Pints With Aquinas - Why Doing Dangerous Things Is Good for the Soul (John Henry Spann) | Ep. 555

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

In this interview, Matt sits down with the one and only John Henry Spann for another conversation that is bound to generate some amazing comments from viewers. The discussion touches on hunting (obviously), why men need to do dangerous things, what masculinity really is, the trouble with most spiritual retreats, living off-grid, having a hobby you can do with your kids, eating pythons (yes!!), and much more. Plus, John Henry answers questions from Locals supporters. - - - Become a member of the Fraternity of St. Hubert, or sign up to receive updates at https://www.fraternityofsthubert.com Follow the Fraternity of St. Hubert on Instagram (fraternityofst.hubert), X (@FratofStHubert), Facebook (Fraternity of St. Hubert) - - - Today's Sponsors: 👉 Truthly – The Catholic faith at your fingertips: https://www.truthly.ai/ 👉 Hallow – The #1 Catholic prayer app: https://hallow.com/mattfradd - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

But then last summer, for the first time, not our first time in Africa, but the first time doing it this way, we said, we're going to go to Africa, we're going to have a safari, we're going to upcharge everybody so we can bring a priest, we're going to have Holy Mass every morning, opportunities for confession throughout it. And that's it. Every single man listening just about has that desire to do something that is dangerous. We've taken sort of the American ideal, which I think is an offshoot of Protestantism, right? This pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, right? And we've tried that in this model. world and there's a time and a place for that right i think it's really great to be self-sufficient in lots of ways but pure self-sufficiency is disordered it's not natural you're not an island right you're not supposed to exist by yourself the whole stoic by your own pull yourself up by your own bootstrap thing i think it's lame so you're scheduling hunts not just in africa but around the country different times of the year so if people go to what's their website again fraternity of st hubert com. Hey, everybody.

Before we get into today's interview, I want to tell you about my brand new book. It's called Jesus, Our Refuge. If you, like many people, unlike all of us, to one degree or another, have been seeking refuge in things other than Jesus Christ and have just found yourself increasingly weary, then this book is for you. This book is about taking Jesus seriously. when he says, come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

It's getting great reviews, and I know it will be a healing balm to your soul. Check it out, Jesus, our refuge. You can get it right now on Amazon. Thanks. So John Henry Spahn, the guest that everybody loves or does not love. So I told you this before we came on the air,

on the car right over here, like I'm nervous for the first time because I'm actually doing like a thing. I'm here to talk about a real thing. And I haven't done that historically. and we were talking about some of the best comments ever and there's two that stick out to me and you let me know if you've got any others but the first one is one guy wrote

I don't remember if this was the last one or the one before but I listened, this is the quote, I listened for about a half an hour and these guys just kept band right back and forth telling inside jokes that I didn't understand and I was driving so I couldn't select another podcast so I just turned off my radio and sat in silence it's pretty good

Yep. And then the second? This was the original. This was five, six years ago. I was on for the Raising Kids in Sodom, which I thought was a good episode. He said, yeah, isn't that a great name? It's a great name. And a guy said,

I love Pines for Aquinas. Matt will have these really smart theologians on and then these dip S-H-I-T's like John Henry on. Really? Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, it seemed like a legitimate, like, compliment. I think he compared it to Joe Rogan. He was like, you know, a lot of these fighters don't know anything about anything on

and these smart guys who know stuff. So I took it that way. I took it as a compliment. Well, what was the classic comment was this guy looks like his one-hand sandwich away from a heart attack? All right, so big, big shout out to one of my students. I might have said this last time I was on the air, but if I did, I'll tell the story again. Victor of Scarpeo, right?

Great kid. He's out of Benedictine now, killing it. Awesome. He used to make that joke to me all the time in the hallways. At graduation, he comes across the stage. He gives me a hug and he hands me a ham sandwich. Oh. On the stage.

Yeah. Okay, so he wasn't the one who commented it originally. No, no, no. He just knew of it. He just thought it was funny and kept bringing it up to me in the hallways and stuff at school. Good stuff. It's pretty great. Well, I'm really, I always love having you one, so.

I just had the best time. We had a cold plunge this morning and the sauna and my wife made us omelets. And delivered them outside. She's a good woman. Had a cigar. Yeah. It was a great way to start the day. You had some allergy medication.

I don't know what it is. I had a little scratchy throat last night, but I like the kind of, kind of, Baritone, Gary, or not Gary, Marvin Gay, kind of deep voice that had Barry White. Yeah, press into it. Before we go any further, one of the reasons I invited you on is that I'm really excited about an apostolate you started,

and I don't want this to get buried deep into the show, so I'd love to hit it right up front. You've started a hunting society, just sum it up for us, and where people can go. And you're very humble about this, and I appreciate it, but this all started, we were on Safari in Africa this past summer, and you said about the fourth night, oh, yeah, I don't think I'm going to be able.

to commit to like every year. I don't think I'm an every year guy. Well, don't you just do it. And then you said, you know, we'll talk about it on the show, we'll do whatever. And I kind of tucked that away. And I thought that might be a cool thing one day. But I'm really bad at having a great idea and then deciding, ah, it's too much work. Like, I'm lazy inherently.

I think that's lame, but it's true. And just sort of letting it go by the wayside. But you were the one who just said, no, this is really good. And you need to do this. It is really good. And you're not lazy at all. I think he might just be frightened by websites. sites and technology. All the tech stuff freaks me. Yeah, you're not amazing. Yeah.

Yeah. So, okay, what is the fraternity of St. Hubert? Check out my super awesome first ever T-shirt that just came in the mail three days ago. It's a wildebeest to a crucifix. It's, I don't want to, I don't even like using the word hunting, right? It's not primarily a hunting thing. It's primarily a, like a brotherhood where we have some retreats that involve killing animals, right? That's the whole idea. And it was the brain. I've been talking about this forever with a college buddy of mine. Jonathan DeThomas, great guy. We played poker with him one time at your house, I think,

about how retreats usually aren't great, right? Typically, and I've been to some good retreats with some great speakers, but typically what happens is you go on a retreat and you do a lot of praying and a lot of talks and even good, good, good talks, right? And then you leave and you go home, and it was nice, it was nice. It's a retreat that reminds you to be virtuous,

all these very good things in and of themselves. But then last summer for the first time, not our first time in Africa, but the first time doing it this way, we said, we're going to go to Africa, we're going to have a safari, we're going to upcharge everybody so we can bring a priest, we're going to have holy mass every morning, opportunities for confession throughout it, and that's it. There's no big talks. There's no big, let's gather around and have a prayer circle, right? It's just you're hunting with the kind of men who will pay extra to go hunt with a priest and have mass. And it seems like the easiest thing in the world, but I was kind of hoping I was going to find somebody else that was doing it, and it wasn't out there. And so we built out a website and did all that cool stuff. And we're, I guess, launching Windows Ayers. What's the website? Fraternity of St. Hubert.com. Yeah, what's great about it is for people like me,

I kind of got initiated into hunting because of you. Right. Several years ago, you invited me to go to Namibia and we went hunting. But that's not something I would have ever figured out to do on my own. And so it was neat a couple of years ago for me to make this announcement to my local supporters first. You remember, we thought, how are we going to fill this? I announced to my local supporters, and within like 30 seconds. Yes, I think it was sold out.

It was sold out with a wait list. And it was, I think there's a real hunger for it. And I think it's the simplicity of it that I think is really, really good, right? What's happening is we're not going to create sort of a retreat with 100 different talks, and there's not going to be a theme of the retreat. We're all going to, and I'm not knocking that. That's great. That's some people.

But the idea is just come out and be in the wilderness, right? Just go in the wild and do dangerous things with good men, because I'd been on a ton of, like, outfitted hunts and stuff in the past. And I love the hunt. I love hunting. I've done that for most of my life. But you would go on these outfitted hunts for the most crass people, these people who would come out and you'd be in camp with.

And I mean, I'm not saying that I'm not trying to pearl clutch or anything when I say, like, I don't like hearing F bombs dropping left and right. I don't want to hear sexual jokes. But I don't. I don't want that around me. Once again, I'm weak, right? And I'll lower myself down sometimes when that's going on around me. And so the idea of, right, the natural filter is a priest is coming.

He's being paid for. You're going to be charged more. You go a little bit cheaper if you went by yourself. But those are the kind of guys who are going to be here. The guy of guys who are going to be willing to pay more for Holy Mass every day. And it was amazing. I wish, I don't know if I have access to some of the emails I got, but I shared some of them with you.

The emails that we got back from these guys, big, big, big shout out to all those guys who went with us to Namibia last year. No, they really were legitimately amazing fellows. And I brought my son with me. It was his senior year graduation present. And it was really great to have him around such good men. Normal men, you know, men who are having a beer, men who are laughing.

but men who are serious during the Holy Mass. Yeah, so I like that word too, normal, right? Yeah. They're not, I mean, there were great discussions, one that I almost wish I could send you the clip to put it in here, but we were sitting, we'd gone on a zebra hunt, right? Mountain zebras, not playing zebras where you walk out and shoot the zebra when it walks in front of you.

Mountain zebras, their mouth, their hooves are almost circular because they're so worn from running around on the rocks and all of that. And so we do maybe a two-mile trek in. The guy gets a zebra, and we're preparing to pack out, But before we pack out, you know, they're breaking down the zebra. You've got your skinners and your trackers and everybody's working real hard. And I sat down on a rock and talked to these two other guys about what a reverent Norvis Ordo looks like.

Come on. Come on. It was the best. It was great. It wasn't pretentious. There was none of that. It was just real. I think, I mentioned this in the car right over here.

I feel like sort of we've been really disenchanted with the world because we're so removed from it. Right? So right now we're in a climate-controlled, Bill, if it's night outside, that's okay. We can turn on lights. If we're hot, we can make it cold, vice versa. And we spend our whole lives doing non-real things. And as a result, I think it makes us harder to realize

how enchanted, on fire the world is with the supernatural. I don't think that it's, I don't think that it's just the scientific revolution and the enlightenment that made us stop recognizing supernatural reality, right? I think it's the fact that we've built this world. It's not just the ideas, but it's physically, the world that we're in that has done that, right? I mean, if you ask some guy in Central Europe in the year 1600

about demons, demonic presences, vampires, whatever, you're going to be like, oh, yeah, oh yeah, that's all there. That's all there. And those demons are still there, right? They're still around us right now, all the time. Demons, angels, all of this stuff. But we're so distracted and we're so not dependent on the natural world like we ought to be that it sort of gives us permission to not think about it.

Yeah, I love that. And now if you want that truth, as you say, you've got to go talk to a Filipino grandma. So that's a, that was a big, a big thing the other day I said basically that all the old, like 170-year-old Filipino ladies in the back of the church who said everything was demonic when you were a kid, they were right, it really all is, it's just all demonic, everything. And so the idea of the fraternity of St. Hubert is, now go out into the wild, do real things with good men, with virtuous men who are going to build you up.

We had guys, at least two, maybe three guys on this last trip who had never shot a gun before, right? We had guys who had never hunted before, but they'd done some, you know, sport shooting or whatever at a range. And it was just this welcoming, good, awesome environment. I had a guy who texted me afterwards, and he said, I'm having a hard time readjusting to the real world after being in Namibia. Right? He said, maybe this isn't the great tagline, but he said, I felt like the guy in Shawshank who couldn't adapt to the real world after leaving prison because Namibia seems more real than real life. And that's the coolest thing.

I don't know. It's just cool. And so it's been on my heart for a long time, and now I'm super excited about it. So you're scheduling hunts, not just in Africa, but around the country, different times of the year. So if people go to, what's their website again? Fraternity of St. Hubert.com. We'll put a link in the description. They can presumably see what hunts you're leading and how many spots are available.

They can pay to have them, maybe them and their son come along with you, and they don't have to be worried, hey, I don't know if I'm great at hunting or anything like that. So it's all handled, right? That's the idea. And once again, I told you, I was, I was a little nervous about this because it feels like a pitch. It feels like a, and it is kind of a pitch. Yes. And it's something worth pitching. But if you go to a fraternity of st. Hubert.com, you can sign up for free to get updates. Right. We also have a membership where essentially, I think it's $6 a month, super cheap, right? There's a whole chat room feature. We'll send you a merch package, all of that fun stuff. But what you, what happens if you sign up for the email is you're going to get email updates saying, hey, we got this hunt going on in, uh, Kansas, we're hunting pheasants in Kansas, or we're doing, I'm talking to a turkey guy tomorrow actually out in Nebraska. I want the Africa thing to be sort of the crown jewel, but we've got a main bear hunt coming up. We've got Namibia 2027. This coming summer, booked immediately in about two hours without even pushing the thing. Praise me to God, right? And today is the feast of St. Hubert, which is super cool. That's amazing. I know. I had no idea. We gave me the dates.

I know. That's cool. I really would like your tagline to be a retreat where you get to kill stuff. I love that. Something like, something simple like that. It reminds me of Ron, is it Ron from Parks and Recreation? He says that fishing is relaxing like yoga, but you get to kill something in the end. Yeah. No, and I don't mean to get all philosophical about it, but I was just rereading Wild at Heart, right? John Eldridge, who you had on the show, who's amazing, and he needs to convert and become Catholic.

He's an amazing, amazing guy. And he gets so into sort of what masculinity is. And I want to make it really clear that the fraternity of St. Hubert is not primarily about going out and shooting things, right? That's super cool. I love to go out and hunt. I trophy hunt. I shoot big animals. I eat them, right?

The reason we hunt in Namibia is because everything's above board there. The animals are respected. But I go out there to hunt because I want to hunt. But that's not why it's good primarily. It's primarily good because it's an outlet for men to really embrace the dangerous, I don't know, liability-ridden. I don't know stuff that we ought to do that we want to do. I've said this and I probably said everything I'm about to say on the show. but I talk to a lot of young men.

I talk to a lot of young college guys, a lot of guys who are newly married out of college, and so many of them struggle with that question of what is masculinity. And masculinity, I want to make it really clear, is not going to Africa and shooting big animals. That's super cool. We have that desire to do that, right? But if you want to know what masculinity is,

I think you ought to look at, I don't know, your four-year-old son at home, who knows he's not a man, but knows what a man does, right? And a man is virtuous, and a man is good, And a man slays dragons and protects princesses. And he plays cops and robbers with his buddies. And I don't know, does all these things that are really, really good. And then we get older.

We get in the malaise of being an adult. And we don't have outlets for that. And the fraternity of St. Hubert, I want to exist to give an outlet for that. Go out and do the thing. You can do it. You don't have to know anything about it. You don't have to know how to shoot a gun. You don't have to know how to, I don't know, stalk Gimsbuck in Africa

or sit in a tree stand to hunt bear in Maine. But you probably, every single man listening just about, has that desire to do something that is dangerous. This is probably, I think this is another John Eldridge quote. We have a society that says, you need to be a nice guy, right? Our church feminizes people, says, be nice, just be nice and be friendly. And that's great. I like nice guys. Nice guys are nice.

But if you had the option of someone saying, Matt Fred, he's a really nice guy. Or Matt Fred is dangerous in a good way. Yeah, yeah. You go with that one every single time. would rather that. And also to the ladies, I mean, they want to marry that man. They want their husband to be married or to be, yeah, they do want them to be married, but they want them to be dangerous in a good way. Yeah, I love it so much. I'm so glad you're doing this. Give me a sense of how much it costs, just real quick. So it's all over the place, right? Yeah, yeah. So obviously

Africa is, this coming year is $5,500 a pop. It's six days of hunting, two days of travel. We don't cover the flight. So you're looking at $1,500 to $2,500, maybe depending on when you book your flight to get over there. But once you land in Vindhook, everything from transportation to food, lodging, every single detail is covered. And I made up a transparency sheet, that's what I've been calling it, for this last one, so that people could compare. They could look at it and say, all right, here's how much it would cost for me to do this. Here's how much you're charging me. So I can justify it because it's not like a big money-making thing for me. And yeah, realistically speaking, it's super cool that I get to go on some hunts that I wouldn't do otherwise.

Well, and I hope you'll make money. I'll make some. I hope you'll make a lot. But just for my time, right, is sort of my idea, because it is a ministry. And I don't think early on we're going to make much at all because that's not the primary idea. We've got servers that we have to, you know, have to pay for all the whatever and the chat room and all the hosting stuff.

But I don't know, I just love it. It's just been on my heart. Do us a favor. Articulate the position of the person horrified that anyone would go to Africa to shoot big animals. Oh, awesome. All right. So try to articulate that well.

so that they feel like you get what they're saying. And then how would you respond? So I'm sure there will be lots and lots of people saying this is horrible that we have two Catholic men sitting around talking about killing animals and how that's fun. First of all, I want to say it is fun. It's super fun. I love it. I like doing it.

I like sneaking through the grass. I like pulling a gun up and putting it on sticks while this innocent animal doesn't know that I'm there and then shooting it and it dying. That is fun. I enjoy that. I don't think we need to be ashamed of saying that, right? I like to be aggressive, right? I like to hunt things. I like to kill things.

I like to eat those things. I think that's good. So no apologies at all. And, and I'm going to shoot the biggest one, right, on purpose. You know why? So it looks cool on your wall. It looks cool. It looks super cool and I feel cool. Look at that thing.

I do it. It was amazing. I was there. Shot that off a truck. So I just want to say that. 400 yards away. Over 400 yards. As soon as I said off a truck, I wanted to be clear.

It wasn't like it wasn't chained to the earth. It was still in a cage. He drove up beside the cage. No, that was awesome. That's a great hunt. But I just want to, I'm not pulling any punches on that. I refuse to give the mushy, gushy. But that being said, once again, the reason why we're hunting Namibia and not some of these other places, there's a few reasons.

But the big one is it's free range, right? We're not hunting a high fence spot. And I'm not knocking guys who hunt high fence, right? I understand. I know I've got great buddies who I love to death who do high fence hunts on 20, 30, 40,000 acres in Texas, in South Africa or whatever. That's awesome. I just don't particularly want to do it, right? But it's also Namibia, from a corruption standpoint, the amount of money that you're paying

that is actually making it to conservation is enormous, right? I talk about this with deer, and I'll talk about the North American model in a second, right? But the African model is you got all these guys hanging out in Africa. Spoiler alert, they're not terribly wealthy guys, right? They're mostly homesteaders, fairly self-sufficient, subsistence farmers, all of that, right? And there's animals everywhere, right? There's wildebeests, there's gimsbuck, there's spring buck, there's water, all of this stuff. And what are those animals doing?

They're eating, right? They're grazing on the same land that these guys' goats are. They're trampling through their gardens. They're a pain in the butt, right? Some of the big predators are eating their livestock, all of that, right? And so there's zero incentive, right? If that's the entirety, right, if nobody's coming over to shoot them, there's zero incentive to keep these animals around.

They're frustrating, right? They're irritating. It's like I trap coyotes all the time. I want to kill all the coyotes that are around my house because they're killing my chickens, and I don't like them, right? But what the African model of conservation does is they take that and they say, okay, don't shoot the spring boat. I know you want to.

I know that it's a financial liability, you know, it's out there. Don't shoot it. In exchange, some guy's going to come over from the United States. He's going to shoot that animal. You're going to get the meat from that animal, and you're going to get paid. And so that's how they fund conservation entirely. Right, Botswana. I think it was Botswana that outlawed hunting, elephant hunting.

Yeah. And when they outlawed elephant hunting, guess what happened? The population nose dived, right? They recently reintroduced hunting, right? And now the population's growing again. And it's because the animals don't have a value. They don't have a dollar value for the locals. They have a negative value, right? They're made out of meat and they're a pain in the butt. So I can shoot it, get protein, and not have to worry about the impact that they're having on my agriculture and all of that stuff. So, yeah, you can feel good about it. And I'm not here to say, I wouldn't go shoot pandas, even if I could, right? Not because I have. Not because they're cute, right? They are, they're charismatic megafauna, for sure. But I wouldn't shoot them because I realize that would be bad for the population. But as, I don't know, backwards as it sounds, it's really good.

It's really good for the wildebeest population for you to go over to Africa and shoot a wildebe. It's not good for that particular. Right? But it's good in general. Trust me. Just stand still. This is good for you.

If I can nerd out a little bit on sort of like hunting history in the United States, you know, the 1930s, right? I live in Georgia. There were almost no deer in Georgia. There were almost no deer. You had some pockets way up in the mountain, and they had some way down in the Oki-Fin-Oki Swamp,

but seeing on a deer track was a huge deal back then, right, for decades. And the reason was they'd all been shot out. People were shooting them. They were selling the meat. There were no laws that regulated hunting, right? Now in Georgia, I can shoot 10-dose, two bucks every single year because they've rebounded so much. The reason they have is the Pittman-Robertson Act,

everybody should look up, right, if you're a conservation guide. That's the difference between the African model of conservation and the North American model of conservation, all hinges on the Pittman-Robertson. Act in the U.S., right, which basically says, we're going to charge everyone extra for hunting gear, bullets, guns, all of that. That's going to go towards conservation. Also, we're going to give anyone who wants to, right, who's legally allowed to, right, tags for certain animals to make those animals worth something. It outlawed market hunting, so you couldn't shoot deer and sell

them. I can't sell the deer that we shoot in the, I don't know, like a stand out in front of my house or anything like that. And it made the animals valuable. It made them trophies, right? It made them something worth preserving. And now we have more deer than we know what to do with. Maybe a decade ago, they doubled the number of bear tags that they gave out because they wanted people to shoot more bears because they're overpopulated. It's a cool problem. Yeah.

Wow, that's really great. I'd love to just talk about, I'd just like to talk about our time in Africa and how fun it was. I mean, having my son show up, who showed up a couple of days after us with Father Jason. 45 minutes out of the car, he shut a spring buck. That was the coolest thing. I didn't realize what a miracle that was until I, missed 800 shots the next day on Springbok. There were so many too.

There were so many and they were right in front of me and they were chained to trees and I couldn't get them. They were not changed to trees. No, they weren't. But no, it was a, it was good. I have made, what's been super cool for me is the community like for anonymity reasons. Obviously your telephone number wasn't shared with these guys.

But mine was and we've got a WhatsApp group and we are back and forth all the time. People are posting baby announcements in there and all of that stuff because that's what we want. what we want is community. And it's cheesy, right? When we talk about our time in Africa to say this, but it's true, my favorite times in Africa, or the time I was sitting around a campfire. Do you remember Philip? Yeah. I won't give any last name to Philip, but he was one. Never hunted before. I don't know if you've never shot a gun before. He and I just did a little

ride around in the back of a door. We didn't see anything. And it was the best. And we talked about real stuff because he's the kind of guy, once in getting that natural filter that is willing to come to Africa and hunt things out of his element and pay more so they can do it with good men, Good Catholic men. It was funny that they kept feeding us really late at night. Didn't appreciate that. Like ridiculously. Well, because the sun goes down there at about 5.30.

We're like, hey, I'm old and can't eat super late. And like, well, it's 9.30 and that's a terrible accent. Something to me just like that. 9.30 and 9.30, 10 o'clock. I loved. We did multiple zebra hunts, right? One guy did a thermal zebra hunt. He really wanted to get a zebra.

He hadn't gotten one. He went out. her buddy Christopher went out and hunted zebras with thermals, right, thermal vision at night. And once again, we were in the Calahari Desert. We saw the plane zebras. They just stand and run around out there, right? You just can walk up and shoot one.

But the mountain zebras, the Hartman zebras that look slightly different. They live up in the mountains. So it's hard. It's a hard hunt, right? He got one. All these guys, we had these like really intense. You remember this? Really intense zebra hunts.

Oh, yeah. And then I went out to get my zebra and one ran across the road. I shot it at about 70 yards. It then ran downhill to die in the road. road and we just like drove up, threw it in the back, took some pictures. So it's all over the place. No, we won't say the fellow's name. I think it was the fellow from Denver. We were talking about this morning. What was the black, what was the animal he got with the giant? Sable. Yeah. Sabal. My goodness. That was beautiful. It was amazing. My favorite thing and I can do

first names, right? Yeah, I think so. Scott, right? Our friend Scott, who was there. He came and the first thing he said was, I'm not going to shoot a baboon. I would never shoot a baton. That too much like people. That weirds me out. So he knocks everything that was, sort of already on the list, because when you go, right, there's sort of a menu. It's like, here are the animals that you have tags for, you can hunt these animals, anything else, we've got to pay extra, we've got to figure all that stuff out. And one of the animals was a baboon. And he shot the other animals that he had tags for within, I think both of them the first day.

And then he was like, well, I might as well go look for baboons. And by day five, his bloodlust for a baboon, it was awesome. That was funny. He didn't get a baboon. We didn't get any baboons. Now, tell them what CJ, our professor. professional hunter, pH, had to say about people who went up to shoot lions and how that was, can we talk about that? Yeah, it's going to be hard to filter, CJ, in real time. I'm going to do my best. Yeah. I think I learned

curse words from CJ. Oh my goodness, that man. Yeah. But it was funny, what was funny is the thing that we kept saying, because we just, earlier, you just said, you know, when people are making sexual jokes or whatever, our only defense against this Namibian awesome fella was we would go, okay. Yeah, calm down, CJ. And then he would lean into it. a little bit, and then back off. He's a great guy. He was a part of gold. Yeah, he was great. So he was, he does everything. He's a, he's a sniper for the Namibian military. There's all this amazing, super cool stuff. And he also guides lion hunts, right? And once again, I might get the hair on some people's necks up, right? But to hunt a lion in Namibia, you're hunting an individual lion. You don't just drive out and shoot whatever lion you see, right? It has to be that line that was a problem, livestock predation, whatever. So if you wanted to chalk up whatever it is, 50 grand to go lion hunting right now you could you'd call them up and you'd have to wait around for a long time until

there became a problem lion then they'd call you and say hey you got i don't know a week to arrive and vendhook and we're going to go on a lion hunt wow and the way he described it is you know we're shooting 300 wind mag freaking pringle can suppressors it's great you can hear it hit the animal and you can tell by the sound if it's a good shout or not but it takes us especially if you're not used to bolt action rifles right it takes a minute so they would go and pull up on a lion he would stand in front of the guy with his semi-auto shotgun full of slugs and the guy would line up to shoot the lion

and he said if you didn't get the lion right away it immediately right he's coming at you it is coming at you right away and my favorite story right was he gets in front of the guy he's like are you ready yeah in front of you behind the guy

CJ's behind the guy backing him up yes yeah yeah he's got his hand on his shoulder yeah the guy is up there with his 300 win mag and he goes all right shoot and so he shoots he misses CJ realizes he's not shooting again the line's coming at them there's only about 80 yards to start right so it covers 40 yards like that and cj looks and the guy's gone the guy's running in the

opposite direction and cj with the shotgun with slugs just do do do do do kills the lion said the guy came back he had uh evacuated his bowels all over himself not great yeah but that's the thing that i want to make fun of but no that's probably what i would do i i think i'd poop my pants i don't think I'd run away. I think my pride would be weaponized. I would weaponize my own sinful prideful nature to be like, no, I will stand here and I will fill my boots up with excrement, and I will not leave. I'm going to nail my boots to the floor. Yeah, I mean, his point was that we have this fight or flight response. And when you get into a situation like that, when a lion is running at you, yeah, you find out. There's no masquerading. There's no, you just, something happens. Yeah, and that takes

me back too to what I was saying earlier, though, about masculinity in general, right? And you think that guy shoots lions, that guy's a man. Every single awesome man I know who I really aspire to be like has not shot a lion. The vast majority of them don't hunt, right? My whole thing is not be a man. If you want to be a man, you have to, this is not some like, I don't know, five-day, alpha male, whatever. It's not what it is at all. You talk about genuine male tenderness. You talk about guys who can actually have, like, good intimacy between men, the best place to do it is around the campfire in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, surrounded by wild animals that want to eat you. Yeah. No, that's good. I'm really glad you emphasize that. That's a great point.

Well, I get accused of that all the time because, you know, I wear a lot of flannel. I carry a gun with me. I drive a pickup truck. I like to hunt. I butchered a whole bunch of chickens yesterday before we came up here. I do lots of farming. Tell me how you hurt your knee again. I wiped out trying to tackle a pregnant goat who, so my goats got Nigerian dwarfs and they're out on like three acres, this giant, they got plenty of space. It's cold now. We're in the North Georgia Mountains. It gets below freezing at night. I've got this big, fat, pregnant nanny goat who's about to pop any day now. And I've got a stall in the barn. There's nice hay in there. I've got a bowl that you plug in and it keeps the water nice and warm. It doesn't freeze her own food. And it's like

pouring down rain. And I'm just going to have the baby at night and die. And so me and my son, he's a champion. And my daughter, who's at your house right now, we go out there to wrestle this thing, and I wiped out so hard. I got a hold of a hoof. She, like, shoves off my face, and I fall on the ground,

and it's killing. I feel, like, I'm feeling my age for the first time in my life in a big way. The knee makes my back, makes my neck, makes my shoulders hurt. It's awful.

But anyway, so I get accused of that all the time, right? Some rah-rah machismo manosphere BS, which is, I could not be further from the truth. Right. But I think the reason why I like doing these things is when I was a little kid and had no idea what a man was like. I just tried to emulate things that look masculine, right? Clint Eastwood is manly. William Wallace is manly. I'm going to take this amalgamation of all these different characters of masculinity, put them together. And then that's me. And then I got older. I started to become, I think, a little more spiritually mature. And I removed all the lies, right? The womanizing or the heavy drinking or the whatever. And what was left is it turned out I really did like a lot of these manly things. Yeah.

But it doesn't make you manly. So I'm not, I don't want it to seem like I'm saying, yeah, I'm selling you a ticket. Do you want to be a man? Come with me in Africa. No, no, no. The whole idea is go on a retreat. Go on a retreat with good men. I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world.

It's outstanding. Hello.com slash Matt Frad. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. hallo.com slash Matt Frad. I use it.

My family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations, and music, including My Lofi. Hello has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily routine and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get. through it all, just go check it out, hello.com slash Matt Frad. The link is in the description below.

It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories to them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic.Hallow.com slash Matt Frad. And the way it works just before we get off in the weeds, right? We do have that membership that you're able to do. It's nothing. It's like six bucks a month. You get a little merch package, all of that fun stuff. And you get first dibs on all the hunts. Will they be able to talk to you if they have part of this thing? Yeah. We'll have I'm working on right now building up the whole chat capabilities

and all of that is going to be right. Yeah, if you pull up the website, it's not quite done yet, but you're still welcome to go play around on it. But what I want it to be is primarily a community where we do have, you know, a half dozen,

10 times, whatever a year, we go on these different huts. Some of them are in Africa. I really want to do muscocks in Greenland, really bad. I don't know why. That's been on my heart for a long time. But a cast and blast

for a three-day weekend in Louisiana or a pheasant shoot or turkeys or white-tailed deer down in middle Georgia or something. My idea is just give guys permission to get together with guys without like a, oh, I'm not good at this, I don't have to prove myself, right?

Because we all have those wounds, right? Or we have to prove to ourselves almost that we're masculine, which is a lie, right? Yeah, no, I 100% agree with that because that is what I was nervous about. Like, I don't know the first thing about X, Y, or Z, and there were other fellows who felt that way, and no one was weird, no one was posturing

and everyone was happy to help each other. Right. You know, I want to know who St. Hubert was. Tell me about him. Oh, awesome. That's good. That's good for talking about, like, masculinity wounds, too. Yeah?

So St. Hubert of Liege, right? Was over there in sort of Brussels or not, I guess, the Netherlands area, right? I want to say 1,300's? Not sure. And he was a good guy, he's a regular, wealthy dude. And his wife and child die. Or his wife dies and his child is shipped off, essentially. And he does exactly what I would do in that situation.

I hate to him. I hope I wouldn't, but I feel like I would, right? He just retreats. He just retreats to the wilderness. He goes out in the woods. He spends all of his time with his dogs hunting, right? Trying to find animals, trying to kill animals, bigger animals, cooler animals,

to fill this hole that will never be filled by anything but Christ, right? He's trying to fill it with dead animals, which I get. I'm guilty of that sometimes, right? Of like, you almost make an idol of it. And he's out there. He's a, it's good Friday. He's told by the,

the bishop. He's reminded by the bishop on his way out and like to that he needs to go to mass. He's like, cool. Anyway, and he goes out and I really want to like double down on how bizarre this is, right? He sees this giant stag. It would have been a red stag. We usually see it as a white-tailed deer depicted. And he's sneaking up on it, right, with his hounds, and they're about to run this deer and kill this deer. And all of a sudden the deer turns and looks at him and it has a crucifix between his antlers. It's the Yeagermeister. This is Yeagermeister, master, hunter. That's where the image comes from. And he tells them to repent and he needs to go back to church, right? And he does. And he turns his life around and it becomes a good man. And that's why I keep

tripling down on, it's not about a hunt. The hunt's really great. You're going to have so much fun. You're going to have a great time hunting, fishing, shooting ducks, whatever we're doing, right? But it's really about finding Jesus through a community with these other men and something that you actually want to do. There's not that many guys out there. And I mean, people can throw shade at me if they want to, but there's not that many guys out there, I don't think, who get super duper pumped about going to some retreat, especially when they're married, especially when they have kids. They go because they recognize it's good for them. And it is. That's great. Go on retreats. But there's a whole lot of guys out there who really want to go flex or masculinity in a real

way. There's a reason why there's a big fat liability release form you have to fill out before you come on this. It's dangerous and it's good. It's dangerous and it's scary. And you might die. You probably won't. But it's a, I don't know that. It speaks to me. And I feel like it speaks to a lot of other guys too. It does. I'm so glad you're doing it. We're going to take some questions. and at any point if you want to go off on a tangent or something you can. I want to throw one thing out, one last thing about the Fraternity of St. Hubert.

We are giving away a hunt in Namibia. What? Yeah, this coming summer. What does that mean? Giving away a hunt. Yeah, you can have it. So, essentially, we've had a lot of guys who were really, like, wanted this to do well.

Yeah. And there's a lot of, we got some money. And once again, this is me coming back to it. I could dip into it. But I think it'd be really cool. And a good membership driver, too, if we said, hey, you sign up with, I don't know, we'll say like two weeks

after this show drops. I think that's what we had talked about. But within two weeks, you sign up, you do like the year-long membership. Once again, six bucks a month, super easy. And we'll give it away, I think like Christmas, maybe Epiphany. Maybe we'll do Epiphany giveaway. I'll call you on the phone and say, come on. And then you just got to get a plane ride to Namibia and everything else's handled is 100% free. That's fantastic. All right. You ready? You got questions? Yeah. Yeah. Philip Z says, what's something you wish you had done 10 to 15 years ago instead of now? whoa that's good 10 to 15 years ago I'll go with 15 years ago that's right before I got married all right um I wish I had I wish I wish I had really delved into and I'm not just saying this

because it's what we're talking about right what it means to be a man and what it means to be a prince of heaven and a son of God I wish I had thought about it more like because even right now I can intellectually assent to that right yes I am a prince of heaven I'm a son of God go team right But getting married to my bride, I had, and I know we all say this, right, 10 years, 10 years ago, I thought I loved my wife, but now I really love her. And 10 years from now, I'll say that's good, that's true. But less my relationship with her and more like my own relationship and my own understanding of who I am.

I didn't delve into that at all. I became Catholic where I started caring about my faith because this really, really pretty girl thought it was probably a good idea, right? And then I liked it. And I liked the guys who were doing those kinds of things, right? And so it was a much more performative faith and I wish that I had taken a step back. It wasn't bad.

In fact, it was really, really good. But it was a, I think, yeah, it was much more performative. I didn't have a sense of like, my, my, sorry, I know, I am rambling. No, that's great. My primary vocation, I didn't understand what that was. My primary vocation is not marriage, right? My primary vocation is salvation, followed immediately by my wife's salvation. And I didn't understand that first part.

I still struggle with that. Do you think you would have known that 10 years ago? I couldn't have understood that. It's hard, isn't it, eh? Because, you know, it's easy to look back 10 years ago and wish X, Y, Z had happened. But I don't know, because you also arrived at this, probably through stupid mistakes that you may have made. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about the whole Rascal Flats.

God bless a broken road thing, though. Like the redemption story piece. I did a retreat or a confirmation retreat for a bunch of high schoolers a few months ago. and I did this big piece about how like, I've got a cool redemption story and I just told it to you and I hate it. I don't like it.

I wish I didn't have it. I wish that I could be like so many of these guys I know who are just good. They were always virtuous. Like that's a man. That's cool, right? These guys,

like I can tell you a lot of stories about fist fights and drugs and girls and whatever. And it's like neat bar talk, but it doesn't make me a better father. It doesn't make me a better husband. And I really admire those guys who probably a lot of them think

that they're boring because they don't have a conversion story. but they don't have a redemption story. Yeah. But I think there's an innate lie and a lot of redemption stories that says you've got to sow your wild oats a little bit to come back.

You got to go, you're the prodigal son, you've got to go out and do the stuff and the prostitutes and the whatever before you come back home and then you can really appreciate it. And that's a lie. That is a lie. If you have not fallen into, you know,

all these temptations and all the sin, that's the best. You know, you're kind of sounding like Therese of Lazier right now. You may not have realized that. That's the best compliment I've had in like a year. Because, you know, Christ says, she's loved much because she's been forgiven much.

Right. Therese says, ah, but what about the one who hasn't been forgiven much? That's because she's been preserved from so much filth. Therefore, I'm even more loved, do you see? She applies that to herself, which I just think is beautiful. She knows there's no merit of hers that she hasn't fallen into depravity. I look back at stages of depravity in my life, and I'm just like, I'm embarrassed, I'm grossed out. Yeah. It's just, and yeah, you're right. There's some element to, if all these things hadn't

happened, I wouldn't be the guy I am today, probably, I guess, right? But man, I'd give a million dollars to go back and to have stood at the altar and married my bride and not brought all this baggage, right? That whole, God forgives us, nature doesn't, right? All those mindsets and habits and everything that I brought into this marriage. It was like, and good dudes, like good guys came in and just grabbed me by the collar and drug me forward, which was the, best thing that ever happened to me. I've talked about this before, but... It's all good. John Power. John Power. John Power. You know John Power. I love John Power. He's a great guy. Cam. Your bride was his youth minister forever ago. Yeah.

I was at a party at a lake house or a beach, uh, river house in North Georgia, having a great time drinking, flirting with these girls, just making an idiot out of myself. And he was this, John Power's this good looking athletic. Yeah. Just big. Filled like a brick house. Yeah, guys like, like women wanted to marry him. guys wanted to be like him. And he kicked all the girls out at like 11 o'clock. I was furious. And he put his giant hand on my shoulder and said, no, we're going to go talk about it. We're going to talk about it. And drags me over to the hot tub. We sit in a hot tub, continue to drink and smoke. And he basically says, like, we got to kick the girls out. Otherwise,

somebody's going to do something they shouldn't be doing, right? We're going to make some bad decisions. And we're just going to sit here and talk. And then we talked. And he like just ripped into my heart over and over and over again with all the uncomfortable questions. the, hey, when's the last time you looked at born? Why do you do that? When's the last time you, why do you drink so much all the time? Why are you constantly trying to get with these different girls? Like, what's going on with that?

And because I respected him, because he was this big, cool guy, I let him do it. And I answered his questions. And that began, like, the introspection of my own life. Let me tell you another cool story about John Powers. So he came and visited us while we were living in Ireland. And he had been so inspired by, I think I'm remembering this correctly. He had been so inspired by a university professor

that he had started to pray multiple rosaries a day so that he could eventually make up for all the days he hadn't prayed a rosary. Yeah. Like that kind of thing. That's great. Really good dude. All right.

Patrick Lord says, are you happy with your move to off the grid and what would you say to those who are considering it but concerned with uprooting their family? Yeah. So I always, just for the sake of honesty, there is one electrical wire that runs to my house. So my power does come.

Now we have a generator, right? We could be off the grid, off the grid if we wanted to, right? But our water is provided and all of our animals and we grow with some food and all of that stuff. Yeah, I'd 100% recommend it. Once again, going back to real things, right? Real things in the real world make you, I don't know, more in touch with reality.

So when it's cold outside, if it's frozen, I have to wake my son up a little earlier to go out and do stuff that's going to take us more time, right? We have to do certain chores every day, right? Or else the animals die or else the raccoon will get into the hen house or else, you know, whatever will happen.

And I like the order and the structure that it forces you to do because you're opting in, right? You're opting in, you're saying, I choose to take on all these inconveniences and all these chores and all these requirements and then you have to do it. And it's the best.

I think it's good for us spiritually, right? I think we've lost, right, post-agrarian society, post-industrial revolution. I think we've just lost a lot of our sense of what makes us human. And we forget that, right? Not to be, not to go down another rabbit hole, but we forget as a, yeah, as a sort of as Christendom, right? That this little time period of a couple hundred years we're in right now is radically different and unique to the vast majority of human history ever. If you take a guy from 700 BC in Greece and then you take a guy from 1,500,000. A.D. in France, different cultures, different everything. Like, they get it. They understand one

another, right? If they could speak the same language, there would be some technical or some technological advances and all that. Cool. That's neat. But then you take that same guy, right, from France, and you put him in 2025. We're alien. It was an alien world. Everything's bizarre and different and backwards, right? Yeah. And so I think going back, like purposely going back to that more agrarian lifestyles. I understand everybody can't do that, but I highly recommend, right? Whatever tiny piece of that you can do, do it. Get some chickens. Who cares about your HOA? They suck, right? Grow tomatoes. If you live in an apartment, raise a couple of quail and a cage on your balcony. Like, just do a little, just a little thing that makes it

more real. Yeah. And the stuff with kids is awesome. Like, we've got, we currently have 32 chicken, meat chickens. We had 57 a week ago. But now, like, a daily activity. I take the chickens, I kill the chickens, I put them on the tailgate of the truck. I cut the legs off, cut the heads off, cut the wingtips, bleed them out, skin them out, and hand them to Henry, who takes them inside and he takes them into Mary Margaret. My 11-year-old, she takes them to the sink, she cleans them off, she wraps them up, she writes the date on it, and moves him to the freezer. And it's just, we have to do that. There's no way I can do this by myself.

And I definitely wouldn't do that if I had the option of not. So I bought the chickens. Got to do something with these chickens. are costing me a lot of money, right? And so I think my biggest piece of advice if you're considering doing that is whatever small piece you can do, do it. Chickens are gateway animals.

Do the chickens, and you'll see it's not that hard, and you'll see that what is hard is really good, and you're really glad you did it afterwards. I like that. I like the micro approach to something, as opposed to blowing up your life, having this dream that is nothing at all like you hoped it would be

and then regretting it and going back. Well, that's how we started. I married my beautiful bride in 2011, and we moved, she moved from her father's palatial mansion estate in the southern Maryland suburbs, and I moved from my parents' house in small town, South Georgia, and we bought a cul-de-sac, or a house on a cul-de-sac, right? $150,000, nice little starter home, three-bedroom, two-bath, back when, like, the housing prices made sense. And it had an HOA, and I grew tobacco and corn, and I had chickens and meat rabbits in the backyard.

and I went stir crazy about it. I mean, I really remember saying to my wife before we even got married that I just couldn't, I wasn't going to leave Georgia. I've been here. My people have been here forever, right? Since white people were in Georgia, right?

We are the people, right? We've been here. And I was getting stir crazy with this because I wanted to do more. It was fun what I was doing. We had gardens and pull out carrots and grow potatoes and peanuts and fun stuff in the ground like that. But then she came home one day,

or I came home from work one day, and she had all these real estate listings printed out. And we went and we bought, we took the next step we bought a trailer it was a double-wide trailer we built so we set it out there you've been there yeah you were there a lot i helped you move into it i think yeah thanks well to know we remember we went and got all you know that this matters anybody watching but just for that guy who can't turn his podcast off didn't didn't we take all of your furniture and put it into a garage up the road or something me you and thomas i think maybe yeah a big pod or

whatever um i burned i've always burned my couches every time i've moved not like that's not like it's not like symbolic it's just inconvenient to move a big couch and i buy a second-hand stuff anyway. No, but then we moved into that and we built that out and we got to us a point where, you know, praise me to God. 2008 was the best thing that ever happened to us, right, because that financial collapse and we actually had some money because we lived at home, which was the best thing ever. We moved, we both moved from our parents' house in with one another, right? Nothing in between. And yeah, then we started to do more and more and then we moved out here and now I've got the big spot and the pasture and everything. But you start super

small because you might hate it and that's okay. It's okay if you hate it and don't want to do that. We need cosmopolitans, and there's always been cities, and all that. I'm looking forward to asking you this question. Matt asks, what should we think of George Washington? What should we think of George Washington? I feel like I'm supposed to have some countercultural answer to that, but I really like George Washington. He's awesome.

I like the whole crossing the Delaware and killing the British in their sleep on Christmas thing. I think he's great, and I can be super critical. Like, don't ask, I'm not, I will not talk about Abraham Lincoln on the show. I wonder if that's what he meant. I'm not a fan of Abraham Lincoln. You don't want to talk about it? Mostly because of the war crimes, yeah. But I really like, I really like Washington.

Cool. All right. Matt Stewart says, what is the proper balance as a father of multiple children when it comes to spending money and time on hobbies or other things you want, knowing there really is no end to what you could justify giving time and money

for their future? I struggle with this constantly. So I want to start by saying, for some reason I've always, I don't know why this is, true, but people have always asked me questions like this as if I have any sort of a, like, good answer. I'll tell you what I think, but none of this is like the right answer necessarily. I remember I was riding up to the right to life march on a big bus with a bunch of

high school kids, and I was talking to one of them, and I finished, and I turned around and I said, hey, how are you doing, just to this other kid who I knew. And his response, what I assumed it was going to be, I'm great, thanks. It was, well, actually, there's really some things that are weighing on me. It's like, okay, great, here we go. So I appreciate it. I appreciate people asking me these questions as if I have any idea, but I'll spitball on that one. Almost all of your hobbies are way more fun if your kids are involved, whatever level they can be, right? And so I spend a good amount of money, and more importantly, I spend a good amount of time on my hobbies. I don't buy fancy hunting gear. I buy a lot of secondhand stuff. I've been using the same bow for a decade.

I've bought my son a couple of rifles since he was born that are sort of multi-use me and him. But, I mean, realistically, I do it as cheaply as I can, and I do it with him. And I think we were talking about this earlier, but I remember when I started hunting with Henry, and he was maybe three or four years old, and he would sit there, and he made everything so much harder. And I did not really like the hunting aspect, but I was trying to be a good dad. And now he's 13, and I get really upset. if he has something that he's got going on so he can't go hunting with me

because I just desperately want him to be there. I used to really relish in, oh, finally I've got a day. I've got an evening, I can go to an evening sit and be by myself for a moment. I love being by myself. I'm secretly pretty darn introverted.

But now, I just really want him to be there hanging out. So just involve your kids. And I wish my wife liked it. I wish my wife and I shared any hobbies. We do not. Can you tell the story about the time she, I don't know, I don't want to get her into trouble.

something died you got to be way more specific well something died because of her and a gun but I don't know if it's it was she came yeah no I don't think I can tell that story

okay good see how but there wasn't that good how I did that yeah I don't need to but let's just let the myth roll around out there pandas who knows yeah that one time it came to your backyard in North Georgia

Zachary May says tips for beginning hunters do it Seriously. And I'm not trying to be reductive. Just do it. And you're going to be bad at it. And that's okay. Watch a couple of you. Look, as I'd say, I think I might actually be in a better place to give advice than you are because I'm a beginner. And that is go with people who know what they're doing and let them initiate you into that and don't be afraid to look stupid. Yeah. And it's okay. Nobody can. It's like so many different like outdoor related hobbies. And I'm sure there's other hobbies, but it's outdoor stuff in particular that I think of because I used to be knew at all of this stuff. Like over the summer, I took my two oldest and I've, paid 300 bucks. We did a trout fishing class up in the North Georgia Georgia Mountains. I didn't know how to drop fish, so we did it. The guy's so excited.

Of course, I was paying him money. But to answer all the questions and go through all of that stuff, I have never, right? I'm a director with the Georgia Trappers Association. I'm an active member of the First Hunt Foundation. I'm a CSI member, all this stuff, right? I have never once had a situation where some guy came up and said, hey, can you teach me about this? And anyone has been like, huh, no, no, I can't teach you about that. Shame on you. Like, not one time ever. People are so excited. Please come in. That's how men like to be the ones who initiate people in things. I have a friend who told me, he said,

I think guys feel good when you ask them for advice. And so I like to ask guys that I like for advice. It's a good way to become their friend. And it's true. I mean, it's pretty utilitarian, but it is true. I love me for advice. I mean, so long as you're actually asking for their advice. No, I completely agree.

Yeah, you think about that. Like, we live, as you say, in an alien world, and there are men who know how to do things. And if you ask them, they feel honored by that. because maybe they don't feel like they know how to navigate the alien world. But talking about the alien world, right? What's super interesting is we've taken sort of the American ideal, which I think is an offshoot of Protestantism, right?

This pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, right? And we've tried that in this modern world. And there's a time and a place for that, right? I think it's really great to be self-sufficient in lots of ways. But pure self-sufficiency is disordered. It's not natural. You're not an island, right? You're not supposed to exist by yourself.

And I feel like that has become so pervasive in a modern world where not only are you not supposed to be doing things by yourself, but you're also living in this alien world where everything's different, right? And everything's not, not conducive to, I don't know, sort of your natural flourishing. And now we're isolated in a weird place and confused and scared. Going back to intimacy, though, right? Male intimacy, it's, that has been, that is something I've grown in a lot talking about in the past 10 or 15 years, is the ability to say like, hey, I don't want to talk about something.

right and not have you be like nope that makes you you you know effeminate that makes you a homosexual or whatever right and i only have a i only have a handful of guys that i that i'll do that with it'll kind of open up um you said to me one time uh that friendship is like being able to bear your heart to someone and saying like this right here this is how you could really hurt me this is how you could take me out if you want to i need you to this is how you do it yeah and that's so hard especially hard as a young man yeah which i don't think it's wrong like i appreciate that the young men, but the whole stoic, by your own, pull yourself up by your own bootstrap thing, I think it's lame. I don't think it's good. Yeah. Megan wants to know what your favorite hymn is.

My favorite hymn? Yeah. Okay, this is a low, low hanging fruit, and it's going to seem like a cheap one, but I'm going to go for it. Um, at Benedict's every Friday at the school where I work, St. John Bosco Academy, by the way. We just opened a new North Campus because we were turning away so many awesome families because we didn't have the space, so check us out. up in North Georgia. But every Friday we have benediction, right? We have adoration all day on Friday. And the whole school, you don't have to go.

It's after the bell rings. 95% of the kids go to benediction. And they sing the Solvei Regina. And I've decided that counts as a hymn for this question. It's beautiful. And they harmonize, and it is the tiniest taste of heaven. It really is. It is amazing.

I go there just to almost sightseed. I just can't believe that I get to be with these kids. It's awesome. So that is my favorite thing to hear something is. Specifically, you know how I learned this, Arvay? I was, I've told this story before, but the heads of Ignatius Press were visiting Covenant-wise because they were doing some kind of business deal. And at the end of the night, it was me, Father Fesio, who's the founder of Ignatius Press,

and a few others were at this like dingy pub, karaoke light stuff going on and sticky tables. We were just, just had a drink. That's your heaven. That sounds gross to me. It was like earlier today. Well, we were in the coffee shop. We were a hipster coffee shop. I'm like, isn't this great?

Like, I hate everything about this. Everything about it was awful. Yeah. Give me sawdust on the floor and sticky tables all day long. Yeah. No, I'm good with that. I don't need that. I don't want that at all.

Anyway, so at the end of the night, we only had like a drink each. It wasn't, we went doing karaoke with Father Fesio. But at the end, he said, well, how about we finished the night with a salvee? With his Australian, he's an Australian. I don't know why I did an Australian accent. And so I was embarrassed because I didn't know the salve.

But it was cool because we sat there in a sticky. gross pub singing the salve and the next day i just listened to it on repeat 800 times on youtube until i finally learned it so this is a humble brag um yesterday on the right end my daughter came down with me right i just took her i do a lot of stuff with him especially this time of year with my son and so i took my 11 year old daughter down and i try to purposefully right have one-on-one time with them and do dates and all that stuff i have five daughters now right i just had a baby four weeks ago and uh so i'm trying i try to purposely spend one-on-one time with them as much as i can and we We pray the rosary together on the way.

And she, without my prompting, did all of her Hail Mary's in Latin. They were all, it was the coolest thing in the world. Super cool. Very cool. And I learned the Hail Mary. I learned the Ave Maria in Latin while I was on a road trip with Angie.

And she just like kind of gave me a couple of pokes about how I didn't do it and know it. And she was like, oh, come on, you're always talking about you like Latin Mass? You don't even know the Ave Maria. I think I was probably 20. It was before we were married. And I spent, I don't know, a couple hours of this road trip with her. like walking me through, like teaching a child to read.

That's beautiful. Maria, okay. Grazie a planet. Like, and we went through the whole thing and then it was super fun. That's nice. Chad says, which bear is best? Which bear is best?

That's all he says. No, that's a great question. The one that's in front of you is the best. Talking about this main bear hunt that we got coming up, you know, main black bears aren't gigantic. I think our Georgia bears

are about the same. size, right? I mean, you can get some 600-pounders, maybe if you're lucky, but for the most part, you're talking about two, three-hundred-pound bears. And I was reading through some, like, comments about this one outfitter and all these guys were complaining about, which are bigger bears? Dude, it's a bear. You just shot a bear. You went out in the woods, this thing that could rip you apart for fun, right? And you wouldn't be saying it's too small men. And you got the bear. I think, I think it's so amazing. I've never shot a bear. I've never been hunting bears and seen bears in the woods at the same time.

I've done both, plenty, but never at the same time. What's your dream hunt? Right now, probably, if money isn't an issue and someone says, come with me to X so we can hunt X. Probably muscox, because it's so alien, right? You have to go to Greenland,

you have to go sort of bearing. I don't even know, what are they called? Musk ox. They look like buffaloes with sort of downward sloping arms and lots of fur. They are the buffalo equivalent. They are to buffaloes as woolly mammoths are to elephants. Wow.

They're big and brutish and, yeah. I see why. Yeah, and a lot of them are float hunts. I just like weird stuff. So, like, one of the hunts we've got, hopefully, right, we get some traction, we get some guys. And the only reason why, you know, we do the membership stuff is because you've got to put,

or like the money up front is you've got to put deposits down on a lot of this stuff, and it's difficult, but I really want to do Python Cowboy, not far away in Florida. What is that? Python Cowboy. He does iguana, python and hog hunts in Florida. It looks awesome. But it's just weird and different and neat,

and that sounds fun to me. Oh, my goodness. Are you on the Python Cowboy? Yeah. Doesn't it look amazing. I want to eat one. That's one of the weird things I haven't eaten. I've eaten most weird things, but I haven't eaten enough.

That scares me. The python? Well, yeah. And it looks like they're in the water and catching iguanas. Is that an iguana? Yeah, they're shooting iguanas. They basically just hunt all invasive species in Florida. Huh.

I really want to do it. I've eaten snake. I've never eaten python, right? And I've never eaten iguana. Here's like frog legs. I'd like to try it. We were talking about that the other day. You know, I've got a real strict rule at my house for my son.

who just passed his hunter's safety course, meaning like I bought him a lifetime license when he was two. But he just passed his hunter's safety course, so now he can hunt by himself. He doesn't, I don't have to be there anymore. And we were talking about sort of like the rules, which we've been talking about in his whole life, right?

But my rule is you can kill anything you want in season, but you've got to eat the thing. You have to eat it. There's some exceptions, like fur bears. You do a lot of trapping. And I send you that picture of the bobcat my daughter caught. It was as big as she was. So cool.

I won't eat male bobcats because they taste like cat pee. But can we also point out how great it was when my son, Peter, thanks to you, thank you for that. You took him hunting and I was with you, of course, but he shot the buck and we gutted it and we pulled out the heart and said,

you want to take a bite? And I said it serious just in case he would. Right. And he did. Which was amazing. He took a big bite, sound like an apple and then shoot it and spat it out and you remember i then i bought him a uh what do you call him in america candy apples yeah yeah candy apples yeah we call them toffee

which looked eerily similar to the heart that's still the biggest buck we've ever shot on that property really yeah was peter well the euro mount is on his wall i wanted to ask you this is kind of off topic but you just had a daughter and i don't know if you want to talk about this or not but the idea of um she could be an assassin secret assassin so it's just can we explore that or so my wife has children at home, which is great, and it scares me to death. I am not, like, the whole off-grid thing and whatever, that's super cool. I like that a lot. But the idea of my wife, right, particularly having a medical emergency, the house scares me to death, right? I'd be alone with all these kids. But I realized, right, we didn't, she didn't need any help.

We had, we have a midwife there who I paid a ridiculous amount of money to come out. And we had some birth pool that eight dozen other women have given birth in that was in my living room or my bedroom and all of that stuff. So the baby's born and it's great. She loves it and has a baby, delivers the placenta, cut the cord after a few minutes, and she just climbed. She stayed at the house for two weeks. She didn't leave. She didn't go further than my front porch for two weeks with this baby. It's awesome. She's so happy. I love it. Truthly is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live and defend the Catholic faith with clarity and confidence. Whether you're navigating a tough conversation, deepening your understanding, or looking for daily spiritual guidance,

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worldwide, Truthly is transforming the way we learn, share and live our faith. One question, one course and one prayer at a time. Start your seven-day free trial today. Download Truthly on the app store. But here's what I realized. if you have your baby at home, you could just not tell anybody. And we just got the Social Security card, so that's out of the realm of possibilities for Little Miss Josephine,

and raise a super recession la la the hitman games. It wouldn't be virtuous, but it would be neat. Yeah. And what did Cameron, my wife, say to you last night? It seems like that would be... She treated it like it was a very serious proposition. You said... Like I was considering this.

I think they would raise a whole lot of issues. and you went, and opportunities. No, I mean, big shout out to my beautiful bride, who, you know, is, she's currently at home with five of my six kids and all girls except for the oldest. And, yeah, she's just the best. She's just the best. And the children, the babies always, I think about this a lot when you talk about having like multiple children, right, lots of kids.

Babies are sort of the one, I don't know, thing in our life that really brings all the little kids together. I say little. My oldest is 13 now. But there really is this sort of like truce of like calling each other bad names and tripping each other and fighting over things and whatever around the baby. And it's really cool. It's really beautiful. I think a lot of people don't realize that kids get older. I think a lot of people who will give you a hard time for having a bunch of kids it's some version of like they think they're just three forever. Yeah. And it's like yeah, I've got a two year old right now. She's a huge pain in the butt. She learned how to open doors. like she's reached Velociraptor level, right?

And that's such a pain in the butt. I hate it so much that she can do that. But in a few years, she's going to be this, I don't know, this person with her own thoughts you can have discussions with and all of these things. And they're going to grow up and hopefully stay in the faith and come back. Yeah. Yeah, you're a really good dad.

I don't know if I've told you this either, but I'm really just going through this phase in my life or I just love being at home with my kids. That's awesome. But that's a new phase for me. I would say that's in the last three years, maybe, that's developed. Before that, I just wanted to, you know, do my duty, like, not abandon my wife or anything, but I'd rather go, like, hang out with someone or go on a date with my wife.

But now that the kids have gotten older, I actually find them really interesting, really funny. And, you know, when they bicker, like, kids will bicker. It's very annoying. It was very heartening last night seeing your children fighting in school. One of them had a knife up in the air and, well, trying to look at something. Not trying, yeah, just so you, you followed that too quickly to the kids were fighting. She wasn't trying to stab anybody, but it was like, please put that giant knife down. But it made me feel better about my own.

I feel like there's so much of a push now in a really good way for people to just sort of, I don't know, talk about how, like, it's hard. I feel like a lot of people do that. I feel like that's great. Yeah. But I was having this conversation with a buddy the other day. I think we listened to something that was talking about how difficult marriage and children were. And like, yeah, it is hard, but I almost feel like we over. emphasize that. Like, it's the best. It's the best thing in the world. These kids are the best

thing in the world. My wife is the best thing in the world. And yeah, I get irritated. Like, I'm an imperfect man and I fail as a father and a husband all the time. I don't know. I think it's like a boomer seepage of family life is bad. And it's really great. Yeah, I think it's that you have to be honest, but you have to be prudent in how you express what you're feeling. If you find your child to be very difficult, it's not helping you. It's disrespectful to them, your wife, and it's not helpful to anybody else to air your grievances. You know, find a friend, find a spiritual mentor,

find a therapist to child, I don't know, depending on the issues you're having, and you can express that it's difficult. But what I don't like is when you see people online complaining about their children. So I think, don't pretend it's great if it's difficult. Because that's actually, that would make someone

feel really alone right now. I suppose they've got kids with, you know, all these sorts of intellectual issues, say, or disabilities, or just, they're having a rough time of it because the money's not coming in and they don't know how they're going to make ends meet and they hear me, someone's saying,

and you saying, that's terrific. Well, I don't want them to feel alone. Like, I want them to acknowledge what's difficult because it's difficult. But I agree with you. Like, I, it's the best. I mean, I don't know what I'd be doing without them. We've reached the, this has been an interesting dynamic

in my house. We've reached the age where my son is significantly larger than my wife. Right. And that's been a really interesting dynamic to just watch and sort of help them both work through a little bit because you almost see on his face, right, he's 13 years old,

he's probably 5'9, he's just a bigger guy, tall, tall guy. And all of a sudden this woman who, you know, used to be scary. This woman used to be much larger than him, his mother. He respected her and he loved her, but also like she could, if she wanted to, she could pick him up and throttle him. She's never done that, but she could. And now all of a sudden he's looking down, literally, looking down at her while she's upset about something.

With a deep voice or a deepening voice. With a deepening voice and he's just physically imposing. And he's not like used to that. But it's a, that's a fun. Well, did I tell you the story about my eldest, Liam? What? Who I love, who's so terrific. And he's now at Franciscan.

He's such a good guy. And anyway, so he said something, a couple of months before he left, right, for college. He said something kind of disrespectful to Cameron. It wasn't too bad. It was just like an off-the-cuff. Hey, and so I walked past him and I kind of gave him a little shove in the shoulder. I went, hey, I was going to say something like,

don't speak to my wife like that. But when I shoved him, he didn't move back. Oh. Not because he was trying, because he's a bigger guy. And in my head, I thought, you need to leave. You need to go find your own cave, your own woman, and start your own life now. Like, this is not going to work anymore.

Yeah, but that's a natural progression of things, isn't it? And it's frustrating with, you know, I only have one boy. So all my boy advice or whatever is all based on this one boy and this one temperament. Yeah, yeah. My daughters have got all these different temperaments. And so I can sort of, I don't know, give, I guess, better-tuned advice about different things, right, girls collectively than I can't my son. But I so just enjoy his desire to be a man, to do man things. I've let him start driving my pickup truck by himself, right?

not off property, but we have miles of dirt roads in this little property. And so I'll tell them to go, drop the garbage in the dumpster. The dumpsters a mile down the dirt road, and we throw it at the back of the truck every day. It's the coolest thing in the world. He's just after that. He wants to do that. He wants to demonstrate his masculinity. And I've been thinking a lot about rights of passage and those sorts of things, right?

How do you do that? How do you have a transition to, oh, now you're a man? Because we don't. We don't have any of those. I was talking to a college somewhere, not too long ago. Oh, and I promised I would do this. Big shout out to the University of Georgia Catholic Center because I am here and not there.

And I was supposed to be giving a talk there to just boys because last time I did boys and girls and it didn't go over grade with girls. Went over great with boys, but not with the girls. They were unhappy with you. So, yeah, so, okay, so I struggle every time we give one of these talks, right? where the girls talks, and this is, actually, I think, I think there's disorder. I don't think I should do this, but I just can't help it, right?

I've got this big, I've got all these little daughters and my bride who I loved it. Right. And so with the ladies, it's ladies, you're princesses of heaven and daughters of God. I'm so sorry, this world has just ruined you, right? God creates an order of perfection and here you are, the Eve, daughters of Eve at the time, right? And I shouldn't, I shouldn't do that. Well, because it's not true to, right? Yeah, agency, they're evil, they fought.

Yeah. I feel gross, I don't think they. Yeah, they do. No, I think so. That's a myth. I'll ask my wife. But with my, with my daughters, I feel like my primary job is to, like, love them. Just love the snot out of them and affirm them in their dignity and just remind them how good they are.

But with my son, I have this, like, I've got to make you a man, right? And so I'm talking to the group of college guys, right? They, I think they really like to just kind of punching the gut over and over and over again, right? Like, Lord, why did you give me your hardest battles? God's saying, I'm not giving you a hard battle. I'm just asking you not to masturbate the Japanese cartoons. Like, what are you talking about? Like, guys want to hear that.

They want the gut punch. I'm like, get your stuff together. I want that. I know that's not all guys, but that's me. I needed that. And I wanted that, especially growing up and coming into the faith and all of that. But I think right now, this is what I was going to say in the talk. I think that if you took 98% of unmarried men, right?

And you said, you can have two eyes. options. You can live this life where you are right now. You can have video games and you can have free access to pornography and you can have whatever and a big house and a stipend or what if you can just do the normal thing. Or I can take you out to 1880s Wyoming. I'm going to leave you there in a cabin and you're going to be standing out in front of that cabin and all these painted Indians are going to come riding and shrieking over a hill and you're going to die or kill them. I think almost every boy would do that.

And then we have all this BS sort of piled on top of everything so we forget that that's what we want to do. That's what I want to do. I'm married. I would like my wife and children in the cabin behind me while I'm staying out there with a shotgun, right? But I'd still like to do it. Yeah. Painted Indians, man.

That's what we're after. I love that. Yeah. Sons and daughters. But it's fun watching my son, like, want that so badly. like want the danger and want the... Well, I actually also like what you said earlier where you said, I got one son, right?

And then you got a bunch of daughters and they're all different. Right. And I say that because I think we can give general, I think advice can be unhelpful a lot of the time. But you think of anything in particular. Think of a particular Catholic devotion or something that works well in your marriage

or something that worked well in your exercise routine. Whatever it be, when people find something that works for them, they tend to them push that on everybody else as if this is the secret. source, but they're different. Their experiences are different. Their desires are different. Their bodies are different. Their temperaments are different. And so I think we have to be really careful with the kinds of advice that we go seeking for online. Like, how do I raise my kid? Like, how do I run my household or how, you know, if I think you can give good general advice

on here's how an ordered home looks, say, or how to raise a child. But I think if we go just desperate, we'll try to apply, you know, a circle, what is it, square peg and around a hole sometimes. And we have to be willing to receive that feedback and then adjust and not say, well, it's this or bust. I've got this talk that I've done at a bunch of men's groups, dads, right, older guys groups, and it's called the, what, I forget the number, but things your kids wish you knew, right? And I was asked to give a talk to all these men one time, and I had prepared all this stuff, and then I realized, I don't know. Like, you all have grown kids.

You all have kids who were teenagers. And at the time, my oldest was maybe nine. And I realized I don't have anything to tell these people. And so what I realized I did have was about a decade and a half of having conversations with high school and college kids. Right. And what they're saying about their parents. And so I prepare it. It was a pretty good talk.

It went over well. And then it was almost like a maybe it was a Holy Spirit thing. I stumbled across about a decade and a half old Onion newscast YouTube video. Those are the best. Whatever happened to that kind? It's this woman who's being invited on as a parenting expert, and the guy says, all right, hello and welcome to Good Morning America. Today we're going to have Renee, whoever, and she's going to answer some questions for us.

The first question we have is, who the hell do you think you are telling me how to raise my kids? And I thought that's so, like, yeah, that's a great point. Yeah. Oh, man, the old onion. Wasn't that the best? What ever happened to that level of talent and brilliance? I think it's coming back. I think all comedy's coming back.

I think everything's getting better. Is it? I talked about this last time I was on. I really don't want to talk about politics, but I just feel like the world is moving in such a good drive. I was telling you this earlier today. My church, Arleigh of the Mountains in Jasper, Georgia, RCA or OCA now, not RCAA, is packed to the brim now

with, like, good old boy mountain people. That's the coolest thing in the world. It's no longer just so-and-so's trying to marry somebody or they're from New York. It's like all these people who, I just saw all these guys. who were like my kind of people wearing like dirty blue jeans and stuff standing outside holding catechisms i was like hey guys what are y'all doing waiting for ocea to start it's like it's amazing

all right yeah go on i was going to say my my well guy i told you this earlier my well guy who looks exactly like sort of a blue collar rural americana of well guy right he was over at my house helped me with a problem on my pump it was right before easter and you know he's got real thick southern accent and the little thing a grizzly winter green long cut tucked under his lip and he looks up at me, he says, when are you all going to Mass? And what he meant was, we got Easter coming up. And I was like, that's a strange question, right? Are you being combative right now? Immediately, I got defensive as if I was going to have to defend the faith. From an Indian. The well guy. And I said, I think we're doing the vigil. And he goes,

yes, too. And then we saw him at the vigil mat. Apparently he and his wife and his daughter had all converted and coming to church. Well, how did he know you were Catholic? I think he'd known, he'd recognize us from Mass. But I didn't recognize him because he's covered in well guy stuff. All right. Honest question. What's your assessment? of this because, you know, Paul talks about in-season and out-of-season. And we've, I don't know, I'm sure you as well. I've been doing this podcast before this. I did missionary work in Ireland and Canada. I think it's fair to say I was doing this out of season. And now The Daily Wire is like, we'd really like your show. And that's clearly because they know how to milk it.

Oh, I hadn't heard that. You were in-day-wire? Yeah, yeah. Did you not see them on Twitter the other day? No, I've never heard of it. And so it's in season, and it's in season for the reasons, like we're just giving, like, OCIA is exploding. What is happening? Where is this coming from? I mean, from a cultural standpoint, once again, I don't want to wait into politics, but from a cultural standpoint,

I think, I've been saying this a lot lately, the pendulum just swung so far. They won. The countercultural revolution of the 60s and 70s won. The sexual revolution won. They destroyed society. They rotted it from the inside out. We're a shell of our former selves, right?

We as the West is Christendom, no fault divorce, all this stuff, right? these fatherless children. They won. They destroyed everything that is true, good and beautiful, except for the tiny, right, the tiniest thread that Christ is always going to leave in the culture, right? Because he wins in the end. And I think they just overplayed their hands so hard. And I'm so glad. I'm so glad that all of this stuff came to light over the last five years from, I don't know, everything, the drag queen stuff and all the BLM stuff and all the just sort of radical they, whoever they is, right?

Left wing, right. No, I'm not saying that. You told me I wasn't allowed to say anything about it. Netanyahu's listening. But they, yeah, they just overplayed their hand really hard. It was amazing. It's awesome. And so all these people, they want to rebel. Young people in particular want to rebel. And they don't have the option to rebel by going further left because you can't go further left. Right. And so they're instead rebelling by doing what's true, good and beautiful.

I think about this a lot with my own, right, sort of conversion story, redemption story, whatever. My parents, who I love, they're so good. I've got great parents. They're great humans, right? But they were pretty politically liberal. And so I think I rebelled by becoming more conservative, right? Where a lot of kids were smoking pot. Well, then, are you afraid for your grandkids then?

I was buying guns. I don't like, yeah, I guess. You know, who was it? Is it Hegel, right? Talking about the dialectic as humanity progress. you have the antithesis, I forget it, right, but it's the back and forth of ideas that come into conflict with each other

and then you have a sort of synthesis between the antithesis and the thesis. And you know, I don't think we're progressing necessarily, but I think there's something to that pendulum swing idea. Yeah, like I grew up, my friends, parents were like, don't call me Mrs or Mr. I mean, you may have grown up in a different place, but you know, and the priest were like, call me John and my,

gross family my friend's mom was buying us pornography right i mean i'm not saying this is mainstream i'm just saying like we lived in this question authority no one you know now we're desperate for tradition because but how long does that last until the next pendulum swing hits i don't know but i know that once again 200 years ago we were fairly consistent with where we were 2 000 years ago i'm talking about societal structures and culture yeah all right right and then we got off course really weird in the 60s and 70s. I think it's going to be, I think it's swinging back. I don't think it's going to swing all the way back,

but I feel like the norm is some standard of truth and goodness and beauty, right, that has always existed throughout humanity. And so I'm still sort of optimistic. I don't think it just swings back and forth every other generation forever and ever again. Yeah, I mean, I'm a Christian, so I believe in God's Providence. But if I weren't, I guess I would say that all of human history is merely the swing of pendulums and the advancement of technology.

Right. So, like, what does this part of our cultural story look like with AI and whatever that will look like in one year, five years? Yeah, the sort of, I don't know, wild card is the whole technology piece. I have no idea. I don't know what that's going to look like. I mean, it's great. I don't want to be a Luddite, but I kind of am, like, just naturally, right?

I'm sort of naturally contrarian and all of this. So I don't know. It scares the heck out of me. And I feel like I just want there to be an. answer besides don't ever let your kids look at the screen ever. Right? I want that to, like that's what I'm doing right now. It's great. Right. It's just, it's working. And they're in a culture where that's talked about, right? Our school, the vast majority of the parents are on board with all of that. And so my kid doesn't feel weird. Yeah. But I feel like that's not a forever

answer, right? Eventually, obviously my kids are going to have a smartphone. Eventually, right? Maybe when they're off on the road or whatever, they're going to do it. And there's got to be, there's a deeper answer in there somewhere. I mean, it's sad, and I don't want to sound defeatist, but with, say, pornography exposure or something, it's just a matter of when and forming your children well enough, because it's going to happen. It's not a matter of if anymore. It's going to happen. And I just want my kids to be formed well enough to where they say, that's evil. I'm disgusted by it. What you guys really need is my kids, the way they'll talk. They'll say things like, let's say we just came out of the grocery store. You're like, that lady was so nice. She must be a

Christian, hey dad, because she was happy? Yeah. That's awesome. That my kids just, no one told them to think this way. They just assume that if you're a happy, caring person, she's obviously a Christian dad. The same thing, too, is like, we'll be at a restaurant and one of my children might say, did you see those parents? They just had those, like, iPads in front of their kids, the whole, isn't that so sad?

Yes, it is. I think even in secular society, that's happening. I feel like there's, I feel like there's more of a sort of societal pressure to not do that. And maybe it's just the circles I run in, but it seems like more and more people are saying, I'm not going to raise an iPad kid. I'm not going to do that to my kid. Look how it screwed me up. And we're all like that, right? We all get screwed up somehow. And then, and that's the litmus test. We implement in our own brains as to how the lone star, load start to guide our children or to raise it. That was for me. But I missed a lot of things looking at the don't let my kid

watch porn. I mean, that's a very good goal. But I think I missed a lot of times. Well, what I mean is I think there's something to that, right? Let's say your parents, failed. Maybe they didn't, it wasn't their fault, but they failed in some area. Maybe they couldn't provide view financially. And so you go, my kids are going to, I'm only going to have a couple of kids and I'm not going to let them go without. Well, for me, I was looking at porn by the age of eight. And that really messed me up. And that's a big part of my story. So for me, when I had kids, my kids will not see pornography. Like, I will not tolerate that. So I just mean, I think there are other things like to consider when raising your children. Sure. You shouldn't look at porn.

And but in our minds, I think we sometimes fall into the trap of thinking so long as I can make up for this poverty I experience as a child, moral poverty, intellectual poverty, poverty, financial poverty, then I'm, then I'm, that's how I'm going to be the perfect. And then all the other stuff goes to the wayside. Yeah, then you're going to forget about other things, you know? Like, does that make sense? No, it makes a lot of sense. Do you have something like that that you think? I mean, mine's just the screen stuff in general. I'm so terrified of all the time and I hyper focus on that. Yeah, I just, one thing, I know I've talked about it before, but if nobody takes anything else away from this episode, the thing that has been so just on my heart all the time, and I bring it up every time I talk anywhere or anything, is this idea of our kid's identity, like them knowing who they are and how important that is, right?

I think that was a big part of my story, right, was struggling with, I didn't know who I was. I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what my identity was. I didn't know that it was based in, that it was based in anything, right? I struggled with what culture I was a part of. I felt torn in all these different directions. I ended up jumping with both feet into a lot of things that I shouldn't have jumped into. And some of it, once again, I came out on the other side. I was like, oh, I like that, but I need to calm down, right? But the whole idea of blessing your children. I know I say it all the time. Every time I'm on the show, I think I say it. But it's so important.

Taking a moment every single night before they go to bed, and you bless them on their forehead, and you say, you're a prince of heaven, you're son of God, your true homies in heaven, you're good. You're my son. I'm proud of you. All of that stuff. And dad has to do it. And it's going to be super awkward the first 10 times.

and then they're going to love it and they're going to want it. And what that does, I hope, once again, I hope my oldest is 13, right, is instill some sense of, here's who I am, no matter what, right? I do a lot of, like, if we get in a fight or, you know, I'm disciplined my son or something that day, I'll say, sometimes you do bad things, but you're so good, you are so good. And I hope he believes it, because I still struggle with believing that, right? I still struggle with believing that I am good and I'm worthy of respect and I'm worthy of love. And I'm not pitching it back to St. Hubert, but I think it's super important to say that out loud as men that we do ultimately.

We just want what is actually really good. If we want to be virtuous, we want to be good, but we don't believe that we can be. And so when I surround myself with people like you, right, people like my boss at work, like my good close friends, who will say, no, you're really great. I say, well, Matt thinks I'm awesome. I think Matt's awesome. So maybe there is something to that. but it stinks right the whole identity crisis is so hard yeah no it's it is true i feel like if you've been married for more than five minutes and your wife can stand to be around you you may not be

as bad as you think you are oh that's beautiful how's that for a low bar yeah i remember thinking that one day i was on the bed and my wife and little children were sitting on me and they were scratching my back and massaging me before i was going to work and i don't know how it happened But I thought, there was a hope that maybe I'm not as awful as I think I am. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. And I suppose in one sense you're worse than you think you are and also far better than you think you are. I mean, that's also probably the case. Yeah, but I don't know if that's the case.

Which one? I had a priest, the worst part. I had a priest one time who was talking about like how God sees us. Right. He was saying, strip away everything. All your successes, all of your failures, all of your sin, all of your virtue. and what do you look like? You look like a baby. How do you not love a baby? That's what you really are. That's how God looks at you. And I think sometimes one of my younger daughters, when she was

a few years younger, called me a butt crack one time. And I like to think, and the way I reacted was sort of this bemused, like, well, I have to do something about this. You can't call me a butt crack. What a hilarious thing to call me. And I like to think, I hope that's how God looks at us when we sit. He thinks, oh, you idiot, you beautiful, precious thing that I love so much. You can't do that. It's going to negatively impact your life. Let's get you to confession. Let's get that handled.

Yeah, I hope so. And our young ladies, too, right? I don't want to just talk raw, raw masculinity. I think that there is so much there that these girls need to understand about themselves, even if it's only an intellectual assent, right? Yeah, it's better to feel. Right. God comes to convert our hearts, not our minds, right?

Converting your mind is really, really great. You can win YouTube playing wars. You can do whatever, right? But it comes to convert our hearts. And the fact that when I look at my daughters, and primarily, and this is for every woman in the world from, you know, two to 120, right, realizing, even if it's only an intellectual assent, that your identity, first and foremost, is a princess of heaven who's good

and, like, lovable and forgivable and who God created, he's been thinking about you from eternity so that he can spend forever with you we just have to remember that. Like, say that out loud occasionally. I have to, and I don't always believe it. I don't feel that most of the time. I struggle with all that, with all the feeling stuff. We've talked about this, but I'm, I had an intellectual conversion to the church

because it made sense, and I felt smart. And I had spiritual pride. I thought I was better than other people because I was smart. And I had found the truth, go me. Jesus is so lucky to have John Henry Span who can figure this stuff out. Now let me tell other people why they're wrong, right? That doesn't matter. That doesn't matter.

It's great. It's nice. It's really neat that you can, have a gotcha moment with the church and then realize it's some monk from 1,200 years ago like talked about how that was ridiculous, right? But what really matters is us realizing what we're actually rooted in, right?

We're shoots off the stalk of Christ. You know, we're good. We're so good. I don't feel good. Got a headache right now. That's beautiful. Really well put. I was with Sister Miriam recently

and she reminded me of a quote from Julian of Norwick who said, God sees sin as pain in us. Don't just, do you agree? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know if you,

too quickly without thinking about it. No, I did, but by the time he said, do you agree I thought about it? Yeah, I mean, you see that in your kids, hey, like when they're,

when they're making bad decisions, it's all, for me, it's very often, I feel like they're out of communion with me and now they're hiding something from me and now they're trying to make life work independently from me.

I'm not talking about old kids. I'm talking about like, you know when little kids do that? And you're like, oh, no, What you need, this happened to me with a particular child when they were very young, they were stealing from me. And I could tell something was up and laid in bed.

What's going on? Nothing, nothing. Like, all right. But I kept pressing, kept pressing, kept pressing gently, but like, what's going on? And this child broke and wept and confessed everything. And I got to hold this child and say, I love you so much. there's nothing you could do that would make me love you less

you know said all that and then said don't ever steal from me again like that was said but it was like you're so beautiful I love you right here's the point though it's like that child was beginning to live a life

out of communion with his father which was leading to hiding like Adam and even the garden and it was leading to shame it was leading to get along without dad here are my fig leaves now here's how I'm gonna get by and the father me in this instance

came in and I was able to bring about communion and then the pain goes away and the child can live in freedom and that's so much of our story I think yeah that I like the terminology fig leaf right how we like what we're trying to hide from God I have uh I was talking to my spiritual about this not too long ago I have imposter syndrome

all the time right this fear that if you really knew right even you like you my friends right if you really knew who I was we wouldn't like I need to put up some barriers because I don't need you to really know who I am And I think we deal with that so much more now. I was a, I don't remember what this was, a talk or retreat or what, but I was talking about, if we're being honest with ourselves, how many of us have been wearing masks on top of masks, on top of masks,

our entire lives from the time we were old enough to care what other people think about us. And it's really hard to like, like right now I feel like I'm kind of, this is kind of a cope, right? I'm kind of cheesy saying all of this, right? But how do I get down to what is really me? how do I really understand who I am, right, primarily a Prince of Heaven? It's hard. It's a lot of, I don't have like a factual angel. It is hard and I agree with you. Like sometimes I'm wondering as I'm saying things that I hope are true, how much of that is just posturing, you know,

but I think you can tell from the effects, you know, if you start living in a way where you're, where everything gets better, like really better. And your wife says to you, like you're actually more patient and kind and loving and the kids like being around you like this litmus test i think like that that shows that you're going in the right direction because if you were going in the wrong direction like if i was hiding from my wife drinking in secret looking at pornography these things my life would get worse and everyone around me would enjoy me less right and i think so even though i don't know if i can tell in the moment am i being authentic or not because what the hell do i know but I think you can tell from

there's this like expanse and this hopefulness and this confidence in Christ yeah so I think you can tell when you're on the right part and I don't think faking it till you make it is necessarily a bad thing no I agree like

a lot of times I do what I feel like a virtuous man ought to do in this situation yeah that's good just because I feel like I should do that I want to be a virtuous man I'm gonna fake being a virtuous man even though I might still believe

at some level that lie that I'm not but I'm not really a good man but I'm not really much of a man at all right i'll have that little lie from the devil in there i'm like but but if i were here's what i would do and the idea is eventually you build that up just you were talking about dostoevsky right uh i'm going to read d'ostoevsky because i want to be the kind of guy who reads dostoevsky and then after a while you're like i actually really enjoy dosto yes who would have thought that happened yeah i'm really an excellent short story of his called the double it's about a man who is very awkward oh i'd love

to read some part of it to you he's so good what i doesn't have to be about dostiski you to be about fiction. What I love about Dostoevsky, and I think why people love certain authors, Dostoevsky reflects my interior life back to me through his assessment of the human psyche, and it makes me feel less alone. I've had all these thoughts and ways of interacting with other people that is awkward, and then I hate myself for being awkward, and then I overcompensate all these sorts of things. And he, like, in his characters, shows me myself. And I go, oh, oh, thank God. Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense. I've been, I need to read, read again.

Like, I listen all the time. Oh, but listing, I think it might be more natural than reading. Really? It's more human. Oh, but I like the idea. I like the idea of sitting down next to my wife, my beautiful bride. I agree that it's cooler, but I think the spoken word around the campfire preceded the written word on pages, right?

So maybe it's more human to listen. So maybe audible is more based than reading. I don't know. I don't remember where I heard this the other day. It'd be more based, actually, to have it read to you from. someone you love, perhaps. Oh, that sounds great. Yeah, yeah.

I'm going to convince Angie to read the Theodore Roosevelt biography. Matt Sedge, just pick it up. No, I just, I want to do more of that. My Audible account is ridiculous. I love, I love Audible. Mary Margaret and I are, we just read The Giver together. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, it was really good.

The apple? I remember the apple. Is it the color? There's an apple as red. Yeah. And he was explaining what color looks like if you'd never heard of color. Here's what I want to talk about, Right. So ever since this baby has been born, the baby sleeps in the bed with my wife.

That scares me to death. I'm worried I'm going to roll over on the baby or something, and I'm just scared of that, right? So I don't sleep in the bed with my wife. We don't have a guest bedroom. So my options are the couch or my son's room. So Henry and I have become roommates for the past four weeks or so. And we've been doing boy movie nights. And it's the best. It's the best thing in the world. What movies have you been watching? A bunch of them. We watched Alien. Does he like that? Yeah. Would Peter like that, or is it too much?

Oh, there's lots of, lots of F words and violence. That's sort of my litmus. Like, I don't mind, I don't mind violence, right? My son literally shoves his hands up in dead animals and he's ripping the guts out of a chicken yesterday morning and all of this stuff, right? And language, I don't like it, but I can, I'm okay if there's a couple F-bombs in there.

Yeah, well, I think we don't say that. Maybe this is a cope, but I think within reason, it's a way to say to your children, like there's going to be some language. We don't say that because we're not, Barbarians. We know how to use the English language. But it's the sexuality piece that I just won't. Yeah.

I won't put in for my kids. But alien, predator. And I'm supposed to be saying, like, man for all seasons. No, we've not watched a man for all seasons. Aliens, Predator. Catamana Cristo, the one with Jim Caviesel, which is... Is it good? It's excellent.

Now, is that a Peterage movie? Yes, you should watch that with him. You should watch that tonight. It's so good. The Patriot, Gladiator, Braveheart. You need to come up with a list for us. I'll put them out, yeah. Maybe you could put it on.

your website and we can link to it. Yes, 100%. Because I watched Braveheart recently, and I forgot how good that movie is. Okay, here's why I like Braveheart so much. Because William Wallace, who's a really virtuous, good man is not the modern idea of what a virtuous, like what a church guy looks like with like a short sleeve button up and his tie and whatever. He's not just like a nice guy because, once again, nice guys are lame. Nobody wants to be a nice guy, right? Being nice is a good thing to do occasionally, right? But he's a fighter. He's like, he's like, Christ, right? He's like, I'm going to go tick off the English guys who are here, even though you guys are having this nice little, whatever, I'm going to go over there and like get up in their face. And then I'm

going to go sack York. I say, I'm going to go sack York on a pretty regular basis. Yeah, it's really good. It's really, really good. Yeah, I mean, it's beautiful. When his, when his father and brother die and that little girl gives him that flower, you watch that and you don't cry. And sure if you're a man. Is that one of the, you gave me five reasons I'm allowed to cry? There were seven and that wasn't one of them, no. But I, can I add that one? I can't add that one. I got so much negative, I got random emails from that. They didn't realize you were joking. I thought it was the most obvious tongue and cheek thing in the entire world. I know, isn't that funny? I think one of them was, if you're riding alone in a pickup truck with the windows down,

listening to country music written between 1982 and 1994, you're allowed to cry one tear, and people are like, that's ridiculous. This is toxic masculinity. And at that point, you should have just doubled down. Yeah, all right. Well, now it's going to be, now it's from 19806. You keep complaining. I'm going to keep closing that window. I am the arbiter.

No, I have. But that movie was so beautiful. I would encourage people to go watch that again. I mean, there's the, there's the nice, classy breast scene. So for that point, I was like, guys, cover eyes for that just in case. But I think, by the way, I think the really, that can sound funny. Actually, Nate Bagazzi has a whole point on this, a whole joke about this. Classy breast themes?

No, but about how. He grew up in a super Christian family and how, oh no, no, it was John Christ, I beg your pardon. And he was saying the bit where the guard is like kissing that girl's face and trying to rape her, shut your eyes. But open your eyes as they slit her throat and whatever. And you think, well, does he have a point? And I don't think he does.

Like I think superficially I get the point and it's funny. But it's easier to watch an act of violence without committing an internal sin than it is to watch an act of sexuality without committing an internal sin. Do you see? Also, acts of violence can be justified, whereas fornication or what have you

that is often depicted in movies is not justified. Do you ever watch Saving Private Ryan? Yeah, a long time ago. I've got that rolled around in my head. I need to do the like common sense media, deep dive on that and see if that's good for it. Because once again, it's violent, violent.

Yeah, I don't think there's any sexuality. Well, what was on the, is it, Mel Gibson did recently? apocalyptic no the guy who's a non-combatant oh haxaw ridge haxor rich yeah i haven't seen that one actually fantastic yeah there is a lot of good movies out there i always talk about three billboards outside of abing missouri yeah he's about to me please watch that i don't know if i've ever seen promise it's worth it um i remember it restored my faith in movies i shot the laptop lid next of my wife i was like that's why people like movies all right but you know what's better than a good movie man what going out and trying to shoot a squirrel but not doing it

I'm serious yeah yeah all right same with video games same with anything that you're like once again real things real things are good real things are better but three billboards outside of it eving Missouri my daughter caught a 30 pound bobcat and a trap shot it and skinned it and we she skinned it we she stood she stood around while I skid it well I'm gonna send that thing to Nashville soon I've got a 12 foot long alligator in my freezer right now like the skin in the head and all the meat i really want to do something cool i'm sorry back no yeah sorry i got a question for you what do i do i do i ask nashville to ship it do i ask daily way to ship that i can think you have to right or do i drive it i would drive it i think i might

drive it but it's a big drive and no one can come with me like you could stick it out the side it's way bigger than it looks it's enormous it's so beautiful isn't it i was lined up on one on our last trip i'm excited for the uh what do we get gimsbuck did you do a gimsbuck mount yeah i've got a got a bleas buck a zebra rug another spring buck and uh a bleas buck i really wanted a bleak were you there when i shot the bleas buck i don't think so it was the one where cj kept telling me you want to shoot a female like i don't want to shoot a female i'm like they have bigger horns like i feel bad i want to shoot one of the guys uh and finally he just like exactly Asperors, like, fine, that's the guy.

Good luck. And I shot. Well, you should, didn't you do like a mammoth shot? It was a really good shot. Six or seven? How far? Now all your build ma'am. I don't know.

I don't remember the yardage on that one. I did take my longest successful shot ever on this trip, though. And it was a 400, it was 403 yard standing shot on a spring buck. And I cannot over-emphasize how great it is to be wandering through the Savannah with a gun. And like, it's amazing. Well, see, we need to do this again. I liked all those fellas, but I would like to do it with just the two of us.

And we're going to do something like that before we die because there's something about getting up in the morning and having our coffee and just going out all morning. Kind of cold plunge. Cold plunge. Because it's winter down there, right? It's freezing cold and it was, yeah. You said it was the first time we went.

We've probably talked about this before, but I was really worried about you not enjoying it at all. Yeah, me too. Not really worry, but I was worried. I thought you were going to quickly go like, actually I just want to like sit back in a canvas tent and like read brothers K or like that's what I'd rather do you have fun like I think it's really great that you're doing it I thought that too but then you shot the first thing we shot last time and you said I don't want to do anything else you remember I said how good life would be if like this was our life you and I just go hunting all day we'd come back to our wives in the evening and we just do it all over again that's great oh how do we make that life I don't think my wife would I was uh I was looking at prices in Namibia.

I would love, you know, the lion's free over there. It's, uh, a big of a pardon? Land's basically free. What is free? Land, I think it's a lion. I thought, I don't think that's true. No, no, they're very expensive. Land is, yeah, I don't know.

That's my, like, internal when I'm thinking of what, this is probably disordered, but on a regular basis, I'll think of things like, uh, what would I do if all of a sudden everyone I love disappeared? They all died in some horrible accident. What would you do? This is disorder, but this is what I think I would do. It's fun. I would disappear.

somewhere and just hunts. I would St. Hubert, I would go be St. Hubert for a while. And then hopefully some holy man would, you know, hit me upside my head and change that. Hmm. That would be, it'd be fun for a few, and Jeff would be there. Jeff, my dog. Do people go hunting?

What other countries are popular to hunt in Africa? Zimbabwe, Rhodesia. Wasn't it a wild to see the level of racism towards white people in Namibia and South Africa? Did you talk to anybody, like any of the, I talked to CJ about it. I talked on the airplane to this girl who was trying desperately to move to Namibia

from South Africa. And Namibia is not much better. I mean, South Africa is about to implode from everything I was hearing. I think Namibia is just so rural that you can just sort of be out and away from everything and never have to go into the city.

But really, really horrifying stuff. The whole... He was saying you're seventh in line as a white man for a job, for a government job. It's like handicap, black woman, black woman. handicapped black man black man well he was uh he was talking a lot about how you know the the

british came and the boar wars where the british fought the boers right who were the dutch inhabitants who had been there for hundreds of years i love how much he hated the british he and he said i promise if you were british right now i'd say the same thing and just like a whole list of oh my goodness like creative explet it's impressive yeah and uh no it was uh they were these really tough people who built civilization out of nothing, out of nothing. I know that's politically incorrect to say, but there was nothing there. There were people there. There were stone age people there. Yes. And then the Dutch came down, built a civilization. The British took it over and then they ruined it. Yeah. I'm not attacking all the British, but the ones in South Africa in

particular. Yeah. Well, now the natives are ruining it. Yes. Yes. I don't think a lot of them aren't even natives. I think the Zulu right up or the Bantu migration. Right. Thank you. That's right. Oh. Thanks for that, correct. Yeah, now they're just ruining it, and the government's ruining it. It's very sad. Anyway, so we should get on a few extra hunts in before the world implodes. No, there's a bunch of those, like, sub-Saharan African countries, but I want to, I would like to hit stuff on different contexts. Can we hunt in Japan?

Yes. There's a great hunting culture in Japan. Is there? What can we go? I'd love to get to Japan. Wild boar, a big one in Japan. Wild boar. I've killed a lot of, like, wild hogs in the U.S.

And I really want to kill them over there. Because these are, they're all technically feral hogs, right? There were no pigs in America. The closest thing were the havelinas, right, when the Spanish got here. But then they let all their pigs go. And then we've had wild hogs since the Spanish showed up. But I really want to hunt, like, over there where they're from. What about Australia?

You want to go just shoot kangaroos out of a helicopter? That's my biggest complaint about Australia. Now, Australians can shoot them. Yeah, but I could never. I don't think I'm allowed to. You don't watch me? No. You can't shoot the crocs either?

Like, you can go on a crocodile hunt? You're going to carry my bags? But I would love to hit an Asian hunt. I would love a European hunt. I really want to do South America. I want to eat the red stag and the black buck down in Argentina. Those are introduced, too. What I want for you is for you to have a room where each room depicts a different continent,

and that's where you put the animals. You should talk to my wife about that. That sounds great. She'll love that. No, we've come to an agreement right now with shoulder mounts that we can't have more than, we can have no new shoulder mounts of the same species

in public viewing areas in the house. So no more. She likes, except for birds. She likes ducks. Yeah. We got a woodcock this year. That's fun. Yeah.

Yeah. Good. Thank you for coming on the show. Everyone, please go check out your website again. It's fraternity of st.hubert.com. Check us out. Sign up for membership.

You'll get newsletter, merch package, all kinds of good stuff. Now, if they go there today, too, they'll see upcoming hunts. How many spots are left, whether they can, how much it is. Sign up. And if you don't want to give $6 a month,

that's okay. I would love for you too, but just set up for the email to stay updated. I think it's good. I think it's really, it's a great opportunity for like-minded Catholics to go be men together. And I really want you to think of a phrase, a retreat where you get to kill something, something like that. Now we've got kind of a cool flowery tagline of, what is it? Yeah, as the hunter seeks the stag, so I seek you, O Lord, and yet you sought me first. Come on, that's good. That's pretty good. It's not as pithy. You probably shouldn't change it to what I ask. It's a retreat where you kill stuff. Yeah. yeah and is that a quote from someone no no no no really got to chewed on it a while i don't think

so that's really nice thanks well i'd like you to change it to mine and then and then and attribute it so that my name is on your website just ah all right god bless you