Pints With Aquinas - Overcoming Addiction, Allegations and Finding Christ (Russell Brand) | Ep. 578

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

Russell Brand joins the show to share about his conversion, overcoming addiction and his latest book, How To Become a Christian in 7 Days.   Ep. 578 - - - 📚 Resources Mentioned: How to Become a Christian in 7 Days: https://store.tuckercarlson.com/products/how-to-become-christian-in-7-days Russell Brand on Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/russellbrand Sunday Service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Q5SF2RoJo - - - Today's Sponsors: 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   Hallow: Deepen your personal relationship with God today. Visit https://hallow.com/MattFradd to get 3 months free.  Exodus 90: Download the Exodus 90 app to start your 14-Day free trial or visit https://Exodus90.com/matt to learn more.  Charity Mobile: Visit https://charitymobile.com/MATTFRADD to get started. Free Phone offer with code MATTFRADD PreBorn: Make a difference for generations to come. Donate securely online at https://preborn.com/PINTS or dial #250 keyword 'BABY' - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 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

Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca.

Wayfair, every style, every home. Allegations have been made about you. Can we talk about that or not? One thing I've always known about myself is that I was motivated by some sort of culturally born appetite for fame, celebrities, success, power. And yet I also had what feels like the spiritual equivalent of a pathology towards mission. Something that you are going to do this no matter what. How are you standing upright and not in constant panic,

given the fact that you have to go and stand trial in a few months? Because I believe in God. Right. Can you back up to what led to this encounter with Christ? As a cracker addict and a heroin addict, really what you're trying to do is defibrillate the dead world, the dead world. into some sort of state of meaning, some sort of vitality. I would like to ask you if it's not too personal a question, why you're not a Catholic?

When I'm taking communion at the Protestant church that I go to, I like want it to be his flesh and I want it to be his blood. It isn't, though. I love the rosary. He's evocative. It's powerful to me. How could you not? This is for you, by the way. I wanted to give it to you. Even something's relatively trivial like of the appearance on Pierce Morgan. which bit of you hurts after that. Give it up.

Put that at the foot of the cross. Now you know, oh, so you do care. You don't want people to think you're dumb. Oh, you don't want people to think you're fraudulent. Put that at the foot of the cross. Give that to him. What's it like coming on a show like this with a fella you've never met before, not knowing what I want to talk to you about,

especially given all that's going on right now? Well, I suppose that faith means. that I'm guided by things unseen and therefore a level of trust is continually required. And also, I'm trying not to rely on my own ability to make assessments about what I want, what I don't want, what's right for me. Although I'm sort of undergoing, people don't understand, I don't think, that I undergo quite a lot of internal interrogation continually and have always done. I'm not a person who does things unquestioningly, although I do know when I'm in the flow, when I'm in the spirit, and I know

when I'm, I start to detect now with greater efficiency when I'm not. So, like, what it's like actually is kind of, in a way, refreshing, even though, you know, I've traveled here and it's at the daily wire. And look, you know, I'm not the only controversial thing in the world. Catholicism is controversial. You carry on, you'll be controversial at some point. Daily Wire is controversial. The relationship between Judaism and Christianity is controversial. Me going on Pierce Morgan and taking a while to locate. The rest of the stuff. I watched it last night. How did you think it went? Well, I was, I mean, I did two interviews in a pretty short period of time and one that thought was pretty good. With him or Megan? Megan Kelly was, you know, I would say ultimately

not hugely beneficial. And one that I felt at a time, degrees of discomfort also didn't go well. But like, Matt, I'm beginning to, these are the inquiries that I'm making myself right now. Why are you going on podcasts? What do you want? What do you want?

How am I supposed to reconcile? And indeed, am I supposed to reconcile? Or is there someone undertaking reconciliation on my behalf? and indeed reconciliation and substitution are also central to his role that my role's almost redundant. But nevertheless, how do I reconcile me knowing? One thing I've always known about myself is that I was motivated by some sort of culturally born appetite for fame, celebrity, success, power, all of the trinkets that anyone would recognize that still dominate what is now known as the manosphere in many places, male status symbols, affability, ability to attract

mates, status, all those things. And yet I also had, and I feel it still, what feels like the spiritual equivalent of a pathology towards mission, something that you are going to do this no matter what. If this kills you, you will carry on doing it. I felt both of those things. Self God, self-god.

Before I had that vocabulary, before I knew how to make them distinctions, before I knew that that was a paradigm that's described scripturally. Well, I'd love to ask you why you're on, because I'll tell you why I'm having you on. Even though it's a show on the Daily Wire, I'm not terribly interested in politics, not because politics can't be interesting or isn't important, but what I'm really excited to talk to you about is how your journey to Jesus Christ, we have your book, how to become a Christian in seven days, may take 50 years of sin and serious F-ups to get started. And then also, like, you know, you're a big name, and so that helps my channel. Those are my two honest reasons for interviewing you.

What's your honest reason for being on my show? My honest reason is that I'm promoting that book and I'm interrogating even now whether or not, like this, guess what I read today? I've got some nuts doing this, and I? Marks are in place. They actually, tell the truth, Isaiah 43, 18, which is what I was looking for in the now, it seems ridiculous to say, famous meme, like a meme. It was already bookmarked. It's already bookmarked. it was there or this has been there for like weeks

um forget the former things do not dwell on the past see i'm doing a new thing now it springs up do not perceive it i'm making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland but i think really as i was looking for it and i was thinking isn't this is early in isaiah isn't it yeah about isaiah 10 where is that i was like we've all been there and yeah well i suppose look i am questioning my own integrity in selling a book. And my point when I picked up the Bible just then was to bring us to two Corinthians. But while we're looking for that, I will make the point that if something is

sort of innocuous as looking for a page in the Bible or looking for a quote in a book to decouple it from ideology and theology, you know, have you ever looked for a quote in a book and not been able to instantly and urgently find it if it wasn't something you were preparing or really even thinking about that day, if that is looked at so nefariously, it might. makes you wonder how many other relatively innocent things might be being deliberately reframed as negative for some other purpose. Because surely there is an appetite to condemn, an appetite to condemn, as one of my teachers, the writer of this book, actually, Jamie Winchip, who you should definitely have on your show, said to me, he goes, well done. For 72 hours,

for 72 hours, it weren't about Jews or Muslims or LGBTQ plus or Trump supporters or Democrats or trance or whatever, it was about you for 72 hours. Well done. Because the people that are doing that, they were doing it before and they're doing it now about something else. For a minute, you just passed through it. Now, like, my little challenge is not to take myself seriously while somehow still having the fuel to go through my life.

So what happens as a resolve of it? Well, what happens as a result of it is I, you know, I read Corinthians today, to Corinthians, in fact, and actually I'm not sure that I can find the actual. and direct quote. But one of my things... Let me sit here for a minute while you find it. Yeah, yeah. You just...

I'm just going to take my time with it. Actually, I found it already. Thank you, God. It says here in 2 Corinthians, chapter 2, we're around 15. We do not peddle the Word of God for profit. We do not peddle the Word of God for profit. And like, so when I'm on Piers Morgan and I sort of am realizing, from the moment I, to tell the truth, enter the Associated Press

buildings. And these are the kind of buildings I've been in a lot of times, a kind of sterility and bureaucracy that brings further wisdom yet to C.S. Lewis's device in the screw tape letters of depicting the realm of demons as an institutionalized bureaucracy. Because bureaucracy is a kind of pose of managerialism and therefore neutrality. We're just functionally doing what's necessary. But it is dehumanizing by its nature. By its nature, a bureaucracy strips away our humanity, anyone that's weighed on the now press three, four, now press two, or I'm unable to help you, it's more than my job's worth. We no longer have the ability to be in the flow of the living water interacting with one another.

You ought to see each other like human being. And they interact and like, you know, for good or for ill. Like, you know, we've become dislocated. I thought this yesterday. I was at the airport and, you know, they have the self-scanner checkouts. And I thought, don't give me that option because I will choose it. But I would much rather have to look someone in the eye and have a conversation. but we're getting to the point where we don't need to have pesky conversations with strangers anymore.

When you're in a grocery store and like using the self-checkout and sometimes the few remaining folk that work there will direct you towards it, knowing that in a way they're signing their own sort of penury because in the end they won't be required, we won't be required. But perhaps it's no more significant than the identity that peasants had when working in agriculture yielded to the identity they had when working in industry to the identity we have as some new Lanyard class

propping up some AI counterfeit system of total control and centralised managerialism where your free will and your sovereignty and your connection to God are just inadvertent private secrets that you mutter in some corner somewhere lest you should be like Daniel

politely disobedient praying towards Jerusalem until the day Okay. All right. So that's how you felt going on to Pierce's show. Well, how I felt was just confused, because also I am a creature of Babylon. I lived there a long time. I'm a creature of Hollywood.

Like, you know, I've been on this merry-go-round. A long time, it seems to me. Like, I've been on it a long time. When you first become famous, it's incredibly validating, and for a moment, sort of golden. Like, oh, my God, surely you've had your own version of, like, this thing that I do and did out of love and just started doing it. And now I'm being remunerated and I can do it more. and this is, gosh, thank you, Lord, thank you. You know, even if you're a sort of secular person,

or even if your religions as diffuse and baffling as the sort of neo-pagan attempts at grasping at meaning that I knew as a, was just a working class person from Essex, drug addict, confused, pursuing something, a dream that I feel like was bequeathed by the culture, become famous. If you want to mean something and you feel like you mean nothing,

become famous. Develop some sort of status in the system. You know, when I first got famous, there is a moment where all of those no, those no, those knows turn to yeses, where no, you can't have a TV show, no, you can't have a radio show, no, we're not interested in your column, your book, your stand up, anything you've got to say, it becomes yes, yes to it all. And that sort of feels for a moment like a facsimile or at least a shadow of glory. But quite quickly, it transpires if you are in any way attuned, and I suppose to a degree

we all are, and perhaps addicts and alcoholics are especially attuned to some real meaning, real nutrition, you recognize this wasn't it. This wasn't what I was looking for, not hedonism, not decadence, not approval, not personal satisfaction. It feels so thin. It feels so thin and empty. But, you know, these cycles are easily perpetuated. You can get people in a real rhythm in them mazes, dropping a pellet to the rack, keeping

them going round and round and round. So when I go back, what I felt like in the Associated Press building is, oh, I know these places, News International's offices in South East London, where they're Times and the Sun and Virgin Radio and Talk Sport Radio are all housed. I know these turnstiles, these Chrome anonymous turnstiles where the fodder of a person is, you know, like the cogs in Charlie Chaplin's modern times, we're cogs in this machine, this simulation, this counterfeit thing. We're cogs in this machine. We're being made machine-like. And then they're them kind of elevators where there's no button, but you're allocated an elevator. Go to elevator C-16 and it will

take you to where you've got to go and then they're all windowless rooms and no people. One person, Peter, I think he was called like a person that worked for the AP who was actually a really sweet person who actually eventually ended up getting me some water, the ninth time of asking for the living water, praying like Elijah for that water to come. Eventually it turned up. And as you see, when I even went to the bathroom prior to doing it, you walk past Associated Press photographic imagery. And these images, if you're like me and you're raised to worship the culture,

you'll see them almost as if you're looking at an exhibition from Man Ray, black and white, prestigious images, serious photography from serious journalists. But it's only afterwards, Matt, I thought. Hold on a minute. These are images of execution and brutality, that famous Vietnamese man captive having his head blown off. And it made me sort of question the real neutrality of the way that media, and the word and the etymology of the word just means conduit for information, communication. There is no neutrality, except for perhaps that type of neutrality that always metastasizes into sin.

So I felt very uncomfortable, but I always felt uncomfortable when I'm doing the MTV VMAs. I'm not like, wow, man, aren't I fantastic? I felt kind of ill, ill in those environments, sometimes thinking, you better start trying to enjoy this because one day you're going to look back at it and people maybe will ask you. And all you're about to say, I didn't like it. While I was watching it last night, I thought, whatever I have to do so that he doesn't call me darling is what I'm going to do. darling. Do you know how that got back in my vocabulary?

It was cause of a Christian. It was cause of a Christian. Michael Emmett, God rest his soul. He was a gangster. Found a Lord in jail after doing time for the largest drug bust of a certain kind in my country. And him and his dad found the Lord through the Alpha course. And Michael is like, all right, darling.

He's like, old school locksstock kind of gangster. Our Lord, he's a man's man. You know, he weren't no sissy. He didn't pee sitting down, Jesus Christ. Like, he was very gangster about it and very affable. And he started to use, he called me, darling, and he called people darling. And in a sense, it didn't feel like a showbiz word no more. It started to feel like a term of endearment.

Yeah, and a bit gangster. But that main, I'm sensing from what you're telling me, that's not how it came over. Uncensored with Pierce Morgan. The two things he made. a big deal of and not for no reason is the allegations that have been leveled against you and then the insinuation if he didn't come right out and say it that this christian christianity thing is just a grift so i know you can't speak a lot about the former but i do need to ask about it um allegations have been made about you in some of the interviews that i've seen you i think right rightfully said that

And I would say the same thing about myself back in the day was an imbecile and an idiot and made bad choices. But then you've said didn't commit. And that you think that if somebody did commit, even 20, 25 years later should be thrown in jail. Can you talk about that or not? So I am really excited to tell you that I have partnered with Theotokos Rosaries. These are, without a doubt, the most beautiful rosaries. Rosaries I have ever seen in my life. Theratocos rosary sent me one maybe about a year ago or so.

And I remember being absolutely blown away. You probably heard me talking about it. I've sent one to my mom and dad and uncle. I give them to some of the guests that we have. And everyone who receives one is blown away. These are just a total different caliber. And when you think about the kind of money we're willing to spend on a phone, it's like, you know, sure, you can pray a rosary on your fingers or on a string rosary.

and it would work just the same, obviously. But if you're looking for a beautiful rosary that's more of an also like an heirloom, something that you could have for life, check this out. Go to dailywire.com slash shop and pick up one of these. This is more of the masculine one.

This one, they based on St. Peter's Basilica. So it has real stone beads and Italian olive wood. This one is inspired by Notre Dame in Lyon, France. So you might want to, again, pick this up. It'd be a beautiful ordination gift, a gift for those who are getting married, maybe Father's Day, Mother's Day, like, honestly, a beautiful gift. I remember what moved me so much is when I sent this to my, I won't say who,

because I don't want to call them out, but a family member who doesn't actually pray the rosary, they started praying the rosary. And I think it's honestly because it's so beautiful and so sacred looking. So again, go to dailywire.com slash shop to pick one up today. and thank you to Theotokos Rosaries for partnering with us. Well, since the Piers Morgan and Megan Kelly interviews, the Crown Prosecution Service, that's the equivalent of the AG, contacted me via my lawyers to say that if you talk about this case at all,

we will withdraw your bail and you will wait for trial in custody, or at least, I don't know fully than it is in custody. Yeah, so, I mean, so really I don't think I can add to anything that I've already said publicly other than acknowledging that, of course, there would be interest in such heinous allegations so publicly made. But you fully deny them and have denied them since the beginning. Yes. Absolutely.

Yes. When did you realize that your sexual deviants, because just to be clear, I was a sexual deviant as well, I consumed a lot of pornography from the age of eight when I was exposed to it and then just had a steady diet of it? it till about 17 and it's the lies run deep now I'm still dealing with them you know um but when did you kind of come to the conclusion that the way you had been living was deviant and wrong um was it when you became a Christian or was it before that long before becoming Christian because it's pretty obvious really even outside of other than from the perspective of a deliberately pagan

pedonic, epicurean kind of perspective, it's sort of really obvious that it's wrong to treat sex as leisure. I think everyone knows there's something sacred about it. It's the desacralisation of perhaps that's most significant. There are perhaps particularities around sex. I'm still trying to understand. Like, does it create a heightened state?

Is intimacy in a sexual state of some sort? special quality. Is there an argument for the sanctification of sex? Is sex a sacrament outside, not, you know, outside of marriage, clearly, you know, particularly within the Catholic faith, sex is for a man and woman in a marriage, period. No further discussion available on that subject. No contraception always open to new life. And so for those two purposes, right, the bonding of the two coming together and then the possibility of new life that's at least not interfered with throughout artificial contraception. I'm really interested in sort of trying to understand with you a kind of hierarchy of sin because like when I talk to like gay people, I'm, you know, because I mean,

like, you know, I'm living in America. I'm attending a pretty great church and I know it, no, I don't know. It sometimes seems to me that there's a not explicit, but sort of agreed upon hierarchy when it comes to sexual sin. Okay. And the way it appears to work from the outside at least is that there's a special condemnation for same-sex relationships, even if it were like loving partnerships that are tantamount to the type of partnership that you would recognize as marriage, aside from the Christian origins of Christian marriage and it being a sacrament. like a partnership, a bonded, committed, loving partnership. See, the way that I feel it and experience it is I can understand. I understand it from a, would I say, from a mosaic and decalogue perspective, that if you're worshiping anything ahead of God, if you're putting anything ahead of God,

you've gone real wrong. You're really, you're really out of whack. And I can see how if you are a heterosexual person or a gay person and you are sexes, has become paramount in your identity, paramount in your behavior, something that you're pursuing. And also, by the way, as a recovering addict, I have a good analytic for understanding

either compulsive behaviors or behaviors that are actually full of worship, that you're worshipping a God other than God, God, God's self. Right. So, but, right, the point of, what I'm trying to kind of get to, is if, like, Christians of, are interested in sexual morality,

The one that it seems they should be most focused on is their own personal sexual morality. How are you behaving? Are you looking at porn? Are you cheating on your wife? Are you staring at the people you're attracted to and objectifying them? That should be way, way ahead. I mean, in a kind of get the plank out of your own eye type way, than the minutiae of same-sex relationships. And I sort of sometimes feel that there's an obstacle being placed in front of

loving people and I'm really like probably like any new Christian mate trying to understand it's good to be how to use that word naturally mate like I'm trying to understand how do we

like because I would think prioritise his absolute proclamation of the kingdom of heaven all embracing love love love love love come to me come to me but not like a bespoke off the peg Jesus that you're able to carry on to see him that's not what I'm saying at all

I'm saying who like we can't go around judging each other on getting off on it. Yeah, so I agree with you that there's a prayer that I pray at the end of every night by St. Ephraim the Syrian. This is a couple of things. One is help me to see my own sin and not to judge my brethren. The other is if I have made fun of my brother's sins when my own faults are countless. So I think that's exactly right, especially in this moment where Christianity, for whatever reason, seems to be in season, as it were, I think it's really important, especially in the internet age, that we condemn our own selves while understanding that

we had deeply loved by the father, right, that that be the primary concern as opposed to what the internet promotes, which is scorn and being sardonic online. So I agree with that, but I would say that every time homosexual acts are mentioned in scripture, they've been condemned, every church father condemned them. I think it's like what, not even a hundred years ago that you would have the first mainstream Christian say that they can be legitimate. So that's why I think, I think the further you get away from the intended purpose of sex, that is, I would say that it becomes more perverted, and the more perverted it becomes, the more it could be condemned. To your question about the hierarchy of, hierarchy of sin. So obviously, having sex with a cadaver would be more perverted.

Let's do a list. Right. Let's do a list of the worst possible. Right. That's not. No, that's okay. Necrophilia, necromancy, beastiality, pedophilia. Yeah, but even if you don't agree with me, Do you see at least the logic there that the further you remove from what the act is intended for, the worse it is? That is the kind of logic that warrants the term, the, the, the etymology of the word, Logos. Like, it's a kind of logical righteousness. In the end, our connection to Christ should subsume rationality. And I also think that the reason Christians for the last 50 years or whatever have been beating this drum against homosexual acts, is because we felt it's been pushed upon us.

Do you know what I mean? So when people say, why are you so obsessed with homosexual people? It's like, no, I don't think that's it at all. I think that every single movie I've had to watch during the 90s has been trying to voice this perversion upon me, and therefore we're reacting against it in a cultural way. In the same way that maybe we've kind of forgotten about that thing because the new war is now the trans thing,

but you would think any Christian worth their soul would say, of course I love people with same-sex attraction. Of course I love people who think they're a man if they're a woman But just guess who did this so much more succinctly than I am able to It's John Rich the country singer who lives here in Nashville Yeah I asked him sort of like week one of being Christian What do I do? Like my friends are gay and I don't want to be judging no one

He goes no separate compartments in hell Just like you know and I wrote that's how he dealt with it that quickly And um but let's see you there Matt saying um Intended purpose of sex a kind of telos Now, like my mate who's gay, she said that this film, 1946, is about a kind of some sort of filialogical linguistic trickery taking place in scripture that kind of inserted the word homosexuality. You know that, do you? Right. Well, what I would say, though, is isn't it interesting that for the first 1900 years, no prominent Christian agreed with your gay friend?

Like, that's weird, that the people who are closest to the time of the apostles weren't able to pick that up. but someone living in 2026 can. What I reckon as well, I mean, I ain't even seen the film. So, you know, I'm here to ask questions and sort of learn from you. But what, I guess, what struck me, one thing struck me is interesting is that when people would say, you know, say if you meet a Christian person, that's married. And you sort of that person has kind of a campness about them. And you think, oh, that person's gay. You are automatically defaulting to the idea that their sexual identity is paramount.

You should come out and be your true self that is gay. And when I started ruminating on that and reflecting on that, that's pretty interesting because, That is to assume that the highest part of your identity is your sexual nature. But I have operated on the assumption that my sexuality was the highest part of my own nature. So there's Russell's job. Russell's jobs nothing to do with people that same sex attracted other than love them. That's my job. I get it.

I'm taking just that part of what I've been instructed or what I have received. Then I began to consider the evident and obvious love that goes beyond Eros between the beloved disciple and our Lord. Are you suggesting that that love would have somehow been enhanced to improve by physical contact or orgasm and what could be more sacrilegious than even to ruminate on such an idea. So if the highest kind of love, the agape love or the fraternal love is available to all of us, then the sort of lesson is a kind of don't deify or reify your own sexuality, regardless of the object of its attraction. And I'm on board with that. I'm just kind of,

aside from the notion that sin separates us from God and doesn't afford him access to our kind of closed down frequency. It shuts down the channel in a kind of literal, I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning, that you're no longer available on the circuit. You've shut yourself off. Aside from that idea, I'm just not down with a condemnatory aspect. I really want to feel that my participation in the message of Christ, which, by the way, even in light of going on Piers Morgan or whatever, I'm questioning, because it's like, if I'm just on here to try and sell a book or to peddle God's word for money, no one needs that.

No one needs that. What I feel I'm called to do to participate in in this generation is how are we to ensure the proclamation of the kingdom of heaven reaches those that need it most? And what I know about that is I know what it is to just be a local and a native in the neighborhood of suicide, to not ever move out of there, to be a kind of a junkie before I was a junkie,

to be broken before I was broken, and to know as C.S. Lewis suggests that since knowing him, I see my whole life differently. I look back at all of it and I feel him there and I see his hand. And if I'm going to do anything at all, it's going to be to talk to people that are interested in the new age. That's one part of it. To talk to people that are interested in addiction and sort of longing and yearning and craving and to see how that might convert into zeal for him. And until sort of quite recently, I felt like I had some sort of intellectual role to play, but that's sort of like taking a bit of a battering in the last sort of 72 hours particularly. Why? Because I felt that I didn't make a good assessment of what a situation, what outcomes would be, you know? Like I felt like. With certain interviews?

With specifically those two interviews in New York. I felt like, well, you're doing this, you know, deliberately. You know that you're going on interviews. You know what I know what awaits in terms of a truck. Yeah, I know Pierce Morgan and all of that. So, but I guess what I'm saying is, I'm trying to be open to the idea. Like, if it becomes clear, why don't you just go and be in solitude for five years? Well, obviously not solitude because I've got three kids and a wife.

But why don't they? They wouldn't appreciate that. That seems another selfish error. Sorry. Good luck out there with the revenue generation. Try a YouTube channel. Don't get demonetized. Like, but, you know, like, I am trying to be open.

to the exposure of what these encounters bring out. What did I learn? Oh, I learned that. Well, if you go into that world, if you go into that field, if there's any part of you that is still looking for something there, and there must be, then you're going to feel that really throb and hum, like an amputated and discarded leg.

Like when that guitar is strummed, all other instruments tuned to the Kia G are going to let you know that it's still there in you. wrong with the world, ask the times I am, says Chesterton. And I am in that I am more than I'm in the I am at the top of the mountain. You know, the I am of this false world, the counterfeit I am, the false identity, the fallen identity. I felt it stirred and conjured. And like, while I was sort of thinking, yeah, you are in a way, he's right, because you're here trying to sell this book. You know, I thought, well, what you can do is just any money that book makes. Don't take anything from it. Do

whatever, be open entirely, absolutely open to, have you got an idea that what we should do with, like, do you know, literally you, Matt, what's a good thing to do with any revenue generated by this book? I'm not, I'm not holding on to anything. One thing I know is I don't know anything anymore. Like, I'm trying to yield. I'm trying to die on the cross with him and have him reborn in me. And so I suppose, like, you know, I've got a trial. The trial's going to be the trial. That's reasonable doubt. We'll deal with that there. I've got to accept it. And I'm happy to. That's my path. Thank you, Lord. But when it comes to the, um, I don't think I'd be walking. If I was in your shoes, I think I'd be laying down just sick to my stomach. I pointed out Cardinal

Pell here recently. He was falsely accused of having committed sexual deviant acts and then was put in prison. He was in solitary confinement in prison for over a year. It seemed like anyone who was being honest knew that this was not in fact the case. What had been said of him could not have happened. and then he was vindicated by the High Court of Australia. I should get you his prison diaries. It might be something to read. Look, dating today, they tell me, is weird. You can feel like the only practicing Catholic in your city

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programs and thank goodness for them. It's great 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 28, verse 8, we are called to announce the joyful news of the Lord's resurrection and to accompany others on their journey with the risen Lord. I don't think it was till after I got serious about my Catholic faith that I realized Easter isn't just a day. It is a season. So this Easter season, the question is, how do we walk alongside others confident that together we are drawing closer to our risen Lord? St. Paul Center invites you to join Father Bonifus Hicks, the Mercederian sisters and their world-renowned theologians for a unique Easter challenge. Over these

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in constant panic given the fact that you have to go and stand trial in a few months? Because I believe in God. Right. So I believe in God. And you know what it's like is there's a kind of a sense of a dialogue and a discourse that doesn't leave me. What was also hard, this is good, right, so why I'm here now is there's a kind of catharsis because I went back into the empire. I don't live in the empire no more. I live in the kingdom. That's the empire. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows it. It's cynical. It's nasty. Anyway, so I'm here to kind of metabolize and chew through and get through all of the experiences that I had in there. And one of them, Matt, what did I feel like while I was in there? What am I feeling in my heart? Oh yeah. There was a bit where, like, it in

intruded into prayer, like it intruded into prayer when I was awake at night. You know, because I wake up at night. And now when I wake up at night, I'm like, oh, right, you want me, huh? Like, I'm here to be with you. I'm here to be with you. You know, I've tried to get rid of my thoughts. I have a preference to be asleep. I have a preference.

My preferences have not been the best guide for a lifestyle or personal ideology. So, but what I felt like is I felt an intrusion into the sanctity. of prayer. And when I spoke to, again, one of my, I've got, the Lord has strapped me on all sides with fine, fine teachers and mentors. So all throughout this, the kind of the people I'm dealing with and talking with are such brilliant minds, such incredible people, some of whom are in the acknowledgments of that book, because I'm sort of given the kind of, what I want to call it, the radioactivity of this moment. I'm reluctant even to honor them by saying their names because I'm aware that I'm wearing so much.

condemnation. But one of them, again, Jamie, he said, as well as like you're absorbing all this stuff. He, he, what about what do you do with this, Matt? Like, in scripture, we talk about spiritual warfare. We talk about demons. We talk about the fallen one. We talk about darkness. We talk about evil. We talk about not fighting against flesh and blood. Be a friend of the world is to be an enemy of gods. Yeah. The world is under the power of the evil one. So it's not like a little moral code of how you try and be nice to people. It's like the Lord of the Rings. Trying to make sense of the Lord of the Rings without reference to Sauron. That's what it's like to try to make sense of Christianity without reference to this spiritual battle.

So I don't think people like talking about evil, present evil. I don't. But there it is. Well, I like it. Think about what Peter, you know, preaches the gospel and save yourself from this wicked generation. We don't like to think like that. We'd much rather think that society's on the up and up. You're about to ask me where it is.

Is that Peter's letters or is that? I know. It's in the book of Acts during the first sermon. First one. Yeah. Save yourself from this wicked generation. But we'd rather be like, no, no, we're on the up and up. We're doing good.

Things are great. To say that this is a wicked generation that we have to turn from the world and be enemies of the world in a sense. Seems so pessimistic, doesn't it? Shouldn't we run after it, flirt with it, try to get it to like us? Well, look where that's got us. So it's when it gets past all of the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood. When does he say it? Oh, I'm talking about Acts.

Well, see, this is what you're going to do, aren't you from now on? Just hear him, you find it, you see how easy it is. Clock starts now. Wait a minute, this is the Quran. Wait a minute, this is Harry Potter. See, I'm going to give up, unlike you did, and say, I promise he said it. That is Peter's first sermon. Yeah, save yourself from this wicked generation.

Says it somewhere, I promise. It's in the Bible, I tell you, I tell you. But, like, what I was, yeah, it's a long sermon. Like what I was looking at Find it to me If you keep talking I'll look it up But I can't just sit here in silence

Because I've seen how that goes People do People are not patient with that I love that you have a beautiful simple Bible There that you've This is the thing All right So I had someone recently say

Don't you think this whole brand thing is a grift Do you think he's just trying To whitewash himself In light of recent allegations And whether the allegations are true or not I'm obviously not in a place to know But I think this is

true what you're going through. I think it's not that it matters to you whether I think it's true or not who the hell cares. You just met me this morning. But I spoke to our mutual friend who said I could use his name on air, Jeff Kavens. He's like, I've been speaking to Russell for two years now. That seems like a weird thing to do if you weren't serious about growing in your relationship with Christ. Why else? I'll talk to Jeff for two years in private. Why would you tolerate Jeff Kavins? Yeah, I couldn't. Unless you were very serious about J. He's very annoying. Hello, I'm Jeff Kevin

so old Russell Look it's important I suppose I do I do prefer it when people like me to when they don't

like me it feels nice I guess I like it thank you thank you I like you too and like

when when what's important or maybe relevant if not yeah go on crack on and what I'll do

is I'll fill the air yeah you fill the air friendly convivial way in a kindly manner because I

I gain nothing from destroying the good faith that all humans will eventually rely on when they face death and the true judge, our Lord God in heaven. No, my point is, actually, I don't want to talk over it because I feel like it might distract you. So maybe what Pierce Morgan was doing was in fact, compassionate. Hurry up. I don't even, do you even know Thomas Aquinas was? Do you know what you're holding?

Have you ever drunk a pint? Why can't I find it? Do you know that's actually a 500 bit? That's a liter you're drinking there. I don't think you believe in Jesus. Is that Alistair Crowley you're reading? Is that a book of Satanism? I give up.

I give up. Here's my main point. Nothing can stop me loving you. Here's my main point, right? The two things that you're dealing with right now are people who are accusing you of things. And two things, right? One is those allegations which we won't go into. But the second is that you're fake or that this is all agrift.

How do you personally deal with that? Do you have good friends in your life? And you just have to block out the... You don't really have to block it out. Because I think to myself, like, for the longest time, I actually wrote on the topic of pornography. I was against it. I would travel and I would speak on the topic. And I spoke to hundreds of thousands of high school students and college students of the topic.

And then I thought this, I thought, if anyone made an accusation against me, which they haven't done. But if someone said Matt made untoward advances against me, he did this. Here's what would break my heart. Even my closest friends would have to say, I mean, I don't know, maybe. Like, it's possible. and he does speak a lot about porn, which is kind of weird. I remember thinking that. And then just the hell of not being able to fully convince everybody

that I didn't do what people are saying that I was doing. It's not hell if you don't want it to be. Julian Assange, your countryman and great hero, said, you've got a superpower now. You know who's real and who's not real. The people that stay near you, they're real. The people that dissipate, now you know, now you know. especially if they're people that actually know the reality because they were there at the time.

Now, I like, I got as I keep reiterating, I have to be cautious when talking specifically about that matter. But actually, I am more concerned about eternity than the temporal. And while the fallen one and these systems of imitation can achieve a kind of synthesis of eternity through the appearance of permanent, they can take your time, they can take your liberty, they can cut you up and carve you up. Isn't the obvious instruction that even something's relatively trivial, like the appearance on, Pierce Morgan, which bit of you hurts after that? Give it up. Put that at the foot of the cross.

Now you know, oh, so you do care. You don't want people to think you're dumb. Oh, you don't want people to think you're fraudulent. Put that at the foot of the cross. Give that to him. You want it to be about you. You want people to go, I think part of this revival of interest in Christianity is very much to do with Russell Brown. You want that, do you?

That's not good. put that at the foot of the cross. You know, like some Francis said, be a fool in the court of Christ. Be a fool in the court of heaven. If I'm going to fall around, I'm doing it for him now. So what, and also a much more practical sort of almost a strategy kind of level, I recognize that my job is if you're got to know your situation.

This, you know, I reckon you're a good faith person and that you'll just talk to me and you'll work stuff out and then maybe like you go, yeah, I liked him or didn't like him or whatever. But some people have a real definitive agenda. And the worst of all, they don't even know they have an agenda. They don't even know that they have an agenda. They don't know the seat they sit in. They don't know where the money comes from. They don't know the role they're playing. So if you're in that situation, if one way or another, your life schools you in every type of media,

stand-up comedian, online media, movies, TV, radio, print. And then you find yourself touched by the hand of Christ, or you feel your belly, filled with Christ and you suddenly know, oh my God, it's real. Like it's something if you were there, you would have seen it. And then you read and educate yourself on it as best as you can in the time that you have. Then now you have a different purpose. Now, don't in the moments when you're tested, let go of his hands. Stay present. Stay present. See him. See Christ in everybody's eyes. And, you know, when you think of it with a more obvious form of temptation, you know, pornography and such and sexuality, one might be aware, if it's pornography,

you're going to be tempted probably when it was me when I used to look at pornography five years ago, say, it's probably when I last looked at pornography. I, yeah, I like would, the situation would be you're on your own, it's probably the end of a day, you can't get to sleep, there's a laptop or a phone or something, those are the conditions. Yeah. You know, and that's obvious. Or if it's with another human being, you're in an environment where you're encountering human beings that are attracted to you and there's opportunity.

Now, those things are kind of obvious, huh? There's more insidious forms of temptation that probably have as the locust and forcrum, some part of yourself that you're barely present with. So the advantage and blessing of Piers Morgan, and by the way, something's happening to me where I don't feel no ill will to people in the way that I used to. Even when I hear other people sticking up for me, God love him, saying that, Piers Morgan, and this, that or the other, I don't feel nothing. I remember the feeling of looking in his eyes and what I felt and what I saw.

And it wasn't, I hate you. It was not those feelings. That's not what it's bringing out in me at all. Those feelings are being processed and sanctified and changed in me. Now, people saying, again, like, you know, oh, you're not Christian. Well, firstly, what do you mean, Christian? That whole word's made up. The whole concept's made up.

It's not a term that Christ used. Now, what, you know, saying something's a fraud more generally. You can have that about, you could say about anyone. You would say that about a person that's in the clergy. You could say that about any orphal. You could say it about a prostit. You could say about a famous YouTube atheist. He's just grifting to the masses.

If you're making money from what you do, then you are open to the charge. You can level that accusation at anybody. That, I think, takes us to a principle that's of maybe more value to discuss. And Lord Alone knows that was part of my frustration with Pierce Morgan was the sense of sort of being corralled into not only personally deleterious subjects. Although, yeah, that's not nice. But this is not it at all in the words of T.S. Eliot. No, no, that's not worth discussing. What are you talking? Oh no, you're doing it deliberately. You're kind of part of it. You don't even know what you're participating in. That is kind of frustrating. And then to see how that might, to see myself contaminated by it, to see myself start to throb or at least walk to the beat of that drum. No, what is interesting is maybe that one must be an ascetic if one is to exemplify high principle, because if people go, well, but you're making all this money out of your church or, you know, whether that's

something as big as the Holy Roman Catholic Church or as evident and obvious as some evangelical movement somewhere in the American South. If you're open at all, you know, like one way of overcoming that charge is by saying, I'm not going to, I'm a mendicant. I deny myself material pleasure. I don't know if it's fully flagellatory, but maybe it's good to mortify the flesh, to let the flesh be dead already in preparation for the new body to say, I don't have sex. I don't do that. I recognize its power. I recognize the allure, even I follow a God that was tempted. But I'm personally, I'm not going to participate in front. I'm also, I feel more and more. I don't need something as vivid and sort of like gargoyle like as the Pierce Morgan encounter to recognize that I don't want

to even be in this world. So why are you then, Russell? What is it that keeps pulling you in? And as always, when I look back to when I was a little kid, I wanted to be famous because I wanted to not feel worthless inside, but also there was something in me that I'm beginning to understand is, well, maybe this is going to kill you one day. And are you ready? Because that's, you don't want to, you don't follow me where I'm going, he says. You don't want to follow me where I'm going. But it's also, don't hide your light under a bushel basket. There is the commandment to go do something with the talents that have been given to you. And I don't know, I read some of your book. You can tell you wrote it, by the way. It's exactly how you speak. Some bits in there I should have took out. But,

When I'm reading this, I thought to myself, gosh, if I was in a bad place or if I wasn't interested in listening to churchy people, tell me about churchy things, I might be interested in listening to what Brand says. So I pray that it will yield a harvest of converts to Christ. Can you tell us about the flies? I have heard you explain it. But this, for those who are watching, there is a cross made of flies. First thought I thought was Beelzebub, but why did you do that? Yeah, I didn't know that Beelzebub meant Lord of the Flies. But even at the time that that image came to me,

that image came to me first, not as flies, but as iron filings. When this moment where I was in the field, with my dog bear, when I was sort of, you know, as is often the case, somewhat suicide adjacent. The, I felt the cross come in my abdomen, come to me in my abdomen. Like I call it a kinetic psychedelia. Like I imagine psychedelia.

are always to be sort of, I don't know, a visual or something, but it was like my stomach felt like, oh, like what is that? And from that second, I knew he's real. Okay, can you please, for the sake of those watching who don't know this, can you back up to what led to this encounter with Christ? This is a big story, but this is a long show. So I don't mean to jump all around the place, but I mean, how did you go from heroin addict, porn sex addict, maybe you would use those terms, I don't know, to, and then maybe I think I've heard you in the way, in the past say things like maybe you've talked about Buddha or Confucius or others on the same plane to then, again, correct me if I'm wrong, to accepting Christ as Lord and the way. How, and then this

specific story about being in the field with your dog bear. See our man, Solotarsus, you know, in my mother's womb, I was the protector of the Gentiles, he says, huh? So I have worshipped and loved a lot of idols and a lot of gods, a lot of Hindu deities, a lot of earthly pleasures, and a lot of transitory treasures. But the heroin and crack is interesting, or to me and maybe to you, because if you are really, really trying to suck some meaning out of this dead inert world,

chemicals can really help because they do alter your state. And indeed, the spiritual experience and the experience of knowing Christ is an altered state. You look at reality differently now, hopefully through his eyes and back into his eyes. Now, as a cracker, addict and a heroin addicts, really what you're trying to do is an ethosize, medicate. And I sort of

say, defibrillate the dead world, the dead world into some sort of state of meaning, some sort of vitality. Now, that's not mine. That's what the 12 steps of alcoholics anonymous, narcotics anonymous and groups that have formed, fellowships that have formed to give a spiritual, to induce a spiritual experience in the addict, sort of with the assumption that they're having a spiritual experience anyway. If you think about it, a drunk, like a proper drunk or a proper junk, they're outside of the world. What's up with him at the party, at the wedding, at the funeral, in the office? They're set apart. They're set apart wholly in a sort of way, in an inverted way. So me, when I got clean and sober from drugs and alcohol, when I was 27 years old by the grace

of God, I began to recognize that there was an alternative path. And then, you know, and unlike with Christianity where I've sort of jumped into it, face first, mouth open, I very sort of tentatively was like, all right, I'm just going to do enough because crack and heroin, You can see that stuff's going to kill you quick. And if not kill you, it's going to impede your pursuit of worldliness, which was my religion then. I wasn't famous. I wanted to be famous. I'm 27.

A lot of people don't know because of things get all muddled up and obviously why would they care. But I was clean. If you heard of me, I was sober and clean by then. I was clean and sober at 27. I got famous in my country at about 30, right? But I still obviously had some other unresolved issues to contend with. But drugs and alcohol was not one of them. Now, as it went on further down that path, you know, maybe getting married or whatever,

you start to realize that the program, the 12-step program isn't just talking about, you know, abstemiousness or teetotalism. It's saying you are worshipping yourself. You're worshipping yourself. You're completely caught up in self. And until you resolve that, making yourself God, some people say that the 12-step program could be summized thus. There is a God and it's not you. That's it.

Right? And most people think, well, I don't think I'm God, but you do. You're in charge of everything. You're trying to run your whole life. You're telling anyone what to do the whole time. I'm completely outraged when things don't go the way that I think they should. Is that disgusting? How dare, yeah, like some angry little baby deity.

Yes, that's how I act. God have mercy. So, when, it's such a great instruction, such great preparation. Because when you are stripped of the thing that you're clinging to, when you have to let go of that false hand, you are confronted with your own fallibility, your own desperation, and your own brokenness like never before. Now, but that's not the end of the story with the 12 steps. 12 steps says, right, one, powerless over drugs and alcohol, life's unmanageable, quit it.

Two, believe it's possible that, came to believe it, the power great than yourself could restore you to sanity. So you open your mind to the idea that there's another way. Now, people secularise that necessarily, because it's the spirituality, a power great and yourself is so evident and obvious. And we live in such sort of, sometimes I think such dead and atheistic times that people have say, well, look, Bob and Dave and Carol, they're not drinking, and lay were worse than you. What, you think they're lying? Yeah, I do think they're lying, actually. And then you overcome that.

And you see, oh, my word, no, they're not lying. They did it. Three, made a decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of God as I understood, as you understand God. Don't even try and push God down your throat or foist an idea of God upon you. But that's a pretty big proposition, hand your will and your life over to the care of God. I mean, that's a real letting go that I'm still trying to work in my own way now with my new understanding and deepening understanding. in the sort of richer theology that the 12 steps provide a kind of a formative training wheels version of actually. Now, step four is an inventory process where you literally go through your life and go,

what's every resentment you've ever had? Well, my mom done that, my dad did that. This happens at school. And sometimes there'd be big things like, you know, the government did this or the media did that. Or sometimes it's small things. And it's yourself and all the things you've done and said and all the things you've done wrong. And then five, you tell it to some confession, absolute total confession.

There's nothing left in you that you've not said, I did this, I did this. And then usually the person you're sitting opposite from goes, yeah, I did a thing like that. Yeah, that's not good. Yeah, I did that. Now, six and seven, step six and seven of a 12-step process are you become willing to let go of essentially sin. Particularly if you look at sin as sort of false gods, fallenness, wrong energy, being inaccessible to divinity. Like you become willing to let go of your arrogance, your selfishness, your intolerance, impatience, greed, gluttony, sloth, lust, dishonesty, arrogance, jealousy, envy, you become willing at least to let go of them.

And then curiously again, and unavoidably spiritually, humbly ask God to remove your defects. It's a very spiritual program. Eight, you make a list of people you've harmed. Nine, you make amends unless making amends is going to make the situation worse for them. But if it makes it worse for you, you go take... It's not about you, remember? So to make it worse for them is not the goal, yeah. 10-11-12 is keep in the process of observing your feelings.

Am I acting out of fear? Am I being dishonest? Am I being selfish? That's 10. Watch it, vigilantly. Share it with another person if you are. Step 11. Increase your conscious contact with God as you understand God and cultivate your relationship with God. And then 12, the culmination and expression of having done all this, you carry the message to the person who still suffers and practice these principles in all your affairs. Are you, when you become awakened or enlightened, your whole life now is about serving others. Now, it can be a bit cyclical

and it can be a bit, I guess I'm a slow learner. I'm a slow learner, man. I struggle with The point of your life is to help others. The point of your life is to help others. The point of your life, feed and clove the port. I find that stuff very difficult. I'm slow. So the book I've written there, How to Become Christian in the Seven Days, it's not just the title that I really like because someone I knew when I was younger,

wrote a book about how to quit smoking in seven days. It's good things. People don't want something that's hard when they're doing something that is hard. And then I like, notice that, obviously, that the creation story is seven days and that seven sort of means completion. And I was able, by God's grace, to put those principles that I've just out, outlined in terms of addiction into the process, my personal testimony of becoming a Christian, particularly helped by when my pastor said, and I understand this to be a common Christian belief,

that when you're not in Christ, it's not like you're drowning, you're dead, face down in the water. We were dead in sin. So I thought, oh, that's good, because that is like addiction. You're telling people something definitive. Stop, emergency, stop. You're living in a totally false world and a totally. false identity, you are broken, you are broken. Stop. Come this way, come this way, come this way. Now what I was trying to do, like anyone who's undertaking a creative endeavor, is I'm trying to,

firstly, this is what I actually mean. This is what I actually mean. And I'm trying to reach, like you always are, the people that you think, how would I get, you know, I'm thinking of the drug addicts that I've known and the alcoholics that I've known. I'm thinking of all these bloody clever people, like so clever. You know, how are you going to get that person that's so clever that can just, you know, they're suddenly going to, one minute they're going to be quoting, you know, Richard Dawkins, the next they're going to be pulling you apart from a derrithian perspective, some post-structuralist frowdown. And I'm trying to, what I'm trying to get to is that hold on a minute, hold on a minute. Like everything that I thought, everything

that I was looking for when I actually read the Bible and having seen me on Piers Morgan, you know, takes me a while, I've just got to find the right passage. It's all in there. The world is in the thrall of the evil one. There is this mystical, paranormal, supernatural, psychedelic, deep time Christ that exists before matter, before form, and like all the things I would have chewed through in the past paganism, but also stuff like, you know, UFOs, Eric von Danikun, ancient aliens, like all of the trying to unravel the mystery. Well, were they extraterrestrials? Yes, that's what it is, the genetic intervention of different interdimensional species. And sometimes when I sort of see those people that have big followings online, that are good, actually, that talk about demons and evil and

occults and secret societies. I'm like, well, it's in here already. It's in here. Look, there is a dark force of beings that are trying to control you, that there is a sort of an attempt to take the omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence of God and turn it into a totalitarian globalist state. That's where you can't avoid the politics, because there's an intersection because the false power of the fallen one is being instantiated in each technological significant epical and global revolution, agricultural, agricultural, advances the kingdom of the fallen one yet further. But that very technology could be, of course, inverted and utilized to bring his word and

message. And I believe that's the precipice upon which we now stand. But with the technology that's available now, you could, if everyone, if all of us were in Christ, like CS Lewis offers, if your accountants in Christ, your lawyers in Christ, and your friends and your family in Christ, he will do it. He's the only sovereign. He's the only leader. You can't just replace Donald Trump with Newsom or JD or whoever and expect things to meaningfully change because the system itself is completely in the thrall of the fallen one.

And if you will see that as a metaphor, see it as a metaphor. I don't see how you'd get beyond metaphor anyway with a limited tool such as language. But the simple truth is, is that the evil principle is prevailing in this world. As our Lord says, as Apostle Paul says, as John said, the beloved disciple, the evil one is in charge. Now, if we have some commission, and it seems clearly that we do, is to ensure that as many people as possible, like, yeah, come this way. I don't know what the merging of the kingdoms is supposed to look like. How could I ever know? But it might, it doesn't like discard earth entirely. So presumably we're contributing summit, Matt. We're contributing something. And hopefully my appearance on Piers Morgan was all that's needed to tip this matter over the edge into the Christian revolution that we're all praying for.

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So visit hallow.com slash Matt Frad to get three months free. Let's make this May a month of grace, peace and genuine prayer. Again, that's hallo.com slash Matt Frad for three months free. Brothers, summer is fast approaching, a season where we rest for a bit, try to get a bit of breathing room. But if we're honest, it's also a time when faith can quietly take the back seat. That's why I'm really excited about what Exodus 90 is doing with the Kings of Summer Challenge. It's a beautiful invitation for men. to slow down, pray and reflect on Christ's kingship over our lives and the astonishing truth, that through baptism we actually share in the kingship ourselves. This year's theme is The Return of the King, led by one of my favorite people in the entire world, Joseph Pierce. If you've ever heard Joseph speak or read his work, maybe you've seen my interview with him,

you know how deeply he ties Tolkien's universe to the heart of the faith. No one knows Tolkien stuff more than Pierce, at least no one I've met. Through the challenge will journey not just through the biblical books of kings, but through Tolkien's world itself, seeing how the kingship of Christ calls us to order joy and renewed purpose. So if you're longing for a summer that's deeper, more centered on Christ and full of meaning, this is for you. Join the Exodus 90 Brotherhood today and sign up for the Kings of Summer Challenge, starting May 20, Download the Exodus 90 app to start your 14-day free trial or visit Exodus 90.com slash Matt to learn more.

That's Exodus 90.com slash Matt. Download the app today and become the man God created you to be. How did you view Christianity in 1998? And if somebody had told you you would one day claim to be a Christian, choose to get baptized, be reading the scripture as ravenously as you currently are, how would you have responded to that? It was impossible that Christianity is just another one of those modalities that's used to anchor people. That's in no, no, no, that's entirely how it would be. This is what I'm trying to get at, because I was hoping you weren't going to go down that road and just say that it is as true a metaphor as some other pagan religion. Now, that isn't to say that truth can't be found in pagan religions or any religion.

There's truth that can be found, and we can, I mean, look at Thomas Aquinas. He quotes Augustine first, then Aristotle, the pagan. So obviously, truth can be found in other things. But good. Yeah. And I like in Acts, I can't remember who I heard this off of, but it goes, you like, Acts quotes pagan philosophers when Paul's talking to them a lot. And he's like saying, yay, you're making all their idols.

He goes, so you can't hold yourself to a standard that the Bible doesn't hold itself to. I mean, I think about that quite a lot. Now, like I'm with a René Girard stuff. I love how he's handled that he exposes the untruth at the center of all myth that usually centers around the sacrifice of a scapego and believe me, I'm starting to identify with that role. But like that our Lord, the perfect sacrifice, inverts it, reveals it, unfolds it, it's the true myth. We can all see that you can't have music unless there's meaning.

You can't have math unless there's meaning. You can't have geometry unless there's meaning. But we, I've not heard anyone else say, but I know it won't be original, that, you know, meaning itself, meaning itself, the person that comes and tells all these stories that gives us parables. And it's a bit like, and really last time I was reading Mark, I was like, what I really sensed in Our Lord was that he was content. continually saying to the disciples, oh man, how do I put this to you? You're such idiots. It's a bit like, oh, a mustard seed. It's a bit like he's using sort of the appropriate parables

and image systems for that time. Where I'm, like, you know, where I'm buttressing and where I really would like to, the benefit of your experience and your wisdom is, I think sometimes that these are, this hermeneutic is geographically localized by definition. Some say, you know, Mesopotamia, some say some of the text, maybe Job or whatever, could have existed in a culture that predates even these ancient scriptures. And I sometimes think about, this is still a bit hibbibby-dibby Christ consciousness, that I know the down-down Christians won't enjoy.

But what's more likely that this is the only text in which the creator of all reality was made relevant, revealed himself and showed us his splendor, that this is the only one, or that other mythologies geographically dislocated may, like the woman, touch the hem of his garment. and that when you hear these stories, how would we definitively and absolutely know,

given the limitations, I mean, the scriptural, the scribe limitations of this came out of that territory, that when somewhere in North India, they're talking about, there was the apparition of this figurehead god man that they're not talking, particularly when we're talking about atemporality and outside of time,

and do you think it matters? I'm not talking false idols here. I'm saying the expressions of, I mean, the story's not over. That's what I, one of the things that really changed in me when coming to him is I stopped wanting to be him. I didn't realize how what an obstacle that had been. That like I was such an individually stupid, silly, silly boy that I thought, I don't want to worship some man, some man. I want to be God. And isn't that the primary floor? Isn't that the

primary floor? Now I've clambered down a peg or two. I'll settle for St. Paul or John the Baptist or whichever, whoever we get cast us. But we're in it now. That's what I like about it when I read acts for the first time. I'm like, oh my God, it's real. That was another one of those near, like, I glitched my inner machine with a feeling of, oh, God, it's real. And it made me feel unusual. It sort of washed over me and through me. This word is not dead. It lives still. Right. Well, to answer your question, the way I would think of it, just speaking off the cuff, would be it's not as if God isn't trying to communicate with all peoples at all times. It's not that we cannot learn truths from other religions or systems, but that the word of God, the Bible, the scriptures, is

fundamentally different in that it is not merely words about God, but in some mysterious way, the word of God itself. And so as a Catholic, and I wonder what you think about this, I would like to ask you if it's not too personal a question, why you're not a Catholic? Because for me, one of the relieving things about infallibility is that it simply means that God has revealed himself, what he has revealed is true and that the church can in a definitive way over time come to know what it is he has revealed

again in a definitive way and I think what you find in Protestantism as much as I learn from my Protestant brothers and sisters and love them and this is not a shot at them many of them are better Catholics and I am I say that a bit tongue in cheek but you know what I mean is you see that actually the main things aren't the plain things and the plain things aren't the main things

and if they were we'd all be agreeing on things like baptism or regeneration, what it is that makes one a Christian, whether or not we can lose our salvation, what the Lord's Supper is, and so on. When I see the divisions within Protestantism, and don't get me wrong, we have our problems in Catholicism. I get it, right? The corruption, the pedophilia, there's things that happen. And then Matt Frad, and what a bonehead he is and the stupid things he does. He's ruining it for everyone. Yeah, well, he probably is a little bit, and God use my bullshit as manure for their growth, as we've said. They don't find things in the Bible quick enough. That's the

other problem. I see you leafing through there like an idiot on a grift. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. But no, that's what I would say is one of the relieving things about Catholicism is that I can trust the church which Christ has established to tell me definitively those things of which I can't make heads or tails of. I like that. And I think to, and one last point, I'm sorry, before we go on is what might be more weird is to think that the church cannot come to know in a definitive way what it is God has revealed. And I think that without the church and the magisterium that has been established, that that's the position you're in. You have to go on your wisdom. You have to, you know, read the theologians throughout the histories for yourself and use your intelligence to then submit to it. And I think was it G.K. Chessenden who said that the genius of Catholicism or the humbling fact of realizing that someone knows more than me.

And that's okay when what they know is what you would like to know. But it's uncomfortable when the church is telling me something that I don't actually want to know right now. It's a big question you've asked me there. And here comes to us. So, interestingly, I'm infatuated with at least Catholicism. I have no problem with transubstantiation. And when I'm taking communion at the Protestant church that I go. to, I like, want it to be his flesh and I want it to be his blood.

It isn't, though. I'm not interested in symbols and signs. Now, though, check it. I don't like, because there was so much time, and remember, I'm, you know, I open, man, I pray the rosary, I love it. Then, like, I was getting to the rosary in under here. Oh, some people don't do the luminous mysteries. Oh, why is that?

Some people aren't Catholic enough. That's Catholic J.P. Oh, I'm okay. And this is what I mean with Catholics have ourselves. This is what I like to call purity spiraling. You see it in every religion, in every group that is like, I'm better than you are, and we can look down our nose so that we can feel like one of the elites. We have that in Catholicism.

One of the problems with wokeism is that it became so mad, mad, cannibalistic carousel, that in the end, it's like no one was right. And that's good. That benefits the system. The puritanism got our hand. Now, so like I did. Okay, the rosary. I prayed a rosary.

I love the rosary. It's evocative. It's powerful to me. How could you not? It's like, it's a, what do they call it? A Bible study on beads. This is for you, by the way. I wanted to give it to you. I'm sure you have enough rosaries to fill a suitcase or two, but there's another one for you. Thank you. Yeah. Who told you about the rosary? Why did you decide to pray it? Well, my mate, when I got baptized, I had bear gruel at one side, my mate, Joe McCann, the other. Joe's a Catholic.

And when I don't know why I started what drew me. This is a good rosary. Well, you seem like you've always liked beads. There's something nice and tactile about Catholicism. Yeah, I need something I can hold on to, man. Me too. I need something I can hold on to. But listen, I've got a lot of things to say about what you just asked me. Thank you for this beautiful gift.

You're welcome. Thank you. I'll do the rosary on the way home. Pray for me. All right, please. All right. Thank you. It's a bit selfish that I've got to do my debut.

Don't care. You just agreed to it. You have to do it. It's on camera now. But I'll let you go. I'll let you unleash there. All right. So this is what it is.

This is what it is. There's a lot of things. So please, and I do, these are not, this is not rhetoric. This is true inquiry. So I love the idea of an apostolic line. I want to reach back to his hand. I want to feel the hand of Peter. I want to feel the brokenness of Peter and Ignatius.

And I love it. I love it. And I love Aquinas and I love Augustine. And a couple of times, and I've laughed about this with Jeff Kavins. As a matter of fact, I like Catholic churches. And I like Catholics. My father-in-law is Catholic. My wife is Catholic.

I went to a Catholic church on Christmas Day, and I thought, I'm going to do communion here. Is that all right, God? I know I've not done all the stuff, but would the first ones have done it? Anyway, like so, but the priest, I don't know what I did wrong, but I did something. He said something.

The priest went, are you Catholic? I went, yes, I lied to a priest on Christmas Day, in a church. So put that one at the foot of the cross. Then the next time I was in a Catholic church, St. Patrick's, New York, I forgot to put it in my mouth. And you know, some people,

it and do weird stuff, I guess, you know. But I'd just forgotten. So I heard the security at St. Patrick's go, hey, you! And I feel like I did a film I did a scene in that place in Arthur. God bless him. Paying attention. Yeah.

And it's like, you know, like I took it. Anyway, so like, but here's the other thing. So I have this yearning and I love the Catholic church. I love it. And I love Catholics. And here's where the obstacle is coming. First, there's so much time dedicated in his word and in his, you know, on the red letter day.

in particular to Phariseism and any sort of attempt to institutionalize or control. He spends so much time doing that. And I'm not saying that that's something that's unique to Catholicism. Of course, I'm not. You find it in the Orthodox Church, yeah, and you'll find it amongst Protestants also. But anything that's sort of, to me, smacks of brokerage or intervention, I don't care for that. Here's something a bit more personal and a bit more visceral. And still, yeah, who knows, I may become Catholic.

I'm like, I'm waiting. I pray and I ask, if there's something I'm not doing this. that you want me to do, show me. I don't want to do what, you know, that from Romans. What I don't want to do, what I do. I do. I want to be what he wants me to be. So I'm completely open and there's those of Catholics that I know that I really love it. I love the meat of the saints. I love the holy mother. I love the blood. I love the flesh. I know that there's something sensual in it that's like enough to overcome the erotic. You know, I know there's a lot in there. However, right, when I was last in Rome, I went there, see my

God's son, he's there, his father, like, I got a God kid, and then God rest his eternal soul, Martino died, and that meant that the godfather role took on a different kind of meaning. So I was there to see him. My mate, Joe, who I told you about just now, he was there too. And we go to, I can't remember which church it was, but people will be out identify it easily from this. There are three Caravaggio's there of St. Matthew. I know the one you mean, but I forget the name of the church.

It might be saying like St. Luth, I think it's like, you know, there's a LUC somewhere in it, right? So we're looking, and I've been there before and looked at them before, but I enjoyed it more this time somehow, the anointing or appointing of St Matthew. And some people they say they debate which ones meant to be, Matthew, but I don't debate it. I know which one it is, it's this one. Like, nah, man, nah. That's the one. There's no question in my mind that that's who the finger is pointing at. Then the next one is him writing the gospel with an angel about him.

And then the next one is him having his skin cut off and him being marted and executed. And when I looked at that, it's not a triptych, but their three paintings displayed together, when I looked at them and I thought you have 10 minutes and a few heartbeats away from the Vatican, like that kind of Christianity, that cost you something. It cost him something. The reason that dude's like, oh, no, don't take me out of my tax collecting gig, because I know where this goes. I'm going to have real skin in the game.

It made me, in a moment, this came to me not as a thought, but as a feeling, that the Vatican would have battlements. the Vatican would feel like a sort of the center of a war. It would feel like it. It would not have some easy affiliation that if not secular may as well be the acceptance of this relationship between the church and the state. Now I will make exactly the same charge or observation. Who am I to be dishing out charges? I'm here to receive, not a issue. The Church of England, I can even hearing the composition of that idiom church of England, where the superior power lies. It's with England. It's not with the church and we all know what happened and how that was established. Or then with

the slew of Protestant movements in the great nation that we're in, which for all I can tell might as well, and I pray one day will be a new Jerusalem. That there seems to be some higher authority. Indeed, it's Christianity, not plasticity, but mobility that allows aspects of, I mean, even, even we're talking about the whole, if we're talking about the whole, then there are many, many aspects of Christ that one might bring to the forefront. And my strong sense, mate, is that what we're being called to do is to ensure that we're the kind of Christians that are described in here. And I know a lot of new Christians, understandably, sort of chronologically, would feel like we must be like the first Christians. We must be. But that isn't that the glory is that we're receiving it direct from him, that he will talk to us

directly through His Holy Spirit that he's here now. And I suppose I don't like no idea of an adjunct between me and him of any description. And yes, of course, the long list that you helpfully cited at the beginning of like, yeah, there's controversy everywhere that comes about, I believe, as a result of institutionalism. And I feel like them Pharisees and Sadducees were satanic, that they were controlled by the worst and darkest forces available at the time. Certainly they killed God. That seems like a pretty fair indicator of what their position is on righteousness.

So I would like to know that the church that I belong to is not like, but part of it will still be my remnant self because I do, I've said it before as a joke. Like, well, it's because I could never be Pope. Like, why would I join a, I'm not Groucho Marx. Groucho Marx don't want to be a club that would have him as a member. I don't want to be a member of a club that won't have me as its leader. And I suppose that's been an obstacle. But in my friend Carl a long time ago says with Christianity they make it so traditional that it's inaccessible or they try and modernise it and they make it kind of crap and nap and like, ugh. And that does feel like a problem.

And like the, yeah, the comfort of like throwing yourself at the feet, not just of Aquinas, but Chester and every Pope there's ever been and maybe feeling, yes, that I too am the rock. But I wonder if being petrified is indeed about being in the state of absolutely accepting him as something. of the living God, son of the living God now, now. And any, like, I understand tradition as a bulwark against this sort of this kind of false mass manufacture, this sort of swarming, swamping attempt to control attention and consciousness itself, the prima material, the holy flow. It's a ballwalk against man-made traditions too. Yes, I hope, I hope.

But then there's this other rather more, I don't know, would you say this is an ecclesiastical inquiry. Right. How do we deal with this contradiction, like, yeah, that if it's not in this Bible, then it's not true. And like, even if I'm testing the veracity of non-Christian scripture or texts, excuse me, I'm like, does it, if it don't contradict this, I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. That's actually in alignment with this. I'm doing that, you know, as part of my own learning. But, like, Catholicism necessarily leans into the catechism and, like, literature that's outside of scripture.

And so I've even had a bit of trouble reconciling that, which would seem. like a more practical question to ask, as well as all that other stuff that was much more personal and perhaps a little looser. Yeah, thank you. Well, I suppose first of all, the catechism, as you know, isn't inspired, nor is it treated as such and can be modified, but it teaches, we think, faithfully, what God has revealed in scripture and tradition. One thing that's not in scripture that you and I accept is the inspired table of contents, the 27 books of the New Testament. As one theologian said, the Bible is not an instruction manual for a church still in shrink wrap, but the Bible presupposes a church already in existence. That we, if we balk at the corruption of the church, and I'm fully willing to accept that the Catholic Church is a corrupt institution, maybe the most corrupt institution, but I also think it's founded by Christ and so cannot lead us into error definitively in faith and morals.

but I would say that the church is who wrote the scriptures, specifically the New Testament, right as the church, canonize the scriptures. And then we have, what is it, the Council of Rome in 382, Pope Damasus I, you know, first sort of giving us the list. So it seems to me that to accept even just the New Testament as canonical is to accept the church's declaration of it. So that would be one thing that's not in scripture that we accept. And then I also don't think there would be many more things than that that I would say you should accept if they're not explicitly or implicitly in scripture. Yeah. But to me, I think one of the reasons me personally, I couldn't leave the Catholic Church for say Protestantism at least, is what to do when one has a fundamental disagreement about something that seems like a big deal.

So when I did something of a survey of the early church fathers, and when they interpret John 3-5, unless you're born of water and spirit, you cannot have life within you, every one of them without exception interprets this as baptism or regeneration. But I know, and you know, Baptists, for example, who are in disagreement to Lutherans and Calvinists as to what that means. No, you'll have to explain that. As to what, well, is it merely a symbol baptism, or does it affect something? Does it actually, in a real way, free me of my sin and make me a child of God? Is it necessary for salvation? And what brings that about? What makes me a Christian?

The point is just that you have competing claims in Protestantism. And I want to, well, where do you go then if you have these competing claims? Because if you say, well, back to the scripture, it's like, well, okay, but it's now 2026, and we still don't know what baptism does. We still don't know whether you can lose your salvation. So I just go back to that logical argument, I suppose, as before. It seems right that if God were to reveal himself and to establish a single church, not a multiplicity of them, but one, that that church, I think it's reasonable to think that that church over time can come to know in a definitive way what it is that God has revealed.

And then I can sort of submit myself to the authority of the church. Yeah, that's where I'm at. That's how I see it. Any of that, that all really makes a lot of sense to me. But I personally haven't had challenges about, because it's been so visceral, urgent, immediate and real. And I've experienced baptism. What was that like? Well, before it happened, I was like coughing.

Like, you know, bare grills came to the house. My mate Joe's already there. My little girls, my little son, my missus, you know, like the priest, not priest, you know, the pastor came. I live on the River Thames there, you know and it was very kind of what I call I want to say sort of punk, but I want to say that it was folk. It felt very real and like how, and as a sort of Yeah, and as a sort of, yeah, yeah, that's good.

I mean, obviously it's a sort of a thatched cottage in Buckinghamshire, England. I mean, it wasn't CBGBs and, you know, Andy Warhol and Lou Reed rolling over smacked up. But it was like, it was, one. mean by punk is it was not institutional even though something was being instituted and I started to cough like you know we like we sort of read some words we sang a bit we went outside and I started to really really cough like something of the breath and of the spirit that was involuntary happened and I didn't like I'm always looking out for an an an anoint in and an appoint in and some approval and a pat on the back and

an applause. But I didn't feel like, oh, this is good, because this might be an indication that indeed this baptism is cleansing me of some sort of demonic possession or some certainly some cleansing that's really taking place. I just felt embarrassed.

I felt embarrassed that was coughing. And embarrassment is just free syllables of shame. And it's coughing and coughing. And I get in the river, that sludgy, dirty, old beautiful river. And if you're British, you're going to love that River Thames, man. To find so much and come

up in the history of our nation and the history of our faith indeed. And like to have one side of me, this sort of extraordinary man bare grills, who's a, you know, sort of a prominent figure, a prominent Christian, whom I now feel sort of protective of, because I know that it's cost him something to be associated with me at a difficult time. And on the other side, my mate Joe, who's done jail time, who's got it in him. You can see the saint in him pretty clear. You can see the many different paths he could have taken,

that if you'd have said to him, we need you to be special forces, we need you to go in that building and extract those people. You can see that. And you can start to see the Christ identity in people who he wants us to be, not who the world's trying to make us, not who the fallen one's trying to make us. Flanked either side, a Catholic and a Protestant, I'd go backwards into that dreary sludge,

and I come back up changed. I come back up, changed. Joe, however, stood on some broken glass night to immediately go to a hospital. I'm Joe. I've been a Christian for like 35 seconds and I was driving. And now it's about him. Can I not just have this one day? Yeah.

That was a powerful experience, huh? Yeah. Are you able to go back to that moment in the field where you said you felt the cross? Yeah. Is that worth talking about? It's pretty urgent and supernatural. What's really interesting about this? When you talk about the establishing of the 12 steps, right?

Which seems like divinely inspired the way that came about, like the sort of the latter day. Some might say prophet Bill W. you who like a sort of a very broken messed up man who's trying to express himself through entrepreneurialism and whatever the culture of the time's telling him he has to do to be great but he just can't stop drinking because he's appetite for a god i would say he's so great that he's trying to drown it out or fulfill it for chemical means there's so many strange things that happened to him like you can see that there's a sort of a perfection in his story but i mention it in the instance now because when he he encountered someone who's gotten sober with

the Oxford group because, you know, A.A. don't exist yet. But he meets a guy just like, I've caught religion. And like, you know, and since getting religious with that, the Christian, first Christian, first century Christian group, the Oxford group, this guy sort of tells him, I don't drink no more. And Bill sort of sees, wait a minute, this dude was as bad a drunk or maybe a worse drunk than me. And he's all right now. So something's going on. Then he has some weird, personal intimate encounter. We're talking Peter on the water style, where he's alone in a room and he gets like a sort of transcendent flash of light and running, you know, blowing wind and sort of weird stuff, weird supernatural stuff.

And he knows in that moment he's never going to drink again. But then a third thing happens, there's always a trinity. A third thing happens where he encounters Dr. Bob. And like Dr. Bob, like, you know, Bill W. He's had these two experiences of meeting a mate that's gotten sober of like this supernatural encounter in town's hospital, New York City. But then when he's in Akron, Ohio at the Mayflower Hotel, on a business trip in 1930, whatever, early 30s, I figure, he feels like he's going to drink. He feels like he's going to drink. And there's a famous photo in AA folklore of the bank of telephones and the bar in the Mayflower Hotel. And he has to make a choice which way is he going to go? And he calls up a priest and says, is there anyone in your parish that's like a serious fuck up because I need help. I'm a drink. But like the I can help them. Like a drink. I need to talk to someone. Oh, yeah, we know this guy. We know this guy. A few weird coincidences. as is always the case, occur.

And he ends up in the kitchen of this guy, Dr. Bob, and the younger man, this, you know, this cad, this bounder, this Montebunk, Bill W., talks to the proctologist, you know, that can't stop drinking. And one might imagine the kind of errors that could occur in that profession if you've not got a steady hand. He says to him, you know, he just tells him his story. Look, this is what it's like, says Bill W that they younger do.

When I drink, this happens to me, this happens to me. I can't stop da-da-da-da-da. And Dr. Bob says, you have it too. you have it too and it says something passed between us something passed between us that's the moment that they say is the day that a.A. began that day. Not the day when he first receives the message, not the moment when he has his divine connection rushing winds up the mountain getting the tablets. No, when he it's a connection, it's relational. It's the third component of the triune molecule, you might say. Anyway, so like when I'm looking back at my,

own what's happening, what's this transformation. There are, I'm forced into a sort of crucible of such dreadful intimacy with God. So when I'm reading this later and I hear about Jacob wrestling, I'm like, oh, cool, man. Like, and when I, when I feel like I'm being called out of a normal life, you know, all of these things are so sort of eerily resonant. And it's difficult to say, what is the moment, but I can tell you some of them, like when Bear grew, like, you know, did I think I'd get baptized in 1999? I didn't think I'd get baptized when someone,

two months before I did get baptized said, yo, you want to get baptized? I was like, yeah, okay, but I thought, that won't happen. That won't happen. And when I, when I was in that field with my dog, bear, with the dog lead that I knew would be a device that would be perfect for option two that I was considering,

I watched a video that my mate Ralph, and I know that Ralph don't mind me saying it's because I stay in touch with him. He sent me this video of Rick Warren on some televangelical TV show, Hi, we're a Christian coming up by the break, where this thing would have come with a 10% surcharge. You know, like it was, oh, they wouldn't have one.

They were Protestant, of course. But like my point is it felt very slick and tax evasive and very nice smiles and nice haircuts. And the thing is Americans don't realize how that comes across. Like I'm from Australia. I remember coming here and seeing the way Americans did faith, the way they had Christian shirts at Walmart, the way they would drape the cross with the American flag. And I'm like, I don't want to be disrespectful. I'm so glad you let me in the

country and I love your country, but this is weird. So I fully understand what you mean when you see Rick Warren, who I think is a fantastic fella from all by all accounts, come on and do his bit. Actually, he was a guest on that show. And he just sort of sat there quite kind of still. And he described the suicide of his son. And without shame, without him pride, just. with due sorrow. And something about that hit me because I suppose I was probably... And you weren't expecting that, I'm sure.

No, I wasn't expecting that. Not I wasn't. And then like then same guy, Ralph, sent me purpose, driven faith. But that was in the same field at the same time. And as far as I can tell the same day. But in retrospect, you know, that there's a sort of a personal language that unfolds

and one does have to be careful not to indulge in kind of superstition and kind of a sort of retro-engineered. madness when trying to contend with the idea that as this beautiful veteran told me, everything's a burning bush and not turning into some mad kind of like, everything's a sign or do lally and giddy with it all. But when I realized only as I lowered him into the grave that my dog bear is a German shepherd that led me to green pastures and sat down with me by steel water.

that I could not receive the justification of Christ's death because the life I've lived in the world I've lived in. I'm a man who lives among people with filthy lips and I myself am unworthy. I have filthy lips. When I was, when I lowered him into the ground, I saw that I was wearing a hoodie, the Lord is my shepherd and that he is indeed a German shepherd and I know that that dog would lay down his life for me in a second. We need you to dive around. No problem. It's hard, isn't it? Sometimes it's the love that's hard to take. Shame, I've been taking it all day long. I'm kidding. A hundred percent. I remember speaking to a friend of mine, a teacher, and just saying to them, I feel like the Lord spoke to me yesterday morning. What did he say? He said, Matt, I'm really proud of you.

But I said, but that's just bullshit. I just want him to say that. And he's like, no, that, just so you know, he said to me, that's not how you talk to yourself. I've heard how you talk to yourself. You know what I mean? Like, I'm open. If he looked at me and went, man, I'm really freaking disappointed with you. How long is it going to take? I mean, how long would you've been doing this Christian thing for?

That, I'll eat that up all day long. But for the father to look at me and go, I really like you. Everything in me is like Peter. Get away from me. I don't want it. I don't know how to take it. It makes me feel too vulnerable, too naked. I'd prefer you to hate me.

Yeah, it's easier. Yeah. Yeah, it's easier. And I suppose then... Song of Songs, chapter 2, you know? The Lord, looking through the lattice, turn your face to me and the head is buried in the rock. Yeah?

Get away. Your face is lovely. Oh, sorry. No, it's... The father's so beautiful. He's so kind. He's so good. He's so real.

Yeah. And the more I can stay in his gaze, the more I can allow him to look at me, the better I become. I'm much more gentle with other people. I'm less of a dick to my family. Sometimes as I feel we're meant to be stealing ourselves. Like I feel like, I'm not meant to be the recipient of a felt and visceral grace.

I'm going to be stealing myself, being anewed. Like I'm, again, perhaps although I loathe it with the painful pruning and with the inuring and the feeling like I'm being fashioned and forged and hurt, than just to sit and feel loved and this idea of letting go like of like let go trust me trust me be still be still i will fight for you all like those things that you know have come to me many times sometimes free human beings and sometimes not it those that is possibly i felt them when you were talking that that love is um the conduit and channel via which that grace is received and that actually there is a different repentance that's available,

like a repentance as yet not taken of like, okay, I will turn away from that voice that says, you're disappointing, you're not good enough, you're a fraud, you're a liar, see, scroll down on X, that's what you are, the accuser, the fallen one, the one that wants you in the hatred circled off in self. And this is fascinating, right, because Satan, as you say, Revelation 1210,

the accuser is what he's called. The Holy Spirit, I noticed, is called the Paraclete. I looked into my Bible dictionary, and it means a defense attorney, one who comes to the defense of another. Praise Jesus. My mate, Preston, he used that yesterday. He's a pretty serious Catholic, from what I can tell. Just confirmed, but he's not shutting up about it. Those are the most Catholic.

They're the most obnoxious Catholic. So you're saying it wears off. It wears off. Well, it's like, didn't someone say, whenever somebody converts, we should just keep the microphone away from them for about a year. Just develop your prayer life. Start being nicer to your wife and then we'll give you one. Yeah, yeah. Paraclete defense.

Got it. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty good. But that reminds me that I didn't finish. The description of the cover. Yeah. The cover I was very, very determined about. My wife is very good with imagery and design.

And I was very determined not to have my face on the cover of the book as usual. I've written books before, huh? Could have been there. Yeah, could have put it there, but it was. Went for the fly. Now, I know Beelze about a lot of the flies. You know, I didn't find that out until after I'd done it. But what it was that, like, what I thought was, you know, there's something, I don't know where it is in C.S. Louis, because I'm reading some compendion, huh?

Yeah. But there's one bit where he says, even before the creation of the universe, he knew and felt the scars and the wounds on his back pressed against the. cross and the flies gathering on the wounds on his back. That's so sort of like, so particular and so awful and gory and ghoulishly beautiful, that it stayed with me. And in my mind, at least, I replaced the idea of iron filings clanging into my abdomen with the idea of it being flies. And then when I found out, actually, after it had been done,

Beelzeba, Lord, means literally Lord of the flies. Oh, no, then this is like some sort of satanic cross. But then I thought, no, what is he doing on the cross? It's like he's pulling all that in. A poison out of me. And it's satisfying when you see that happen. And actually, this is another genuine question, not just a chance for me to talk, is this. Whenever you hear like saints, you know, like when you reflect on them or hear what they're written and I feel like, isn't it that they've, that their humanity has been stripped of worldliness that it becomes indeed like the St. Francis.

prayer a channel of his piece that like if you're around st francis and so i was thinking of the thing with the animals you know that for the animals were just like oh he's just like a tree or the air he's so pure god you can just land on this guy he's so cool and i know about all the brave stuff he done because i read that chester and book on him huh um so i've done research um like but like so when i'm thinking about saints i'm like and also thomas merton catholic priest pretty near contemporary like when he says like it needn't feel like or be sacrificed because your attachment is so, you're not attached to this world. So you're not, you know, you could go down the ex-comments,

or Russell Brown, or Russell Brand, isn't he fantastic and he should be? That you would not, you're not engaging. You've identified and embodied that that is such a small fragment of total reality that you do not business with it. You're so with God. Now how do it, like, and that's what I feel like them saints, that's what they've done. And that's, you know, what else is there to do? What else is there to do except pursue that to the jaws of,

death, which is where it will take you. But why then does our Lord suffer so much in Gephsemini? Why then? If the saints are defined by their ability to overcome worldly suffering to the point of, or am I getting this wrong, and almost indifference to stimuli, that the stimuli is bad, bad, bad, good, good, who cares? You know, and things Thomas Martin literally says, you know, pleasure, pain, don't get involved, nothing. Why then is he suffering the epitome so significant? I can only assume that it is to do with, though you know, I recognize this could be wrong,

the uniqueness of his suffering, the consuming of all sin, the consuming of all sin and the separation that that must have been for him specifically. Yeah, what was, I think Dr. Scott Hahn said, he paid a debt, he didn't owe because we owed a debt we couldn't pay. I don't think it's that the saints don't experience suffering, but I'm not one, so I couldn't tell you. I think they experienced a great deal of suffering.

The suffering was probably even more intense in the sort of suffering that I have to endure every day, which has to do with disapproval or tiredness or my own stupidity. But there's something about trusting that whatever is taking place is part of God's, at least permissive will. So we can distinguish between God's perfect will and then his permissive will. So when I sin, this isn't God's will in the sense of his perfect will, but he does permit it and he can use all things for my good. And so I just recently underwent some terrible suffering because of someone who's very close to me experienced something that scared the hell out of me and it was awful. It was the worst three weeks of my life. And to somehow in that go, oh, Father, Jesus,

Holy Spirit, I surrender everything to you. I trust you. And I don't know if I do trust you because as I say it, I can tell that I don't. Okay, so I don't trust you. There we are. Would you help me trust you. I don't even know if I want to. So would you help me want to want to trust you? There's something about that surrendering to the good God who hasn't taken his eyes off of you since the moment of your conception that at least brings great comfort into the suffering while not remitting it, I suppose. I don't know. Cool. And also the sort of image and what I felt is that the pressure, the push is like that you're and it's eliminating that we have now identified something that was not with God. This, you're, you have.

are not willing to trust me when these things are happening. So let's just burn through that, shall we? And that's, again, even sort of very local and pretty trivial experiences that we've discussed up to now in this conversation. I am beginning to see with increasing speed or accuracy what the actual lesson is. What are you saying to me, Lord? What are you saying to me? Why is this happening now? Why this? Don't you see? Come this way. Come this way. And for me, it does start to feel like, and we see when I'm asking about a saint, I'm not asking about, I'm not talking to canonization, posthumous canonization, I'm not talking about that,

and what is it that they are feeling and how is what they are feeling somehow distinct from Christ in Gephsemini in the passion and is it distinct from that? Because some of the people that, I've only met a couple of people that are somewhat saintly and they were not Christian,

they were people in India. And what I mean by saintly, and I recognize that we'd probably better off relying on a dictionary than mean when it comes to what words mean. But like for me, what saintly means is I sort of sense from them an eminence that's not human, kind of similar to the word genius in fact. Like when we say genius, are we not really saying, where did that even come from? Whether it's George Best playing football or Mozart or whatever it is, it's like a person can't just sit down and do that.

That's God. It's the presence of God. And in a culture that no longer reveres or even accepts or acknowledges God, then you're further down this road of individual expressionism being the highest principle, which is actually satanic, do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law. And I suppose the Amma, the Huggin Saint, she's a, Amma is her name. She's known as, colloquially,

if there were another way, I don't know it, the hugging saint. She, Indian peasant lady from a fishing village in Kerala, say, and this lady, Amar, a lot of people are down with her. Now the fishing village that she's from, where at the age 17, she would go into delirious, altered states,

eyes rolling back, wandering around, I'm assuming, unyellow, what's that, ullulating, like, you know, all kind of crazy stuff. All the people in the village, understandably, thought she was a crack pot. But then some, the Brahman class come to check things out, India being what it is. And they say, no, no, she's legit. She's a reincarnation of some aspect of Carly. Now, when I, myself on several occasions, have spent time with and around Amma, what I've felt is. You know her or you've met her.

I don't know anything about this place. What Amar is. Yeah. There's two, a couple of ways. you could look at her. You could look at her as the Indian Oprah Winfrey if you wanted to. Certainly that's what I felt when I stayed at the ashram and I saw the bars of soap with her face on it and stuff, like i.e. she's got a brand. But what I mean also is that, you know, you can't just transpose Oprah Winfrey onto India. It's such a different idea and such a different

culture. And their country is so splendid and redolent with God that all it's more present in their culture in the broadest sense. Secularization is occurring more latterly, you know, the post-colonial version of commerce that's being. being embraced now through their, you know, Medi, is that his name? You know, they're turning themselves into a proper corporate churn right now, industrializing, technologizing. Anyway, though, the people of India is like God is all over their face. You can feel God in them and much more easily.

And they're sort of a breezy nurse, a kind of, when I first went there, someone told me, you won't be out to do your personality in India. They won't hurry up for you. What does that mean? Won't hurry up for you? Come on, what's going on? Let's move more quickly. How about that?

Oh, I see. I see. They just laugh. Like, you know, can we get, why don't we get calm? We'll go there, then we'll do this, trying to manipulate the world, you know, sort of shamanically, trying to hold in the broken system, the living water, which is what I was doing for a long time. We've always known God was real, but, you know,

that's the problem with a new age. And it seems almost that what's being contested by you as a devout Catholic is prostitism could bleed into the problems of pantheonism. If everything is God, then anything is God. And when I, for the first time, went back to a yoga festival thing, after coming to our Lord, I realize that the problem is

if I'm taking a little bit of Nietzsche, a bit of Confucius, a little bit of Sartra, a little bit of Buddha, a bit of Saddata, who's at the middle pulling the strings? This idiot. I can't do that ever again. He can't be in charge. He has to submit and completely yield,

and that works much, much better. Anyway, I went to Amr's Ashram, which was maybe the second time that I encountered her, and my point indeed, is that this is someone that emanates the kind of unique selflessness that in a way honors the particularity of a verse like you are fearfully and wonderfully made and you are very particularly and uniquely you, which in itself exposes the falsehood of identity politics that you would make a false God of your identity.

No, you're not going far enough. You're not going far enough. You are, you never mind your identity as a trans person. You are literally a one-off, unique, personally signed masterpiece. of the Holy One. I heard a priest, someone told me that pornography is not bad because it shows you too much. It shows too little, productive, two-dimensional thing for my consumption. You've turned it into that.

Can we talk about pornography? Because about 10 years ago, while I was writing my book, The Porn Myth, I came across your excellent video where you were sitting on the bed, I think, in a towel, and you went off against pornography. And this was before it was cool to go off against pornography. So thank you. and I just remember so many people being so gratified by that. I think what's so lovely,

what's great about hearing non, because you weren't a Christian at the time, you know, speak against these things is you speak, you're very good at your language is, what do they say, verbal IQ, I don't know what they say,

but you're very good at speaking, as I am not. So the way you conveyed that was so fresh and so powerful. So thank you for that. And then also I know, you know, we live in a culture

where men and women are up to their fireballs in it. They hate it and they love it and they hate that they love it and they don't know how to get out of it. Could you please offer some advice maybe to a young man who's watching right now who's like, I don't know how to stop. I don't. My life's becoming smaller and smaller. I'm no longer interested in the trees and the sun. It's just about porn. That's all I care about and I don't know what to do. I know what to do. What it means is you've lost your real identity in God and I would say, of course, in Christ, and you're hungry and you're famished, and you're looking for intimacy, and you are, in fact, looking for the right thing, but you're not looking for it in the right

place. They say, I was taught, if you want to know if you're addicted to something or not, see what happens when you stop doing it. That's how you know. If when you stop doing it, you suffer in ways that you did not anticipate and find it difficult to tolerate, what you're likely dealing with is addiction. Let's unpack that word a little bit. It means you've formed an attachment, a little part of yourself lives in that behaviour or that chemical compound, whether it's an externally smoked one or endocrinally generated in your belly and your brain. You need it. You have found yourself worshipping at a false altar. You're worshipping there. You're a kind of weird priest going into the holiest of holies alone with your private thing, all gollumed up on lust and

glommed on to something that even you frown upon. So when you next find yourself, this is it with an addict. You have to meet them there. You have to meet them exactly there. I used to think this with one of my dear friends who I love, she's a prostitute heroin addict. She's not a prostitute heroin addict. She's a beautiful person that took heroin and was prostituted

and allowed herself to be prostituted. I would say to her, you know, I need to meet the person that does it. I need to meet the person that does the heroin, not the prostitution, Lord. I need to meet the person that does the heroin. Like, where are you? Because I meet you and you're all cool. You know, like now sometimes what's good is that, but as a person in recovery, this is why my Christianity is deeply informed and undergirded by the recovery. It's because recovery is like a basics version. It's broke it down a bit for you.

And it's also plain how you're going to utilize it. And we're going to use it now with this pornography. Example is that where are you going to, in that moment, see, like, addiction is obsession and compulsion. You can't stop thinking about it when you're not doing it, and then you can't stop yourself when it comes to it. Now, in the moment when it comes, when it comes, like, oh my God, I'm about to act out, I'm about to drink, or in this case, stick particularly to pornography. That's what we're discussing. You know, what are the conditions? Presumably, like when I was looking at pornography, I would firstly, I would justify, I was nothing wrong with it.

It's just, you know, and then when you do it, my God, it's so brilliant, you know, like the first time, hi, if you go some time without looking at porn and then you look and it's so really, ancient, interminton, sort of beautiful, this is so glorious, they're sort of warped and unredeemed song of songs, erotica, worldly erotica, diabolical erotica. So, you can feast on that stuff, you can feast on that stuff, but where you have to get is, where is it? Like, who are you when you're about to do it? And I actually think, in a way, it has to be done collegiately, and it has to be done in company, I mean to say that when you next, if you are, if we're talking to this

apocryphal, excuse that language, if we're talking about this metaphorical, a porn addict, then when you are about to, firstly, recognize when do you do it? I do it when I'm on my own. I do it if I'm not feeling good. I mean, I know people have done it in like mad places like other people's houses when they're at work and stuff like that, looking at porn in a bathroom and they're meant to be doing some other task. You know, it's funny that people would do a thing like that. It's funny that a person would do a thing like that. So when you're in that situation, you may need to talk to someone else there that understands and that will not talk to you from a place of shame and humiliation and embarrassment,

even in this country of America, where they talk about porn a lot. They're not talking about masturbation. They shy away from that. That it's onanism. That it's a sort of a weird, peculiar act. It's an angel would not do that. And you've lost yourself.

Now, like, how you, the only place you can tackle addiction is in the present. It can only, like, our Lord, you have to find him there. You have to find him now. You have to find him here. So with pornography, it's because you want intimacy. It's because you think the best thing you can do in your life is to look at that and jerk off.

And like an org, even though you know you want to feel terrible after, life is so awful and crap. And so without meaning that that's as good as it's going to be. And I know that feeling well. I know that feeling well. So it does require faith. But see if you break it down from a step perspective, which is a great. ladder out. One is it's a problem. If the person is not saying it's a problem, oh well, it's over. You can't help. If I go, it's a problem. Good. Do you believe it's possible to change? No, no, I don't.

I used to do it. I don't do it anymore. This is something I do notice in people who are addicted. They refuse to believe that others don't do it. That sort of cynicism where there's no way you can be better than me. And you're just lying. When you say it's been seven years, it's a lie because it can't be, because this is my reality, so it can't... Not to drag us off the subject of pornography, why would I, Russell Brand, be the person to do that? But, you know, having just endured some cynicism, that's what it is.

No! No way! You can't be! There's no way. I deny it. I deny it. You must be in league with demons. With Satan, that's it. Tell the truth. There is no God. There is no Christ. You can't be saved. I can't be saved. No one can be saved. So we might as well give in, shall we,

to post-enlightenment rationalism and allow the state to be in charge of reality. and then advanced technology and treat people like a commodity. Why don't we? We'll put a chip under the skin, take a vaccine whenever you're told to take a vaccine. There is no God. Nothing matters.

Only pleasure, and we can be in charge, and we can issue you pleasure on subscription now. That's the world they're trying to sell. And as soon as you try to, in a fallen and broken way, say, hey, there's another way. I think there's a way out of here. I think there's a way out of here. It's not me.

Plato's cave, right? Get out of the cave. You know, the difference with the classical model is it's impersonal. Plato's not going to come in there with you. He's not going to come in there with you and take you out, but our Lord will. And he's real and he has no favourites and he doesn't care about any differences between me and you or anybody listening to this. And I, as a person that worships my own identity and individualism and has done for so long. I need precisely that.

That's exactly the inoculation I need. Stop trying to do this as you. Stop it. It doesn't matter. And I think that is applicable to the person that can't get step two with pornography, which is came to believe that power grading ourselves could restore us to sanity. It's insane. Do you agree? It's insane to stay in that room, jerking yourself off, looking at dead-pixelated images of ghosts, performing erotic acts, probably under the torture of addiction and exploitation themselves. Right. That's insane. Good. Do you believe it's possible to not be insane? Some people don't. Some people think this is all there is. That's a big problem. And that would be like the answer to number one if there's not a problem, right? If I can't but be insane, it's like, okay, well, I can't help you. Yeah. So that's where we have to get into the Bonhoeff, I suppose, that our love of God has to be so vivid. They're like, oh my God, I think these people are telling the truth.

Because look, they're willing to die for it. They're willing to actually die for it. I think they're telling the truth. Our love of Christ should make atheists question their unbelief. Oh, my God. If these people are willing to just take a bullet, then maybe this worship of the dead world. Oh, I don't know. I think there's something, a gas.

I love it when C.S. Lewis pushes people on that. Because when people think that the image of God, the father is sort of superficial and, insufficient, what they probably imagine God as, if you push them on it linguistically, is probably some sort of nebulous gas or force or something, is similarly lacking in substance in a way. And also our ability to explain it is, at the end, is going to meet limitation, given we're dealing with infinity. Anyway, like an eternity and what is beyond those things, and infinite, unknowable, not unknowable love, but indescribable love. Anyway, so like, if they can get to the pot, that's where a human interconnection,

between addicts is useful. Because if you can say someone, trust me, I don't do it. I don't do it either. And that's what Alcoholics Anonymous is founded on. And all 12-step fellowships are the therapeutic value of one addict helping another. Like you don't like when people, drug addicts and criminals and broken people, the world over are being counseled in some mandated way in some police cell or some clinic somewhere. If they're a true addict in their heart of hearts, they're looking at that counselor thinking you don't know what it's like. And what they need to receive in that moment is yes I do I know what it's like you think I don't know what it's like to want to kill myself you think I don't know what it's like to think there's nothing better for me than jerking myself

off over porn or participating in in in indignified and ignoble activity when so much is available to me I know it all I've been there I've lived there now now that's what's glorious about the 12th step you know to rush ahead some you know is you live in it now you live in it now you practice these principles in all your affairs you try to you again with the acknowledgement of the And so coming to Christ for me was you've, I'd had like, you know, like through a glass darkly, I'd glimpse the image of you're supposed to be less selfish, basically. Stop being so selfish. And then the powerful and potent illumination of this inspired and unbelievable scripture. That's what's made it flesh. The word became flesh. The concept, live. through time in spontaneity as he walked it where time and space and action and flesh and eternity coalesce momentarily, accessibly if you can eat the flesh and drink the blood and be aside from time and through time and with time. And these, you know, if it's sort of compulsive

masturbation, is a form of worship, acknowledge it for what it really is and recognize that you don't have to do it on your own. These two things do have to be done in community, actually. We all have mobile phone service. It's time to support a phone company that supports us. Switch to our sponsor, Charity Mobile. They're different. They're proudly pro-life and impacting the culture of life in America. With Charity Mobile, there's no compromise on service, quality, or affordability. You get the same nationwide coverage as the major carriers with no contracts, and their customer service is staffed by Pro-Life Americans. Every month, they take a percentage of what you pay and send it directly to the Pro-Life, pro-family,

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We don't shoot our wounded. Like, forgiveness. Okay, don't worry. It's okay. Okay. I'm not perfect diver. Come this way. Come this way.

It's okay. But the individual. How does the individual respond to the relapse? In the same way. You're saying that part of themselves? Come back. Yeah. Come back.

Condemming yourself after doing something stupid is not only a bad idea, but it doesn't work. It's not just a wrong thing to do. You know, St. Paul says, be gentle with those who are caught up in sin. Correct them with the spirit of gentleness. Don't ask me where it is because I'm a Catholic and I don't know. Do you need someone to talk you through this and help you with it? Right. But it's like same thing with yourself, huh?

When you fall into those things that you said you would never do again, to kind of look to Christ. And this gets back to what we were saying earlier, right? Like when I find myself in a shameful situation, I can look to others worse than me to feel better, you know. I can look to myself and feel nothing but hatred maybe, but to look to Christ who apparently went to death to save me. And that saving is what he does,

that that's actually his name. It's his job description. So the idea that I am a delight to Jesus, even my sins when I repent of them are a cause of delight to Jesus, because how could it not be a delightful thing for the Saviour to save? Anyway, but okay, so to deal with ourselves with gentleness, is that the... In a way, I don't know how you deal with yourself because it's, in a way, suggests a kind of perpetuation of the problem that it could become a little Sisyphian

if you're dealing with yourself at all. And there does need to be an accessory agent. I am sort of here making a case for a priest class and an apostolic line. I went to confession this morning. It's a great experience to kneel down before someone you don't know and say all the things you hate about yourself.

Do you fully let rip? Oh, I let rip. And I'll tell you... And it's weird too because, you know, now that I've got something of a platform and a dis, you know, accent that people recognize, I've got to go in and go, here's all the ways I suck.

and then I get to receive the mercy. And just to have, there's something about the incarnational aspect of confession to be, but like, you know, because you're like, well, you can just say your prayers in your bed. You could repent in your bedroom. And that's, of course, true and you should. But to stand before somebody and, and as you know, right, in a different context, right, to accuse yourself and to not, to not have someone go, ugh. But to go, yeah. It reminds me of something Jordan Peterson said a long time ago.

He said, sometimes you'll hear people say, how could anybody get hooked on heroin? He's like, are you kidding me? Getting hooked on heroin is the most obvious thing. And you could say the same thing about pornography. Why would anyone look at pornography? Are you mental? What's interesting isn't why someone would look at pornography. What's interesting is why anyone, having looked at pornography, would decide that they would like to stop, please.

That's interesting. The enjoyable statistic with opium dependency comes from the service personnel in Vietnam when this country was at war with them, I think a significant number of vets returned dependent because it was being issued as standard to cope with the terrible stress of being in that conflict. My understanding is that 90% of returning vets stopped taking heroin, recognizing they were no longer in Vietnam and the circumstances no longer warranted it. 10% continued regardless, which is sort of maps onto the general belief that 10% of the population has an inclination towards dependency and maybe particularly chemical dependency.

So some of us, once we've found that there is a sort of a reliable, kind of a placebo, really, if the true thing is the spirit, and it's worth noting for a moment that placebo effect exists at all. You can just tell people that works, that does. And if their faith is strong, if they have just a mustard seed of faith, they'll start to get better. I mean, that's even more interesting, really, than my original point in the way, but the fact is, is that some people can't let go of drugs unless you directly mainline them with a spiritual solution. And the 12 steps derived as it is from Christianity does that. But there

are a couple of other interesting components to its origin. One is the interventioner Carl Jung. All of this, actually. I write about this in the book because partly what I'm trying to do is the principles and simplicity and rawness of recovery into what can sometimes feel like the impenetrable mystery of Christianity, as well as all the other problems, the piety, the judgment, the condemnation, the posing, all of the things that any Christian institution or any Christian could exhibit at any moment. But if recovery, which is annoying in its own way, there's this such a sort of a sense of people like, a friend of mine ages ago, a friend of Fred, actually said that the 12th that reminds them of the early church.

that people are having these quiet little meetings and oh my God, right, okay, what are we going to do? And organize it themselves and passing the basket round and having their stuff in common and full autonomy and independence of each group, which I think are such great, great principles, actually, that anything that becomes a vast institution, the problem is, once it's an institution,

all you've got to do is capture the institution and now you've got it. Whereas if people are somewhat decentralized under him, then there is, you've got to kill every single unit. You've got to chop off every single one of the head. Anyway, so my, I guess what I was trying to say there, we were talking about addiction, weren't we, mate? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And setbacks and gentleness and intercession.

Oh, yeah, that Young got involved. Young got involved because Jung treated, prior to Bill W., one of his friends, got treated by Young, who was obviously still practicing then and probably not as famous, but regarded as a pretty preeminent and important voice in psychiatry. who said, this dude, who he treated a guy for six months in Switzerland, so the story goes, the guy got sober with him. And then as soon as he got on the boat back to America, just drank, so they sent him back again. He goes, I don't think I can do anything for you. You're probably going to die of this.

I have seen rare cases where a person had a profound spiritual experience and the ongoing support of a community get well. And those two notions are what forms the 12 steps. It's an attempt to induce a spiritual experience and then to maintain it through fellowship. And that too, I feel, is present in good church that we recognize that at any one moment, you might be the person that's in the crosshairs and in the spotlight, whether that's because of your own flesh and fallenness or some external imposition. And I like that. I like that being part of a brotherhood of people are like, this is not all there is.

We're heading to eternity. So we'll deal with this however we need to. But the thresholds change and the watermark changes. you see where some people, oh, no, that's too much now. That's too much. And, yeah, so, oh, yeah. So, Jung's intervention is also interesting, too, because of his correspondence with Bill W, where he said, like, where he quotes back to Bill W.

He goes, look, I held back from telling that guy everything, because I didn't think he would be out of handle it. But I can see you can handle it from the way you write. Thanks for thanking me, by the way. He says, he says, I thought of Psalm 42, you know, like, as the, deer panteth after the brook so my heart pants after god till i receive you and he goes and that's what i think the science alcoholics he says and then he said um there's an evil principle prevailing in this world that may as well be called the devil but you can't use that language these days because

people start asking too many questions and i was like really struck by the acknowledgement of that idea the concept of evil and as to your point earlier you can't have lord of the rings about Sorin. Soren? Yeah, yeah, Sauron. I always get Sauron-Saraman mixed up. I think Sauron's a fruit bread loaf, which would be much less threatening. The inhabitants of Middle Earth.

Did Ricky Javees read this book, or is he commenting on your experience, or is he just saying something without reference to you at all? The latter. The latter. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn't. It's not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions, but you can't have your own facts. Amen.

Did you see, um, did you see Doug Stanhope's quote? He's an American comedian. Read the Doug Stanhope. This one? Is this? If God can create everything. Oh, no. That's not one above.

Ricky. Yeah, Ricky and Ephesians. That's it here. Am I going to be in some sort of endless hell where I'm forced to look through books? Books that you can't find. Or eternity. Maybe. Yes.

I hear it is. Okay. Good, good, good. Let me read this. The top one, huh? I don't even understand the connection. with, died for your sins. He died for your sin. Well, how does one affect the other? I hit myself in the foot with a shovel for your mortgage. I like that inquiry by Daxana. Yeah, at least it's honest.

The good atheist inquiry, but afterwards I think I found the right. Ah, when you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us. He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. What was your opinion of the new atheism during the years of the new atheism? Did you jump on that bandwagon? It was pretty impressive, wasn't it? All the smart, cool kids were saying God didn't exist,

and I felt like an idiot for disagreeing. I felt like pretty, like, Dawkins, even in saying selfish gene, is attributing human characteristics to a gene. And one of their main problems is that we're somehow applying, kind of an anthropomorphic willfulness to the unknowable and the unknown

and by their reckoning emptiness and is it Aquinas that said if you believe that you have deduced using your consciousness that there is no God then you are saying that your consciousness which is itself the result of a lot of random empty meaningless molecules

bouncing into one another over millions of years is the very thing that you're using to assess meaning itself. How can you rely on that? Right. Because it itself is the result of just... It's like a Plantingian argument. Alvin Plantinger is a philosopher who made this case that if we are merely the result of blind evolutionary processes, then we have no good reason to trust out, yeah.

That one. Yeah. So that's what I guess with the avi... And there was a kind of a delight in it. There was sort of pious and sort of kind of self-fellant. righteous. And I think I notice a kind of an inverted faith. I notice a kind of a cling. Like a no, I actually like believing this. And that's one of the things that you really notice if you operate in the social media world and all of us do now to a degree is that really what

people are doing is, I like doing that. I like saying this. I like condemning that. I like agreeing with this. I like disagreeing with that. There's a sort of such blind personhood at the core of so much online conjecture. And I see a kind of perverted delight in atheism, a kind of unwillingness to relinquish misery. And I suppose what's beautiful about reading C.S. Lewis is he takes you from his atheism with a better mind than yours, all the way into believing not just in God, but Christ specifically,

and then in a grief observed into a crisis. Wow. That's so harrowing for him that when he says, I just encountered her mind, like, you know, his wife, his departed wife, that that's enough of a comfort. And when he says, you know, like to hear him when he says, my faith, the which was just like up until her death was just like a rope tying up a box in the corner of the room. And now I'm hanging off a cliff by that rope. I don't seem so certain. I don't feel so certain in that rope. I read that relatively recently. That opening line. I was reading it to my wife. What does he say? Something

to the effect of, no one ever told. me grief felt so much like fear. I keep swallowing. Something like that. It just hit me like a ton of bricks. I had to leave my poor wife in the kitchen. I was too ashamed to cry like that in front of her. It's a beautiful book which people should read. They should read it in collaboration with, what is it, the problem of pain, which is really his sort of philosophical argument against the atheist argument or response to the atheistic argument that evil, therefore not God. And then you're dealing with the heart, how the heart endure is the evil that he endureed. So yeah. Why do you think Christianity seems to be making a, I don't know, why are people more interested in it today? And what is your advice to someone who's watching right now? And they think, look, I'm open to being Christian, but I don't want to trade in my intellectual credibility for a bunch of fairy tales that are meant to make me feel better. I would rather have nihilism and truth than warm, fuzzy stories that are meant to make me feel good about some, you know, theme park up in the clouds if I just can stop masturbating.

Do you know? Well, the truth is the first component and is foundational and the girdle that holds the rest of it together, even in Paul's metaphor of personal armory against the evil. I think the reason to become Christian now is one, I believe, as it just observing socially what's happening, is the collapse of belief in a system, the very visceral and real acknowledgement, that the pledge that the culture was offering you, bread and circus is point O, is over. It's not working. People are seeing and feeling and experiencing their own poverty, both financially, materially,

and I think more significantly spiritually, hold on this doesn't work. Whether it's even with something like the rise of ethno-nationalism and the surge of kind of enjoyable power of, say, the assent of Trump, who as a political figure, I consider, because I regard politics primarily as a spectacle, a great inhabitant of that. play, people are, I think, starting to recognize you can't invest any faith in human beings just like you. And in the end and in the final reckoning, whether that's just something as prosaic is observing mortality, they are all like you. And I think, too, people might be recognizing that the worst tyrants of the last century with their lurid red and black and their stomping boots and fantastic mustaches, could not envisage the sanitary, bureaucratic horror

of what dictatorships and tyranny look like in a technological age. We're here to help you. We're here to help you. All you have to do is be obedient. The bureaucratic power that we're facing now seems to me precisely what Lucifer would conjure. That it's invisible. It's normal. It's It's sanitary. It's practical. It's brutality masked in maths and geometry. Just neat little squares for you to stand in. The bars barely visible. Your consent long ago issued on some forgotten form. You belong to the state. You belong to its ideas. When Orwell said, if you want to understand the future of humanity, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, perhaps we didn't correctly detect that the face is the signature of God that is the divine aspect of you that's being destroyed. And in

August Huxley and in the sterility and sanitary slickness of a brave new world, I can almost feel that we're inhabiting the monorail Steve Jobs version of a world where power is consolidated and centralized in order to protect and help us, where we give up our free speech in order to protect people from hate speech, where we take whatever medications we're issued in order to protect us. Never really questioning that elsewhere it doesn't seem like this gargantuan Goliath state

doesn't seem to love human life over there, doesn't seem to care about righteousness and honor in this direction, but all of a sudden, because life is so sacred, go in your homes, take the vaccine, do as you're told. It seems to me that the reason to consider Christ now is because we are in some kind of quickening, in the same way that the Roman roads perhaps could be regarded as one rational, if rationale is any tall at all, reason for his first appearance because of the expansiveness of empire.

Now the networks of communication are fully omniscient and an omnipresent and the word can travel very, very, very quickly. Remember, I sort of alluded to it earlier, mate, it's emerging of the kingdoms. We are bringing something and I wonder what. I wonder if a new church could be formed or if the beloved church could find expression in decentralized systems where each community is independent, worshiping whoever they want to worship, and I would pray that they would worship Christ, providing all of their food and nutrition needs locally, permaculture, agriculture, decentralized, where the removal of these sort of phantoms and ghouls of bureaucracy,

the regulatory bodies that end up somehow regulating us into food that's got poison in it and intoxicating our own water supply and eating, having even a phrase like junk food as a weird portman too. Why would you put junk in your mouth? It's diabolical. It's the devil's world. This is, it's happening so fast. The tool for total capitulation, the tools and the technology for total capitulation to evil are now available. But similarly, we're at an inflection point where, you know, it's weird because I'm trying to reconcile, and I don't know how, that it's already done. The victory is won. You don't have to do anything. You know, but somehow through this faith in him that we do these works as a result of our faith in him,

and, you know, Paul was hardly an inert and immobile person. It's dedicating his life, perhaps somewhere intuing that his head's getting cut off at the end of it all. Nevertheless, never stops writing, never stops preaching, never stops moving. And I feel that we're in real danger. of people living meaningless lives en masse forever and just accepting a new surf class that just runs AI and robotics, a diabolical new world.

Stay on your homes with your Uber Eats and pornography and don't make a problem. Just stay there. You're being denied your access to the living water, to the living flow. And it's always all like that, God, I wish I could be more punchy in the way I talk. But the reason I wrote the book

is because I wanted to say that the Christ that the Christ that the Christ that I have encountered is no problem with the kind of the anti-establishment feeling I had that don't fob me off with some phony thing like a supernatural psychedelic deep-time Christ that wants you to participate is he has saved you anyway but there's an invitation for you to participate in something of real meaning and value is not going to be like you know the thing is now the reason it's growing is people know they're not getting a Lamborghini and it doesn't matter if you replace your phone every 15 minutes and increasingly

Oh yeah, I've got access to sexual imagery 24-7 and I feel disgusting. There's no, all of Satan's simulacrum has been shown as ashes. It's happening so quickly. And there's a strange race on for information and for control. There is a race and he says in there, Paul, run to the last, run. And I feel like this is where we are. And I know every generation, Fin DeSiegelor, it's us that's going to face Armageddon. And surely individually, I'm going to die, you're going to die.

The apocalypse and the revelation is coming for us individually. There's something of the nation too. I feel like, Matt, we may have the chance to participate in the banquet, the banquet. And all we have to do is stop eating their crumbs. Well put. Your advice to a young man or woman who doesn't want to trade in their intellectual credibility for fairy tales, who's watching right now and is very open to Christianity. First of all, they can pick up your book.

We'll link to it below how to become a Christian in seven days. But what would you say to them as we wrap up? It's not, you're not going to have to. condescend to come to Christ. You're not going to have to be, you're not going to be diminished. It's becoming who you always are. The apostasy, you're already trapped in a dreadful religion. You're already devout. You're a Pharisee of a dead culture. Come home. Come home. Amen. Thank you, Russell. Thanks for being on my show. And thank you for sharing with me what you

shared. Thanks for having me. And God bless you. And I pray your book leads many souls to Christ and thank you for saying your rosary which you promised to say for me on the way home. Now do we do the luminous? You do that if you want. What do you do in a first day? Well, I do the joyful and here's why. The 150 arveys for the three different, you know, joyful, sorrowful and glorious were meant to sort of be an imitation of the 150 Psalms that a monk might pray over the course of a day or over the course of a week. So when St. John Paul II introduced the luminous mysteries, he introduced them as here's an optional thing that you could do. sometimes pray them. They're really beautiful. You're meditating on the scriptures. But personally, I try to

pray three rosaries a day. So I'd, to stay within those kind of like 150 a vase is why I do it. You do joyful, glorious, in one morning, at one hit or? No, not in one hit. I don't have that kind of attention span, unfortunately. But I'll wake up, I'll kneel down. I'll say the opening prayers. The creed, our father, three hail Mary's glory B. And then I'm off to the races. So I might go on a walk around my neighborhood, just say the joyful mysteries, and I don't say the concluding prayer. And then maybe I'm in the car because I've got to get a CVS for something. I'll say the sorrowful. Maybe I can only get too sorrowful in.

I'll do the other three later. And then I'll sit down with the family and I'll pray the glorious. We always pray the rosary. We try to pray the rosary every night. Do you all of you? With the kids, yeah. Pretty nice. What you go one whole round?

Just so the five decades, yeah. So not the 150, as I said. But you do, whichever that one is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now when you get in here, are you doing Glory B and are you doing that Fatima one? So this is a really good question. I like to be minimalist because Catholics can get way too enthusiastic and they start adding a bunch of prayers in the middle. You're like, come on, dude, what do you want from me? Jonathan Rumi was sticking all sorts in there when I'd done one with him.

So there's freedom, right? Do what you want to do. So for me, I don't usually say the Fatima prayer, though it's a beautiful prayer to pray and sometimes I'll do it. I'll just do the Glory B. So I'm very minimalist when it comes to the Rosary. And the other way I can get through the rosary is by not demanding perfection of myself. I just go, you know what? My mind's going to wander. Sometimes I'll get to the end of the decade and I'll realize I didn't think about that mystery once. And so I'll go give it three more and do my best and carry on. I see a book where it's like each one of the decades got its own little thing also.

Yeah. Each little bead. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I know what you mean. Yeah, it's called the scriptural rosary. Yeah.

Where you might read a verse of scripture and then move on to the next Hail Mary. Yeah. I tease Jonathan Rumi because when I used to listen to it on. Hello. Like, here he's mocking calls. Like Jonathan. That was excellent. Your channeling roomy there.

Well, he was my body double in one of the last TV gigs. I did ballers. And like me and I used to just check. He hadn't, he was like, oh, I'm going to do this thing called The Chosen. I'm like, well, good luck with that, mate. Was he a Christian? Yeah, I think so. I mean, we didn't really talk about, I wasn't.

And I don't know about like, he was really lovely and a good mate. He's a great fella. Yeah. I can see now the resemblance. So that's funny. He was a stunt double? I get to say Jesus is my body double. That's good. And like he substituted himself for me.

Like the reminders are there if you look for them. Yeah. Yeah. Not that you need my promotion, but where can people find you? And your lovely wife and the good things you're attempting like we all are online. All right. Watch Sunday service. That's me and my wife, Laura, just looking at praying together and looking at the word.

I do a show on Rumble and then I'm on all the internet platforms. platforms. Really, I'm here because of my book, How to Become Christian in Seven Days. That's on Tucker Carlson books right now. And I'll be, which must be a popular name in this building. And it depends who you are. And then I'm, you know, it's out everywhere from May 12th. Oh, okay. Fantastic. All right. Well, when this releases, this will be there so people can get it on Amazon or we probably don't want to do Amazon now that we've just been raging against the machine for the last. How do we get out of this thing? You know, maybe I'll just. Tucker Carlson Books. That'll do it. Well, God bless you. God bless you, man. That was good stuff. It was a good conversation.

I was in it. I was in it. Me too. Thank you.