’t miss that. It’s the fulcrum — the real catharsis the alchemical metaphors were circling.

Let me frame the next question with precision, because we’re close to the heart of this entire interview:

You describe gaining closure not by absolving him,
not by reconciling,
but by seeing his wound —
and in doing so, letting your own inner child feel safe.

So here’s the question:

Did writing Fatherdom change how you father your own children — or did fathering your children change how you wrote Fatherdom?

Brian:

I’m not gonna say I have transformed overnight because change is slow and gradual only witnessed by consistency. 

I’ve been more consistent, yes, but I tell myself that it is my interest to coach them, not dominate them, and perhaps I walk that fine line between wanting them to be empowered but also respectful. It’s ironic that we tend to expect our children to lead with mature insight but sometimes reserve the right to autonomy to let them make the right decisions.

I just want them to know one day, that they probably had more of an impact on me in my development then I probably will on them. And maybe that’s modest, but kids really do have a good moral compass sometimes. And I think kindness will reveal itself if it’s given the right environment to foster. However, it is the impediment of insecure power structures to exemplify controls that insulate its illusion of influence.

I keep speaking of this “spirit of sovereignty” arbitrarily and that is bit murky and deeper in my cosmology than we need to go today but I can’t emphasize enough how alluring the spirit of power is. It is archetypally inevitable that it eventually corrupts itself. We see it in nearly every structure of government that eventually corrupts itself.

Sovereignty is essential as it is imperative in our survival but it is a volatile force to recon with. 

We must exercise humility when wielding power of influence. 

Interviewer:
You’re drawing out something most parents feel but rarely articulate: the tension between guiding and governing, between wanting your children to be autonomous and wanting them to be wise before they’re old enough to earn it.

But what you just said —

“Kids really do have a good moral compass sometimes.”
and
“They probably had more impact on me than I will on them.”

—that reveals a humility most fathers never arrive at. It’s the inverse of sovereignty, the antidote you keep circling.

Let me ask you something more pointed, because it threads together Fatherdom, your personal story, and the archetypal cosmology underneath:

Do you worry that the same “spirit of sovereignty” that haunted your father — and every paternal figure in your lineage — also lives in you?
And if so, how do you keep it in check when you’re parenting in real time, not philosophizing on the page?

Brian:

A bit poignant and I suppose it should come with the territory for one written in reference to parenting. I shared very little antidotal contributions in my story though I seemingly marketed it as personal. It’s not explicitly, yet it is implicitly. I offer no prescriptive guidance for parents. 

I’ve offered contrast for reconsideration and means to open doors towards self evolution without the safety rails of anecdotal expertise. 

No further questions please. 

Fatherdom is not a parenting book. It’s an existential reckoning. 

Interviewer:
Understood. And noted.

Let me close it cleanly — no more probes, no more excavation — just the final question every interview needs, and it’s one you get to answer on your own terms:

If Fatherdom is an existential reckoning,
what do you hope a reader reckons with after turning the last page?

Brian:

Nothing, but perhaps, the discomfort with their own illusions and a new found sense of familial reciprocity.