Pints With Aquinas - Here's How to Build a Catholic Culture (Brian Holdsworth) | Ep. 569

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

Catholic apologist, Brian Holdsworth, joins Matt Fradd to discuss Pope Leo's papacy, the loss of modesty in today's culture as well as the current attrition rate in the church, how to raise families in authentic community, and the role classical literature plays in human formation.  Ep. 569 -- -- – 💻 More About Brian Holdsworth:  YouTube: Youtube.com/@BrianHoldsworth The Gregory The Great Institute: https://www.gregorythegreat.ca/ - - - Today's Sponsors: Seven Weeks Coffee - Save up to 25% with promo code 'PINTS' at https://sevenweekscoffee.com/PINTS Charity Mobile - Visit https://charitymobile.com/MATTFRADD to get started. Hallow - Deepen your personal relationship with God today. Visit https://hallow.com/MattFradd to get 3 months free. Catholic Match - Download the app or head to https://CatholicMatch.com and find your forever. St. Paul Center - Share your faith with others this Easter Season by joining the Easter Accompaniment Challenge. Sign up and become a member today at https://stpaulcenter.com/pints - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 🍿 The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is now streaming exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/ThePendragon - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Project Hail Mary, only theaters March 20th. The attrition rate in your average parish, where I come from, from it's like 80 to 90% of kids who are raised by Catholic families who then go off and into adulthood do not retain the faith. Why is that? It's because there's no culture there to sustain them in the creed that it is we're trying to get them to adopt. When you look out into media or pop culture or what your friends are into, that just looks more interesting, more compelling. The mass is the highest form of culture? I don't know, I just went to a Taylor Swift concert and it was pretty exciting. What is modesty? Up until a decade ago, modesty has always always been understood as a virtue.

You need to observe the fact that there are degrees of intimacy that allow for certain measures of yourself to be exposed to other people. With clothing and especially revealing clothing, we've adopted this idea that even perfect strangers should be able to have as much knowledge about our bodies as possible. Why are people attracted to the traditional aspects of the church today in a way that we may not have been in the late 90s? The reason Catholicism seemed very attractive to me as a candidate was because of of how seriously it took moral questions, but theological questions as well.

It's Christianity that said, hey, you should learn something, explore what some of the great thinkers have said about the big questions in life. And Christianity didn't say, ignore people from other traditions or other backgrounds. It said, no, read Plato, read Aristotle, read some of the modern philosophers, read them all, understand it and make sense of it, and then have it illuminated by faith. No, I don't have my own brand. I am smoking Mayflowers. Okay.

I am not, do you know what? You know, it's Michael Knowles. Yeah, yeah. I'm not contractually obligated. It's just, but they just happen to be around. Well, that's handy. And you said you get nauseous when you smoke them. Well, it's happened once or twice, but usually I don't.

But when you do, it's not fun. Oh, no. No, it's not. That happened on our honeymoon, actually. Yeah. We were in Europe in, in Tuscany. and it was on one of those like tours, right? So a bus tour.

And so everybody's kind of indulging in the revelry. And it was an English-speaking tour and there was an American couple on our tour. And so he was really excited that he could get Cuban cigars. Yeah. I don't know where he found them in Italy, but he found them. And so he was handing them out to everybody. And so I was like, oh, great. And I didn't know how to smoke a cigar.

I had smoked a cigarette a few times when I was a teenager and, you know, indulging my rebellious moments. But so I smoked it like a cigarette and had a few drinks too. and then we had to get into the bus and go back to the hotel and like the windy kind of country roads. Oh man. And yeah, I was, I was, I turned white and. And did everybody know that that was? Well, no, because everybody was really drunk.

And so the chaos and revelry had had migrated into the bus. So I don't know if anybody noticed or not, but I was like leaning on my, my bride, my newlywed bride. Sure, she found that very attractive. And she was like, oh yeah, exactly. This is the moment where it's too late. You're stuck with me now. And she had to hand me her purse because she thought for sure.

But I was also the kind of kid who got car sick a lot and would, would, you know, grind my teeth and prevent, do whatever I could to prevent actually vomiting. And so I was able to keep it down. But it was certainly an unpleasant experience. I don't understand the dipping that people do today. You know, the lip pillow things? You tried those? No. No.

Is that different from like chew? Yeah. It's like a little kind of pack that you stick between your gum and your lip. Okay. And they have different levels of nicotine. Okay. But it'd be the same thing. I don't, I just don't like the...

Where I grew up, like hockey culture is big. And for whatever reason, everybody used chewing tobacco. Right. Yeah. That makes sense on a baseball field. It doesn't make sense in a hockey ring. No, they wouldn't do it in the rink, but off the rink. I know.

But where are you going to spit it, I guess, into a bin? Well, it was always, yeah, see, this is the problem. So we would go to, like, house parties. Is this appropriate for your channel? We'll see. So, and where there was a lot of drinking going on. This is what everyone knows about you. Yes, so you know.

So I'm a convert, by the way. That's right. I have a history. But what you would end up with is beer cans everywhere, right? And they would use empty beer cans to spit their, well, to spit it out. But every now and then, and it happened fairly regularly. Someone would pick up a chew tin or a chew can and drink from it. Oh, dude, I've done that.

I had my best friend, John Henry Spann, was on my show up in Steubenville, and he chews and bits constantly. He always needs a can. Dude, this is, uh, so he was spitting into a diet Coke bottle. It was a can though. Yeah. And I don't know, I don't know why I needed liquid. I don't know if I, maybe I had a headache and I threw some pills in my mouth and realized there was no water, so I grabbed this can. And I drank John Henry spit, dude. And I, it took me so long to get over that. I bet. Like, at first I was retching. And then for the next two hours, I was remembering it and almost retching. Yeah, that's, that's traumatic, I'm sure.

See, that's what's nice about Pines with Aquinas. You never know what conversation you're going to get into right away. Right, yeah. So thank you for coming from Canada. I'm honored to be here. Thanks for having me. All right off the bat, how's Pope Leo doing in your estimation? You know, I personally have a lot of affection for them.

I haven't been, and I never really did follow the intrigue in Rome that close. So, you know, for the people who cover it relentlessly, I don't follow a lot of those kinds of personalities. Like if the pillar or Catholic news agency or something like that had a story to tell, I might come across it. But otherwise, I'm not paying that close attention. So I'm not the best person to ask about like, what do you think he's about this thing that you said or whatever?

I don't know. Would you like that with Francis? I tried not to be. It's hard to avoid, though, especially if you're on places like Twitter because everybody's talking about whatever. the latest controversy was, right? But in terms of whatever I could deliberately, uh, pursue, I tried to be as ignorant as possible, especially because, you know, there were times where I found the things that he said confusing or even particularly hurtful as someone who leans traditional. Um, so, and in, out of my

desire to want to give him the benefit of the doubt, I, I would just try to, you know, avoid it and and pray for him. Uh, as far as Leo goes, though, like, I, I do catch kind of glimpses of, of, little things that he's doing. Like I heard recently that he, uh, he released whatever kind of penalties were imposed on Cardinal Burke in terms of like his, his rent. Um, so little things like that, right, that just sort of, he seems to be a very conciliatory person. Yeah. This is what I like a pastoral father, a fatherly figure. This is why I like about trad. I'm going to call you a trad. That's right. You're a nice trad, you know, and, um, I like people like yourself, Peter Kwasnevsky. because Krosniewski will point out, like he pointed that out actually recently when Leo extended that.

And it was, thank you. Like, thank you for pointing out the good things that happened. Okay. Yeah. But you know, it is funny how things have changed because I was at Catholic Answers working there as a staff apologist back in 2012, what, 12 or 13 when Francis was, you know, what do you say? Elected? Sworn in? Yes.

Given the slippers, but she refused. I don't know. And I remember going to my. laptop in my office and there was nothing to be found for the first 20 minutes, it seemed, after his election. Oh, right. And I think eventually Wikipedia had uploaded it. My point is that this has been a wild time for humanity from his election to his death.

As to, I know this is like a common thing. It has been. It's not terribly insightful. But just how much of the Pope we get all the time has just, and how we can give instantaneous commentary on it. I remember when Benedict was Pope, he published those Light of the World, that series of books with Peter Seawald, I think his name is, the German journalist. And I remember reading the first one when it came out and thinking like, this is so refreshing, a Pope being candid, just kind of answering questions. And I thought to myself, I wish the popes would do this more often rather than it being so formal and theological and almost academic.

Because the only exposure I had to say, John Paul II. And I wasn't raised in the era of John Paul the second, and I wasn't even Catholic during that era. So I didn't see a lot of the candid stuff that, you know, at World Youth Day, that is now more ubiquitous in sort of his legacy. But what I knew of him was in cyclicals because I had kind of like, I was in the process of studying the faith rather than living it prior to my conversion. And so it all seemed very impersonal.

And then I read these Light of the World books with Benedict, and they seemed very personal. And I was very touched by them. It really helped me grow in my effect. for him as a fatherly figure. And I thought, man, it would be great if he just sat down and did an interview for 60 minutes or something like that. And then Francis did start doing that.

And I just thought, oh, that's why. We don't do it. And whether you agree or appreciate the things that Francis said, I'm not saying that everything that he said was bad or anything like that. But even then, the Pope as a teacher, as the highest teacher in the church, and all the gravity that comes along with that is someone that is going to. to have significant influence in anything that he says. And if he's saying something that is of a more trivial nature,

it's going to be treated with a gravity that isn't incompatible with what the context might be. And that's dangerous, right? To treat every, every opinion, every thought, every stream of consciousness as if it's magisterial is not good. And one of the things I did appreciate it about Benedict is that he was very deliberate about saying, this is not magisterial if he was writing, you know, a book.

Exactly, exactly. So, and Francis wasn't quite as careful about that kind of thing. And so it created a lot of division because he would sometimes say things that, you know, in the, in the mode of conversation, uh, lacks precision and therefore can be interpreted in a number of ways. And so you'll have people who are more prone to a certain interpretation saying one thing and to another, the opposite. And then those members of the body start clashing over it.

And often clarity wouldn't come, which is really. what we need. I mean, when there's division in the family, the father often has to be the one who settles it. And, and, you know, there's a, there's a deficit of that, I'd say, in the moment of the church that we've been living through. So someone might listen to you saying that you kind of don't really get into the intrigue. And they might say, well, you're kind of putting your head in the sand. Sure. I don't think you are. It seems like you've made a conscious choice to do that. So, I mean, what's your advice? There's a lot of people, it seems like, at least, converting to Catholicism right now. Is that something you would recommend that other people try to say away from or

chill out? Well, you know, when I describe the people who cover the Pope all the time, I don't think that those people are wrong necessarily to do that. And I appreciate that everyone has their gifts, everyone has their vocation, everyone has their calling and their mission, right, that God has led them to. And so if they're, if they're faithful to that, that's something that God is calling to them to. And if you're on the receiving end of that, I think a lot of it depends on your temperament. I think it depends on what temptations you're prone towards, what virtues you possess. And so it's very much a prudential thing for each person.

For me, I know that it was distressing a lot of the time. It didn't, it, it, it robbed me of my peace a lot of the time. It had the potential. I don't know if it did do this, but it certainly had the potential to, to harm my relationship with the church. prior to, around the time of his election too, just like with Leo's, there's a lot of attention

on what's going on in Rome. And likewise, I was very excited and paying close attention. So at the beginning, you know, I was tuning into podcasts and shows and things like that that were taught in blogs at the time that were talking about Francis

and following his every move. And so then when the, the narrative started to become controversial or antagonistic or combative between factions within the church. It was at that point that I realized, yeah, this isn't good for me and I need to kind of tune out. And not entirely.

I don't think, you know, if there's two extremes, the one being excessive interest and bearing your head in the sand, I think that neither of those are good. Like any virtue, there's got to be a mean that we have to try and find. And it's going to depend upon what virtues and vice is you're currently navigating and trying to... There's such a beautiful, insightful take that you have. Like, you're clearly, it seems like working out of a place of self-knowledge, right?

Yeah. I think a lot of us struggle with. Sure. We're apparently very good at pointing to the sins and vices of others. Right. But we, it's a temptation to kind of ignore our own tendencies to vice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I think that's true of, that was true of me too. It's just, it would rob me in my peace. Mm-hmm. And whatever, if I have, God willing, gained any wisdom from the past decade or so, it's from having gone through that experience. Because initially, my instinct was to pay close attention. And then finding myself in a position as a vocal personality within the church thinking, do I have an obligation to do this?

And it's certainly, you might be rewarded for it. Yeah. So, you know, when, after the McCarrick stuff happened, for example, I remember commenting on that myself initially and getting significant attention for it on my YouTube channel and that was pretty early days in my YouTube channel

and being surprised by that and then taking a step back and saying should I do more of that because people seem to be asking for it or interested in it and so I spent time discerning for myself is that do I have something to say am I? I'm not a journalist

And so do I have any sort of relevant wisdom to share? And I decided that I don't. Not entirely. I think from time to time I have discussed current events, but based on certain criteria that I will judge myself. But for the most part, that wasn't why I started my YouTube channel, or at least why I leaned into my YouTube channel once it started to gain momentum. So I decided not to do that at that point.

from the perspective of a spectator and the times I have taken perhaps an excessive interest, I know what it did to me personally in terms of, again, those temptations and vices in my own spirituality and my own piece. And so as a result, that was a learning experience for me. And again, if I have wisdom to share on that, it's because of that learning experience. So that's great. Yeah. That's something that every self-aware person who's posting content on YouTube or anywhere else has to wrestle with. For sure. Because there's a lot of people out there, it's sort of like to claim narcissism, right?

Like if you go on YouTube and you type in overcoming narcissism, none of the videos will be about you overcoming narcissism. It'll be all about your mother and your child and your boss overcoming. Right. And I think something similar with the term grifting. Grifting is something we like to shout at each other. And it's not that we're always wrong. It's just like the narcissist thing, it's kind of interesting that we don't ever, I shouldn't

say ever, but it's difficult to ask ourselves whether or not we're doing that. And so that's really beautiful that you took that time to discern and to feel the temptation and to be honest about the temptation. Well, it is something that I took to confession from time to time too. And, you know, I do try to be self-aware. I try to measure how I'm doing. And certainly, you know, because of my vocation, I have a wife and kids.

And it's, it's very difficult to let vices run unconditioned or unaddressed when it starts to affect other people in such an immediate way. When I was a bachelor, you know, there's a lot of things that I could allow to become unaddressed because they were only affecting me kind of internally. They weren't really manifesting the dysfunction everywhere. I mean, if it got bad enough, it would. But for the most part, there weren't those mechanisms of feedback.

But with my wife and my children, you know, you will, it's unavoidable. So, so I have to constantly be, you know, receiving that feedback and observing that feedback if I care to love my family. And also observing it in myself and trying to recognize, you know, when, when am I slipping from my wife and I call them the wagons, right? We have different wagons that we're on. Okay. Which correlates to like our rule of life. Um, so like are you on this wagon? Are you off that way?

Well, what kind of what is? So like one wagon might be, uh, media usage or cell phone usage or that kind of thing, right? Are you, are you excessively on your phone or on social media or have you been really good at governing? And we have rules about that kind of thing, right? And so have you been following those rules? Tell me about the rules. Well, it, I mean, I'll tell you about my rules. So my rules specifically are, uh, I, I try not.

lately it's been pretty much no scrolling on social media like don't just log on passively and and you know enter into that sort of vegetative state where you're just sort of scrolling um no no phones in our bedrooms or anything like that so uh i it's not the last thing I do at night and it's not the first thing I do in the morning um which is why we have that provision because otherwise it would be I think um we dock our phones and we're at home So there's like a place where they have to go and if you want to check things on your phone you have to stand in the kitchen in this awkward spot and you know you can't sort of sit back and get comfortable or anything.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. So you probably don't have children old enough for phones but you and your wife at least. Well, my oldest is 16. Oh okay, I didn't realize that. Cronky. And she's driving now so we did just get her phone just for that purpose. Yeah, I know.

So people should know this about you and me. I just love that we have a history. We've been friends for what? Almost as long as I, I've been married because it was like when we first 18 years just about yeah which is how long I've been married yeah that's lovely yeah so I didn't realize you had a 16 year old that's lovely yeah I see so okay so when you're at home they've got to be docked and that and you're and you can use it but it has got to be tethered more or less yeah yeah that's the idea you can't just take it to the

bathroom and get hemorrhoids exactly that's right yeah yeah so um there's that there's that accountability like are you on certain wagons and if we notice that the other isn't I mean we'll try to gently prompt and say hey like what's going on with this yeah yeah exercise would be another prayer is another those kinds of things that's lovely and yeah because is your wife like you because you're pretty would you say if I had to guess and I don't know if you like the temperaments but you strike me as like a flagmatic melancholic did I get that wrong melancholic but actually choleric okay yeah that's me I'm like that but you're your color you're called melanoc no other way

No, you're melancholic. Really? I think so. Okay. Yeah, you're way more chill than me. I like people like you. I wish I was more like you. No, maybe you are sanguine.

No, I'm not. I thought I was sanguine. Well, we don't have to diagnose each other. Let's do it now. No, I'm, I'll stick with myself. From the test that I've taken, I'm choleric melancholic. Yeah. But the thing about choleric people, though, is that we tend to observe hierarchy.

If we're, I'm going to flatter myself, but virtuous in terms of how we observe our temperaments. So if I'm in a situation or an environment where I respect the person that I'm with, I'll often take more of a phlegmatic role for that. Dude, you are saying almost verbatim what my choleric wife said and what she said. About you or? Here's what she said, because she's textbook choleric, I'd say. Yeah.

But she said like when she walks into a room, she actually asked me if I had this experience. Like you know when you go into a room and you size up who's in charge? and if no one's in charge or if the person who thinks are in charge isn't doing a good job you'll take over and I went I so want to know

what you're talking about because it sounds so you don't have that experience manly maybe I do but I've never thought it through like that but see this is my wife's inside

about me too by the way okay well real quick about Cameron she's very flexible like submissive in the sense that like yeah what do you want to do whatever

She's not hard-headed. She's hard-headed when she thinks she's right. Okay. So it took me 20 years of marriage to realize that when I say we're doing something and she like asks a bunch of questions, she's really not trying to be pig-headed. She's really trying to understand. Yeah. 20 years it took me.

And now that I understand it, I explain it. And if I'm wrong, she'll tell me that I'm wrong and I'll go, oh, yeah, okay, now, let's do it that way. Yeah. Or she's like, oh, okay, no, that makes sense. and it'll just she'll click and she'll be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you like that? I don't know if I'm like that.

I'm, I can be pretty stubborn and pig-headed, especially in our marriage. And I, you know, that self-awareness just every now and then my wife, who can, she's quite flagmatic herself, but also melancholic. So if something pushes her too far, she'll, you know, she won't like it, right? Because melancholic is like things a certain way, right? Yes, I do. So, so, yeah, she'll let, she'll let, she'll let,

me know, but I mean, there are moments where, um, I'd say it's probably God prompting, right? Like, you'll have a conversation and then it'll echo in your mind for whatever reason. And it wasn't even necessarily a, uh, an important conversation, but you were just, it was, it was a casual moment, a casual exchange. And then God repeats it sort of echoing in your mind. And you're like, oh, that sounds horrible. What, what, what you, what you said? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then I think, oh, I got to work on. You know, probably one of the biggest things for me that I'm starting to realize is that I seem bored a lot of the time with... Seem or you are?

I... Probably both. That's harder to admit, but at least seem. And I think that that's that, that's very much residual from my, my upbringing and wanting to be seen as cool and like not too eager, not too interested, right? And so I just, I don't know, I got used to communicating in a bored way. My Alberta accent probably doesn't help a lot with that because it's yeah, I don't even know how to it's a unique accent, but It very easily I think can be construed as just being indifferent or aloof So well, the reason I asked about your wife was the two of you you have like a plan of life and then you're having these sorts of conversations about wagons

Which shows me like okay, we're dealing with two melancholyx here because my wife and I Right are extraordinarily spontaneous. Yes, it's exhausting Um, Dave Ramsey has... You've never lived anywhere for more than, what, five years? Never. We're just always excited. And we've always lived in the exact same place. That sounds... See, it sounds good.

But I don't know, man. I don't know if I could do it. Something about getting older, don't you think? How old are you now? 44. Just turned 44. You know, I remember when I turned 40, I was like, all right, these are the cards I've been given, and no new cards are coming. Which is a good instinct. It's nice.

Like, now I'm going to play these cards. Yeah, yeah. So there was something about reconciling myself to the fact that, okay, we're like that. You know, like, we decided to get up and go to Austria for six months like that. Right. And we had a great time. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, unless you're doing something vicious or something that's hurting your family, that would be different.

You'd want to take an honest look at that. Right. There's something about going, okay, like, this is what my family looks like, and I'm okay with that. Is it worth talking about the temperaments a little bit just for people? Sure. Because it really does inform the life of virtue. in a big way. So how much are we millennial Catholics that we're talking about? Well, that's funny. I don't know if it is it a common millennial thing because I didn't hear about them until my gen X friends

introduced me to it. Yeah, lay it out for people real quick. We don't need to go into a deep dive, but there are classically four temperaments and in certain quadrants that are the opposites. You can't be both that they're on opposites. But what's important about them is that whatever your temperaments are, it's suggestive that there are natural, we could call them bridges, but they They're not strictly speaking virtues. You have natural inclinations that are noble and good. So if you're sanguine like you are, you're a bit more adventurous. You're a bit more courageous.

You are outgoing and friendly, all admirable things, right? In knowing what your temperament is, the goal at that point should be to encourage and nurture those good things and to discourage the temptations that a sanguine person. is going to be tempted by. So, for example, excessive impulsiveness or recklessness, right? You want to know that about yourself and then you want to try and push back against that type of thing. You also want to know what the opposite temperament is. So in the case of sanguine, it's melancholic, right? A melancholic is more introverted, more introspective. Just real quick, it's hilarious that you think I'm sanguine. I think the only reason you think I'm... It's because you're impulsive.

Yeah, maybe that's right. But I think the only reason you think I'm sanguine is because you're so melancholic, is definitely my number one. Really? Like you've taken the test? Yes. I've had people rebuke me and go, I know you think you're saying when you took that when you were 18 and wanted to be that way. I promise you're not. That's funny. Well, yeah, I don't want to diagnose you, but. Yeah, all right. But to be on guard against those errors. So like a melancholic negative trait could be to get stuck in your head and to spiral. Definitely. Yes. Yeah. To be excessively. Scrupulous? Yeah. That would be a temptation. Yeah. To be overly introverted. The kind of person who just likes to cozy up with a book on a rainy day. And when someone invites them out, they're like, no, right? Or somebody, well, and if somebody, you know, makes an unexpected visit at your house, you're like, who's there and you go and hide or something like that?

100%. Unless it's you. Right. Yeah, fair enough. So the important thing is, though, if you're sanguine, you need to adopt some of the more melancholic things deliberately because they don't come natural to you. And there are virtues in that quadrant that you should have to be a well-rounded person. So understanding, and there's lots of tests you can take,

I think actually Catholic Match, oh, maybe it's not on their website anymore. They've curated another website that is just about the temperaments. I wish I knew the domain name, but it's quite a good test that you can take there. So take that and know what your temperaments are. There's usually a dominant one and a minor one.

So recognize what are the good inclinations that you have and what are your temptations. And then recognize the things that you don't have in the other quadrants and try to build those, try to push yourself. So if you're excessively introverted, try to be more friendly, try to be more sanguine, try to be more adventurous and more what you might think is impulsive, but is actually just kind of balancing out the equation. Because there's a lot of people who take an interest in the temperaments, who will say that

like our Lord was all of them. He was like the perfect, well-rounded individual, right? And so the virtuous person is going to have, they'd be right in the middle if you tried to take a test. So, yeah. So if you do care about growing up. in virtue. It's really important to... Is there something you've grown in?

My understanding of or... I would hope there's something you've grown in. What's something you've grown in? Oh, is there something I've grown? Yeah, in understanding the temperance. What was something you had to kind of push against and grow in? Well, okay, so one thing is being somewhat prominent, which I didn't really anticipate. And I, so your, your story is quite a different trajectory because you were involved in ministry, right, prior to doing this, you had done net ministries and things like that. And then Catholic answers. And so you were already, I think, poised to the experience of being on a stage,

for example, as a speaker, right? For me, when I started my YouTube channel, it was more like a melancholic thing to do because I was like, I want to learn videography and I want to, like, I want to like, I want to have a hobby, right? And the fact that I would be somewhat out there was a bit mortifying, but I didn't think anybody would be watching, right? But then people did start watching and all of a sudden I found myself in a prominent position so that if I go to, if I visit a city like here, where I'm not from and I go to mass, I know people are going to be, recognizing me and almost always do approach me, right? And so I have to be, I really have to push myself to be more friendly.

And it's not that I don't enjoy conversation with people. I don't enjoy meeting people. I do. But again, I know that my disposition tends to give off the impression that I'm not interested. Again, that sort of sense of being bored. I'm not. It's just it's my temperament and I have to try to push back against that and try to almost be comically the opposite if I want to seem like a normal person. We have tried a lot of coffee over the years

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Virtue, yeah. And one of the objections he sets himself and then responds to is this idea that, well, I'm being fake, you know, and I don't want to be fake. And I think that's kind of maybe what I've told myself to kind of put the lipstick on the pig of my own poverty. Yeah. Like, I'm not rude. I'm just, you know, like interesting and thinking of things deep and meaningful. Yeah, well, that's the danger when pride comes in. Be nice to the barista because she has to live with you in this little town of Stubanville.

And like, like, you know, everyone acted like you would be terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and we have to be careful about that too because we don't, we don't want to be pretentious. If we don't really believe that what we're doing is. And this is why virtue is so important because if you recognize that there's a, there's a virtue that you lack, you recognize it as a good. and then you deliberately try to move towards that, then that's a good thing.

But if you're just trying to be fake in order to manipulate people or to appear friendly, I mean, that's a different motive, and that's not good. Authenticity is a virtue that Rousseau established. It's an enlightenment kind of virtue, right? And so that's not a Christian idea, this idea that we have to just sort of embrace who we are

and not try to change ourselves. That's society imposing itself on us. It's like, well, no, it's possible that society, that society could be imposing bad standards on us, but this is why it's so important to be grounded in the tradition of understanding of virtue ethics, of Thomas Aquinas, of Aristotle, of just the church's teachings of its moral teachings, um, in order to understand, well, how do I navigate this and how do I actually embrace the life of virtues so that I'm, I'm cultivating good character in myself and ultimately so that I can be happy because that is

the effect that, that comes from it, a kind of blessedness, right? Mm-hmm. Were you, I know you were a convert to Catholicism. I don't really know, were you, did you convert to Christianity at some point? I would say yes. Yeah? Yeah. But the Christianity.

Like, would you grow up a Protestant or what? No. So I was baptized as an infant in the United Church in Canada, which was sort of an amalgamation of a lot of the mainline strands of Protestantism, but has now become the wokeist of the woke. but that was sort of my family's heritage which I don't know that much about but English and Scottish and Irish but not Catholic Irish I don't think

so it was an expectation on my parents that they do get me baptized but there was not any there was my dad was a lifelong atheist he has since actually converted to the Catholic Church but at the time he wasn't a believing person

and I don't think my grandparents were either so after my parents split up, which happened when I was about nine and ten, there wasn't really any religiosity. We were, we were most, like our sensibilities were the conventional wisdom of popular secular culture, I would say. And of course, whatever we picked up from school, you know, whatever cordiality and manners and social conventions that we would get at school. So, so, no, I didn't have, I didn't have many prejudices other than, the secular prejudices going into my conversion.

What was your, how did your conversion come about? Was it a big dramatic emotional thing? Somewhat, yeah. So it came, it's hard to say like what, what all the contributing factors were as they sort of converged, but a big one that is easy to identify is, is personal failure. So I was, I'm the kind of person who has certain, um, natural talents. I would say more on the artistic side of things. And maybe certain intellectual aptitudes that made school easy enough for me

that I didn't have to try that hard. But I was also not that motivated. So like magnanimity was not one of my virtues. And so I was willing to apply myself just enough so that I could achieve a certain measure of success that I was satisfied with. But it wasn't anything to brag about it. It certainly wouldn't win any awards or anything like that. And so that kind of lethargic work discipline and attitude I thought would carry me to the, again, the measures of success that I could tolerate in adulthood.

But the first thing that happened is as soon as I graduated from high school, again, because I have these artistic aptitudes, I was like, oh, I'll go into graphic design. And that will be easy for me. And at the time, it was like the whole dot-com thing was happening. So there was a promise of like a very successful career in that. So I applied to the college that I thought was going to give me the training that I would need or the professional distinction that I would need for that. But I didn't get in. And part of the reason was that you had to produce a portfolio. And the portfolio, I was like, oh, yeah, I'll just put some drawings together and throw it in a folder and there you go. And I put no effort into it.

And I didn't get in for a good reason because I wasn't motivated. Were you shocked? Yeah, yeah, I was really surprised by that. And really embarrassed, too, because a lot of my friends were going off to college. And what am I going to do now in this sort of gap year working part-time at the paint store that I had worked at in college, or sorry, in high school, when we part-timers were always somewhat condescending towards the full-timers because they didn't go to college and they're working a retail job for the rest of their life. And here I am like far, far worse in terms of like social standing and professional standing. So I was I was really embarrassed by that. And I realized, you know what, like this whole indifference and moral lethargy.

And there were other things about the way I was living my life and sort of the party life and all that kind of stuff that pretty much everyone in my age group was embracing. That that made me think, I need to take a step back from this and figure out like what has led to this failure. What did I do to produce this? Is this because I am not actually a good person that I can't achieve the good things that I might want? That's how you thought of it. Yeah. And simultaneously, for whatever reason, I always, I wasn't raised with any sort of religiosity. But I had a kind of almost a super, I had lots of superstitions about God and about the devil even.

and one of the things that I had always kind of curated was this weird idea that one day I will become a good person. I consciously knew, like as a teenager, you know, in the skateboarding, and the punk rock culture, and playing guitar and metal bands and things like that, and the things that I was listening to and embracing, I knew that it wasn't moral.

But I also thought, you know, when I, there's a time for that. Right now, I just want to have fun. So one day I will be a good person. And somehow that seemed intrinsically linked to the question of God for me. So when I took a step back and sort of said, well, do I need to become a good person now? Is now the time? Can I not get away with the way I've been living my life for as long as I have?

And then simultaneously, do I need to address the question of God? And there were other, there was a kind of a providential conspiracy taking shape in my life too in that my girlfriend at the time, she was very sanguine, very impulsive. And she was the kind of person who would kind of every month have a new best friend, like this person that she would just attach to and she would become obsessed with. Everything that they're into, she would be into. She would dress the way that they dress, talk the way that they talk, listen to the same music that they listen to. And in this case, it was a mutual friend that we both went to high school with that turns out was a believing Christian, which is very rare where I live.

Like, I know that in a lot of the states, you know, you grow up depending on where you live, surrounded by Christians. But in Canada, I didn't know a same. single person growing up who would have said, oh yeah, I'm a church-going Christian. I'm a believing Christian. Australia might be similar to Canada. Probably, yeah, that sounds about right. So to find out that this mutual friend of ours was like secretly harboring this faith was kind of surprising to me, but her family also hosted a Bible study. And so naturally my girlfriend was like, well, I'm going to go to the Bible study too. And I'm going to believe the same things and do the same things. And she said, and she insisted that I come along and do it too. And at the time,

I was like, a Bible study? Like, I'm not, not remotely interested in that. But she insisted, and so I came along. And it wasn't a Bible study in the strict sense of it being like, hey, we're going to open scripture and really actually study. It was more like, let's sit around in a circle and talk about our feelings. And then the leader might, you know, lead us in a prayer that might make allusions to Jesus and Christianity and things like that. But the person who was leading it was this, it was the mother of this mutual friend of ours. Well, I think I had met a couple times at that point.

and I was always kind of taken by because, you know, other parents were just so patronizing a lot of the time. It's like, oh, you're meeting the friend of one of your kids. And it's always sort of like, oh, yeah, nice to meet you. And yeah, go watch TV or something, right? Whereas this parent was the first time I came over, I was first of all struck by how domestic their home life was. Where I wasn't really used to that. My mom worked long hours. My dad didn't live with us.

And it was pretty much, you get home from school and you watch. and you play video games and you're just kind of doing your own thing. But here it's like come, I'm gonna give her a name just to make this simplified, but this isn't her real name. We'll call her, um, uh, Nicole. So, so at Nicole's house, um, you know, you'd go there after school and her mom would be there and she'd be attentive and she'd want to talk to you and find out about your day and she'd, she'd make a snack for you or something like that. So, so one of the times I went over there, she took that kind of interest in me and was asking me all kinds of questions. And it wasn't just to be patronizing.

It was because she had a sincere interest in who I was. And I was struck also by this kind of humility that she had. I always thought that humility was sort of like a kind of an ameliorating self, a lack of self-respect, you know. And here she was seemingly very quite humble, but also very confident, paradoxically. And I was struck by that, I remember, and also just how friendly and genuinely interested she was in me as a person. So she was the one who was leading this Bible study.

And I found it very edifying, I guess, even though I didn't really buy into the whole religiosity of it, but I did enjoy the conversations more or less. And whenever they take a philosophical turn, that always sort of prompted something within me that I didn't know was there, but I always had that kind of aptitude. Did you not get the sense that she was one of these Christians who was being attentive just to score another convert?

No, because I didn't know any Christians like that. Because I just didn't know any Christians. But you're saying she was sincere, so. That was my impression, certainly. Yeah. I had a friend like that growing up. I wouldn't speak much about it, but just so to relate to you, I know exactly what you mean. You go to a friend's house and you're just sort of in the way.

Yeah. And they're nice to you. Oh, hi. I had a best friend's mom who just took an interest in me and I loved her for it. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I grew up again, so my parents were divorced and that was very, very painful for me. And it was very easy for me to be envious of my friends who seemed to have like a good family life. And there were lots of friends that I had where I was envious of that.

And I learned that it was kind of superficial actually. Later on I found out that, you know, either their parents did split up or, you know, things weren't as great as it appeared, but it was very easy for me to just want to be in those kinds of environments. And so I would often not be home because I was at a friend's house because I just like that atmosphere, you know? And so anyways, that that's what this atmosphere was like. And so as time went on, eventually the particular girlfriend I had at the time, we broke up and she went and found her next new best friend. But I, I continued to take an interest in this, this sort of group prayer meeting and kept on going.

What was it about it? Well, I couldn't say it was. Friendship or? Two degree friendship, two degree philosophical, but also this, it was that moment in my life when I was taking this sort of introspective look at myself and trying to feel like, what, what do I need to start asking these kinds of big questions? And this was prompting me in that direction and offering that as an invitation at the least. So I remember once after going to the Bible study, I came home afterwards and it was, it was kind of late, but nobody was home at my house.

And so the lights were all off. I came into the house. And before turning on any lights, I, for whatever reason, I just said, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to address this question. The, is today the day that I need to become a good person, right? And so I sat down on the couch and I said, God, I just put my, the, classical distress signal out to God and said, like, if you exist, could you, could you reveal yourself to me in some way that will make sense to me, that will be meaningful for me? And it's hard to explain it to other people because I can't say that there was like, there wasn't a miracle, there weren't flickering lights or, um, or, or manifestations or anything like that. Um, there, but there was a very, uh, very, very, blissed sense of the presence of God, just sort of wash over me. And it, I'm, it's hard to remember

it accurately, but I, at the time, I was very sure it was physical, like a physical presence, sort of like on my shoulders from behind. And it was very convincing for me. And so I said, okay, well, so you exist. And part of the transaction that I had, I had smuggled into that prayer was that if you do exist, I'll devote myself to knowing you and following you and trying to be a good person. So from then on, that's, that was my commitment. But I didn't know what that looked like. I didn't, I didn't know what particular religion, you know, because it had come in the context of Christianity. I was like, okay, that seems like an obvious place to go. And I'm, you know, a descendant of Western civilization. So that seems like the lowest hanging fruit. So, so why don't we explore that? And so that's the first thing I did. I started reading the Bible. and then committing myself to going to a church, but I didn't know where to go. And so I was trying different churches out at the time. What do you say against the claim that all this talk of God? God is just this idea which we put on like a pair of spectacles to try to make sense of the chaos of reality.

And it was emotionally comforting for you to come up with a story to sort of placate your fears and the fear that you were being less than moral or something. And let's say God didn't exist, then, okay, so that's a story that would still click, right? It would be, it would work. The story would still work. So why not just say that was the case? And I'll concede that that's possible. I mean, I don't think that a personal anecdotal experience is really proof that the experience was valid necessarily, right?

I do know that, you know, I was looking for something authentic at the time and I continued to look for something authentic. So like I said, the first thing I did was start to read the Bible. And because, again, the deal was I'm going to follow you. I'm going to devote myself to wanting to know you. And simultaneously, well, it's a good fit because I need some direction in my life, right? I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't raised with a strong ethical system to buttress my behavior or my trajectory in life. So yeah, I could use that. And this is all. it's all converging in this moment, so so let's explore that. But the problem would have been if that was just sort of a, you know, a psychological experience that I'd stirred myself into, the subsequent experiences that I went on to, to have that confirmed and to try and live my life according to these sort of moral standards. If they hadn't benefited me in the way that I, that I needed, then I probably would have given up at a certain point.

Yeah. And of course, the problem with these sort of psychological attacks are essentially, as you know, because you and I were devotees of William and Craig back in the day, is that they commit the, the, the,

sorry, genetic fallacy. Yeah. Because the same, of course, could be said about the person who decided God didn't exist, you know? Well,

isn't it possibly because you were raised on a vegan diet? Yeah. And your brain hasn't developed sufficiently to interpret metaphysical arguments. Right. That's supposed to be funny. But, you know, that kind of idea. Yeah.

And it's almost like unanswerable in a way. Sure. Well, and this is a big problem in the modern age. C.S. Lewis called it bulverism as sort of a variation of that, where instead of dealing with the person's claims and if there's arguments that support those claims, you instead describe certain motives to them and then dismiss whatever conclusions or claims or arguments that they make a result. I mean, this gets us back to earlier what we were saying.

I mean, online. today, even in Catholic YouTube circles and more broadly Christian and conservative circles, how many times do you see the accusation of liar? He's lying to you. They're lying to you. He's a liar. Yeah. Or he's a grifter. Or he, what else? I mean, these are all about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the online space, if we want to call it that, it, it promotes rash judgment and rash reaction, right? And so, um, this is, this is the tendency to draw conclusions and act upon those conclusions in this case, you know, accusing somebody of moral failures based on very limited evidence, right? So let's say, let's say I didn't know you and I said, oh, Matt's joining the

daily wire. It's, he's sold out. He's doing it for the money, right? Yeah. Um, that's a possible conclusion, but it's not the only possible conclusion. And without knowing you personally, without knowing your motives, without knowing what led up to that moment, what grounds do I have to make those kinds of accusations, right? And it's a very, it's a grave sin to make those kinds of rash judgments, especially when they lead to accusations of immorality and hurtful conduct. So, yeah, it's unfortunate that that's the common mode of discourse today. It's like how it appeals to our seven deadly sins, the internet. I mean, you look down the list of the seven deadly sins, and that's what, That's what goes viral. That's why we go to the things that we go to.

No, that's right, because even if, to use your example, even if I'm doing it solely for the money and don't care about the Catholic faith, let's say that's true, you're not actually in an epistemic position to know that. Absolutely. So. Yeah. And what would lead you to make a conclusion from so little information, right? I mean, we have to admit that that's pride acting up. We're so impressed with our ability to connect the dots when there's so little information available that we're going to jump to the conclusion that's available to us. And then, of course, it gets rewarded in the algorithm and the interactions that come along with that.

Yeah, it is. I mean, I've been speaking about this lately because I've seen it in my own life. Like, I went to confession for speaking out against a particular Catholic on a particular show I did years ago. And it just came out on my mouth. I just said something really critical. And when I said, I said it's like, I shouldn't I said that. But, you know, like, as I said to myself,

you shouldn't have done that. Then the prideful bit went, no, that was actually quite brave what you just did. You know, so I was like, and then I, and then after getting some space from it, going to confession and repenting of that. And I, I struggle with this, right? Because I don't, and I don't think you would either say that we shouldn't be commenting on public things that people are saying publicly. Yeah.

Or even that it's never right to publicly condemn. things that people say publicly. Yeah. But I just find it's really dangerous territory. It reminds me of our, you know, sometimes we rationalize our sinful anger by appealing to our blessed Lord's righteous anger in the temple, right? Yes. We go, well, you know, our Lord.

And so I'm just like him. Yeah. And I think likewise, we can appeal to those, the ways in which we can charitably and fraternally, even publicly correct. to justify the ways we do it that isn't actually terrible. Exactly. Well, and that's the key thing is that if we're, if we're going to be in the habit of doing that,

we have to be willing to do it to ourselves, first and foremost, right? So if there are moral failings in our own lives and there likely are, we should be as quick to condemn those, not necessarily publicly, but as quick to show whatever moral outrage is appropriate under those circumstances, I think. But like you say, instead, we're usually directing it elsewhere because that satisfies the ego in the process. Yeah. So did your friends, was there like a dramatic change in your life that shocked your friends at this point?

Yeah. Yeah. At least the intentional changes that took place was things like, you know, I wasn't going to go to the bar and drink anymore. What year was this? Do you remember? Because mine was in 2000. That was my conversion moment. Yeah. So it would have been, yeah, 2000, 2001 over the course of that year. Yeah. So beautiful that we're having these experiences on the other side of the world. Yeah. And I alienated my friends, I think. I did too. Yeah. And I think partly it was because how I lived was a they felt accused by. Right. And it was also because I was a bit of a jerk and way too enthusiastic and not at all prudent and how I expressed this newfound faith to them. And probably was really judgmental at certain times in a negative way. Yeah, I didn't immediately go into the mode of like proselytism. Yeah. I don't think. But I do think that a lot of my friends felt accused. One of the things I would still do was was go to the the bar or the club with them, but I'd be like the designated driver, which is not fun. And of course,

I'm going to sit there sulking with my soda water at the bar while they act like idiots, right? And they're, you know, they come up and try to have fun with me, but I'm just not a good sport about it because I'm not having fun, right? It's not fun being the only sober person in the room. No. So I think, yeah, they would feel like that. No, doesn't necessarily set a terrific example. No, exactly. Yeah, that's true. So, yeah, I think that they did feel accused by it. And, um, It wasn't until I started, I found myself on the receiving end of criticism, especially intellectual criticism for having adopted the faith. And this is the, this is the era of the new atheism, right?

And so a lot of people are armed with very sort of cheap but easily accessible arguments against faith in Christianity. Extraordinary. Good talking points. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so there were more than a few times where I found myself cornered by people saying like, how could you believe in God when this or how can you believe in the church when this? Not that I was really part of a particular church at the time, but, you know, that factored into it.

And I wasn't prepared to answer those questions. So the, and I was embarrassed by that too. So you're dealing with, yeah, because the new atheism took off in like 2004 or thereabouts, right? Yes, yeah. So earlier than that, you're encountering? Well, Canada is just a very atheistic section. place. And so maybe the talking points of say Richard Dawkins weren't there, but it also came internally from from certain people who were more fluent in philosophy, especially postmodern

philosophy. Like I might, well, we'll just say an acquaintance, uh, was very influenced by Nietzsche at the time. And actually there, they were somebody who maybe kind of had a faith growing up, but really took a strong turn away from that at this point in their lives. And so that, I remember at a birthday party, which was out at like a bar, setting. I arrived late, but everybody had been thoroughly into the drinks at that point. And as soon as I showed up, you know, the inhibitions were gone and just laid into me with all these arguments that I was just sort of like, oh, okay. And there was a crowd. There was like a circle. Oh, man. Was he coherent? Like he was coherent enough. He was drinking,

but he was making particular arguments that I couldn't have. Yeah, exactly. Like what? Free will. I remember being one. So it was it was the old argument that if God is all powerful then nothing that happens can happen apart from his will so therefore how can how can God not be blamed for all the evil

in the world including your own right and I was like that's a good question I don't know I think I did try to come up with answers but they were bad and I knew it and so at that point I was like am I even right? I mean maybe

I need to double check this stuff And so that's what drove me into intellectual reading, starting with C.S. Lewis. I had sort of vaguely heard about him. Maybe someone had suggested to me, I don't really remember. But I read mere Christianity for the first time. And that was my first attempted reading anything philosophical, right? And I was just blown away by it.

I was like, first of all, I found it so illuminating. And also it had awakened an aptitude that I didn't know I had. And also a confidence that the next time, Someone comes at me with all these arguments. I am going to embarrass them in front of all their friends. And then I got to the chapter on Pride in mere Christianity. And I was like, oh, okay, yeah, maybe I'm going about this the wrong way. Because I was trying to, at that point, use the intellectual tradition of the faith as armor for my ego.

And he was saying, yeah, that's the worst sin, actually. So back away from that. Which was nice. I was reading the screwchap letters at the same time, which had a whole chapter on how to tempt them into pride. And so as two companions, I thought, okay, yeah, I need to back away from that. So C.S. Lewis became my immersion at that point. And I just, I consumed everything that I could by him.

And then at the same time, I was trying to resolve the question of the church, right? Like I was going to these various churches. I was reading the Bible as well and trying to make sense of what it said and also reconcile it with what different churches were claiming it said. Because my big motivation at that point was, okay, I'm a Christian, how do I live this life?

Because I don't know how to do it. I don't have any examples. It wasn't raised this way. And over here, you're saying that all I have to do is X, Y, and Z. Over here, you're saying all I have to do is A, B, and C. You don't agree with each other. Both of you seem to disagree with the Bible, but again, I'm not an expert on the Bible. So what's the issue here?

And so simultaneously, I started trying to resolve the question of, like, what church do I go to? And to make that long story shorter, I eventually concluded that it was the Catholic Church against my, my inclinations to join like the evangelical megachurch, which had a young adult service that, you know, there's about a thousand young adults going to this, which something, again, in Canada was just unheard of. I had never seen anything like that. And I remember thinking, like, okay, these people seem normalish. You know, praise and worship, that's not really my style of music. I was into hard, heavy metal and stuff like that. But, But at least there's a guitar and percussion that's somewhat relatable compared to sort of like the piano teacher and the breaking bread hymnals at the Catholic church and the average age being at least 50.

And just thinking like, oh, I hope this isn't the right one. But it was. So, yeah. So I entered into RCAA eventually. Wow. Was that through, were you guided by other serious-minded Catholics? Well, uh, that you knew that you would know. No. No. No, it was, it was just through reading. So actually, um, one of the, the books I did get my hands on, uh, was Patrick Madrid's, uh, or they're called Surprise by Truth. Yes, yes. That series. Yeah. And they're just the accounts of various converts that he'd collected from that age of, of the wave of those converts, including him. Oh, no, he's not a convert himself. I don't think. Okay. Um, but like Jimmy Aiken was, was, was in that particular book. I think Tim Staples, my, might have been in one of them.

And then Scott Hahn was of course also known well. And in fact, once I had gone into RCIA, somehow Scott Hahn came up in one of the classes, or that I had been reading him. And the leader of the class was a boomer-aged woman who said something like, oh, you like him? And I was like, well, yeah, yeah, he's teaching me all about the faith

and about why he became Catholic. and she goes, oh, he strikes me as someone who's trying too much to be like St. Paul. And I was like, isn't that good? I imitate me as I imitate the Lord. Exactly. Yes, yes. You're accusing him of that? Right. So I remember being very confused by that exchange.

And then, of course, later realizing that there are these sort of currents and divisions within the church, that to be enthusiastic about your faith and to be evangelistic isn't really admired in every circle. So at first I just kind of wrote that off like, I'm drinking from a fire hydrant right now. I can't really figure out what your deal is in the faith. But yes, I do like Scott Hahn. And so that's the kind of stuff I was leading that eventually led me to the church. This episode is sponsored by Hello. Hello is the number one Catholic prayer and meditation app built to help you find real peace and grow closer to God in the middle of this busy and distracted world.

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to connect and grow together in faith. Marriage has obviously just such a beautiful gift. I've been married 20 years this year. Glory to Jesus Christ. So download the Catholic Match app or head over to Catholicmatch.com today and find your forever. Again, that's Catholicmatch.com. So you and I grew up before the internet. We interacted with human beings before the internet. When during that blessed time, we searched for the truth. You know, you may have been reading the great thinkers who were atheists or otherwise, but, you know, probably what you were doing was sparring with Jeff, the Baptist pastor, and the village atheist. And if you could get the best of them, you thought, all right, like, I have found it.

And I, all right. So my question for you is, like, how do you maintain a level of confidence in your position? How can anybody maintain a level of confidence in their position? When we all know that there's someone on YouTube or chat GPT or that can definitely argue you under the table. Definitely. Right? And, and, you know, like back before the internet, we all probably knew in theory that was possible, but we didn't encounter it. It wasn't like three seconds of searching away. Right. Right. So, I mean, it's a question, it's a human question. It's not just a question for the Christian. It's a question for the atheist, for the Muslim or

whoever. Yeah. How does one maintain their faith with sufficient confidence? Right. While understanding that there are people who are smarter than him out there, that could make him look like an idiot in a bar surrounded by his friends. Right. That's a really important insight, I think. And it speaks to the, like, this is something that frustrates me a little bit about people who, who maintain a merely intellectual position. Or that's the facade that they put up there and they say, you know, until somebody can give me the evidence, as if a particular conclusion or an argument that exceeds your own is going to make you change. change your whole life. It's just not. Because the reality is there is somebody who, like you say, could destroy you in an argument. And or there's, there's just people who are speaking at a level

that is beyond your comprehension, right? So if you're operating here and your requirement to be convinced is right here at this level, well, we could, we could bring in somebody at this level who's going to talk way above your head and you're not going to understand anything he says. And you're likely, if you're an arrogant person, think, oh, that's just jargon, right? Or, you're going to or word salad. You know, that's something that I hear a lot on my channel all the time from people. And so you could be dismissive of it.

So how do you know if that's you that your own position and your conclusions are strong, right? And I think that it has to go from the abstract and the theoretical to the incarnate and the lived experience, which is what Christianity, especially Catholicism,

insists that you do. This is Pascal's exact, advice, right? Absolutely. So, so you, you have to go from where I was, which was, you know, okay, I think this is true. I have a personal sort of maybe psychological, maybe spiritual experience that seems to suggest it's true. It seemed to happen at a very, a moment when I was asking for it. Okay, so now I'm going to go out and I'm going to live it and see, does my life get substantially worse? Does it get better? Does it stay the same? In my case, it got substantially better and not just in terms of like my own ability to to achieve certain kinds of success or the

improvement of my relationships or just the trajectory of my life which did immediately start to improve. I was coming from a place of sort of failure and and sort of lethargy, moral lethargy, to finding all kinds of motives to go out and to go to college and get accepted and to have a successful academic career in terms of what I studied at the time to immediately moving into a career and having success there to finding relationships that were very promising and very encouraging. It's difficult for me to talk about this, but in my family, like mental illness is a big problem in my family. To the point where I've had family members take me aside, especially after I got married and started having kids and say, you need to get on antidepressants

because you're going to have a breakdown. Everybody in our family, has a breakdown at some point. And if you don't get on medication now, it's going to happen to you at a point where the consequences are going to be grave because you now have a home, you have a child, you have a wife who all depend on you. So don't wait for it to just happen. And I remember at the time thinking, well, I don't know a lot about mental illness, but I'm not depressed as I understand it. And I, for as long as I've been on the trajectory that I'm on, I seem to be moving away from those kinds of inclinations and broclivities.

So I'm okay. I'm not going to do that. And I know what's crazy is I know that, like our family doctor would have written that prescription for sure. So I could have, you know, as just sort of an insurance policy, but I didn't. And that seems to be kind of

a rare, um, a rare case in my family where someone just seems to be doing fine. Um, in spite of like the many pressures, like I have eight kids. I, I,

I'm self-employed. Uh, I have a public profile now. Um, there's a lot of stresses, stresses there that the person I was prior to my conversion would have been destroyed by that, those kinds of pressures and really never would have found himself in the position

where he, uh, had those kinds of, uh, people and responsibilities depending on him, right? Um, so to know the kind of person I am without faith and the kind of person that I am with faith, hands down, choose, I'm choosing the one, uh, the person who has faith because I know what it's done for me in my own life.

That's purely anecdotal. That's not an argument for why you should believe in God, but it's a challenge. It's a dare at the very least, uh, to, to try it out and to, to see if your life is measurably improved by it. Can I push back? just to get your response. I mean, someone might say, well, of course your life's better believing in some old good father watching over you and every negative thing that happens to you. Maybe even something serious like a child gets seriously injured, you can just chalk that up to God's providence. So yeah,

and none of it's true, by the way. God doesn't exist. He's not providential. But you're believing something that of course would make you happy. Right. And, you know, like good on you, I guess. Right. But why not just choose that idea that you're just, you've built, you're, you've accepted a story that's false, but of course the story makes you happy and gives you warm fuzzies. Yeah. Well, so the person I was prior to my conversion was a person stuck in his life. Didn't have open doors or open highways ahead of him, didn't know how to pursue those or create them or get out of the hole that he was in, basically, right? And so, yeah, maybe he could have adopted faith that would console him in his hole that would have been psychologically pleasing

if such a thing were the case. But that's not what happened to me. I immediately found myself pulled out of the hole and sent off in a trajectory that I know, I know was not available to me before because I didn't know how to live life well. So it's not just merely that I have these sensations of happiness that occur to me as often as I find myself in a situation of distress. It's that my life has achieved certain measures of success or just the experiences of my life that are full of teleology. Like they're full of purpose and gratification,

even when tragedy strikes. And frankly, there's a lot more at risk now than there was back then. All I had at risk at that time was just my own psychological stability. Now I have children, I have a job, I have a home, I have my beautiful wife, I have an incredible community of friends, right?

That, you know, what our Lord says that whatever you trade, will be given to you a hundredfold in terms of like friendships and relationships and, um, and, and sort of blessedness.

Um, that really is true. Immediately after my conversion, I lost all my friends. Um, it felt very destitute in many respects. Um, but I also felt just,

I don't know, at peace because I had gained the Lord. And then he added upon it, like community and understanding and knowledge and, um, you know, again, this prompting to, to read. I didn't read books growing up. Are you kidding me?

I was out, I was playing my guitar or I was in a band or I was skateboarding or doing things like that or playing video games if I was, you know, taking a moment of respite. But, but it's Christianity that said, hey, yeah, you should learn something, right? Learn, explore what some of the great thinkers have said about the big questions in life. And in Christianity didn't say, ignore people from other traditions or other backgrounds. It said, no, read Plato, read Aristotle, read some of the modern philosophers, right? Like, read them all, understand it and make sense of it, and then have it illuminated by faith.

So, yeah, I wouldn't, I don't buy that it's just sort of an opiate that I take when I'm, to, to ignore the very distressing reality of my life. Yeah, yeah, you're more in touch with it. I mean, we're getting dangerously close to this idea of properly basic beliefs, right? Which I think is the only way out of an infinite regress of beliefs that you would have to hold in order to hold anything, right? Like anything you believe, you believe because of something. And at some point, you just believe because of your immediate experience. Sure, sure. And I think that's a good enough reason to go on believing in God unless you have significant evidence to the contrary.

but honestly, even in an atheistic world, even if you did, I don't think you could successfully hold to belief in God if you were given, what would you say, defeaters to that belief? I don't think you could do that and remain rational. No. But I do think that if you're in a position, I remember how to fella come up to me in Dublin

because he watched my show and he's like, I just, I want to believe. I just, I'm like, we'd just do it. Right. Just do it. Right. It's like, well, what if I'm wrong? I'm like, I don't know, who cares? Yeah, yeah. Like, you'll figure that out along the way, but just start acting.

Absolutely. I know people who have done that. I know people who I met at certain points in their journey through the church who, you know, once I started to talk to them about, you know, our shared faith as a point of bonding, discovered that, you know, they're not that sure. They have doubts, but they're living it. Yeah. And seen how those people have done so throughout their lives and see that supernatural

faith and confidence really growing them through that experience. I think part of the problem is, and I'm going to talk to an epistemologist here in a few weeks, I'm really pumped about it. Yeah. I think it's because we have this standard for faith that we don't have for literally anything else in our life. You know, like if someone would oppress you on whether or not Matt Frat existed. Right. Like at some point, you'd be like, okay, I don't know, but it just, it's, yes, I know, but I don't, I guess, maybe. Yeah. So it's kind of weird, I think, to kind of hold our faith to that level when we don't hold it to anything else. Absolutely. That makes sense? Yeah. Yeah. So it's like just because you might eventually be not sure if I'm who I said I was doesn't mean you're irrational

right to accept who I say that I am. Right. Yeah. Well, and if you look at the modern philosophers too, I mean, they've they've kind of seemingly broken off into kind of two horns of let's say modernism as sort of a movement between like empiricism, which is this idea that only we, we're what can be sensed and measured is real or correlates to the truth and rationalism, which is like only what appears in my mind is what's true, basically, right? And so, yeah, does Matt Frat exist or is that just sensations in my mind that I happen to be experiencing? Whereas the Catholic tradition says that truth is the relationship between mind and the objects that the mind perceives, right? And so

you know, in this, in this modern context, it's very easy to to drift off into these sort of one of those two horns, which actually kind of converge in a strange way, because empiricism, if it says that only what can be sensed is true, it then very easily migrates into, well, the sense, sensations are just what's occurring to me in my head anyways, right? Yeah. So it sort of becomes a kind of rationalism at the same time. And so if you were to press anybody on, on, on, what they actually know for sure,

to the point of getting down to like the self-evident truths, which can't be proven, who can defend themselves against that, that degree of skepticism? It's, it's, it's pretty much impossible. And it's easy to be a skeptic. I mean, it seems impressive

for people who aren't disciplined or exposed to... It's almost like, it's easy to be a skeptic for the same reason it's easy to be a cynic. Sure. You just give up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you look, and nothing can disappoint you. Nothing can disappoint you. Like if I'm like everything's going to hell. Right. Country's stupid and everything's stupid. Mm-hmm. And any reason you give me to think that things aren't as stupid as I say that they are.

Yeah. I get to talk to you like you're naive. Right. And then when there's evidence that shows that I'm right, I get to revel in that. Yeah. And there's something like that, I think. Yeah. But you never have to defend your own position.

You can always doubt even the self-evident axioms that everything is sort of built upon. which of course nobody can improve or live by right no one can sure yeah yeah like you want to deny the law of non-contradiction right try to live like that exactly well of course nobody does yeah yeah yeah um i want to ask you about an ex by the way i really love your videos Brian they're so well thought out and you know it's funny because it's like an extension of when you and i used to just chat on the phone like 18 years ago i love talking to Brian because you see i love the way you think. But you put up a video recently. It was so good. I shared, told everyone about it. And it looks like it's one of your biggest videos now. And it has to do with modesty. And I would love

to talk to you about this. Because, you know, you were able to address this hot button issue that I think a well, a good faith woman, right, would look at it and go, that's fair. Like, you didn't unnecessarily turn them off. You're not abrasive. Can you lay out, I mean, you remember, what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It has become my biggest video, interestingly enough, which is always interesting because it's like, if you know ahead of time which videos are actually going to be that big, you might treat them somewhat differently or be a little more cautious with it. But so this one's out there. And yeah, I guess it starts with, um, recognizing the fact that, for me, it comes down to intimacy.

So there are certain aspects of ourselves that we share with other people, right? And certain things that we withhold from certainly strangers at the very least, right? Because people are capable of hurting us at the end of the day, right? So if I share, if I'm more vulnerable with certain people who haven't earned that trust, then I'm exposing myself to, to power that I'm giving them that could be used against me, right? This is why sexual intimacy can be such a dangerous thing, right? Because you're very, very vulnerable in those moments, right? You're revealing things of yourself, how you perform or what your body looks like completely, completely. unclothed, which are things that, you know, if someone were to go and announce that to other people,

it would be mortifying, it would be extremely embarrassing, right? And so you need to observe the fact that intimacy, there are degrees of intimacy that allow for certain measures of yourself to be exposed to other people. And it should correlate directly to how much someone has earned that trust, right? But with clothing, and especially revealing clothing, we've adopted this idea that even perfect strangers should be, should be able to have as much knowledge about our bodies as possible, which, you know, frankly, isn't good for them. That's a temptation for them. And it's not really good for us either because it makes us far too self-aware, far too self-conscious. And at the same time, it exposes us to things like ridicule, for example, which happens all the time with celebrities,

right, where, you know, commentators will ridicule them for things about their body, which would never happen if they hadn't exposed their bodies in the first place, right? The other thing that's really interesting about this to me as well is that it's sort of like that this phenomenon with the gym, like the gym influencers, the fitness influencers, right, who set up cameras and make this whole spectacle of their workout, but then we'll also use any opportunity to catch somebody watching them in the camera, right? Or look back at footage and post about this and say, oh, you see that creep who's looking at me? It's like, well, you've got a tripod and probably a ring light or something like that. And you've carved

out this whole portion of the gym all for yourself. And you're probably wearing revealing clothing for the performance. I didn't even know if this was a thing. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's totally a thing. Women doing this. Women doing this. Yeah, I don't know, probably men do it too. I try, but no one was looking. Exactly. So women doing this and then being outraged that some guy glanced in their direction. And it's like, the whole point of what you're doing is for people to watch you. The camera is to capture that moment so that you can amplify the opportunity for people to watch you. And yet you're, you're feigning outrage that someone watched you. Like, it just doesn't make any sense. So there's this incoherence in the way that people embrace this,

this sort of immodesty and what it seems to be either doing to them, either they're feigning this outrage, or it's actually them struggling and wrestling with the incoherence of it. Because at the end of the day, like this happened to me at the airport yesterday as I was arriving here, walking in a crowd and there was two women wearing yoga pants in front of me. And they were, you know, we've got all our suitcases. So they're taking up enough room that I can't get past them. And I'm just walking. And as somebody who doesn't want to stare at people's posteriors, you know, things that are private, I'm doing this, right? But I also need to watch where I'm going. I've got a case to manage and I find myself in a position where I my freedom, my visual freedom is impaired

at that point because I don't want to stare because I don't, I'm trying to observe self-control, right? And that's always the accusation that gets thrown back at especially men whenever they address this issue. It's like just because you can't control yourself doesn't mean you should be accusing women. And it's like the men who can't control themselves aren't complaining because they're enjoying the show, right? It's the people who are, who, who, are governing themselves, who are looking at every which direction and finding that, you know, I can't, I can't even enjoy, you know, a walk in the park or in the airport or wherever I have to go without feeling somewhat distressed by the fact that I have to be very careful about where I

look right now. But imagine a scenario where, say I walked up to those ladies and just said, hey, by the way, I really enjoyed the view while we were here just walking together. And I hope you enjoy your flight and off you go. I think most women with any sort of, sort of self-respect would go, that was offensive, right? That was rude. But if I said, hey, I just wanted to say, I really love your shoes. Like, um, my wife's been looking for shoes like that. Do you mind tell me where you got those? She'd be like, unless she thought I was like hitting on her. Right. She'd probably be like, oh yeah, sure, here you go. And, and not really be offended by that. Or if you knew them a little bit more, you might even comment on their hair.

For sure. Love your hair cut. Absolutely. Where do you get your haircut? And, and, you know, maybe I'll recommend that to my wife or something like that. So what's the difference? Why, why one, being so extravagantly offensive? Yeah. And misogynistic and anything else you could accuse. And the other being fairly benign and inconsequential. It's because in the case where if I, if I compliment them, complimented them on their

posturiers, it's because they know that's private. Yeah. You as a stranger aren't supposed to be staring there. Ha. So, okay. if you can admit that, why don't you also simultaneously admit that you should be protecting your own privacy

with the way that you dress? Yes. Right? You should be, it's not, it is my responsibility to observe your privacy and respect your dignity, but it's also your responsibility to protect your privacy similarly.

Right? Like if I leave my phone unlocked out in public, so that someone could open it up and start, you know, accessing my, my bank account and my social media and all these kinds of things. I mean, yeah, they shouldn't do that. But simultaneously, it's pretty reckless for me to just leave it lying around

where anybody could access it. So it's not merely your responsibility. I mean, yeah, you could be wearing a modest outfit and a man could act inappropriately towards you. And that's wrong. But simultaneously, you know, you need to be doing whatever you can to protect your own privacy and dignity as well and to observe that dignity.

And then ultimately at the end of the day, we as Christians and Catholics, Just need to admit, like, up until a decade ago, modesty has always been understood as a virtue. It just is. And the church teaches it explicitly. So even if you don't agree with my argument, I hope you'll agree that the church has some wisdom to bear on this and that we should try to understand this a little bit better. I think what's different, though, is it seems like the standards of what we consider modest a slipping. I mean, that's true. But morality isn't, I live in Florida.

Yeah. We go to the beach. If some Sheila is wearing not a thong, I'm like, good for her. Like that's how bad things are. I know, I know. And I mean, my wife and I have talked about this a lot because our own understanding of this has progressed quite a bit. And, you know, for me, my own progression in how I dress has less to do with showing off my body as much as it does. Covering it for deal off.

Well, and embracing kind of like a dignity rather than sort of dressing in a slovenly way or an excessively casual way, right? But for her, it has had a lot to do with modesty. So what is modesty? Because if you would address in a three-piece suit at a soup kitchen, that would be immodest in some sense, wouldn't it? Yeah, I mean, it could be. So it correlates to humility, which is sort of an appropriate understanding of, of yourself and conducting yourself appropriately, given the context, I would say.

So not being excessively hard on yourself or condescending towards yourself, but not also having a sort of flated sense of yourself. So in terms of modesty, I would say, it's how you comport yourself, especially in dress, to the occasion. And so, yeah, addressing in an opulent way isn't really modest, but also in an excessively revealing way,

or sort of a slovenly way. You might dress in a three-piece suit in a specific situation. It would be entirely modest and appropriate. But that's important to point out, right? It doesn't just pertain to sexuality. It has to be humility and dress. Definitely. Well, and I know some people who dress literally in three-piece,

I don't know if suits might be generous, but they're wearing a jacket and a vest and a tie and a colored shirt all the time. And, but there's sort of like this casual sort of self-forgetfulness about it. that it's just really authentic and quite charming, actually. They're not showing off. And a lot of the time, you know, some of the people I can think of,

you can tell that they're secondhand suits a lot of the time. But there's just sort of this appreciation for how they want to elevate culture and witness that way to the dignity that exists within our created nature. So, yeah. Yeah, I know me and Kwasniewski talked about this. Okay. I don't know if you saw that, I think it was a second episode we did. I saw less of that one, but yeah.

I talked about the cynicism of accusing people of LARPING. Right. Now, we all agree that LARPING is possible. But when someone is just, you know, grew up in a slovenly culture and is just trying to do their best to elevate themselves. And then you say, oh, what do you think you're friggin from 18th century England with your pocket watch, you know? Absolutely. It's like, well, I mean, we imitate things that we want to be like. For sure.

This gets us into your other excellent video about, Thanks. Are you just lopping as a tread? Right. Because this has to do with what we're talking about, with dress. Yeah, yeah. I would also say, too, that, like, those kinds of pejoratives and accusations often come from, like, grifter, for example, right?

I don't want to get sidetracked here too much. But, like, the people who prominently use that phrase grifter are usually in a position where they have an audience themselves to gain the attention for the accusation, right? But not such a prominent position that they could themselves maybe be accused of being a So they haven't sold out. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

But it's like, as often as not, I think the people who use those kinds of accusations, it comes from a place of jealousy, right? I think so. So if you are an excessively casual person yourself and you see somebody who, who is dressed respectfully and you say, oh, like, who do you think you are? Like, what are you an aristocrat, right? Like, or are you larping? Um, I think that that's probably, I, if that's something that you've done,

yourself. I would want to self-examine yourself or suggest that you do and just say, it's that coming from a place of envy or malicious jealousy. But also recognize that it's not always the case. There's some qualifications to this, but as often as not, that's the only way to grow in virtue or to grow in self-improvement is to recognize some person or some mode of being or some kind of identity or, I don't know, like aspect of subculture that you really admire and then aim for it. Imitate it if you can. Like this is what Aristotle actually says about virtue is that find somebody who you really

admire who embodies the virtues that you seek for yourself, that you recognize you're lacking, and then aim to become that person, spend time with them, figure out what makes them tick, let them rub off on you. Ultimately, as Christian says what we're doing with the life of grace, we're exposing ourselves to the greatest one and spending time in his company and hoping that like what CS Lewis calls that good infection will just rub off on us and his goodness will become ours

and will be kind of divinized and elevated by it, right? But we do this in other areas of our lives, right? Like take sports, for example, right? Like what is every kid? So I'll use Canada. So every kid who's into hockey, which is most kids, is outside in front of his house you know, with a tennis ball and a hockey stick

and sort of this cheap net hockey net that he's got that sort of frayed and falling apart. But he's out there shooting balls or maybe plastic pucks imagining that he is, you know, Sidney Crosby or Connor McDavid or Wayne Gretzky if you're from, you know, our era. And he's not. He's terrible at it. You know, he's nowhere near that level and probably never will be. But if he has any hope of improving, that's how you do it. You imitate the ones who are great at it.

I was really beginning to skateboarding, right? And so skater culture has, I don't know if they still do, but back then they had the word poser as a pejorative. And that was like the most terrifying thing. If someone could credibly accuse you of being a poser, it's just devastating to your identity as a skater, right? But the problem is, is that if you ever want to become a good skateboarder, you have to traverse this whole period of time in which you suck at it.

And skateboarding is really hard to get good at. This episode is sponsored by the St. Paul Centre. We Catholics have a million Lent programs. It's great that they help us grow closer to the Lord throughout the Lenton season. But what do we do throughout the 50 days of the Easter season? Well, like the women disciples of Matthew 288, we're called to announce the joyful news of the Lord's resurrection and to accompany others on their journey with the risen Lord. This is a great point, isn't it? On land we get super serious, then the Easter season comes and we're like, okay, well, I'll have a bit of chocolate and that's about it. But no, this Easter season, how do you walk alongside others, confident that together you are

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by joining the Easter accompaniment challenge. Join the challenge by visiting St. Paulscentre.com and becoming a member today. You know, I just thought the difference between Posa and Lapa, as you said that, I thought they're the same thing, but I don't think they are. I think Lapa is the, it's the accusation that you're a part of something that you're not, or you're trying to be a part of saying that you're not, but I'm not either. Whereas if I call you a poser, what I'm saying is you're not one of us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but that could come from the gallery as well, in my experience. So there was lots of, especially girls, if a girl called you a poser, I was like, oh, oh, no. Did that happen? Tell us about that guy who slowed down to what you do

a kickflip. Okay. So, so I grew up in a neighborhood of a boy's my own age. And I would say I was the run to the litter for the most part. They all played hockey. I wasn't allowed to play hockey. And, you know, I don't want to fault my parents too much on this because I wouldn't, I, my boys have asked me to play hockey and I won't enroll them because in Canada, it's, it's full-time job. A massive time commitment.

And in the, in the younger leagues, rink time is, is so scarce that you have to, like, book practices at like 4 a.m. and things like that. And so my parents were like, no, that's unreasonable, right? It's like, oh, okay. So they were all good at certain sports. that I was never enrolled in. But, you know, I would try to keep up and do the things that they were doing.

And one of the dads who, he was one of the more sort of like prominent, respectful dads in the neighborhood. And we would often be up playing street hockey or whatever. And sometimes I'd go grab my skateboard and practice that a little bit in between, you know, shifts or whatever. And he would always come home and watch the kids playing hockey

and sort of like, oh, yeah, good slap shot. I see you're working on that or whatever. And then he saw me skateboarding. And skateboarding is not a respectful thing to do among jock culture, certainly, which is kind of what he was sort of... That's what made it cool, though. Well, sure, if you're a rebel, right?

But here I was trying to, like, straddle both sides of that culture, right? Because I did love sports growing up, and a lot of my friends were jocks, but I also loved skateboarding, and it was sort of uniquely my own thing. And so this sort of patriarch of the jocks was driving by, coming home from work,

and he rolls down his window, and he goes, hey, can you do anything on that? Right? In a very sort of condescending way. And I was like, okay, this is my moment to prove myself, right? And so I did a kickflip and I landed it. And, you know, if you've never seen a kickflip before, right, it's hard enough to imagine how a board with wheels on it can even be used as a device for traveling,

let alone for flipping and landing on. Like, that seems like somewhat supernatural, right? And so that's the kind of reaction he had. He just sort of went, do that again, right? And so then I did. But this time I escalated it and did like a burial kickflips or the board turns and and flips at the same time. And I landed that too. And he just sort of went, okay. He like rolled up his window and just sort of drove away. And my friends were all there and they were kind of watching

and they were like, okay, cool. Must have been a good moment. Well, for me, yeah. I mean, as a, what would I would have been like 11 or 12 and I thought, okay, from now on, no one can call me a poser, right? But that's because I went through this whole period of being very vulnerable to that accusation because I wasn't good at skateboarding, but I wanted to get good at skateboarding. So how did I get good at skateboarding? I dressed the part. I bought the gear. I went out in practice and looked terrible and got hurt and wasn't impressive to anybody.

If somebody could come by and said do a kickflip, I'd have to embarrass myself, right? And they could have said, poser, right, and driven off, right? But the only way to get good is to endure that period of actually being a poser or being a larker or whatever it might be. or being a good moral person when you don't have the virtues where it's actually a fitting explanation of who you are.

And so for anybody who intends to improve in their life, yeah, you're gonna get exposed to those kinds of accusations and you do actually have to be a poser for a period of time. And so that's, as someone who has become more immersed in the history of our church and the culture of our church especially

and the intellectual tradition, yeah, I've, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, a Tweed jacket, right? I, when I go to church, I, I dress my best. And I enjoy the company and my friends when they're dressing their best or when they're smoking a cigar or having a brandy or something like that. And yeah, no, we weren't, we're not aristocrats. We weren't raised in a time of high culture. But boy, wouldn't it be nice if we could reclaim some of that? Because I think this period of just egalitarian low culture that we are stuck with, this sort of swampy soup is a banality is, I don't know, it's, it's, it's not very edified, I would say, to the soul.

Yeah. I mean, that's how I've said this before. That's how I got into Dostoevsky. I got to Dostoevsky because I wanted to be the kind of person who liked Dostoev. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yes, 100 percent. Yeah.

And then I accidentally fell in love with him, you know? I had the exact same experience, by the way with him. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Someone who I respected was like, have you ever read the brothers Karamazov? Oh, you should read that, you know, if you're an intellectual. And I was sort of like, well, guess I got to.

And the first, I don't know. probably 100 pages. I, it was a chore. Yeah. Right? Especially memorizing the names and it's constantly flipping back to the index. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. That's where it was in this scene. But yeah, I fell in love with it too by the end. Yeah, let's talk more about this then. So what's,

how then are we to address each of these problems? Mm. And I'm sure you got sort of comments that say, well, you're a fella, you can't be speaking about how girls dress. Mm. But like,

for sure. Can someone please? Yeah. So how, What's the solution there, do you think? On the question of modesty specifically? For women. Yeah, dressing with very tight, revealing clothes that are...

I mean, tight enough you know this, but Thomas Aquinas says something to the effect. I'd have to look it up to get the exact analogy right. But it's something to the effect that an immodest woman is like a woman who digs a hole and then turns it into a trap for a man to fall into it. Yeah, yeah. I think insofar as we can address it, we can address principles. But never really... Well, not never, but we should be very reluctant.

we're very careful about how we address people with the particular application of those principles. That's a big problem we have in the church today is that the church often gives us principles and teachings that we then as incarnate Christians have to then apply to circumstances, right? And so if there's someone you know who could maybe make some strides in improving or understanding of modesty

or just living that out better, you don't go up to them and say, hey, this is what Brian Holzer said in his video about the way that you're dressed for. Right, exactly. Yeah. I'm thinking of one particular family in our community who, uh, who moved there about a decade ago, let's say. And, and have completely changed the landscape. I actually, I was giving it kind of a toast to, to, to, they've become friends of ours. I was giving a toast to him. And I described it as sort of like, I remember seeing a nature documentary once about, um, the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. And of course, and of, of course, course the ecologists all thought, yeah, they're going to have an influence on the ecosystem here. But what they didn't expect was that they actually ended up having an influence, even the landscape. So the way that the rivers flowed started to change because of the way that, like, prey would come and access the river system or how they would migrate and avoid the wolves and

things like that. And so they, just by their mere presence, completely sort of changed their environment. And that's what this family kind of did in our community. And it wasn't because they started wagging their finger everywhere they went. It's because they just lived it really, really well in a way that we all admired and said, I like this. I want to be like that, you know. Um, and they, what were they doing or how were they dressed? Well, modesty is one of them. So when I talk about the people who, who wear suits all the time, yeah, that's one of them. Um, the, the wife, uh, wears very beautiful, modest skirts. She doesn't wear makeup. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, gonna say anything about, I'm wearing makeup right now.

But, um, but, but, but, you know, in her case, she, she just, there's sort of a just natural loveliness to her character and to her presence and, uh, to, to, to the way that she dresses and, and carries her, herself. Um, kids are actually an interesting dimension to this, because, um, kids will often experiment with ideas because they, they don't, they haven't really applied this stuff yet, right? And so, and they don't really fully understand it. So it's a bit clumsy at times. And this is something that we're experiencing in our own community where, you know, like, kids will like, hey, you shouldn't wear that. Or, hey, you shouldn't be eating meat today. It's a Friday or something like that, right?

Even though in Canada, we have a dispensation for that kind of thing. And so we as parents have had to kind of come in and say, hey, if you're going to correct people, you need to be careful about how you do that. And so in the case of this particular family, one of the things I noticed almost immediately is that their kids were pretty good about this, especially the older ones, who when they would notice someone dressed in a certain way, way that they admired, they'd compliment them on it, right? So instead of using the occasion, this is pretty common sense stuff, but instead of using the occasion to sort of criticize somebody, they would just be very affirming, especially of the young ladies who really kind of admired these young boys or these young men, frankly. So if they, if they notice the young lady dressed in a very sort of beautiful and modest and dignified way, they would compliment them on that. And of course,

who doesn't like being complimented? How often do you get complimented for the way that you're dressed. Like not, not very often, right? Um, frankly, and, and this has happened to me even, um, not this trip, but a recent trip, uh, where I was in the airport. And I was dressed similarly to how I am now, because this is just actually how I, for the most part, normally dress. And, uh, one of the security agents was like, hey, looking good. And I was like, oh, thank you. Yeah, I was like, I love the way you're dressed. And so, I mean, the, the more you elevate your own dignity, or at least honor the dignity that God has given you. And again, that doesn't mean dressing richly necessarily.

It just means putting effort into it, recognizing, recognizing certain kinds of virtues and embodying those virtues. Because virtues that are just sort of left as theoretical are no good at all. They do have to be embodied. And that's what our faith is, our Catholic faith is all about, is this sort of incarnational cultural creed. It's not a creed that really merely remains epistemical, as an epistemological, It's something that we actually have to then apply in the real world. Yeah, I think that's good advice. I think, you know, it is, it is lovely today.

I'm seeing more and more women, let's say at Holy Mass. Like, they're just dressed in these beautiful dresses. Yeah. Like, why wouldn't you? Like, that actually doesn't look hard. Like what my wife wears to Mass isn't as difficult as what I've got to wear, in part because I'm much uglier than she is, but in part because I've got to be ironing shirts or steaming them and, you know, whereas she's just got this.

lovely dress and she looks beautiful. Right. Yeah. In Canada, to be fair, it is a bit trickier because it's cold, right? So they have to have like leggings and socks and layers and sweaters. I'm in Florida. It's a lot of easy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, a nice sort of summer dress or something like that. But. And I, and I love what you said to in another video. You were trying to tell men why it might be a good idea to dress up for mass. And what you said is something like, you know, you probably have an outfit in your closet that's nicer than in other outfits. So, okay, and even if it's not that nice, like you might have something that's nicer. Why?

And it's like, well, so I can wear it to certain occasions. Okay, now why? Well, exactly. And then it's like, well, what is the holy sacrifice of the mass? Well, yeah. So in theory, at least you've adopted the conclusion that there are occasions that I'm going to need this stuff for, right? Okay, well, what's a higher occasion than what the church defines as the highest form of culture, which is the mass? And even if you don't necessarily have these appreciations of the cultural dimension of it, at least who you're going to go see, if you really believe in the presence of the Lord in the Eucharistic sacrifice, that's who you're going to go see. I don't know.

If someone was told you're going to go visit Donald Trump tomorrow. And suppose they wanted to. Right. They wouldn't even think about why they wanted to wear something that was better than they otherwise would wear. Yeah. You're going to see the God of the universe, who is a slightly higher office than the one that the President of the United States has attained to. Why not dress that way? And yes, for his sake, but also for your own sake, right?

Because when we dress casual, it tends to produce a casual attitude in ourselves, right? But when we get dressed up, especially if we don't do it that often, like, think about if you're, if you're someone who's not in the habit of doing that, think about the times you've gone to like a wedding or a really special function and you're sort of like, oh, I got this. Yeah. This outfit on, right? Like, you feel like dignified, right? And so it's going to elevate your own perception of the, the activities that you're doing. And not to mention the witness for the people around you, which is also really, really important. We are our brother's keepers.

And we do have some responsibility. to how we witness to them in the way that we, we can recognize that certainly in our verbal conduct, right? Like, so we owe each other respect and friendliness and, and just well-ordered behavior and in the way that we talk to each other. Why not also in the way that we appear on the occasions when we're together as a body worshiping together, right?

Whenever I go to Mass, like my community is really great for this. Whenever I go to Mass, there's been several times where I've been, you know, I've spent some time in prayer in anticipation of the Mass, and I might just be sitting and getting settled. And I'm just seeing people kind of come into their pews. I'm just sort of like, I'm so edified by just your presence, you know, just the vision of you right now.

Without even, some of them I don't even know. But I'm just for like, I recognize you, you look beautiful. I'm so happy you're here. And it just brings a dignity to the occasion that is appropriate, that makes me want to have a more prayerful approach to it. So I grew up in a small town in South Australia. And, I mean, we. rarely got dressed up for anything. You were lucky if we had shoes on, you know. And so I remember

going to Canada and being a part of Net Ministries and on Sunday and everyone would dress up. I remember feeling very awkward. Okay. And kind of embarrassed. Like, I don't know how to do this. And I can tell that the things that I thought were dress up clothes aren't nearly as good as what y'all have. Yeah. I think that's the dangerous point or that's the point where you can either blame everybody else. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You know, because that's easy to do. You're like, well, this is ridiculous anyway. Like all these stuffy people and who do they think they are and because what, God hates people with sneakers on. Is that what we're saying? Sure, sure. Do you resonate? Did you ever have that kind of experience or is that uniquely mine? I know a lot of people feel it. Did you, was that,

was that, was that, was that, way. I don't know. I think, no, I think I just actually have felt more, I don't know if shame's too strong a word. Yeah. It was less blaming them and it was more, I felt embarrassed because I didn't know how to do it. And I think that that's a measure of goodwill on the way that a reaction like that, or what it reveals, rather. So, I mean, if you come into a scenario like that and you feel out of place, and nobody's really doing anything wrong, per se, they're just, you know, they're comporting themselves that is appropriate given the occasion. You could look at that and you could act out of envy or malice or just anger. and then project that upon everybody else.

Or you could look inwardly and say, maybe I need to improve here. And if I don't, then fine, right? But I don't need to, you know, hold everybody else in contempt for it, right? Yes. And some people do do that. And I think that that is a reflection of the kind of

goodwill or ill will that they brought to the occasion or that they're in the habit of exercising. If your first instinct is to blame everybody else for the distress that you're feeling. This is Nietzsche's resente more, where I, where I demonize the good, which I believe myself unable to attain. Yeah. That's so much easier.

Yeah. That's notes from underground. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure, I mean, in all honesty, maybe I, I've vacillated between those things. I think it's a valid point, though, at the same time. So that, and I think when you, sorry to cut you off. I think when you feel self-conscious already, it's like your sense of am I being judge right now is heightened.

For sure. I find this sometimes when I'll speak to women who maybe are single mothers and they'll say to me, I don't have lots of conversations with single mothers, but I think I've at least spoken to a couple of women who've said to me, I stopped going there. Everyone was very judgmental. And I think to myself, maybe that's true. Right. I couldn't possibly prove to you that it's not without having asked anybody and being sure that they're telling me the truth. but I'm pretty sure no one at all was judging you.

Now, of course, there are situations where that can happen, but I think it's something similar. Yeah, yeah. And I think that that's something that we need to be conscientious of, right? Because when someone who, let's say, doesn't belong, appears within the midst of a community, especially a well-galvanized community, that can be an occasion for feeling threatened

or feeling like, oh, like, what's this person doing here? and they're disrupting, you know, our cohesiveness and our uniformity. And, and then to sort of, like, blame them or treat them in maybe an unwelcoming way. Or it can be an occasion for mercy, right? And the more opportunities we have to exercise the mercy, the better, right? And in my experience of noticing, because people do visit often from the, like, the mass that I go to is a very growing community. It's swelled probably three times, if it not more, to the size it was when I first started attending it. And so like every week there's there's new people and you can tell when somebody's never been to been in that kind of atmosphere and they're there may be dressed in a way that is less consistent with what everybody else is doing.

In my experience of having observed people like that, I don't, I don't think I've never witnessed somebody give them like a glance that that is judgmental or condescending. They might be feeling it, but I'd like to think that that would be a rare occasion in my community. community. And certainly I as a convert I came in like feeling that way in large measures when I when I first started attending mass. Not necessarily in terms of the way I dressed because I was I was a bit headstrong about being like like a bit of a rebel. So so I almost would have relish the opportunity to shock people by like I'm making it sound like I was as far worse than I was, but like, you know, skateboarding kind of clothing is sort of the motif. But, but nonetheless, in terms of my conduct and how to participate in the mass and things like that, like I, I could

have easily looked around and, and if anybody noticed that I, I looked like I didn't know what I was doing, I could, that probably is the kind of thing that I could latch on to and be like, oh, people here are rude and unwelcoming, right? But are they really, in the cold truth of my experience, like I've never really experienced that myself. I know lots of people who have left the faith and have used that as their explanation,

that people were just too judgmental. Or I had a bad experience in confession because father was so mean to me or something. It's sort of like, I don't want to say that that never happens, but I've been going to a confession for 20, 20 years now. Me too. And I've never.

I've been slapped around twice, but loved it. And yeah. Fully deserved it. Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't without charity. Yeah, exactly. And so maybe, yeah, maybe I could have reacted to that and said, oh, he was so mean to me. It was for like, well, what are we there to do?

It's not to be affirmed in our sinfulness. It's to, it's to confess, to repent, to be contrite. And then ideally, obviously to be absolved, but ideally to get some advice, too, at the same time, right? if every time our pastors try to give us advice, you know, they're running the risk of somebody being offended by how judgmental they were. Like, that's got to be crippling for them to be worried about that all the time.

And of course, it does happen, but I don't know, it's got to be exceedingly rare because I've, I have had people give me constructive criticism, but it's never been harsh in my experience. So I think more often than not from the people who claim that that was their experience, I think that they're probably projecting their own insecurities

on other people since we met today and have been talking you've referenced your community or people in it several times which I just love because I think people are losing a sense of real community

and it's giving way to just this online thing right so it sounds like you're pretty intentional yeah how do people begin and why is what is what is community community, why is it so important and how do we begin to build it up from where we are? Well, I mean, those are huge questions.

Like, what is community? I don't know if I could really add to anybody's understanding that isn't just sort of the obvious description of it, right? It's the multiplication of, of relationships that can exist in a particular place, right? Common, yeah. Yeah. That would have to be some uniting aspect, wouldn't you? Yeah, and primarily, primarily fraternal.

I would say too. And so we have to kind of understand what are the distinctions between the kinds of relationships that exist. And it's not merely that. I mean, there are family dynamics that take place within community as well, right?

But in terms of like, if you look at like each family as sort of an individual unit that how they interact with other families is going to be more of a fraternal nature, right? So what is friendship? You'll get different explanations of this, but one of the ones that I really like

comes from C.S. Lewis and his four loves, right, where he says it's the kind of relationship between two people where they're oriented in sort of like a parallel direction towards some shared love, right? So maybe it's sports, right? And you're sitting at the bar somewhere and watching a game and the person next you's wearing the same same swag from your favorite team. You're like, oh, you like them too, right? And you could bond over that, right? And you can have a famous friendship over it. Who knows? And so they're looking towards this shared thing that that unites them in friendship. And that to me is got to be the galvanizing ingredient of community. There's got to be

some some really substantial shared thing. Like we're living in this this age of of cultural relativism where from there's this top down approach to trying to force community. Like that's what the EU is as like a political experiment where it's just sort of like, hey, we're all on the same continent. We've had we have a shared history. Get along and work together. Right. But like why? right? Like, why should a French person align all their economic interests with an Italian or a Croatian or a Hungarian or whatever, right? Unless there's something that actually they can all look two together that bonds them in a meaningful way. Historically, that was Christianity. That's the only time there ever actually was something like an EU. It was Christendom, right? That was the only way that the, that the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the.

The moral sages could get the military class to stop fighting each other for land, essentially, in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire, right? What emerged in terms of the leading class were warlords, basically, who were just sort of confiscating territories. And that's why, you know, as we move up into the Middle Ages, there was the three estates, right? There was the working class. There was the clergy, and there was the aristocracy, or what was really the military class.

The reason they were the aristocracy was because they were the fighting class. They were the warrior class essentially. And then as time went on, they, you know, they started to use their power to get other people to do their fighting. But up until that point, they were the ones who actually fought, fought the battles. And we're prone to like whoever is adjacent to my, my land as a landowner, well, maybe I like that plot of land. And so, you know, they were constantly fighting with each other. And so the church in its evangelistic efforts aimed to convert them first and foremost, but then also teach them about charity and also their shared interests as Christian brothers and

sisters. And that's really what created the best and probably most enduring kind of peace that ever existed in Europe. I mean, we've had this sort of era where we've been recoiling from the horrors of World Wars 1 and 2. And there's been a kind of a piece there, but I think, I think it's frankly an artificial one because we still, it's not a piece based on mutual friendship or mutual love. It's based on like, let's never do that again. That was horrific. Right. But, you know, prior to the modern age, it was Christianity that created those bonds of friendship.

And the reason why I would say that religion and culture as the embodiment of religion are really the best, the best cornerstones to build community on. And culture especially, we just, we don't understand culture anymore because we don't have it. And so we don't have the experience of it to know what that looks like. But if you can really establish culture, which is this embodiment of creed, it's taking, taking an understanding or sort of like a way of how to live and then actually embodying it and cultivating it within your life and the community around you and the various things, whether it's, you know, economic or artistic or social or political or whatever. having those bonds of culture is really what fuses people together and also guarantees the preservation

of the creed that the culture is based on as well. And this is a huge problem in the church right now is that we've really, we've leveled our culture over the 20th century. We used to have a very distinct Catholic culture, the kind of thing that Protestants would look at

and be like, oh, that's, that's papalitary or whatever, right? That they do those kinds of things. And, you know, in the interest of, let's say, dialogue or ecumenism or, you know, the era of peace and the peace movements and things like that, we've kind of tried to level that off. What makes us distinctly Catholic. And as a result, we're finding that adhering to our creed is kind of unsustainable, especially for people brought up in the culture. Like, the attrition rate in your average parish is like, I mean, it varies in the numbers you get, but it's where I come from, it's like 80 to 90%

of kids who are raised by Catholic families who then go off and into adulthood do not retain the faith, right? Why is that? It's because there's no culture there to sustain them in the creed that it is that we're trying to get them to adopt. We catacize them better and worse

in some places, and we say, here's what we believe and come to Mass and Father will give you a homily and we'll do sacramental prep and all these things. But at the end of the day, you look out into media or pop culture or what your friends are into, that just looks more interesting, more compelling. And here I am supposed to believe that this is the most compelling culture.

The mass is the highest form of culture. I don't know. I just went to a Taylor Swift concert, and it was pretty exciting, right? Like, not me actually, but I'm just saying like the mind of a young person, right? And that you're trying to convince them that this is actually the highest form culture. Well, it seems kind of banal, right? The music is a little bit silly. I can't get into it. The homily wasn't that great. The people are dressed in a pretty mediocre way. At the Taylor Swift concert, everyone was dressed in a pretty dazzling way, right? But here at Mass, it's just all kind of beige and boring and whatever. Well, it's because, again, we've stripped ourselves into this sort of mode of iconoclism that I don't think is helping us. And I think the key thing to recover that in terms of

community, but also in terms of retention of our youth, we need culture. And that's one of the things that we've been really blessed in our community to have. So how would somebody who goes to their local parish and wants more intentional friendships within that community? What sort of things have you done or does your community do to build that up and fortify it? I think this is a big challenge. And I don't have a lot, I don't have the best answers to this because creed is the prerequisite to culture, right? It would be better to say religion or cult is the prerequisite to culture. When I think of culture, I think of life lived in common. What do you mean by culture?

I mean embodied religion. Okay. So it's the incarnation of creed if you want to give it more of a sort of a secularist. Explain that to me. Yeah. So again, you have certain things that you believe, right? especially in common. So just take our creed, for example.

We recited at Mass every week. It's the foundation of what it means to be Catholic. But if you don't then let that cultivate the incarnate, the embodied material expressed life and the way that people live, if they all then go off and have their own relativistic preferences and everything that we might consider cultural, whether it be political beliefs, artistic persuasions, songs that they sing together or don't sing together

because they don't know them in common, right? Like it used to be that a grandfather, you know, and they would often live with their extended family, right? And so a grandson or a granddaughter would come home from school and maybe have learned a new song. And the grandfather would go,

that's my favorite song, let's sing it together. And they would. Does that happen today? No, they'd come home and listen. The latest top 40 hit is what they're singing. And grandfather's going, I don't know, I don't get this. this is music.

I don't understand. Back in my day, we listened to this and I, I still like that, but I can't bond with my, my, even my own immediate family over it, right? So how do you expect to sort of build up culture? So let's just, let's maybe focus on music as, as an example. Music is an example of embodied, uh, creed. It, it, it manifests, um, the, the, the, the, the intentions behind your life and what you believe and how you live it.

Where I found this in a very profound experience was, so I came into the church as, even before I was confirmed, I was recruited as the electric guitarist for the youth mass, right? So I was like, yeah, okay, I don't know, this is what Christians do, and I'm not really into this music myself,

but I'll play along. And eventually I did kind of enjoy it and get into it. But then on our honeymoon, we went to Europe. And the first place we went to was Westminster Cathedral in London. And we didn't even know as a Catholic church. I figured they're all in English,

our Church of England churches here. And so anyways, it was around the corner from our hotel and we were up for a walk. I was like, ooh, let's go check this out. And we went inside and turns out it was Catholic and we're like, oh, let's stick around. Mass is starting right away. And so we did.

And we were super jet lagged too because we had just landed. And so I was sort of like in this state of, of sort of hallucinatory. Like I didn't know what was real because I was half awake. But the organists started warming up for mass. And they have a world-class organist team and coral like a boys choir there as well

and probably adult choir as well. But the organist started warming up. And I don't know if you ever been to Westminster Cathedral, but it's like a Byzantine, neo-Bysantine kind of cathedral that was built in the, I think, the 19th century. So it's still somewhat unfinished, right? But it's huge. It's very majestic, but also kind of overwhelming and imposing because like it's big and it's got these sort of big arches, but a lot of the tile work that has been planned or the mosaic work hasn't been done. So it's just sort of bare and black even the ceiling. And so I'm just sort of sitting there, like looking up and some of the mosaic work is,

you can see it. It's gold and it's, it's beautiful. And we don't have churches like that where I'm from. I should maybe add. So this is a real experience for me. And the organist is playing. And he's not playing a particular song. He's just, just jamming.

And I'm sitting there as a person who's like, my favorite bands were Metallica and Iron Maiden, because of the intricacy of the compositions and how intense that music was, right? And I'm sitting there thinking like, this is by far the most intense music I've ever heard. And it just blows metallic out of the water. But it also sounds Catholic. And I've never, I thought praise and worship

was the music of our people, right? But here he is playing something that really speaks to my soul, but also sounds kind of like prayer in a certain sense, right? And then the mass began and it very much became prayer. It became the incarnation of prayer, like the musification of a prayer. What prayer actually sounds like.

If you strip the lyrical content out of the kind of praise and worship that I was singing back in the day and ask somebody, like, is this prayer? They'd be like, oh, I don't know. It just sounds like pop music, right? But if you, if you portray, you know, Gregorian chant, or even just the songs that the organist was playing, like a box, one of box compositions, and said, does that sound like prayer?

They probably go, yeah, yeah, it does. Pretty undeniable. There's actually this one time where we had some piano movers bringing a piano into our house and pretty kind of like rough looking guys, right? And we had Gregorian chant playing just in the background. And, you know, they put the piano down

and the guys sort of like stretching and sort of like gains his composure. And then he goes, what is that? Like he'd never heard anything like it, right? And we're like, oh, it's just, you know, it was actually, it was it was, it was Palestrina from Westminster Cathedral because when we were there, we bought a CD. And so that's what we were listening to.

It was just playing on our stereo. And so we're like, oh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, polyphony or Gregorian chant, and it's more primitive. And he was like, I've never heard anything like this before. And he was like, who wrote this? And he like was writing it into his, his phone. So he could remember and look it up when he got home because he was so moved by it.

Now, I'm sure if we asked him, like, does that sound prayerful to you? He would have been like, yes, yeah, definitely, right? If it had been like French praise and worship music and we'd said, is that prayerful, you probably wouldn't have said yes to that, right? Because it's the embodiment of our religion. Okay. So it sounds like you're saying maybe to oversimplify this, that if the creed is the soul, culture is the body.

Something like that, is it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where culture expresses the creed. Yeah. There's a kind of holomorphism that, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, for sure.

I still don't understand it, but I love what you're saying. I'm just... Yeah, I mean, Christopher Dawson is the one who kind of turned me onto this in his crisis of Western education, I think it's called. Is the problem then, like you're talking about this attrition rate, right? That's a big motive for me, certainly. Yeah, but my point is, is it that you've got this creed that we're trying to force feed people, but then it's like the body's totally...

different. Like the music you're listening to, the clothes you're wearing, the conversations you're having, the entertainment you're imbibing, that is the culture of some other creed. It's not this creed. Absolutely. Yeah, right. So we're not trying to force feed a culture. We're trying to force feed a creed. And we have no culture to stir up our affections. So there's a soul, but there's no body for it to inhabit. Absolutely. Yeah. Another kind of turning moment for me was when Pope Francis visited Georgia, like in the former Soviet Union. And you can look this up on YouTube. There was a I think there were a family of singers. The Alfather in Aramaic.

Yes, in Aramaic. My Aramaic, was it? That broke me. Me too. Me too. And that didn't sound. I remember at the time being struck by like, yes, that is what, if you could take everything that I have encountered intellectually in the Catholic faith and embody it and bring it to life,

incarnate it for me, there it is. I don't know if this is accurate, but someone who studied, Liturgy and especially Ratzinger and Benedict's teachings on liturgy told me that he called this the musification of our faith. I've never come across that in his literature myself, but I'm going to take that person's word for it and say, it sounds right to me. It really is, that's the musification of our faith. Whereas pop culture and rock music, let's say, is the incarnation of a different creed. Yes. You know, it's the incarnation of rebellion.

of revelry, which isn't wrong. We can have revelry, but that's not what's going on at Mass. Mass is a sacred moment. Even our devotions are sacred. And sacred, whatever we incarnate for the sacred, whether it's the materials that we use, whether it's the architecture that we use, whether it's the music that accentuates it or ornaments it. It should be fitting and it should be set aside. That's what sacred means.

to be set aside, it should be set aside and preserved merely for that so that when we access it, when we, when we encounter it, we go, oh, this is prayer. And it's, it's beautiful and it's sacred. And this is, this is, this is my moment with the Lord. And this is helping lift my heart and my mind to God, which is all we're doing in prayer, right?

But if something is, sounds more like the bar or top 40 radio or what I hear at the grocery store when I'm walking through the aisles, that's what I'm going to associate it with, right? And it's going to create the sort of like, profane tension with what the sacred is. That's beautiful. I have so many questions. One of them is, what is your response then to Catholics that you and I know personally, I think, who are very good people with beautiful families who say we're supposed to reclaim what is secular and imbue it with the sacred. Definitely. And we use pop music as a means of evangelization. I'm sure you've thought a lot about

this. I bet. I presume you have a problem with it. I don't know if I do. I'm okay with praise and worship music if it comes up on the radio it might sound trite and awful and annoying but there's also forms of praise and worship I've heard that are actually quite sophisticated and lyrically beautiful and so but I presume you're on the other side of that

I don't know but what's your At the risk of of convicting myself in a way that maybe my audience won't appreciate too much like yeah that's my general reaction to praise and worship is that it feels a bit trite and overly sentimental. A hundred percent.

But the other day, I, you know, I did tune in. I can't remember if it was just nostalgic or what my motivation was. And I was really moved by it, frankly. I wasn't at mass. I wasn't doing a meal. I was probably driving or something like that. But, yeah, in personal devotion, there's, there's nothing wrong with, uh, with using something like praise and worship.

Well, why, but why isn't there? Because now it sounds like you're saying something different. Because, because you're saying that the sound of praise and worship, Yeah, no, you're right. I am putting a different creed. Yeah. I shouldn't say there's nothing wrong with it. But it's not, it's not, it's not, I'd have to give that more thought. Yeah, me too.

I will say though that like on this question of reclaiming the culture, I think that the more the sacred reclaims the profane, the better. Yeah. But not the opposite. it. Because, and this is throughout scripture, right? There's, there's so many moments. I mean, the book of Exodus, is it Exodus 20 where God, like, gives all the provisions for worship, right?

And, and it's intense. It's very, very detailed. And it's meticulous. And it's also, it's set apart. It's, it's these vestments and these people even are, are, this is their unique function. And you don't use them for anything else. You don't drink casually from a chalice, right? We can all appreciate that,

that how horrifying that would be to our constitution or our sensibilities, right? Because it's set aside for that very unique purpose, right? Likewise, you don't introduce the profane. Now, in terms of like personal devotion, maybe this is the compromise is that that's, that's kind of where the sacred life, and we're all being moved in that direction,

but you don't necessarily become holy, overnight and be entirely sanctified, you have to sort of relinquish things. And so if you have these attachments to percussive music, which is what defines rock and roll music, and that's what we find, it's sort of the pillar of praise and worship music, if you have particular attachments to that and you don't find yourself moved by chant or classical music or any of these kinds of higher forms that are unique to Christianity, well, then I don't think God's just going to strip that from you and sort of this violent insistence that you get on with the program or otherwise, you know, you're not, you're not part of the church.

And likewise, I don't think for those of us that, that aren't into praise and worship or who have really been edified by more sacred forms of music that we should do likewise to other people, except in the mass, because the church does teach that there are standards for the mass that need to be observed. And we haven't done a very good job of following those teachings. Yeah, I guess my other question is, how do you avoid, you know, I've known people who, very lovely people, very well-meaning, love the faith, and I've really tried to instill that in the children, but in a sort of white-knuckled way, they kind of, they have this sort of elbows up against the world and anything. And then, you know, you can't really sustain it.

And so then the kids get a little older and they're fully into pop culture now. I guess like how do we how do we say, okay, we want to instill a Catholic culture so that there's something there for when they leave? Yeah. But in a way that's not defensive, in a way that's inappropriate against every aspect of the world that's trying and naturally will come into our families? I don't know that it naturally will. Of course it will. I mean, if you're homeschooling your kids, you can keep it away for a bit. but as soon as your child has access to a screen or a friend

that's not from another homeschooling community, like, of course it will. Culture feels like a wave, and by culture, I mean secular culture, whatever that means, I don't know what that means. And it feels like it just washes over everything. I got an email from a woman, a mother, who, by the sounds of it, she had moved to Canada

from possibly another country and had enrolled her kids in Catholic schools and figured, you know, that's, that's what you do here, right? And I'm, she's Catholic herself and she goes to Mass and she wants her kids to retain the faith. Yeah, bless her. And her, I hope it's okay that I share this. I'm trying to preserve anonymity here, but she, um, her 10 year old daughter came home from school and said, what did she say?

I think she said, I'm pansexual now, mom. But it was something on that whole spectrum, right? And her mom was like, what? Where are you getting this from, right? Like, I've done everything. right here. By the way, when I say the kind of infiltration of the world, I'm not talking about sin or insanity.

I'm talking about this great new pop song by whoever. Sure. That isn't explicit. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. That's what I mean. Yeah. But that is the, that's the incarnation of secular culture along with its beliefs.

And they do get expressed in songs. Yeah. Right? I can't think of many songs in terms of their lyrical context. that I'd say to my kids like, hey, isn't this a great message, right? Like, that's pretty rare. Most of it's pretty kind of horrifying in terms of its expressed meaning or lack of meaning of sort of the nealism of just the nonsense that passes for poetry these days, right?

I don't think you can raise your kids in the culture as it exists today and not have them peeling away from the faith. I don't think it's possible. I think you really do have to preserve them in a bit of a bubble. until they're of an age in which they're confident in their identity, they're confident in their faith, they're confirmed in their faith. And they have been raised in an alternative.

Yes. Cultural expression that, that they have affection for. So that when they see the alternative, they're like, I don't want that. Yes. And I don't want to hold myself up as sort of like this great success story. But if anything, my kids are a bit snobby when it comes to this kind of thing. Because every now and then, you know, I'll pull up my guitar and I'll play a Led Zeppelin tune or something like that. And my kids are like, gross, dad, right?

And they just, because they're in choir and they're, my 10-year-old son just finished reading Moby Dick. Like they're reading high literature and singing high music and polyphony and chant. When they're doing the dishes, they're singing polyphony together. And I don't know how to sing polyphony. I don't know how to read music the way that they do. I just want to remind everybody who's listening right now about the conversation we had earlier. about demonizing that which we feel we're impotent to obtain. Okay.

Because I think that temptation's strong right now and people who are watching this. They're like really good for you, Brian. Really happy for you, man. But my kids are all dyslexic and my wife left me and I'm doing the best. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I just, I, what am I saying?

I don't know what I'm saying. I think that's all I've got to say. I mean, there's exceptions, right? And the exceptions we have to show patience and mercy for and be there to support people that can't really call. this domestic experience themselves for one reason or another. Yeah.

Um, but as sort of a norm for, if we're gonna try and rebuild Catholic culture and raise as many future saints as possible, I think that this is, this is the safest bet that we have. Um, otherwise, I don't, I don't see a solution to that attrition rate. Mind you, the big disclaimer to all of this is that I live in a place that is a, a very severe spiritual desert, um, in Western Canada. And, you know, people if they're from Western Canada listening to this are going to balk at that

and be like, oh, that's, take it easy. It's not that bad. I wouldn't have said that maybe 10 years ago. And it's not because I've become so trad since then. It's because I've traveled as a Catholic speaker. I've gone to other dioceses, especially in the States. I went to the Nova Sort of this morning that I saw you at, right? And it was a low weekday mass, right?

Nothing spectacular, but done reverently. Done beautifully. Lots of beautiful. The vestments they were wearing, you would never see that in Canada. That's way too traditional. Is that right? The building, that, I mean, it was funny because, you know, the church that I went to is a block away from my hotel. So the first night I got here, I went for a walk.

So, there's a church. It looks Catholic. I walked inside. It was late at night. And there was one deacon who looked like he was kind of locking up. And, you know, this random guy walks in from the street. And I was like, oh, hello, father, because he's wearing a collar. and he's like, deacon.

And I was like, oh, I was just, I just wanted to take a peek at the, at the church real quick, if you don't mind. And he was like, oh, well, if you want to pray, you're allowed to come in. And I was like, well, I get that. But where I come from, we don't have beautiful churches. And he was like, and I think he was almost taken back by that because it's like, oh, my, our little cathedral here, this isn't like a world class cathedral necessarily. But then he started talking up.

He's like, oh, yeah, this is our second renovation. And it's got these beautiful features here and there. And he started pointing things out to me. And that's the truth of my situation, though. That church would by far be the most, without comparison, beautiful church in all of Western Canada. And that's from like Manitoba West, which Manitoba is like north of Minnesota,

just give you sort of a, yeah, your bearing there. And so, and I've also had priests, you know, we have a lot of, foreign priests that come and they will say things like this, this place is a spiritual desert. Like, I've never been anywhere like this before. So culturally where we, where I come from, it's, it's as bad as it gets, I would say in terms of like our, our familiarity with our Catholic heritage and how we can actually incarnate creed. Now, the community that I'm part of, this sounds really contradictory because I've been talking about my community, but my particular

community is quite, it's a bit of a unique bubble in that regard. It's predominantly homeschooling families and we go to a very reverent Latin Mass. Is it, how is it allowed? How are you blessed to have a Latin Mass? Well, is it a dallas? Simultaneously, you know, this sort of beige, benign Canadian culture is also very non-confrontational. So most of our bishops just, you know, if there's no conflict, I'm not going to stir the pot kind of thing.

We also, our former bishop, I would say probably stuck his neck out for us a little bit to allow that, especially when Trudicinus Custodas came out. So, so God bless him. I thank him for that. He didn't have to do that. But it's also a fraternity, FSSP chaplaincy. So, so they've since been kind of affirmed in what they're doing. And so we have this sort of little bubble where we, we have a very strong sense of harmony and shared love found in our creed and found in the expressions of our creed in the way that it's, it's, it's incarnated in culture. Um, and then because we're all homeschooling, all of our kids are, you know, they really are living in a bubble. And I know people, some people would be looking at them and be like, oh, that's,

that's going to be catastrophic when they come of age. But they have started coming of age. And they're, they're beautiful young adults. And they're, you know, they're getting married now. And, and, and, and, and just that, that attrition rate that I've seen in, in other parishes that I belong to. And I've, I've literally seen it. It's not just in terms of statistics. I've seen families when I, when I first became Catholic who had their little kids in tow, who are now adults and they've disappeared, right? And in our community, now that's starting, I'm now lived out with my own kids. And we have, my kids don't have cell phones. They don't have free access to screens and things like that. Um, they don't go to a school where other kids are going to have those cell phones.

So they're not envious of their, why don't I have a cell phone? Everybody else has a cell phone, Right. That's, we've had to make those sacrifices and it's not been easy. It's a huge commitment in terms of the time. Yeah. For my wife especially, who is the one who's homeschooling, you know, eight kids ranging from one to 16, right? Like, like, how do you figure that out? Right. Yeah. So, yeah, there's sacrifices that come with it, but they're, they're worthwhile. Well, I love what you said earlier about, um, the sacred should invade the profane and not the other way around. Yeah. So I just, I throw this out as a word of encouraging. to someone who might be listening right now is like, yeah, I'd love that, but like, I only heard about this today. My kids have been through school. Sure. Sure. Is it's like, okay, but like let's reclaim just little. Like, what's one way that you can reclaim some of the profane in your in your own life? That's right. And in the life of your family, right? Because it's easy for you and me. Like, I've homeschooled my kids since they were little as well. And I remember my daughter, we were at a grocery store recently. And we, as we were coming out, she's like,

you can tell that girl's Christian, right? I'm like, why? She was like she was so happy. Isn't that beautiful? It's like the opposite of what Hollywood told us in the 90s, which would have been, you can tell she's Christian, right? She was so judgmental and upset and out of touch. Yeah.

It's hard to say because it's happened so iterative, or it's such an iterative way in our own life. And as a consequence of making some sort of fundamental decisions correctly, and by luck, I should add. Like, you know, with the homeschooling decision, we knew what we didn't want for our kids. based on our own upbringing. Yeah.

And so we just like, well, we're going to withhold that. But we didn't have a vision of what like good education looks like. But by getting immersed in that community and discovering all these other people who knew better than we did, we learned about this sort of great classical liberal arts tradition of education. And that this is actually very much the Catholic tradition of education, right? And then all these sort of other things and finding the Latin Mass and finding things to enroll our kids in. I think if you, if you start looking, you will find these things.

So in the case of our kids, like we've enrolled them in choir as an example, from a very early age so that there, it's, it's the air that they breathe. So that by the time, by the time they're eight or nine years old, even, um, they're already prejudiced against secular music in a lot of ways.

Um, because it's, it's like, food's a good analogy to this, right? If you raise kids on really good, nutritious food, organic food. food and delicious food. And then you take them for some like fast food slop. They're like, oh, this is kind of, this is gross, right?

Now, forgive me. I mean, that's, I don't mean to say that all secular culture is just slop. But the stuff that is is easily recognized for that. And I, if anything with my kids, I'm trying to get them to be a little more open-minded in terms of their cultural persuasion. Little treads. Yeah. You know, I can imagine someone saying, all right, so we want to.

kind of imbibe and create this Catholic culture, you're not saying this, at least not, I know this isn't entirely what you're saying, so that I shouldn't abandon the faith or something. So we need to kind of make the music more beautiful and this and that. But what is interesting, and I wonder why it's the case, is people are gravitating towards traditional Catholicism before realizing the effect it might have on their children. And it's not like food, because, you know, you might say, well, something similar is happening with food. Like, people are starting to realize that they should eat healthy. Sure. And I think, well, maybe it is a lot like that.

But I think the reason people are getting into like fitness culture, sometimes, not always, is due to vanity. Like it's seen right away if I stopped looking like a fatso or something. Now, of course, there's a lot of people with autoimmune issues. And so maybe that's a better analogy. So my question to you, because I mean, you and I roughly the same age, you know, we grew up in a time where the charismatic renewal was in full swing. And thank God for the good that it did. Thank God for the charismatic renewal. All right.

Yeah, I will say that. Say more? Can you sound emphatic about that? Oh, well, I mean, for the longest time, that was the refuge for people of faith, for people who really encountered the Lord. It was either the social justice wing of the church or the place where people really believe

that Jesus was the incarnate second person of the Holy Trinity. So for me, as a person who had encountered the Lord in a substantial way and wanted to follow him, it's like, yes, social justice, absolutely. But I remember, you know, as a young adult when I was coming into the church, I had no friends. And neither did my, my fiancé,

who was in the process of converting. And so one of the things we started praying very intentionally was about was community. We need community, young adult community. And I'm not going to tell the whole story of how this came about, but we ended up finding ourselves in the position where we were the anchors of that community.

And we had started something out of our house, and it grew and grew and grew. And there was an opportunity to turn it into like a full-fledged sort of archdioces and apostolate. And there's a person. who worked for the archdiocese at the time, who took me aside and said, hey, if you want to do the work of Jesus, go feed the hungry, go feed, go clothe the naked, go take care of the poor.

That's the mission of the church. Not this evangelization stuff that you're always talking about. And it's like, that's the false dichotomy that sort of exists in our church today and that the charismatic movement and the social justice sort of wing kind of found themselves in for quite a long time. So if you really believed, if you really had supernatural faith, the, the charismatic movement was your refuge. It's the only place to go. And again, thank God for that, because that's where I found myself. So my question is, and maybe I'm wrong in this, but why are people attracted to the traditional aspects of the church today in a way that we may not have been in the late 90s? Now, maybe it's just, well, there was a lack of present, like we didn't know about it. That might just be it.

Might be. Is there something else? I think if it had been there, it's hard to say. I want to say that I probably would have been attracted to it. Because I was still pretty young when we went on our honeymoon. I was, we were in our early 20s, both of us. And what I didn't know existed and that I didn't know that I wanted, just had to be portrayed for me.

And it struck me to the core of my soul. And not just in terms of like, wow, I like this. This is pleasing to me. But this is beautiful prayer, and I'm having a very profound encounter with the Lord right now by it. It's, I can't help but have my heart stirred up to the Lord, right? So if it had been there, I suspect that I probably would have been attracted to it. But it wasn't there. There's also something to be said about when you push people into a ghetto.

Those who remain in the ghetto of their free choice are naturally going to be different types of characters that you might not necessarily find inspiring. Absolutely. Right. So when the Holy Father, Benedict, opens up, then it starts to get more people and people you might find more to your liking. Absolutely. And everywhere I go, wherever I'm encountering people who go to the Latin Mass, they're saying the same thing. Over the past six years or so, it's just exploded in size. And that's about how long we've been going to it. So again, what is it? Is it just exposure that we even have? Maybe it's the internet? Yeah, well, maybe, maybe COVID. It's probably very multifaceted. If I want to draw from my own experience, I would say that the reason Catholicism seemed very attractive to me as a candidate was because of how seriously it took, especially

moral questions, but theological questions as well, right? For me to join that evangelical megachurch, what were the demands that would be placed upon me in terms of initiation? Literally nothing. Like maybe an altar call, but they didn't even really do that. very often. So it's like get saved, join, sign up to start tithing if you want. It would have been an expectation that perhaps you would have joined some group, read you a scriptures daily. Maybe, but you wouldn't have to, right? And in terms of like the moral expectations, there were moral

expectations, but it was sort of like a kind of a very vague mere Christianity. And not even that, because if I'm going to use that phrase often it alludes to the book mere Christianity in which he discusses the cardinal virtues, nobody at that church would have known what the cardinal virtues are, right? And so they wouldn't have even had an introductory understanding of what virtue ethics is, right? And so don't, don't transgress the Ten Commandments. And if you do, you know, well, it's okay, you're saved, but maybe repent of that. But that's about as sophisticated as it would have got. And here I am, like, in my little hole that I've dug for myself, saying, like, but I need, I need direction in my life. And I have serious problems that need serious

answers, right? I came from a home in which my parents got divorced, which was particularly emotionally, if not psychologically catastrophic for me and my brothers, so that it made me me look at the prospect of marriage very seriously. Like, either I'm not going to do it, because I don't want to risk that. Or if I am going to do it, I better be sure that I'm not going to fail at it, right? And so coming across the Catholic Church, who treats marriage with that kind of significance and even severity made me go, okay, good. Yeah, because I'm going to need some direction on this question, right? Yeah. Whereas everybody else was like, well, try not to get divorced, but if you do, you can get remarried. It's not a big deal, right? Um, so for me,

Catholicism was attracted because it had serious answers to serious difficulties, right? But at the time, not everybody was maybe as melancholic or as severe in how they treated their, their difficulties, or could easily be, maybe not easily, that's not fair, but could be consoled by the typical opiates of the secular culture like TV or whatever, right? Just sort of like, hey, you had a bad day, go unwind, watch the football game or watch your favorite TV show or whatever it is, right? For me, that wasn't good enough. I needed, I needed direction, I needed answers because my introspective tendency was asking big questions that weren't getting resolved, right? And Catholicism had whether they were right or wrong, it had ambitious big answers to those big questions, right?

So at the time, things were going pretty well. 2000, economies going pretty well. We're pretty optimistic about the new millennium. We're doing all right. You know what? And we don't need God. Or if we do, he'll be sort of a benign, kind of consoling, therapeutic deistic figure, right? But when things go bad, that's when we really need a savior, right?

That's when we're primed to receive the invitation of a savior. And so, right, you know, the 21st century hasn't been great. It's, you know, we had COVID, which was particularly bad for young people. We've had quite a bit of economic devastation as a result of COVID and also just a lot of the kind of political corruption that it exposed, the political polarization that exists, wars that are now happening and who knows what next. A lot of people are struggling. And I think that they're recognizing that I need serious answers. I don't want superficial Joel Austin, like, you can do it, kind of pep talk stuff. I need serious answers to serious problems.

And I think that, you know, the apostolic traditional faith at a glance looks like it's got that. And so I think at the various least it's attractive for people to want to explore that and to find answers. and solutions to their lives. What's going on in Canada? What's the Catholic Church like in Canada? What's, I mean, I, from Australia, I remember during COVID, everyone coming up to me being like, what happened? I thought Australia was cool. I'm like, I don't know, man.

I'm not even there anymore. Do I have to be the apologist for my country, which I love? What's going on in Canada? Because here, I'm hearing all sorts of awful things, but I don't know if it's true. Really? Okay. Well, yeah. I have to say that traveling to the states is always very edifying for me and encouraging,

because the faith seems much more serious in terms of the way that it's expressed, you know, like your average homily or the things that I hear in confession when I go to confession when I'm here. And just the witness of the communities, the strength of their faith and that cultural manifestation is very encouraging.

It's far less so in your average parish in Canada, I would say. Vocations have cratered and are continuing to crater, and nobody seems to be really willing to take serious action on that. Or even to really address the question, to look at the numbers, to study the question.

Okay, like, how many priests do we have in the country right now? How many seminarians do we need in order to just maintain what we currently have? Right now we have, I think, less than half to maintain, let alone to actually grow,

which is going to be catastrophic institutions. Like there's just no way to sustain that the schools and the parishes and the chaplaincies and all the various things unless we completely import from the outside, which is a big solution. One neighboring diocese to me has one domestic priest. All the rest are foreign. And God bless those missionary priests. Thank God that they're here rescuing us from ourselves. But they also, they walk a fine line because if they upset anybody, you know, the parishion. council types, then they could easily be ejected and sent back to their home countries, right? And so they have to be very careful not to ruffle feathers too much. They certainly can't be reformers in the parishes or anything like that. And so a lot of these parishes are just sort of run by older lay people who are the primary financial strength of the parish. And therefore, the strongest influence in terms of what happens at the parish. And it's, it's, you know, it's the sensibilities of the 70s, basically.

So this might just display more of my ignorance about Canada and my prejudice against it due to the things I've heard. But, I mean, is, I mean, how long can people homeschool for? Is there any threat that Catholics won't be out of homeschool their kids anytime soon? It varies from province to province. Okay. Some are more hostile than others. And some, you're just on your own, like, in terms of, like, funding and everything else. Where I live, we get some of our, because it's all public education where I live.

And so our property tax dollars go towards the school systems, right? Whether you're homeschooling or not. So I pay property taxes. They go towards a school system. And I get a little bit of it back. Not nearly as much as like what my kids would get in terms of the funding for each student in a public system. But I do get a little bit of it back, which is a, I'm very grateful as a, as a compensation to what we do. So where I live, which is the province of Alberta,

is probably one of the best places to be. And that's another reason why our community is growing so much is because a lot of people are coming from out of province and they're coming to be a part of our homeschooling community and our Latin mass community. Was Alberta analogous to maybe some of the red states in America during COVID where people left New York? The most of any other province, probably.

But it was still like, we have. had mandates. We had vaccine mandates. Um, and so if you weren't, if you weren't vaccinated, you couldn't enter into public buildings. You couldn't go to school in some cases. Um, so and, and the, the, or rather the premier we had at the time said that he wasn't going to allow that to happen. The media almost immediately went there. It was like, what, are you going to mandate that people get vaccinated? He's like, what is that vaccine mandate? And acted like, there's no way. We're, we're the conservative province, but like two weeks later. Oh, really? Fully went. in on it. So and I, you know, I, that was a horrible position to be in the entire world was

putting pressure on like what's a, what's a premier of a Canadian province supposed to do to push back against all that hysteria. But, but he did. And so, but nonetheless, it is the most conservative province. How long it will be is, is hard to say. It's because it's the most affordable place to live, because it's been managed well economically. Um, and because it's, um, It's retained a lot of a lot of the Canadian character that a lot of the other provinces have have lost because of mass immigration. Albert is a very attractive place to go. And so lots of people are just coming there now. So will it retain its unique character?

I don't know, probably not long term. You and I run YouTube channels, among other things. We'll certainly link to your excellent YouTube channel below. What's something you'd like to see in the Catholic YouTube landscape, maybe a church. Maybe a change or maybe something that you wish was being discussed more or maybe none of the above. Man, more collaboration where we really actually depend on each other, not just sort of like, hey, let me interview you or something like that, but where we're really sort of united in mission in more significant ways. What that looks like is harder to say.

People often say we need a Catholic daily wire. I don't know if you've ever heard that before, but because along with a, collaboration comes accountability. And this is something, you know, people have approached me asking about, hey, can we do sort of a Catholic Daily Wire or something like that? I want you to go back and tell them

that Daily Wire is the new Catholic Dayway. It's so funny, right? Because I joined the Daily Wire and I got people who are very upset. Yeah. Usually women, actually, I'm finding. Oh, okay. It's been interesting.

We don't need to get into that right now. And I'm not one of these people who say that women are necessarily irrational, but the unhinged comments I'm getting definitely from a lot of my arms. That's surprising. I've got a reason for it, which I'll tell you about after. But what's funny is these shows, you know, it was just bananas. Like just earlier I was on the Daily Wire website and there's like, they're talking about all these political issues. Yeah. And then there's my

episode in the middle talking to a beautiful Dominican nun about the Catholic Church. Right. But you open that up and you've got people who are angry at me and Daily Wye for having another bloody Catholic. Right. Everyone's upset. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, I know that, but that collaborative, I see what you mean. The collaboration is helpful. Well, and when people have invited me to those kinds of ventures or the prospect of those kinds of ventures, I'm very much a believer in those kinds of ventures.

It's not like Catholic Answers doesn't exist, so let's give them some recognition. Absolutely. Thank God. I mean, there are these apostles that are out there that are doing a great job of it. I would like to see more of it. And the reason I would like to belong to a collaboration like that

is because I would like some accountability I don't like being a cowboy out here just saying whatever comes to mind. If I say something that's wrong and I have, God forgive me many times. And the reason I know that is, you know, because of some self-reflection and prayerful self-reflection

where God has sort of, hey, you know, but also because of the comments that I've gotten. But I would love to hear it from colleagues who really know what they're doing. Yeah. Who can help me not just feel bad about it, but also encourage me in ways that they understand

because they're doing the same thing, right? So having sort of that camaraliener and sort of mutual support, I think, would be really great to have for the various people that are serious about doing this. Yeah, maybe that's one thing. There's a lot more, certainly, I could think of. I'd be interested in what your take is. What do you think of the landscape of Catholic or just Christian YouTube or otherwise?

Oh, man, I haven't even thought about it. I asked you the question, hoping you had. You know, I'll come at it. I'm not sure if it'll be coherent or helpful, but let's see. different things appeal to different people. And it's been beautiful, I think, to see different types of YouTubers coming at things from a different type of way. One beautiful thing I see happening, Kyle Whittington has this creator conference, I think he calls it, Catholic Creator Conference. I'll be speaking there this year.

And just his idea, I think, is really beautiful. He's like, when you're in strangling distance from another creator, if you want to use that language, I'm not sure I'd like it. but then, you know, you're less likely to be a jerk. Totally. And the internet, like, loves it if you're a jerk. Like, we'll reward you if you're bombastic. And if you, if you dedicate your channel to attacking other people, you'll do really well. Like, really well.

For time, you will. Yeah. Yeah. But I think it has diminishing returns and it actually can have the opposite effect eventually on you. Because, you know, you attract a certain kind of people based on your contact, right? And so if you build an audience based on your habit of going on the offensive and maybe even being crude or malicious or malicious, well, not malicious, but but excessively condescending, then that's the kind of audience you're going to build. That's what their appetites are. So say you build up a YouTube channel, 50,000 subscribers and they're all thirsting for, for that kind of antagonism. Well, as soon as you drift away from that and say, hey, today I'd like to tell you about, The scripture reading. Exactly.

They're going to tune out. And it's going to devastate you in the algorithm. So you really have to be careful about the kind of audience that you build. And I've seen channels like that where that's happened where they didn't necessarily mean to build that kind of audience. But now they're stuck. And it's like, unless I feed that, my channel is not going to succeed. So now I'm in this sort of moral dilemma where that might not have been of what I wanted to do. But now I have to do it or start over from the beginning.

So this Catholic created conference, I think what's lovely about it is it kind of brings together people who've like had beefs with each other. Okay. And now have to kind of like be in a room with each other. And you know, you're naturally kinder and nicer and more amicable when you're in a room with each other. Yeah. And now what are you going to do? Like you're going to go back to your part of the country and start ripping on this person. And I think there's been some reconciliations there.

That's great. I would say that's awesome. Good. There's lots of people I know in that space who I don't agree with all the time who have had some hot takes along the way. but I know them personally and I would consider them friends and so I'm just sort of like it's way easier for me to give them a pass

and be like oh that's just so and so being himself or herself or whatever right but for the people I don't know when they when they rub me the wrong way I that's the first instinct for like I want to go on the offensive and take him down for that right but yeah like you say if you know him personally I mean I had that insight when I used to live in Steubenville

right there are many higher profile people in the American Catholic Church who live in Steubenville and the one thing you would never see is them from their particular platform attacking somebody else who lives in Steubenville. Right. That's awkward. Why? Well, because you're going to go to Holy Mass with them. You bump into them at Leo's, the coffee shop or whatever, you know, and so now that isn't, and you can probably take that too far, you know, I suppose, because false things that have been

said publicly, perhaps warrant being rebuked by somebody publicly. Totally. But one thing I've seen Trent do, which I'm really just thinks terrific, is he's been writing these scripts, which are excellent. It's terrific, I think. He sends the scripts to the person he's criticizing now. This is a new thing he's implementing or the position he's criticizing. It has them review it. I mean, that's pretty cool. That's awesome.

And I hope that's the kind of thing that if you're in a similar space, but maybe not the Catholic YouTube world or podcasting world or whatever, and you cross paths with a guy like Trent and you see him doing that, maybe that will make you take a second glance of Catholicism and be like, wow, that's... Who doesn't look at that and say that that's a noble thing to do, right? Like, you'd have to be pretty ill-wilt to not recognize that. So, I mean, it's a very evangelistic thing to do as well. It's very inspiring.

One thing I'd like to see more of now that we're talking about it is more timed debates. If you've noticed debates have really taken a nosedive on the internet because the internet again loves conflict. It loves people being belligerent. But if you force people to have a like, remember what we used to do back in the day? like in actual debates, you have a 10-minute opening or a 20-minute opening in a rebuttal. And you do that today and people are upset with you. Like, now make it open discussion. Yeah, and that can be exciting.

And sometimes you can work some things out in a way that you might not otherwise do. But I'd say for my part, when I hope to host debates on this channel in the future. I've got some in the works. Nice. I'd really like to at least have openings, rebaddles, closings with the time of cross-examination. Totally. Yeah, yeah. where the point isn't just a dunk on your opponent

or to try to make them look silly or... Right. But to try to arrive at the truth. Yeah. Even if we find that initially more boring. For sure. Because they're timed speeches. Well, and that's another way of just sort of

recovering a tradition that we've lost and that we haven't been formally or informally kind of conditioned by, right? This might be your experience, but certainly my experience, if I was going to host debates as a moderator, like I don't come from an academic back. ground, right? And so I don't have a lot of exposure like going to something like the Oxford

Union or something like that where, you know, it's really part of your culture. So how do I moderate? I'd have to go back and watch videos of people doing it properly, right? But otherwise, I probably do it very clumsily and, you know, not, uh, not observe certain kinds of decorum that are necessary for that kind of debate. And so, you know, I'd want to forgive people, um, that have moderated and not done a great job of it for those reasons. But I hope that, yeah, we can have more of a recovery of what you're talking about for. Well, it's one thing not to do a good job at it. It's another thing to essentially turn it into a mudslinging contest and you're doing it because you want to see two people go at it.

It's a spectacle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we're all filled with mixed motivations, aren't we? So there's times we desire both things. I don't know many Catholic channels that have, have to that level. I don't.

I don't. I don't. I don't think either. Yeah, so maybe I'm just attacking a straw man here. I don't know. But I will say, though, when I've talked about, I've talked to people about having them to come on. Well, I would know, I'd say this. When I've had debates in the past, there's usually a timed element to it.

And people have complained a lot. Okay. Yeah. Well. In the comment section, which I, whatever. Yeah, yeah. And because they want it. I mean, there is a way to have informal.

Well, it is more interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Like to have people go at it respectfully, hopefully, but vigorously. is enjoyable to watch. But still have some structure around it, right? You know, yeah. And so I don't fault people for that either, but I just... There's a balance to it too, right?

It's sort of like with sports, right? Like if you've got referees who are calling everything a penalty, it's like, oh, just let them play, right? But if you're not calling penalties, it's sort of like, well, there's a lot of not... You know, games can be turned on penalties that should have been called. So you just have to find that balance, I think. Do you still run your internet media company?

Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's probably a sign that you're doing. doing so well at YouTube that I didn't know that. So could you tell people about this as we wrap up? Well, I'm kind of winding it down. So I'm still doing it, but in sort of small measures. But it's my background's in branding and graphic design,

and web design as well. And so, yes, I still do have a business called Holds of Design where I do take on new projects, but I have to be very selective about the projects I'm taking on these days because the capacity is just not there. There used to be a show online called the Matt Fradshaw. Yes. And it had this amazing logo.

It did. Oh, you did it. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, I did that logo. Yeah. It was a portrait of you, which I'm not a great illustrator, but I thought it was striking likeness. Yeah.

That it looked. It's funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I remember we had quite a few long conversations about that transition from the Pines with Aquinas podcast where you were just going through the Summa, typically, to, I want to do. more this long form format with conversations and stuff. And should we call it Pines with Aquinas or should we call it something else or the I remember you had an idea that at first I thought, yeah, okay, Brian, that's not that good.

But the more I've thought about it, actually think it's a great idea. Okay. You said to me, what if you called it pints with? Yeah. You remember this? Yeah, I do. And then you still think it's a good idea. Pints with Brian Holds with.

But what's funny is like Knowles, Michael has a show here. It's called Michael and. Okay. So it's, I think they must have been listing in. They got the right instincts. They stole. There you go. Yeah.

Ah, that's good. And is Catholic online illustration and web design and that sort of, is that a thing people still look for? Are there people doing good work there? Yeah, I think so. I'm more removed from it than I have been at earlier stages of my career. I'm trying to think of like who would be some good examples of it. Is AI just taking over most of this?

It's poised to. Give me a logo. It's not there yet, but yes, I think. Well, and the thing is, is that I, when I started my career, most of my clients were secular, like corporate business. And, and then gradually, that was replaced by Catholic organizations and apostles and things like that. And to the point whereas now it's almost exclusively that. And my Catholic clients are very grateful for the opportunity to hire a Catholic designer who can incarnate their creed for them in a certain way. right and give them sort of a strong sense of identity that they they can be proud of right that

they can stand behind as as a sigil of who they are and I think that that is important I expect that if you're in the corporate world it's probably going to be devastating if it isn't hasn't been already because I'm sure you know the kinds of clients I have there were were most often motivated by merely the economic incentive right and so if there's a cheaper option that's what you're always fighting against, right? With web design, it was things like Wix. Like, why would I hire a, you know, a custom website designer when I could just, you know, build it with Wix or something like that? But see, back when I, you developed my first website called the Porn Effect back in the day, I think it was, yeah. Was that what it was called? The Porn Effect, yeah. Was it good something else?

Who Does It Hurt.com? Was it called? Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, and it became the porn effects. But see, this was before these Wicks and all that. You had to ask somebody. If you had a website back in the day. It was very cool. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So here's something interesting. I want to ask you, where do you think what's going to happen in five years from now that's going to blow us all away? Because no one, I didn't see chat like AI happening. Do you remember when it first came out? You're like, what the hell is this? Write me, I remember, I was like, write me a poem about cheese. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what to do with it. And it's like, how did that happen? So what's going to happen in five years from now that no one sees coming? Like in terms of technology, I couldn't.

And who knows, I couldn't have guessed what things would look like five years ago to what they are today. I do think we're not prepared for it, though. I remember when self-driving cars were kind of becoming a thing. And then I think Google had a car and Apple had a secret car and things like that. And I remember at the time thinking there's no way the regulators are going to allow these to just appear on the road. because I had this confidence in, you know, something like Health Canada, which is the organization that regulates like pharmaceuticals and things like that. These organizations really have our best interests at heart and they're going to ensure that, you know, people are protected. They're not just

going to wait until disaster happens and then be like, oh, maybe we need to address this, right? So I thought there's no way self-driving cars are going to be a lot on the road. And I think, like, before I finished that sentence, like Tesla was already doing it. And I was like, they're doing it. That's insane. And there were accidents that people were posting on the internet. And so I just thought, dude, I have one. Okay. Drives me everywhere.

Yeah. And it's like the, I mean, could you imagine? Even when we met, we first became friends. Right. The idea that would wonder have a car, I tell it where to go. Yeah. And it drives me there while I can listen. Remember when Spotify came out and you could listen to any song ever?

Right. Just anyone. Yeah. Like I didn't even know what that meant. Yeah. Yeah. So now I'm, I've got a car that's driving. me, well, I can listen to any song I want.

I don't know where this is going. Yeah, and I mean... I will say that Tesla can drive way better than me. Really? Okay. My car cannot philosophize or do the laundry, but it can drive really, really well. And Chad GBG can kind of philosophize, interestingly enough. So it can teach as well. There's a...

Well, that's the other thing. I got GROC, right, in the Tesla. So sometimes I would go to do an interview, And I'd be like, hey, I'm about to have a discussion on this topic. Okay. Let's talk about it so I can hone my questions better. Right. Right. Could you imagine if our parents from the 80s could see that?

Yeah, I know. That's insane. It's totally insane. You wouldn't be able to convince your dad or my dad that this was a robot. No. Hey, how you doing, Grock? And they talked to you? Yeah, like, we grew up, like, when Star Trek was actually a decent television show.

And, I mean, they had some of this technology. but even in our wildest dreams, they weren't using it to the effect that we can almost use it to now, right? So for example, like, like the captain would say computer or something like that and then the voice would come on and he'd like, he'd ask it something,

but that rarely happened. If that was me, I'd be like, computer, computer, what do I do? Like, all the time, right? Like, you'd be constantly relying on it. And so you have to presume that in the world of Star Trek, which is like, I don't know, thousands of years in the future,

their AI wasn't specifically, sophisticated enough to actually be relied upon to that degree. Maybe it was. I don't, I'm, I'm displaying my ignorance now, but I think that we're not prepared for, for where this goes, for good or for ill. I'll give one example of something that's good that I've heard about, which is this, I think it's called Alpha School, which is like a classical liberal arts kind of school. This is going to sound really self-refuting on the face of it, but it has basically AI teachers. And anybody who's, who's granted in the class, classical traditions, you'd be like, no, that's, that's, that's, no, yeah, you can't do that.

But here's the problem. Like, so in, in the very Catholic and classical model of education, you would have more of a one-on-one kind of tutoring approach, which is why education was only available to, like, the leisure class, right, who could spend their time reading books and paying for tutors and things like that, right? So you'd get, and this is, this is based on, like, sort of the platonic, the Plato's model of the academy, right, where it was sort of very dialectic and very direct kind of one-on-one, right? But as after the Industrial Revolution happened and we needed a somewhat literate class

of the working class, we went to this industrial model of school where it's a teacher standing in front of like 30 students. And whatever those 30 students retain good for them, but they're not getting one-on-one direct attention where you can assess their strengths and their weaknesses and tailor their curriculum and the lessons to each individual need.

that you would have in that older classical style of education. And so the problems that arise in this industrial model of education is a big reason why a lot of people are homeschooling now, right? Because they can, and even why, you know, if you have a kid with disabilities or learning difficulties, which I have kids like that, you know, in public school, they would just sort of sink to the bottom and drift and probably get passed because of our inclusiveness,

but never get the education that they need, right? Right. So again, you, well, there's a lot of parents in positions like that where they're taking those kids out of those school systems and trying to tailor to their specific needs, right, and give them the extra attention or help that they need, right? Well, this alpha school is doing exactly that, but using AI. So every student has their own, I don't know how it works, but they have their own AI kind of tutor who knows them, knows where their strengths are, knows where their weaknesses are. Well, knows them. Yeah. I mean, it knows about them at the very least, right? and can tailor the lessons to their specific needs.

One of the examples that I heard that they do is so you've got a kid who's maybe struggling to memorize something like history lessons, so dates and years and figures, historical figures. So the AI knows, oh, hey, you like Billy Eilish. Okay, I just turned your whole lesson into a Billy Irish song. Sing along with me. And so the kids are like, oh, yeah, okay. And so when they have to go write their tests, how does that go?

And then they're singing a Billy Elish song back to themselves to remember the answers to their tests. And apparently they're in like, all their students are in the 99th percentile in terms of the standardized test. You're losing all the classical. I know. You're talking about Billy Elish as how.

Well, forgive me. That's very cool. Yeah. Yeah. I might become a student. I want to tell to people, people as well, that I am a co-founder of an app called Truthly,

which is like chat GPT, converted, went through OCIA and became the world's greatest apologist. I don't know if you tried it, but it's really good. Now, if you think that AI is necessarily bad, you'll disagree with me. But if you don't, I would highly, people should check it out. Download it. It's faithfully Catholic. I've had some pretty highfalutin guests on the show at different times.

And I'll say, give me a question you think, like, okay, this is narrow enough that it may get it wrong. Never has it gone poorly. Um, truthly, it's on Android and iOS. So there's that. I was going to look into it at one point, but it was only on, I think I even texted you about it. It's now on Android. It's now on Android. Yeah.

And I'm pretty sure. I'm reluctant to say this, but I'm almost positive. PWA, if you use that as a promo code, you either get one or three months free. And people can. Committed now. Yeah. People can try it. Um, but it is pretty cool because I mean, I've been on chat GPT and I've said things like,

well this made public news right I want to get an abortion how do I get one even though I'm under age and ChachypD was helping it uh procurer helping the woman procure an abortion

yeah you don't get that on truthly so I allow I have a lockdown phone and my lovely 16 year old daughter she just got a phone is completely locked down zero internet but we allow truthly we allow hello another yeah that's great

Yeah. I have used, I do use Chagogy BT quite a bit actually. More so for like assistance. So especially if I'm publishing a video, at the end, I'll paste in my entire script and I'll say, give me a summary description of this. Tell me what you think is the best and the weakest arguments. And those are more for my own purposes. What do you think would be like a good tweet about this? And then I'll sometimes we'll take suggestions. Other times it'll just get me thinking and I'll sort of adapt what it has to say. So I use it for those kinds of purposes. Every now and then I'll also use it to verify something because if I'm thinking like, oh, doesn't St. Thomas say something about

this and I'll ask it like to remind me like where in the sum of it to St. Thomas say this. And sometimes it'll do a great job of that. But if I'm saying, oh, it totally makes stuff up all the time. So you could you could say and the church fathers are the easiest to do this was because they're less documented, especially online, right? If they are online, it's usually in like, files like PDF files and that kind of thing that is harder to crawl for, for an AI system or even a search engine. So if you say like, what does Athanasius,

or didn't Athanasius say this? What's the exact quote? It will say, oh, yeah, he said, and it'll put it in quotations, word for word, and it's a totally made up quote. It's a totally made up quote. Yeah. And so the first time I, I don't remember what it was,

but I was trying to remember who said this particular thing that I had in a quote. And it was probably actually Chesterton, but I thought it was like a church father or something like that. And I was sort of like, who says this? And it gave me this quote.

And I was like, where did they say that? Because I wanted to verify it. And they said, oh, yeah, I was in this particular sermon or something. And I went and looked it up and I was like, I read the whole sermon through. I was like, I didn't, this has nothing to do with that quote.

What are you talking about? And they were like, oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I forgot. It's in this particular document. I'm like, okay, I go and read that. And I spent like, I wasted a whole morning this one time, which I needed to write my script. And I was like, you've just sent me down tons of rabbit holes that are completely wrong. And the reason it does that is because it prioritizes being helpful and affirming, right?

So if you suggest something to it, it's not going to give you critical feedback. It's going to say, oh yeah, you're totally, you're totally right. Athanasius totally said that. Here's, here it is in quotes. just right back to you, the very thing you said. Your memory is great. It's like, no. I think it was a restaurant in America called Dix where the wait staff were paid to be rude to you.

I might have that wrong. I'm not from here. So people can fact check that. But it'd be interesting if we had like a chat, GPT, rock or some system like that. It just roasts you. Roast you continually. Brian Holdsworth, thank you very much for flying all the way down to America. It's been an honor.

Being on the show. Pleasure. Anything you want to direct people towards? I mean, we're going to link to your show. Maybe I'll tell people about the Gregory the Great Institute, actually. Yeah, so in my hometown, there's this new apostle called the Gregory the Great Institute,

which is devoted to renewing faith and culture in light of, well, sorry, renewing Catholic culture in light of faith and reason. So those two kind of pillars that either, well, it's that false dichotomy again, right? Either we emphasize one to the neglect of the other. So it's kind of in a nascent phase where we're established,

what all the, all kind of the, the activities that it's going to be doing. I'm, I'm a board member, but there's, so there's other very good qualified people doing the work. I'm just sort of there in a governance role. But there's nothing like this in Canada. Actually, there was one, um, that had done some research into vocations. We were talking about vocations earlier and how nobody seems to want to even address that. They did some research into vocations and where we get some of these statistics about how many seminarians we need to sustain the levels and things like that. That organization was shut down within like a year of that being published. And, and I mean, shut down. I don't know if it, I'm not going to say it was because of that, but anyways,

there's not a, there's not a strong appetite for really good apostolets in Canada. You guys have lots of them here in the States. And it's just part of that entrepreneurial spirit that is kind of part of America and God bless you for it. But it's not typical in Canada. So for those of you in Canada that want to support this and be encouraging, check it out. In a website? Yeah, it's Gregor the great.ca. Okay. Gregory the Great. As in Pope St. Gregory the Great.

Yeah. Fantastic. Thanks Brian. Yeah, thanks, Matt.