Yellowstone’s Rip Wheeler: A True Man’s Guide to Being Seen

 In this episode of the True Man Podcast, Mike Van Pelt explores what the relationship between Rip Wheeler and Beth Dutton in Yellowstone reveals about masculinity, loyalty, love, fatherhood, and the deep human desire to be truly known. Through powerful scenes, biblical truth, and practical application, you'll discover why real strength isn't found in building thicker walls, but in becoming the kind of man who knows God, knows himself, and lives fully. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Well, there's a moment on every ranch, every job site, every office floor in America, when a man does the work of ten men, says nothing about it, and goes home to an empty house, wondering if a single soul actually sees him. Well, that man has a name on television, and his name is Rip Wheeler. And if you've ever watched the show Yellowstone or Dutton Ranch, if you've ever sat there during one of his scenes and felt something tighten in your chest that had nothing to do with a cattle drive or a bar fight, you already know exactly what today's episode is about. So, welcome to the true man podcast. I'm Mike Van Pelt. I'm your host. Today I'm gonna do something different. I'm gonna have a little fun. It's the middle of summer. Why the heck not? So, back on episode uh 151 of the true man podcast, nearly 100 episodes ago, I did a podcast on the movie The Truman Show. The movie, yes, great movie, by the way, and compared it uh to True Man the Life, comparing that movie to what I do. And today we're gonna take that way deep with one of my favorite shows and talk about one of my favorite characters from Yellowstone and the Dutton Ranch. So we're not opening with scripture, we're not opening with a personal failure story, though. We'll get there. We're opening with the television show, Yellowstone and the Dutton Ranch, because sometimes God uses the strangest door ways to get a truth into a man's chest. Now, if you have watched the show, you know what's bigger than a soap opera and cowboy boots. It's the story of the Dutton family, owners of the largest continuous ranch in the United States, fighting off land developers, corporate raiders, outside pressure from every direction, trying to hold on to something that their family built generations ago. The show's over now, but the saga certainly continues through the Dutton Ranch because the stories about legacy and land and family actually never end. They do exactly what the Dutton Ranch did. They move from Montana to Texas and changed zip codes. And at the head of the family, uh, as the show was on Yellowstone, uh is John Dutton. Now, I'm not going to spend much time on him today, but you need to understand John Dutton in order to understand everyone else. He is the patriarch of the family carrying the full weight of a generational of stewardship on his back. He is not a soft man, he is not a sentimental man, he is a man forged by responsibility and loss, bound to a piece of the ground that has cost him more than it has ever given back. Every decision he makes filters through one question. What will this cost the family? And is it worth paying? Now you'll have to go watch, go back and watch Yellowstone to see how it all ends. Uh, and by the way, that'd be well worth your time. Just know up front, a lot of violence. Uh yeah, it's a lot of violence, a lot of language, but boy, I mean, they're cowboys, they are cowboys. So, John, uh John's Dutton character is um his traits are in every man. Uh, that's part of his character. And even when protecting things cost you sometimes that you don't get back. That was the story of John Dutton. But today we're gonna we're going somewhere deeper. We're talking about two other characters, Beth Dutton, John Dutton's daughter, and Rip Wheeler, and what their love story underneath all that cowboy drama is actually trying to tell every man and woman listening to this episode right now. So let's begin by talking about Beth Dutton. She is brilliant, she is volatile, she is devastating in the boardroom and just as devastating in a bar fight. She is fiercely loyal to her family, and she will burn the whole world down to protect them. But you strip away all that sharp tongue, you strip away the scorched earth tactics that she has, and underneath you're gonna find a woman who has spent her entire life to win one thing: her father's attention. Every calculated business move, every reckless act of self-destruction, every wall she's built, brick by brick, it all traces back to the same woman. Does my father see me? And does my father choose me? Now that's not a fictional problem, men. That's likely sitting in your living room right now. That's sitting in church pews, sons and daughters who built entire careers, entire personalities, entire identities around the hope that a parent would finally turn around and say, I see you. And when that affirmation never fully comes, well, you get Beth uh Dutton brilliance turned into armor. I want you to sit with that for a second because some of you might be raising a Beth right now and you don't even know it. Be careful, man. Now to the man himself. This is where we're spending a bulk of our time today. So Rip Wheeler is played by Cole has actor Colehauser. He is a ranch foreman on John and John Dutton's right hand. He is the enforcer. He's the most trusted man and the one who handles the jobs that nobody else can stomach to handle. Rip is rugged. He's loyal. He's carrying the past that would have destroyed a lesser man, and he carries it without complaint, without excuse, and without asking a single person to feel sorry for him. I think of Rip as the modern-day Marlboro man. He's just cool. That weathered, suncreased image of American masculinity, gruff exterior, calused hands, a man who can break a wild horse and break up a fight in the same afternoon. He's just badass. But here's what separates Rip from a cardboard cutout of toughness. The show never lets you forget what's underneath. He's passionate. He's tender. He is fiercely, almost helplessly devoted to one woman, Beth Dutton. And that devotion is the truest thing about him. Now, this is the part most men miss when they try to imitate toughness. They have a steady exterior that silence the stoicism, the square jaw, and they never get down to the engine room underneath it. Rip's toughness was really never the point of the show. Rip's toughness was always in service of something tender that he was protecting. Let me walk you through uh some scenes that prove that out. There's a scene where Rip and a character Lloyd, a fellow ranch hand, who's been there longer than almost anybody on the ranch, are driving out to turn a wild horse loose back into an open land. Uh just a simple errand on the surface, right? But in the truck, Rip tells Lloyd he's getting married. And Lloyd's not even surprised. He noticed something different in Rip for a while now. And Rip does something nobody expects. He asks Lloyd to be his best man. Lloyd points out the obvious. Hey, Beth's brother is standing, you know, is here, practically, you know, obligated to do it. And Rip doesn't argue that logic. He just tells him plainly, he's asking Lloyd anyway. Then they let the horse go. No dramatic music, no big speech, just two rough weather men standing in open country watching something wild run free, having just shared something, neither one of them would ever call sentimental. But both of them know exactly what it is. An absolutely beautiful scene, one of my favorites from the show. That scene, man, is a master class in male friendship. Rip didn't choose Lloyd because it made sense on paper. He chose him because Lloyd earned it. Through years of showing up, working beside him, being present in ways that had nothing to do with blood. That's brotherhood. The way God designed it. Covenant friendship forged in shared labor, expressed sideways because direct emotional language does not come naturally to men like Rip. It's not even in the conversation. Or men like a lot of us. How many of you have a Lloyd? A guy who's been there through the actual work, not the highlight reel, the work. And you've never once told him what he means to you. Yeah. Write that name down. We'll come back to it here. Here's another scene. Later in the story towards the end of Yellowstone, Rip is standing at John Dutton's grave. If you haven't seen this, I apologize. I just gave up the ending. John Dutton is the man who took Rip in, who trained him, who trusted him, and eventually became something close to a father to him. Now he's gone. And Rip, he doesn't deliver a eulogy. It's not in Rip's nature. He doesn't perform grief for the audience. Can't show emotion. He simply makes a vow to John over his grave that he'll take care of John's daughter and he'll try to love and protect her the way that John did. And he'll see him again one day. That's it. No embellishment there. Just a man keeping his word to another man because that's what honor requires when nobody's left to make you keep it. Scripture has a lot to say about vows. In Ecclesiastes chapter 5, it tells us when you make a vow, don't delay fulfilling it. And it's better not to vow at all than to vow and do not follow through. You know, Rip understood something that a lot of men have lost touch with. A vow isn't a feeling you had once at an altar or a graveside. It's a it's a debt you keep paying for the rest of your life, especially on the days nobody's checking whether you're paying for it. Now, in another scene, and honestly, men, this might be the most practical, useful piece of relationship wisdom this entire show's ever produced. Rip and Carter, a young man that Rip has taken under his wing, much the same way that John Dutton took him under his wing, or out riding the Dutton land together, just the two of them on their horses. And Carter has been wrestling with some girl issues, and you know, and so he's asking Rip what to do. He asked Rip straight up, what's he supposed to say? And Rip's answer isn't complicated, and that's really why it lands so hard. He just simply tells Carter that the secret isn't in what you say back, it's in your willingness to simply listen. When they're saying something kind to you, when they're saying something kind to you, or something sharp, or something you don't fully understand. Your job is to stay present and pay attention. Just listen. In a previous conversation between these two, Rip is telling of a story that he had asked John Dunton several years ago about marriage, and Dunton had said this when she's right, she keeps being right, and eventually you find out that you were the one who had it wrong the whole time. Great wisdom from cowboys of not so many words, delivered with it that gruff cowboy humor, of course, but underneath that joke is just real humility, isn't it? A willingness to assume that you might be the problem before you assume she is. That's not a weakness, man. That's wisdom. Most of us spend decades avoiding. In Scripture James chapter 1, verse 19, it reads, Everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak. Fantastic advice. And Rip, a man of almost no words himself, was teaching a teenage boy in these scenes the exact discipline that scripture commands. Not because he'd read the verse, because he'd lived long enough and loved hard enough to learn it. The way men usually learn the deepest truths through cost. And here's why I want to bring this home. Rip and Beth are not just compelling television characters, they're mirrors. You see, Beth is every woman who's ever wondered if she's enough to be chosen, who turns brilliance into a weapon because vulnerability felt too dangerous at first. And Rip? Well, Rip is every man who learned early that showing what's underneath gets you hurt. So he built a fortress instead. Strong enough to protect what he loves, quiet enough that nobody ever sees what it cost him to carry. And then something happens to them that happens to very few people in real life. Someone gets past the wall. You see, Beth sees Rip not as the foreman, not as the enforcer, but the boy who survived things no boy should survive, and still chose to become a protector instead of a predator. And Rip, well, he sees Beth, not the venom, not the volatility, but the daughter still waiting for somebody to choose her without condition. That men is the love story underneath the love story. It's not about cowboys and ranch land, it's about two people who finally got tired of performing strength for an audience and let one person see the real thing. I'd guess a good number of you listening know exactly what that fortress feels like from the inside because you built one. I know I did. Maybe out of necessity. Father who wasn't present, a betrayal that you never spoke about out loud, a season where asking for help got you mocked instead of helped. So you did what Rip did and does, continues to do. You got tougher, quieter, more useful, less knowable. But here's the truth that the gospel offers that Rip's story can only point toward. You were never meant to carry that fortress alone, and you were never meant to be loved only for what you produce. Psalm 139 says this: For you form my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. You were not the sum of what you produce on the ranch, in the office, or in the home. You were known fully, already, by a father who doesn't require you to earn the right to be seen. And the love Rip pours out on Beth, sacrificial, protective, unwavering, even when she's nearly impossible to love is a faint shadow of the love Christ calls husbands to. Ephesians 5, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Not love that waits for her to deserve it, love that gives itself away first. All right, men, let's let's land this podcast here. This has been a lot of fun to talk about. Three things this week. One, stop performing strength for people who only ever see the exterior. Find one or two men in your life, your Lloyd, and let them in on something real, even if it comes out sideways, even if one sentence in a truck on the way to do real man work. Two, practice the Carter lesson. Next time the people you love are talking, don't load your responsibility while they're mid-sentence. Don't excuse me, don't load your response mid-sentence. Just listen. Even when you don't understand, even when it stings. Especially then. Three. Remember the value made to your wife, to your family, to the mission God puts in front of you, and keep paying it down. Even on the days nobody's watching to see you do it. So here's the challenge that I want to leave you with. Rip Wheeler became who he was because somebody finally chose to see past his exterior and love what was underneath it. The question isn't whether you've got a Rip Wheeler exterior, man, although that would be cool. Most strong men do anyway. The question is whether you'll let anyone close enough to see what's underneath that strong exterior, and whether you'll do the same for the people God's placed in your life who are still waiting to be chosen. I'm convinced Rip has discovered something I teach, and that's the three pillars of a true man. Know God, discover your true identity through faith. Know yourself, heal, grow, and own your story and live fully. Lead with purpose and build lasting impact. Man, I had fun talking about this. When I first thought of this, I was like, man, we are going to do this. And I was excited to bring it to you. And I and I hope this was a cool way to begin a conversation with yourself and maybe with those around you and another man. I encourage you to do so. Look for TV shows and movies that cause you to think, that cause you to start a conversation with yourself so that you can better your best and be your best person. And if you have any questions about how you can do that, if you want to talk about this, you can go out to my website, true manlife coaching.com. You will find my calendar there. If you don't want to do that, drop me an email at Mike at true manlife coaching.com. Happy to speak with you and hear your thoughts on this show. And if you enjoyed me talking about Yellowstone and the Dutton Ranch, we could probably just have a whole podcast on it, quite honestly, uh on a weekly basis. It's so good. But if you enjoyed me talking about this today and you love what I'm doing, pass it on to another man and leave me a great review on your favorite podcast channel. Always love to get those reviews. All right. I hope your summer's going great. I hope that you're able to take some downtime this summer and enjoy all the beautiful things on this earth that God has to offer. Thank you for listening. God bless you, and go out and make this your very, very best day ever.