Social Media, Conversion & Being Married to Candace Owens w/ George Farmer

let's go George farmer pints with Aquinas or as they say in America George farmer you feel like it's the ours that give us away whenever we try to do their accent there's something about the word water which they can't pronounce water or the word no what you say no differently to me no that's way more proper no yeah fundamentally right so as a result it's like I I joke that I speak American and English and uh most Americans don't understand that joke because they just think that American is the only language I did once you're An American in a souvenir store say do you speak American and I went oh this is this is what they mean about uh we sound good do we everything's coming through wonderful so we are recording from our new Cigar Lounge in Steubenville Ohio chesterton's grand opening is this Friday in Steubenville Ohio uh chestertoncigars.com you can go there check out our Instagram page we're pretty pumped about it and I Have a Cigar Aficionado here so I'm glad that this could be the episode that yeah this is a very different setup for me I feel very uncomfortable yeah I'm used to my table I'm deeply honored to be I thought I was the first British guy ever then obviously we discovered that that was not the case so first interview from The Cigar Lounge is wonderful to me should I tell the story about what you could be doing right now or should you go for it I don't mind it was the greatest sentence a human has said to me ever I think including my children and wife it was better than when Liam said daddy we're driving and you said that uh this is just like when I'm like we have very different lives Kanye West calls your wife Candace Owens and invites her to a work fashion show in Paris yeah last minute and Candace asks you if you want to go and you said no I'm going to Steubenville with Matt Fred I got to do pints with Aquinas it's my favorite show on YouTube I've peaked it is quit yeah this is the this is the Zenith of your career it really is there's nothing better coming down the Park yeah yeah the uh it was all very last minute she it was kind of like a Sunday morning 4am sort of book flights mad mad last minute 4 a.m what were you because it was it's one of these things I mean there was it you know kind of it was all in the build up to trying to get over there for Monday and then it was it wasn't happening on Saturday and then on Sunday morning he was on he was already back in Paris and he was texting her early and so then she woke up and there was all these kind of she'd been put on a tax chain with his travel person and flights were being booked and all this craziness so my Sunday morning was chaos but uh you know I said I can't go because I've got Steubenville Ohio it's amazing London Paris Steubenville that's right that's right that's good this is great yeah so when did you move to America moved over in 2019 um in full marriage yeah pretty much when I met when I'm so Candace and I met in December of 2018 and we got engaged very quickly after 17 days um and uh Thursday just looked up what yeah when you I mean just it was one of those things I mean it was it was very much a God thing um the Lord was in control of that whole process and um I mean it's quite a funny the full story is quite insane I mean the full story was she she actually came to London to do an event um with the organization she was with at the time which was called Turning Point and um even the build up to that story is quite funny so she basically Charlie Kirk who runs Turning Point and Candace were kind of doing a speaking tour of the US and um UK you mean no this was this was still when they were in the US right and um she said to him one day she was like I feel like we should go and doing it do some events in in England we should go and do some events in London and Charlie sort of was like okay well you know we'd sort of they'd sort of been thinking about doing something or a sister organization in the UK and so she then became very belligerent about it and she when she looks back on it now she says I had no idea why I was so belligerent about going to the UK um but there was this kind of great calling that she felt that we needed to go and do this event in London we we should get the Turning Point UK chapter on the map etc etc and so Charlie got in touch well she got in touch actually with some people in the UK and sort of said hey heads up we're coming over in December of 2018. and um that info was relayed to me I was quite involved in British politics at the time um so it kind of made sense I'd heard of her organization her organization is called brexit and which is the black exit from Progressive policies and you know I was very involved in brexit so you know it was kind of like a Synergy there and she came over and um she did this we did this event they did an event at the Royal automobile club in London in 2018. which was um for about 300 I would say three to four hundred people and I was in the audience and I just something about her demeanor just kind of instantly struck me and it was it was very unusual I remember messaging a friend of mine you know a couple of days after it's just been like there's something different about this girl has something different about had you met her yet or just seen her we'd shaken hands and that was it um and then the next night I organized this dinner for a whole group of people so it was her and Charlie as well and and they actually turned up three hours late because they were doing a a podcast in the countryside and so when they came back into town it was kind of like three hours late but we sort of got to know each other a little bit better and then the next week I flew over to the states to see her speaking at a conference in Florida and nothing had been said like there'd be no there would be no romantic overtures at all at any of these at any of this point um it had all just been very kind of above board and talking about politics and engaging in kind of philosophical conversations and then at the end of December we started I I called her a couple of times just to kind of chat and again you know just had these long like prolonged conversations which mainly about politics and trying to understand what she wanted to do in life and at the end of December um I was actually flying to South Africa at the time for New Year's and I called her and I just said listen I know this is completely crazy and we've just met but uh how do you feel about getting married to me just real quick I missed the bit where there was any sort of there was literally nothing nothing romantic had been said up to this point okay I mean literally okay so I missed nothing we hadn't gone on a date we had not talked about marriage or the future or anything like that all right and I just and she said yes no yeah come on she did that didn't happen yeah she you're making it up it's all a fiction um fake news uh no it was it was this guy is not even Candace Owens husband I thought it was weird that he would refuse to go to Paris who is he what a strong random guy that just pulled off the street in students right you just you just you called her up and said how would you feel about getting married yeah were you nervous were you serious or were you partly no was this a pickup line no I mean and no I was 100 serious I mean you know I I felt that there's a little bit of a story there also in relation to like the hand of God in all of this which is that [Music] um you know when I was first up to this point I had been kind of I would say dormant in my faith um and not really living you know a Godly life not really living a life which was you know Meritus of being worthy being called a Christian Life really and but I had been praying this prayer because I've been saying to the Lord like please can you show me the path before my feet you know what is this path that you what is the path of my life where do you want me to end up what do you want me to do and [Music] um in the aftermath of first meeting her about a week later I had this long car ride some car Journey where I was driving down to Devon which is a county in England which is about three and a half hours outside of London and I remember having this very powerful Vivid emotion kind of overwhelming sense of God speaking to me saying you were praying this you were asking for this so here is here is the path there are now two paths before your feet there's the path that you've walked currently which is you know many ways I would say like a a life not lived for him right it was a life lived for me um and then there's a second path which I'm putting in front of you which is a life which you don't necessarily know the outcome of yet you don't know where this path is going to lead but this is the path that I'm putting before you're feeding it's now up to you to choose it um and that car ride that I had you know kind of was formative in some ways because um I just really I felt this overwhelming sense of I have to act this is this is it this is this is that cringe-worthy moment that they talk about in in all films where it's like you have passwords you have to choose the the right path for you you know and um and so it was that kind of moment and I realized that God was speaking to me and and and so I called actually my dad at the time and I and I said to him I said I know this is crazy because next weekend is Christmas but I'm gonna fly to America tomorrow and uh go and spend some time at this conference where she was speaking at I'm getting mixed up on the timeline it was it after this car ride where you felt God speak to you that you then called her so we met on December 11th um we had dinner on December 12th it was about a week later on December 18th that I had the the car ride the car Journey um the next day I flew to the U.S that was when we spent three days together just getting to know each other then I flew back back to England for Christmas spent Christmas with my family and then the week after Christmas was the week that I called her a couple of times started to get to know her you know we I said hey do you want to FaceTime it was like I was expecting like a 10 minute face time we ended up FaceTiming for like three and a half hours um and then on December 29th I asked her to marry me well so that was the kind of I mean it was crazy I mean everyone thought I was mad everyone thought we were both mad you know I mean it was just nuts like my parents were kind of like what is this you know are you being serious kind of thing and um you know one of my sisters was sort of she she actually just laughed about the whole thing she was just like this is this is so not you but it's also very you you know and so she kind of she came out with that line which I thought was quite a funny way of putting it um and then you know a lot of my friends kind of didn't believe it or they sort of thought that I was trying to hoist something on them and then they kind of realized that I was being serious and then a lot of them got on board um and then kind of we didn't we didn't just sort of announce it to the world because it was it was too it was kind of too much for a lot of people to process they just thought that it was like a joke and um so we kind of held back announcing it and I think we've finally actually put something out about it kind of in February or something like that um but that was the kind of timeline that we went through how long were you engaged for until you married eight months eight months yeah we got married in August of the following year 20 minutes yeah August the August the 6th yeah don't mess that up yeah August 12th for me that's why I asked oh really yeah 2006. oh wow that's so cool yeah I had the pleasure of meeting your bride yesterday yeah yeah exactly right so all right so you were raised nominally Protestant Evangelical yeah yeah so my upbringing was um was what's described in the um conservative Evangelical right so um my father was he is a really big Christian I mean he's a he's a conservative Evangelical guy in the UK he himself had a very kind of powerful religious experience which which converted him when he was in his mid-30s um you know he grew up in he grew up in some pretty scholar conditions in post-war Britain which was not a kind of great place to be and he's spoken about this I think publicly as well so you know his his testimony is out there but basically he kind of went went to bed one night um you know being kind of I would say an agnostic or a kind of you know atheist um secular not nominal secularist and uh he heard a voice call him in the middle of the night you know which said Michael just said his name and he got out of bed and he just said Lord what must I do you know and uh he just knew straight away that that was God's voice calling him and so he you know much to kind of my mother's I guess you know confusion the next morning kind of gets out of bed he's like I'm gonna go to church you know want to find a church that teaches the Bible and so you know he walked into the church and one of the big churches in the city of London which is the financial district of of London called St Helens Saint Helens Bishop's gate and um it's quite well known in in the UK as a kind of big Evangelical Church um it really found its footing in in the 80s under the under the rectorship of this guy called Dick Lucas who's still with us in his 90s is a great man very astute thinker um and he you know became fully committed to the Lord I mean he just started he he wanted I think my father would say that you know his belief in Scripture he doesn't want that he he doesn't want there to be any barriers between himself and you know kind of understanding God right and so um you know he and I mean this was obviously much later on and there's much more to go in the story between now and then but he and I talk about the Catholic Church you know quite some quite a bit often um because he's I think I guess he's quite interested in why I converted to Catholicism um but he he he then became this Christian you know he started getting very involved in the church started supporting the church in the UK quite quite vigorously um there's kind of two big movements in the UK I would say in terms of the Protestant kind of quote-unquote Revival so there's the charismatic movement which is you know really spearheaded by a church in London called htb Holy Trinity Brompton and the pastor there is a guy called Nikki Gumbel yeah and that's um they run the alpha course and you know there's many you know there's there are there are good people there you know there are there are many good people there um but then there's a second kind of I would describe that as the kind of what's traditionally termed as happy clappy you know it's like it's quite a lot more kind of arms in the air speaking in tongues which is um a little different to the English temperament like here in America it seems to make sense Americans tend to be a little bit more colorful loud extroverted as a nation yeah so it's not yeah yeah like I mean it's it's very unenglished yeah yeah I mean their services are kind of I would describe them as intense it's quite intense um but that was not the movement that he he fell into he came into the opposite I mean not the opposite but a few degrees of separation away is is the Saint Helens of the world which um it was very it was kind of low church I would describe it was like I mean the similarity in the U.S would be Baptist right that's that's the kind of denomination that it would it would classify under um and really it I mean we went to church you would sing a couple of hymns then there would be a scripture reading and then the majority of the service was the sermon and the sermon would you know I mean it was not unusual to push 35 minutes you know to 40 minutes um and so you're sitting there people take notes you know it's kind of it's just quite thirsty right now um but it's it's quite intense in terms of intellectual training I guess um and that was the church I grew up in you know that was that was kind of what I knew I just I didn't know anything else um you know I really just knew I knew this style of scriptural understanding you know and my day was formed as a boy of coming down in the morning I would read the Bible with my father I would pray with my father you know he gets up super early you know he would he would spend some time reading the word of God and then he would pray for her I mean what a beautiful example for a young boy yeah and you know the funny thing is of course is that I didn't know any different so I just thought that this was perfectly normal like everyone All fathers do this every day um and I guess it was kind of by the age of sort of seven I remember getting into my first theological argument at school at the age of seven um and and I kind of knew there was something different about what we were doing just because of the fact that there was so many events which happened on Sundays in the UK like sport events or you know get-togethers like I mean more often than not Sports were conducted on Sundays and my parents always said well we don't do that you know we we go to church on Sundays and so I remember kind of raising this with a couple of my peers at the tender age of kind of seven six seven eight and I was like well I can't come to Sports on Sunday because we go to church on Sunday and they kind of looked at me quizzically as if there was something kind of wrong um with that with that analysis so I remember about seven eight getting into my first kind of arguments about it and you know I still remember to this day the first religious debate that I had at school which was there was a Muslim guy in my class and I was in my class and he and I started getting into kind of like you know the at the tender age of seven thinking that we could settle the world scores between Islam and Christianity and we started arguing about it and what was and I vividly remember it because what happened was the rest of the class who clearly had not you know been kind of raised in uh soaked I would say in theology in the way that he had and I had took offense at the idea that any religion could be exclusive in terms of its access to the Lord right and so to some extent both of us were pilloried by the rest of the class because at seven yeah they were like well you know every all the all the religions are away to God you know that was kind of really arrogant to say that there could be one exactly right the idea that that ridiculous um uh relativistic sort of cultural religious indifferentism idea has permeated the heads of seven-year-olds what does that say about the culture in which they were raised I mean it says it it is a great flag waving you know kind of this is exactly where the UK is yeah I mean that is exactly where the UK is I mean spiritually you know moral relativism has permeated the whole of society um and I and I you know I mean I can talk talk endlessly about about how the the decline of faith in the UK in some ways is like a Hallmark of the decline of Britain right I would say um and there have been plenty of politicians who said that I mean Thatcher actually famously wrote that in one of her books statecraft she talks a lot about um how America America's Reliance upon faith has actually been kind of what has made it great in some ways um and Britain the Church of England now is kind of like I mean you might as well just pick up a left-wing newspaper and and read it it will be exactly the same messages as you'll get from the pulpit um and church congregations are in are in a state of absolute you know that in I mean I wouldn't even say they're in Decline they're already dead you know I mean it's just it's it's completely empty churches Church buildings shutting you know it's a generational thing um as the older generation the kind of baby boomers you know pass away they were really The Lost Ones who held on to the Church of England as a kind of institutional church right what was it like when Pope Benedict gave anglicans the ability to become Catholic was that a big thing in England in your circles I mean yeah I mean I would say that you've seen I mean you've seen just a huge movement of the clergy particularly from from the church of England to um to the Roman Church and I think that's in part motivated by the decline of the Church of England but it's also I mean it kind of comes back to the why are we Catholics like there has to be something in it there has to be you can't just say your church is declining Ergo become a Catholic you have to say well what doctrinally is attracting you to this to this Faith system and you know Bishop Nazir Ali who's now Monsignor Ali who was the former Bishop of Lee no Rochester sorry under the Church of England he was uh he was a very prominent uh Bishop um raised in Pakistan you know became an Anglican priest um elevated to the to the to the Diocese of Rochester with you know at one point he was being touted as a future Archbishop of Canterbury um which is the kind of you know the premier Diocesan rank in in the Church of England he he converted and he he's written several times about what Drew him in both from a moral perspective but also from a doctrinal perspective um and I and I mean ratzinger set up the ordinary out of Our Lady of Walsingham to deal with the incredible number of clergy who were converting away from the church of England um and that's been hugely successful I mean it's it's had you know hundreds of I mean maybe not hundreds dozens I would say of of priests and former Bishops who have moved over there have been three Bishops I think in the last I'm going to get this wrong now but I think it's about the last two years who have converted to Rome um and all former Bishops of the Church of England I mean it is a big move um and there was kind of a little bit of a I guess people were kind of entertained I mean theology doesn't dominate British life you know it just doesn't dominate British life and in the in the same way that for example in the U.S you know like I would say that when I moved over here one of the first things I noticed I said this to my my parents at the time was like being a Christian in America was just so much easier because it's so much more accepted in public life and it's funny because I say that to Americans and they go are you kidding me yeah like you should have seen it 10 years ago when it was so much easier kind of yeah and so there's this kind of constant feedback from um from Americans that they they thought it was much easier 10 years ago and you know now it's got so much harder but it is much easier than being a Christian in in England because like there have been so many people in British public life who have really hidden their faith because they feel afraid of talking about it um and that is kind of that's kind of like what it you know what it is in reality like you can't get up there and say you know I'm a Christian um uh or I'm a Believer because you get pilloried by the world and the Press you know and so I mean Tony Blair famously is like one example Ruth Kelly being another example um you know Tony Blair obviously former prime minister for 11 years famously his press officer who was a guy called um Peter mandelson who's now Lord mandelson he famously said you know we don't do God and that was the new labor government which was in charge of Britain for 13 years um and he said you know we don't we don't do God in this government and actually what was revealed afterwards and mandelson Mandy as his as he was nicknamed Mandy came out afterwards and said you know Tony Blair actually very much did do god he just couldn't talk about it because he didn't want to and Tony Blair became a Catholic um and Ruth Kelly one of his senior you know advisors is you know I think I think her her she's a very well known Catholic she actually basically retired from public life because she said you can't really be a Catholic in government because the the social teaching of the secular world in the UK prohibits you from being able to put in into place Catholic Social teaching um am I right I think I heard once Catholics can't become prime minister in England is that still true no you you can now um that was you know gosh that's a that's a history lesson right there but yeah there was something called that I'm gonna get I'm always vulnerable to being fact-checked here but I think it was the test and corporations Act of 18 something or rather 32 I want to say um which was basically um the last limiting factor for Catholics to be members of parliament and so they were barred from becoming members of parliament and there were numerous pieces of legislation particularly in the beginning of the 19th century it was kind of it was a sort of 1800 to 1850 kind of those 50 years were very much defined by the Primacy of the Church of England trying to maintain its Primacy in terms of its um kind of influence over legislative politics in the UK um Catholicism was basically banned from you know in public life from the time of the the jacobites and when Charles the first had his head chopped off and and and and and James VI um became king you know so that was that was kind of the the fall out of that and it was basically a you know 250 year hangover from the Commonwealth with Oliver Cromwell being in charge um well and of course even before that with the Tudors um where Henry VII of course you know really in Elizabeth the first Reign was when the Primacy of protestantism was kind of well established in the UK and ever since that time onwards it just became exponentially harder for Catholics to have positions in public life all right so seven-year-old you're debating a Muslim so how did you start to think about Catholicism yeah well I mean at that at that stage so yeah I started picking up that something was very different just about me and about the way that I was being raised because Faith was just not important to most people um most people of my age you know and I kind of realized that there was something not quite the same not you know it was just a bit different and so um you know around I I continued to grow up in a home where you know regular Church attendance was used to de facto Norm of everyday life reading the Bible every day was a de facto Norm of everyday life praying with my parents we had grace before meals um you know my dad is his kind of nickname was the god Squad you know I mean in the UK in the kind of financial circles that he moved in because him and his business partner or a couple of his business partners were were all very strong Christians um and then I guess by the time that I kind of went to some pools some pools is a big Secondary School in England um you know I was pretty well I thought I was pretty well versed in kind of anti-catholic like I can defeat the Catholic Church you know on All doctrinal Points um and you know kind of classic arrogance of a 12 year old teenage boy who thinks he knows everything um and there was a priest arts and pools so some pools is an Anglican school um but um there was a priest there an Anglican priest who would what I would what I would describe him as was like a high Church Anglican right which is kind of anglo-catholic as it's called in the UK and anglo-catholicism is you know there's for example like he would genuflect when he walked into the church this was something which was totally totally opposite to how I grew up um he the service that he conducted was done Investments again something completely opposite to how I how I grew up um and there's a kind of fun punch line to the story at the end of it but without ruining the punchline he you know he basically started defending Catholic viewpoints so I walked into the classroom being like this is it yep I'm good I know the answers um and I started spouting off about you know he he and I kind of had quite a few classes together and and really by the kind of age of 15 I think I was I was in the thick of trying to defeat him on Catholic theology would you say at the age of 15 you had a living relationship with Jesus Christ and were trying to abstain from sexual impurity and things like this yeah yeah yeah I mean what a what a Grace you know I mean like all teenage boys there's living in a major Global City you know there's there's Temptations everywhere um but I definitely had a knowledge of the Lord you know I was I was engaged in a yeah I mean I was I was definitely engaged in living relationship with God at this point um and you know that would and I was I was battling with this question of Catholic theology you know I was kind of baffled by how he had started defending for example like Sacramento theology so you know I walked in and basically said well the sacraments deny the the effects of Grace you know like to say that you require the sacraments is an obstacle to knowing god and therefore right um like you can't you can't be justified by by faith alone if you require the sacraments right and this priest um his name is Patrick allsop he you know I remember vividly having this conversation with him where he he was just like well the sacraments are all about Grace like they are actually exactly about Grace this is the whole point and I didn't really have an answer to this you know I didn't I didn't have an answer to any of these points that he raised because having been raised in a home that was you know I would say not not anti-catholic I guess but it was I mean it was anti-catholic but it was it was more just that Catholicism and Catholic teaching wasn't taught like why would it be taught you know we were not Catholics so why would it matter and you know there was a kind of stereotypical view of Catholics which was smells and bells and rituals right and and an obsession with Mary um and so the there had never really been any coherent intellectual debate about Catholic doctrinal points it had all just been an echo chamber um and as a result when I walked in to start to try and attack the points that I had been raised in this Echo chamber to attack I had very little to fight back against when sound doctrinal arguments were put back to me right and this is what he started to do this is what uh father also started to do and that really kind of in the same way that people who have profound religious experiences and people who have political conversions often become more zealous than anyone else um for me that was the first step were you processing this with your father at the time yeah I mean I was I was asking a lot more questions by this point um so another like another very big thing which I think is is kind of is interesting is that you know the Protestant my church Saint Helens at the time basically you know it's kind of like I started asking questions I was like well what happened before the Reformation do we just do we just believe that nothing happened before like what happened to Christianity for the first 1500 years I was just I was very inquisitive about this and I kind of didn't shut up asking these questions I'm like well and then what was funny was that there were a couple of um Christian teachers who like Evangelical teachers like those I think I'm gonna get his name wrong but I think there's one called Gary Lennox who um gave a I remember we went on Christian summer camp every year um which was for the whole family and um he gave a a talk series on the early church or like on the on on the first 1500 years and what was I was so excited to listen to this series because I was like wow this is going to answer the questions that I have about what happened before the Reformation um and what was funny was that he started off by saying you know like there I mean he basically started off by saying there were lots of Christians before the Reformation it's just that you kind of had to you had to seek them out you had to kind of look into the the writings of the Bishops um and you you you did find quite a few Christians and and as soon as he sort of said that it kind of triggered in my mind we're like hang on a sec so what are we saying here like and then all these questions I mean all the questions that so many Catholics I know have been through themselves when they have asked themselves these questions kind of started coming up because then because then he was saying that you know there were like bishops from 11th century Spain who were talking about the effects of Grace and how justification by faith alone was you know was was doctrinally sound and all this kind of and as soon as he started saying this I realized that there was there was a Christian Church before it wasn't that the the church had just started in you know the the the date that Henry Yates decided that he wanted to get divorced from uh you know this was Catherine of American um you know he wanted to get married to amberlyn but it was there was a church which existed before this um and now of course when I look back on it it's it's kind of funny because that's a question that like I If there's a book called crossing the tiger by Stephen Ray and you know Stephen writes in that book like the the fundamental question that he as a former Baptist had was you know was the early Church Catholic and then became Protestant or was the early church Protestant and then became Catholic right yeah and and that was kind of where I was you know that was where my faith was at this point I was like well hang on a sec like was the early Church Catholic or Protestant and then for me that elicited like hundreds more questions have you heard of Peter kraef's question to his university Professor no I haven't you know much about Peter Kraft yeah yeah really worth reading he just Jordan Peterson just interviewed him it was the one time I wish Jordan Peterson would have spoken less just let Peter craft shine did you watch that you were so good so he's he's in a class with a professor and he says all right so uh he just started learning about the church fathers and so he says okay so you're telling me if I got into a time machine and he said I still remember the way the professor looked at me like he used some kind of sci-fi nut if I go into a time machine and went all the way back I would feel more comfortable as a Christian in the first second third Century than a Catholic would and the professor said exactly and he thought okay good so now all I got to do is go back and read what these early Christians taught and I'll convince myself that they were all Calvinists and yeah you know the rest of the story he's a Catholic yeah exactly I mean that and that was kind of so so then what happened was that I was by this point I was asking way too many questions to just be art I mean and and I mean and here I will kind of become a little bit more polemical about um the Protestant Church you know um because uh this is this is really where the answers started to fail um which was the the first thing which was that every every time I kind of reached every time I wanted to have these questions answered they were effectively shut down because this was considered like why is this relevant was a constant question which basically came back to me like is this from your dad from your who's saying this was from like study group leaders and um youth group leaders and all the and and and anyone who was kind of in a position of authority within within like a very non-hierarchical Church you know it was like the Evangelical conservative movement doesn't really have a hierarchy it's not officially it's under the Church of England it's now under gathcon which is a separate Breakaway group um from from the general Synod of the of the angular communion but anyone kind of within that church hierarchy started to push back on my questions because I was just interested I mean I was it wasn't like I was trying to be difficult I was just asking relevant questions about like what did happen in the first thousand years like you know and then and then once this door had been opened you know other questions started to come in like for example you know I mentioned this to you yesterday but it was like the whole basis of my faith had been scripture scripture alone and solid scripture and and everything that you could possibly take was from the Bible you didn't need anything else and um so I said fine if that's that if that's the truth if that's the case then why does the Protestant Church deny the real presence because Christ quite literally says this is my body this is my blood he doesn't say this is a symbol of my body this is a representation of my blood he literally says this is my body in this moment so I was now I was now in a stage where I was using Protestant arguments to defeat protestantism right I was I was I was saying well hang on a sec this doesn't make any sense if we're if we are basis on scripture alone then why are we denying what scripture says because it doesn't say at any point this is a representation so at this point you know I was kind of my own mind was in Rebellion against my own mind you know it was it was I was being thrown left right and Center and of course you know fundamentally kind of behind all of this there was this uh you know one of my religious studies teachers at school father also was was I guess not pushing but he was answering many of these questions that I had but not with the answers that the Protestant church was giving right so he was answering them with Catholic answers to Catholic to questions about Catholic doctrinal issues um and and the first thousand years and all this kind of stuff so do you know any Catholics at this point in your life I knew one a new one I'm still friends with him to this day um your age or yeah my age that's right and he was a Greek Catholic and um you know I was sort of plugging it was kind of funny actually I mean that's that's the kind of Side Story but he he and I had always clashed about this and I kind of mocked him for his Catholicism you know have mercy on me Lord but um you know I was kind of mocking him consistently I was like oh you just you know smells and bells rituals the rosary you know and um and then I sort of started to ask more questions to him and kind of I was like well I'm gonna say like what do you believe like what what do you actually believe like because I I actually don't know what you actually believe I realized that I didn't really know what he believed I think it's a good thing to realize that if another person's position seems ridiculous to us there's a good chance that we don't understand that position yeah it doesn't mean people don't hold ridiculous views but if people have thought out their views they usually have reasons to believe the things that they do reasons that you might be able to sympathize with if not go all the way with yeah and I think that's just a good lesson I mean yeah it's easy to see here as Catholics and say why don't the Protestants understand us or something like that but of course we do the same thing it's just a much easier way since you don't have the time to investigate every religion you wish to dismiss nor are you called to do that um I think it would be an impossible feat so we do just sort of dismiss things that we don't want to have to engage yeah but then when you get somehow inserted into that world either through questioning your own worldview or the witness of someone from that particular worldview that's yeah that's when you start to take these things a little bit more seriously I suppose yeah I mean I was just you know I suddenly was very interested in what he actually believed and then on the you know then there was also more drop terminal issues which started raising I mean you know there were two other kind of things that really started making themselves feel present in my life which was one the idea of church Unity um and how was the how was the Church of England taught in history class in England in a Protestant school I mean I'm sure it's a long story but just sort of sum it up for us I mean how because from from our point of view it's like you got this King he was like really horny and had a bunch of wives and one of this other one couldn't get an annulment started a church like is that how it's I mean that's pretty much yeah I would say I owned a Cod piece yeah I mean and maybe several but like yeah he had wonderful calves do you know this is no this is something about Henry VIII that is often taught like it was it was considered a medieval England or like the the Renaissance the medieval period you know to to promote your calves okay it's like a this was a symbol of your kind of masculinity Henry Henry VII had had massive calves and this was considered to be like a sign of his masculinity [Music] um but yeah is there a more sophisticated story that gets offered to a little Protestant English boys no no I mean I mean there is a kind of I I guess there is a there is an attempt to kind of justify the basis of the church you know in the in the grand schema of the Protestant Reformation across Europe um so you know obviously kind of the rise like Luther that it's kind of attempted to kind of squished into that yeah yeah yeah you know it's kind of like uh makes it a little bit more respectable if it's about Doctrine exactly that's right yeah and the corruption of the church yeah the corruption I mean that that is something which you know was very is quite frequently taught like how heinously corrupt the Catholic church was you know and um and obviously you know Luther of you know the back end of that was uh was obviously rebelling in many ways against the like what he perceived as the corruption of the church um and so Henry VII is kind of slotted into that kind of like here's one we did earlier you know got a neat package yeah I'm with them what they say yeah exactly that's right shut up Henry yeah yeah I mean but but of course you know in many ways people people can see through it obviously because I mean he had six whites I mean it was it was you know the man Was a Serial philanderer you know it's just he obviously was not a was not a devout man I mean even though he is actually taught as somebody who really did you know respect the church the Catholic Church um that's right he gave to him because he he wrote a book defending errors that's right and uh not defending uh attacking attacking and he he you know and of course never has a son of the church fallen so far you know I mean he just divorced and then proceeded to execute you know numerous Catholics and Bishops certified him and you know obviously had Thomas More executed and it was just I mean kind of a horrendous track record on the back on the back end um near the back nine uh so so yeah he kind of but that is how it's really taught you know there's not really much Nuance to it because it's kind of it is what it is I mean people can see through it like you wanted to hang about you wanted to get married to this girl who was you know kind of parading around in front of you in your court so you but you had a legitimate Catholic wife um you know there's not really much more to it than that yeah there's not kind of much more sophistication than that so there isn't a kind of I I would say there's a vague attempt to try and justify it in the light of the Reformation but most history teachers most history teachers that I was taught by weren't people of Faith themselves right so as a result they don't make any attempt to justify what he did through the lens of Faith right they just say this is exactly what it says on the tin you know he he wanted to Marianne Berlin that's it um so and of course that in turn raises you know more questions about like what is the Church of England like I mean you know I showed you that Meme yesterday which is just like can I divorce my wife no that's bad okay watch this the Church of England you know it's just and and and that's kind of where we ended up I gotta I'm gonna text I'm gonna slack you this Neil and if you can throw it up because it's that good yeah but I mean the other you know that was in some ways my parents and kind of the faith background that I grew up in was not really like a they weren't really denominational if you know what I mean right they kind of they kind of said I always used to ask them this I'm like what denomination are we and they would just say well we're considered Evangelical you know and I said well does that mean that we're part of the Church of England and they were like well not really you know maybe a little bit you know if you if we had to be defined by something it was kind of the Church of England that we were defined by but really they didn't sit within denomination my parents to this day are still very you know like I would describe them as non-denominational in many ways right um which is why they're closer in some ways to the kind of Baptist organization in America which is very low church and very kind of in some ways non-denominational right the southern baptist I just sent it to you there do you see that there is some I I this so now just throwing it up I'll explain how I laughed out loud this morning because we last night you sent me this image and I'm like yeah that looks that looks fine you know I didn't because we were with Scott and in his wonderful basement libraries he didn't have time to and then I opened it up this morning and I looked at it and man is it on screen isn't that funny that font just screams of England I don't know how memes are something the internet yeah that's amazing the Deep memes the charge of okay the Deep means all right yeah yeah so yeah but I mean that was you know really because I was brought up in them because every time we pushed I kind of pushed the denomination question on them they kind of came back and said you know like we don't really subscribe to denominationalism you know it's really perceived that yeah we kind of are you a Christian or not like are you a Believer or not right and um as a result you know the Church of England itself was kind of like a by a by thought you know as a as a young as a young man in England you know it wasn't really something where like I I kind of thought oh I'm a member of the Church of England it was just something that was there I guess the justification for the doctrinal beliefs that they held were far more linked to Luther than they were to the act of Supremacy under Henry VII right so that was like Luther and Calvin were far bigger in the mines in kind of the Mind's Eye of um my church as a you know as a child than say like you know the leading Bishops of the Church of England you know I would say the Calvin like Calvinism Calvin zingrily you know all the all the kind of major Reformation theologians were much more um prominent in in terms of protestant thought from where I grew up at then then say like you know Henry VII's active Supremacy or anything to do with the early Church of England um when it was originally founded so you know it was the the that kind of links back to the church Unity thing which which was another huge question at this point in my mind which was just that okay how um Paul writes in his letters you know you must be a unified Church like this is this is very important to the New Testament scriptures yeah yeah and so again kind of coming back to the same point about how how did one I was using scripture to defeat protestantism right and I this is kind of what I was because I was looking at the Protestant world and you've got like 28 000 denominations and you know you've got all of these different groups and and I kind of I was asking myself I was like well hang on a sec are we saying that the people who are saved in this world are only like the you know the the 1200 people who go to St Helens on a Sunday you know that kind of it just seemed a very narrow scope of Salvation right so the the sociological claims of uh that is one thing I think I would have found compelling against protestantism is this confusion around the way in which we're saved yeah so baptism you know um you you correct me if I'm wrong but I mean it's like you've got the Calvinists are baptizing babies and that baptism is uh effective for the elect uh you have Baptists who don't baptize babies you have all sorts of manner of you about baptism and it's like 2 000 years after Christ and we still aren't we haven't nailed that one down yeah so you've got all these Protestants going off the same book yeah and coming up with it that just seems so unlikely if if God was to guide the church into all truth and away from all era that we would be confused about that fundamental thing yeah yeah I mean again you know coming back to the baptism thing which is a great point you know unless you are baptized with water and spirit you shall not enter the kingdom of God yeah it's like I don't know how much clearer you can be I mean I genuinely don't know how much care you have to you have to be but yet there's so much debate over the Sacramento or yeah in Saint Peter's letter baptism which corresponds to this now saves you yeah yeah it's kind of so and again all of these areas that I was using scripture to defeat the Protestant argument that none of this was important right um and so the church Unity thing was huge in my mind because that that that was just massive in terms of like how can we how can we be saying that there's just so much of the Christian world like the alleged Christian World which is not saved you know you're writing off you're riding off the whole of Catholicism you're writing off the whole of Eastern Orthodoxy as not even Christian right which was kind of is that the view you held oh yeah they weren't even a Christian yeah they weren't they were they were Christian in them only you know like nominalism basically um so there was that kind of huge area which started looming very big in my mind and that was a big driver of me towards the faith um and then and then the other kind of big area was was that there's a um a verse in Hebrews which talks about when I was when I would when you were a child you you were fed milk and when you grew up you became a man you you ate you ate Adult food and paraphrasing here obviously um but and then Paul writes you know but the when you were when you were infants in your faith I fed your spiritual world but now you're now you require spiritual food and this passage was like you know just I I remember hitting me because I I was thinking like I've reached a limit of everything that I can know under this branch of church teaching right I'm coming up against all these roadblocks there's no answers for what happened to Christianity before the Reformation there's no concept of Christian Unity they're not even interpreting scripture using scripture to confirm what scripture says um there's no church hierarchy like where's the central Authority you know there's no concept of apostolic succession like you know even things like in the Acts of the Apostles where you know the handkerchief and the shadow you know are being used to cure people well like his great example of relics you know like that there is there is a clear definition of sainthood of relics um all of these doctrinal Catholic points I mean at this point I was you know I I was basically already there but were you reading Catholic Books at this point or just asking questions so I started to read Catholic Books what was the first book you remember reading so I mean I went straight in with the heavy stuff I mean I I Cardinal ratzinger principles of a Catholic theology one was the first one that I read wonderful um is this when you're at Oxford this was just before I was at University so this was when I was 17. and you know I was just like okay we're gonna go straight in with the heavy guns you know I was like I want I want I knew this guy I didn't know much about Cardinal ratzinger at the time or Pope Benedict as he was then um but I just knew that he was supposed to be a preeminent Theologian within the church and that was kind of what I had heard about him and by the way you know he was I forget what year his election was was it 2004 I think it was or 2005. uh yeah five five was it yeah around then so and I just remember thinking like you know again here was this great contrast like great contrast between um a man who is being widely touted as like a heavyweight Catholic intellectual Theologian and like the flip side being all of these questions that I couldn't get answered so I just thought maybe he's got some answers right and so I started reading his work and that was kind of like I mean by that point I I was there you know I mean it was just I was like okay had you attended Holy Mass at this point no I hadn't I was too frightened to get a mass I used to go well so that's I mean I had gone to mass and I had just sat at the back of the church so Westminster Cathedral which is the mother Church of uh of England really I mean it's uh it's the one where um the coronation takes place well no that's Westminster Abbey okay right but Western's Cathedral is the big Catholic Cathedral in London oh okay right beside Westminster Abbey um and it's where the Cardinal you know traditionally the UK Cardinal has his seed and um that was not was that given back to the Catholics it was built by the Catholics in in the 19th century oh um so kind of like at the height so England's Catholicism is quite a funny story because basically in the late I mean obviously John Henry Cardinal Newman you know very you know Saint John Henrico new very well known um Catholic thinker but his original movement the Oxford movement as it was called you know was actually a Revival of the Church of England right and this is kind of not that many people understand this it was it was traditionally considered to be like a an area where people were under trying to get to understand the Church of England more and then what happened was he became a Catholic and this kind of shook I mean it was it was seismic I mean it's funny to think now like I always like these little kind of anecdotes from history but like just how much Faith played a role in the mind of Generations before us you know like I I studied Byzantine history when I was at University and like there's this great story and I'm sure it's familiar to many people but like there's some big Monastery in in Constantinople at the time and one of the monks wants to go down to the market to get a loaf of bread and it's kind of in the mid of the nestorian crisis you know the storing kind of councils and uh he basically gets mobbed on his way to the market by this crowd of people arguing about the nature of Christ you know I'm just like and yeah you know we've got like lizzo twerking you know nowadays it's just like it's like the country and we and we claim that we're getting smarter as a human right I'm just like well you've got a crowd of I've got an angry mob in Constantinople arguing about the Dual nature of Christ and now we've got like you know Tick Tock um you know yeah it's just kind of like this this Chasm of intellectual thought between where we were then and where we are now and um but westman's cathedral was built in the latter half of the 19th century because because England went through this great Catholic Revival um which was really the first time that England had a Catholic Revival for almost 400 years 300 years and um it was led by John Henry Cardinal Newman at the time and so he he uh he kind of spearheaded that movement but westman's Cathedral is this beautiful Byzantine style Church in London um I mean it's it's very dark it kind of reminds me a little bit of some marks in Venice which is one of my favorite churches and um I went and sat in the back of Westminster Cathedral and just kind of sat there for many like I prayed a rosary for the first time I didn't even I kind of didn't even know what I was doing I had to kind of look up how to do it um you know I I I went I sat at the back of the church I watched the mass several times I was trying to understand what was going on and for me that was just kind of it just felt I felt at home almost straight away I remember the first time I realized how similar the high Anglican liturgy was to Holy Mass I was in Adelaide looking for a church shortly after my conversion and so I still didn't know a lot of things a shop at this Cathedral so I thought well that's Catholic I think and so I went in and I was kneeling and so it's just funny they got a British flag it's just different you know and then a woman came out and went nope and I'm going in the Investments that sounds about right yeah I mean yeah the Church of England I mean that that's a see it's it's funny that like so many English churches have like they've got British flags in place of the Tabernacle you know they've got like pictures of the Armed Forces you know it's it's funny because it is a national church and kind of when I look back on it now I'm like it I guess it must have seemed in some ways the Church of England and this is kind of a bit of a meta thought really but it's in some ways the Church of England is like it's a great symbol for like it's a great litmus test of England and that that sounds uh sort of going to a bit more detail but it sounds ridiculous to say that but the Church of England's ascendancy as a church was directly linked with England's ascendancy as a world power and in turn its decline has been you know like with the church of England yeah England has declined alongside the Judgment when you first prayed the rosary were you afraid of offending God no no because I think there's probably a lot of Protestants out there who are open to Catholicism and there's that big hurdle which is namely Mary and devotions to her and they might be attracted to the rosary but afraid of being attracted to it they might want to pray it but don't want to offend God yeah how did you overcome that obstacle yeah I mean it comes back again to the early church for me um I I was finding all these answers in the early church the questions that I didn't to questions some of the questions I didn't even know were questions until I realized that I had these questions in my heart um again it came back to that kind of early church so the theodicus um of the Council of Charleston I think it is in 452 which um basically says well and it made perfect intellectual sense to me and at this point I was I was kind of reading about Mary I was it was the early days of the internet I was just kind of downloading as much information as I could from wherever I was reading books um trying to understand engaging kind of as engaging with as many Catholic people as I could find to engage with um and I just remember reading about the theodicus and it made sense to me if Christ's nature is truly God and truly man then surely it must be accurate to say that Mary gave birth to God right so she must be the mother of God right and so that argument was so blindingly self-evident in its logic that I just had no argument against it and I was like okay that makes absolutely perfect sense to me of course Christ can't be divided in nature this is exactly what the early church was talking about um and so as a result you had to say well that truly must therefore mean as the early church proclaimed that Mary was the mother of God which means that Devotion to Mary is a sound part of doctrinal and Catholic teaching which makes perfect sense to me because you are asking for the intercession of Mary as the mother of God to carry the prayers to the feet of her son um so you know this made again there was nothing which I was coming up against which raised any significant intellectual barriers to me I wasn't thinking like I mean the first thing that I was easy to I mean the real presence I was already basically I mean the real presence is in my opinion was just the easiest thing to understand so for me I became Catholic when I was in 2000 when I was 17 and I came back and the only people my age who who were enthusiastic in their love of Jesus Christ were my Evangelical friends or those who I had met in my small little town and so I was hoping we could kind of get together and kind of share these this beautiful faith and then they started sort of questioning the certain things I did and I remember like because I didn't know much about my faith at the time unfortunately um and so in my mind the only kind of scriptural reference I could point to to these Protestant friends who defend the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was what is it Luke 22 something this is my body this is my blood yeah which is good enough but I had no idea about John 6 yeah like I just I don't think I ever read it yeah and so I remember picking up the Bible one day and reading him say like unless you eat the Flesh of the son of man and drink his blood you have no life in you and I'm I just was shocked that that even existed in the Bible and then I wondered if they even had that in theirs and was shocked that they did have it in theirs and still found they still found the Catholic belief so yeah so absurd yeah yeah I mean yeah I just I was I was I was being dwarfed by this weight of intellectual Catholic Catholic thought at this point you know I was just being like crushed underneath and he crushed by the Catholic Church you know it's like destroyed by the Catholic church do you have like Catholic interlocutors at this point like you had that one friend but do you have others who are trying to argue into the faith or is it just you rat singer and your Rosary at the back of Westminster Cathedral well by this point I was I was transitioning from Secondary School to to University and to Oxford um and you know talk about a fast track to Faith I mean it was it was um like Oxford as a police is the I would say the Beating Heart of kind of English theological thought you know it's it's the kind of center it's the center of the faith there's several monasteries there there's you know there's Dan scotus was there yeah that's right yeah um you know like black fries is a Dominican Monastery in the middle of the town There's um a Benedictine house there there is you know a house from by the Jesuits there's a house run by Opus day you know there's like there's all these different groups who have centers there and so it'd be amazing to be there yeah and it's also by the way the heart of like Anglican thought as well I mean there's there's you know Christchurch Cathedral the University Cathedral is literally Anglican and it's in the middle of Christchurch um and most of the colleges you know have chapels on them all of which are pretty much Anglican um so you know it was it was it was kind of the first time that you were not surprised to see monks walking down the road which you know was kind of a real novelty in England because there aren't that many monasteries after Henry VIII destroyed them all um so you know you just see like some Benedict teens walking down the road you're like oh wow I'm Benedictine yeah I just never really see a Benedictine yes um and so by that point I was kind of deep in Inquisition territory um and I contacted the Catholic chaplaincy of the University of Oxford and reached out to them and and I wanted to and I basically I I sent an email which uh you know I wish I still had it but I basically said something like I want to become a Catholic how do I become a Catholic and um and they said and they replied and said well you should start the icia and so I started attending weekly sessions of the rcia and being trained by the Jesuits at the time actually um and again I knew nothing about the Catholic church so I just was like give it all to me give it you know whatever whatever can happen um and uh and that was kind of the first step well that was the beginning I guess the end of the beginning you know and uh and it was so did you have Protestant friends at the time yeah and did you engage with them yeah I did argue with them or did you just sort of drift apart into more Catholic circles yeah we drifted I mean really it was a drift you know like there was a there was a drift I mean Oxford's a funny place in that regard because you're kind of thrust into the middle of so many different groups of denominations like you know I was taking classes with anglo-catholics and with you know people who went to synebs which is a really strong Evangelical Church in Oxford and it's an all dates which is the charismatic one and you know I was kind of being thrust into classes with all of these different people and there's a there's a kind of great transition period in that time when you know you you're still finding friends and and I was many of my friends at that time were anglicans who actually also ended up becoming Catholics um so there were about three or four of us who went over to Rome at the time and it was and it was it was almost a Hallmark I mean kind of it it was like here's one we did earlier you know here's another guy who's becoming a Catholic um and so there was there were quite a few of those um who who started coming over to Rome um and yeah I took instruction for a year and then you know I became and it helped that I was doing theology so I mean the I was studying theology as an undergrad and they that obviously was answering quite a few of my questions anyway um because my specialty was the church with kind of patristic period early church you know kind of medievals medieval period And I wanted to do a bit on the Eastern Church as well so I did a module on Byzantine church history and early Syriac Christianity which linked him very well with the patristic period and that was just fantastic because you know here we're all here was what little researcher I'd done already had been was now just been complimented by this overwhelming body of thought from tatalian to origin to Saint Ignatius you know to all these early church fathers who were who were writing about you know the real presence and baptism being crucial and all all the kind of doctrinal points that I had really never engaged with and suddenly you know and I think you know as as Henry as Cardinal Newman said you know to to study history is to become a Catholic right yeah kind of that was the point where it was just I was like this makes so much more sense yeah the Nuance I suppose at least is it to cease to be Protestant yeah I did a deep dive into the to the teachings on the Eucharist and when that started to different opinions and when they started to form and I just I was shocked at just how solid the patristic evidence is on the Eucharist not to mention the biblical evidence I did a debate with Cameron 2z which is online somewhere on YouTube and my thought to him was like listen like you maybe you don't have to become Catholic given what we're about to discuss but you cannot you cannot hold to this sort of Baptist view of the Eucharist I mean obviously there are many different views of the Eucharist within protestantism maybe you can adopt one of them maybe you have to become Orthodox but you've got to give up this merely symbolic sort of Baptist view yeah so did you get confirmed in Oxford yeah confirmed in 2009 by the bishop of Oxford so how how did you presumably you said you knew Candice for 17 days before you proposed to her I presume you were were you a faithful Catholic at this point no not really I mean I kind of at that point after I became confirmed I I sort of I I guess to some extent I was kind of intellectually exhausted by the whole process um there was also a um there was no doubt that it was it was like controversial I would say uh in my family like I mean you know I didn't tell my parents about it I didn't tell my parents about being confirmed um you know I was very frightened about doing that and you know I kind of I mean my one of my sisters is a missionary you know just kind of it's a big part of my family's life you know it's just a big part of that I mean my you know my father is very well known in the UK for his outwardly you know strong proposition of Evangelical conservatism um and you know I mean he talks about it frequently in his political life and his business life you know he doesn't really give business talks about business he gives business talks about Christianity that's kind of what he's known for um and that's interesting that you would come to Faith get confirmed after his long intellectual study I would think you'd just be like basking in the sunshine of like Catholic uh fellowship and the sacraments how long did that last until you settled to drift away um I guess I kind of I once I finished I kind of was like okay now I'm there you know I'm I've crossed the tide where I'm done you know I don't need to worry about this anymore are you still attending holy mess yeah very infrequently it actually became less frequent after I became confirmed which was strange yeah um and then I really I just drifted off into the world you know I I started leading a very worldly life I went into the city of London in finance I went into Investment Banking okay I went into the hedge fund world you know that world is not a spiritual world you know I mean it's a world which is run and operated by the love of Mammon oh 100 you know and and I actually remember my first interview in Investment Banking was quite funny like that that the he was a very senior Banker who was who was interviewing me and he he said to me he was like so he was American and he was like so you studied Theology and I was like and I was like yeah that's right he was like great well from from God to Mammon and then I was like okay and he was like you know back to the real world kind of thing and and he and I actually got on very very well but it was just I got that interview always stuck with me because he was right yeah it was I mean that was that was exactly what it was you know and and I guess my dad who had been in finance in the UK very successful Financial career had almost distinguished his financial career from other peoples by being this active Christian in in in business and he had like made a Hallmark of his life by being a Christian in business um I mean he went to church very frequently you know often three times a week um you know he would lead a Bible study two Bible studies a week you know all this and and for him it was everything but I I kind of thought that I guess by this point I was I was both frightened of of uh exposing myself as a Catholic by this point which made me more reticent to kind of say anything about it I just was like okay you know what I'm just done with all of this um and I it was too it was almost too exhausting to do it you know I was just like I was too frightened of the reaction of the ridicule you know I didn't have the courage that I should have had um and so I drifted off into the world and you know started leading a worldly life and you know all that entailed as a young man in London um and then really it was you know kind of what I talked about earlier was that was yeah this is the two Road thing exactly talking about earlier yeah I went to my first confession you know and I was just like it was just one of those so okay yeah first confession in England no this was actually in the states by this point okay so how did that go yeah what exactly did you confess give it to me right now um I mean it was one of those confessions where you know you walk in and it was like bless my father if I have sinned it's been X number of years buckle up yeah since my last confession and I think that the priest who was an elderly priest on the other side of the um the confessional was just he kind of took a breath yeah he was like sharp inhalation and and actually I mean he was he was you know and I said listen I don't really know what I'm doing you know I mean I I I didn't say that exact words but I said something like that because um I just so throughout this time of drifting away from the faith and engaging you I mean you you sort of alluded to it by saying the sorts of things a young man in London may fall into so I'm presuming you're talking about relationships yeah that's something out of marriage so were you never then tempted to uh redefine your Christianity to be able to include your fornication oh because this is that's the coward's way out it seems to me but it's the way that seems most convenient well if I want to remain Christian and I wish to fornicate and engage in all these things then this I'm not Catholic or I'm a special type of Catholic or um oh yeah 100 but you would you never no I did that the whole time you did do that I mean I I totally rewrote Christianity to fit my world view interesting I mean I I I to the point that did you ever want to kind of stop being Catholic and maybe join the whatever was necessary for me to feel good about myself yeah right with no intellectual challenge challenging of that right and so I just kind of I was fully on board with redefining Christianity and in my in the back of my head you know I mean it's pathetic now and I and I kind of look back on it with such disgust but you know in the back of my head I I was basically saying well you know I was resurrecting the the the Protestant argument that like justification by faith alone and I and I in the back of my head I was like well I still I still believe that Christ was the son of God so therefore I'm good enough right and that was kind of like that's all I need you know so I was kind of back in in in the ways of of my early years where I was kind of justifying myself through non-attent no I mean I wasn't attending church I wasn't attending Holy Mass you know I mean it was I was wasn't going to confession you know I would you know a little lighter I have a lighter over here here Thursday you want to pass him on I could there's those who are watching we have two men behind the cameras Oh you come here oh just in case and uh they're trying to light cigars with unsuccessfully yeah um yeah but you know and and actually that first and still to this day I find the sacrament of reconciliation to be like one of the I mean I I would that was another thing again in my mind another doctrinal point because Paul writes about confession and he says confess your sins to one another um like I found that to be hugely powerful um and I still to this day like you know San Jose Maria talks about this as well where he talks about like he I think he describes it in one of his in one of his books that he like loved confession I mean he like bounded into confession with with eternal Joy right because because he he he wanted to to have this reconciliation and I kind of I remember going to this first confession and just feeling this like I mean it was it was overwhelming it was just the power of confession is so is so totemic it's like it crushes you because you just feel this relief and you I mean I was just like what am I doing whatever the lights kind of gets sobered up yeah you're like what was I doing I mean like what have I just done yeah like what have I done um I've lived a life which the Lord is totally unhappy about but he still loves me and his Mercy is greater than my worst sin and his Mercy rolls on for Generation to Generation Um and the there's a passage in the science was like it's a steadfast love of the Lord is renewed every morning yes and as far far as East is from the West so far has he removed our transgressions from us that's right and and I just felt how good is that let's just pause and bask in that for a moment isn't that wonderful Therese of lazier who I'm fond of quoting and since we just celebrated her feast day compared the most Grievous sins over the most Grievous sinner to a drop of water flicked into the Raging furnace of God's mercy I mean just breathe everybody who's watching you know if you're if you're a woman watching and you've had an abortion if you're a man living in a homosexual lifestyle you know if you've committed murder or patricide or if you've had multiple abortions uh all of that the most shameful the most criminal things we've done drop of water God's mercy raging furnace flick it in get to confession yeah you're not that special your sins will not extinguish his Mercy yeah glory to Jesus Christ glory to God glory to Christ I mean it and that was just something I remember that emotion of just power and and also just I'm so afraid to go to confession I just I was so you were that one time or yeah that first time I mean I was just I was so frightened I mean I was just like I didn't even know what I'm doing I remember the confession I had given before that and then I you know I've been years ago and um and then I went to this first event and I was just so it was just shaking when I went into were you married at this point or this was before we were married before you met no before we were married married sorry that's right so what was it like if you don't mind if this isn't too personal what was it like about to marry a woman who from my understand I don't know if she wasn't a Christian or isn't a Christian she's she's a Believer she was raised again you don't have to get into anything yeah I mean she's you know she's we talk about faith the whole was that problematic then like looking at marriage and now having this renewed Catholic faith and yeah I mean it was kind of an interesting yeah I mean it was something which I had to like really start to Grapple with at this point you know it was kind of like asking myself all these questions like what do I do about this now yeah what do I do about this elephant that has just come back into my how will we raise our children a lot of people are in this situation yeah yeah and I mean you know so Candace and I talked about it and and and you know she agreed that raising our children Catholic was um was something that she was on board with and she herself you know has has read many Catholic Books um and she's attended Mass with me she's never received of course but she she's come with me before and and that's you know so how did where did you get married we got married um we actually got married under an Anglican priest because my I don't think my parents would have would have accepted uh a Catholic wedding and so we then had the marriage radically sedated yes by the church um and so you know that made it not made it uh acceptable right yeah it's valid valid in the eyes of the church so um and that was kind of perceived as a somewhat of a compromise I guess between like most of my parents and my parents believed my parents friends and at the time also you know like I was it wasn't just that I was trying to compromise it was also that I was only just rediscovering my faith right the faith that had been from for many years so important it had been everything to me and then I suddenly was rediscovering this Faith so I was I also wasn't kind of I wasn't pushing a Catholic service because at this time I was I was still kind of rediscovering what I was going through and and you know it wasn't as important to me at that point as it was going to become you know and then suddenly it kind of went through this exponential like growth explosion where I just was like what like you know kind of when you start asking yourself the questions then it just becomes everything and and then that Fire ignited Within Me and then I was just like the Lord is with me yeah it's like okay was there was there a fear that you would drift away the way you did when you were confirmed or was this a different thing no it was different yeah it was it was different at this point I mean in some ways it's and it's never turned off so am I thinking kind of like in your teenage years or when you're a boy there was this love and heart relationship with our Lord if you want became very intellectual drifted away it sounds like the second time it was like the heart and head if you want sort of came together there was a yeah it was it was it was the heart of it was the heart of Mercy you know it was the heart of Christ which he it was the praise God the heart on fire you know and and and that was suddenly I just like you know I've had more just emotional moments I guess just sitting like I get hit by these I mean I was saying to Candace the other day like just driving somewhere I was driving back from Mass actually and and I just got kind of smashed in the face by this vision of the first time that I'm gonna meet Christ you know in the beatific vision of the kind of angelic court with billions of people praising his name I just got kind of you know you know just driving along and suddenly there's this great vision in my mind's eye um and it was just a sense of overwhelming joy and and you know that for me that was that was one of the the biggest things was just this kind of sense of fulfillment that the church suddenly offered to me it was like all of the striving all of this meaningless like existence that we have this search for recognition the search for remembrance the search for legacy the search for wealth the search for material possessions all of these things became completely meaningless to me overnight and suddenly I was just like I just want to give it all away I just want to grow his his message in his church in this world that was that was just what I felt and that's still kind of what I that is to this day what I feel I just want to I want to help grow his church I want to help build it I want to help resurrect it where it's died and and I just that's what I feel called there's a Simplicity that comes with Christianity that makes our life so much more beautiful like something I've been thinking about more and more it's like this this bud about to Blossom I don't know how to fully articulate it yet but you know when I'm not in Christ or if I'm seeking the approval of the world let's say yeah then I'm literally seeking the approval of everybody who matters to me whether it's someone watching on YouTube or my wife or her family or my family or you or whoever it's like wait I would need the approval of every person yeah but when it's when I'm in the Lord and I'm seeking his approval it's really me and him yeah it's so much more simple it's like he's everything yeah and I really just have to say be merciful to me a sinner and then of course if I've harmed somebody or if I've embarrassed somebody then I need to I need to reconcile but it's all out of love for him life's just so much more simple it's sort of me him um his will yeah whereas apart from Christ it's trying to seek the approval of everybody around me that matters to me and following their will to some degree in order to try to achieve my will in some utilitarian sense it gives you great courage I think to to recognize that you're trying to seek his will because suddenly it becomes so much more important yeah right and I mean that was in some ways like a there was you had someone on the show a while back I forget who it was it might have been Sister Miriam James but she was a woman she was talking about I think there was a somebody who walked in and and kissed the ring you were talking about kissing the ring and positioning and the priest and and somebody kissed the ring and they said oh don't do that and he said it's not about you yeah this is about Christ I am men yeah I just want to shout that out one of the things I love in the Eastern Church is it's customary to kiss not just The Bishop's hand but the priest's hand and it and I said to a newly ordained priest like what's that like and he said something very interesting but very accurate he says I need to grow in humility to in order to accept it which sounds counterintuitive you would think it's not an act of humility but of course it is because this isn't about you father yeah please let us question about you that's the point yeah and I and that was kind of then what I and that's still where I am to this day in terms of my intellectual grappling with confession which is that it's like it's not about me I mean it's it's about my relationship with God it's he already knows what sins I've committed he wants the broken and contrite spirit yes in in you know to feel that sense of I mean I feel such guilt so shame but when I go to confession it just it it's but it's it's cleansing it's that great cleansing experience and you know I've kind of talked about this this is kind of one of the overlaps that I think you know the modern world really needs from from the Catholic church I mean I think the modern world needs all of the Catholic church but like one of the issues we have with social media for example is like the lack of grace and the lack of mercy and I've said this before in in conferences like I spoke at a event down in Miami and um you know and I said that I said like we need grace and mercy the con the idea that somehow you can put something online and then that you can never change your opinion it's just absolute garbage like what are you talking about of course you can change your opinion people change you think that what I was putting out in 2006 on Facebook is still what I think to this day I mean what kind of video you see is that to think that people's belief system never evolves or changes or develops it's just nonsense yeah and then we can pin them down on the one thing that they you know and everyone makes stupid mistakes am I right in thinking Candace has spoken openly about like a blatant Act of racism that took place when she was a teenager yeah but I wrote about it in her book but one of the things I I loved about what she said was how much grace she extended to these people who were actually blatantly racist not the fake kind of racist that the left likes to propagate but the actual sin of racism yeah and that she said yeah like you stupid kid who has no stupid things like I forgive him yeah I just thought wow what a woman yeah I mean that's I mean that's I mean you know kids say stupid stuff I mean it's just obviously like I mean I'm so glad Instagram didn't exist when I was yeah and I mean like you know oh my gosh I just poor kids I'm so glad my kids will never have Instagram yeah yeah I mean and and there have been politicians in the UK like again I'm bringing him up even though I don't particularly think the guy was any kind of example to live by but Tony Blair famously said if social media had existed when I was a child I wouldn't be a prime minister yeah and it's just and it's so true because now we're putting this impossible standard up and what's interesting is it's almost like there's never been a time when it is so easy to get your thoughts across to so many people so instantaneously yeah it seems that precisely now is when we need Grace yeah I mean 30 40 years ago if I'm writing a book presumably I've put thought into this thing it's gone through an editing process it's then been published yeah maybe that's something to be canceled over but to click record and say stuff that comes to my mind in a long-form conversation or something else yeah and it's like no we need to absolutely eliminate him yeah no I mean where's this coming from it's coming from it's coming from an impossible standard right and well really I mean that's a great question where is it coming from fundamentally it's coming from the nonsense that the group think nonsense that happens when you put you know like classes of people against each other right that's that you're always seeking to cancel the next person for the alleged like political for their alleged failings in political thought right so as a result like you the circle gets ever smaller and smaller you know you have to continue to be like you know it's not just enough to support feminism now you have to support transgenderism and in fact you can't be a feminist without support you can't be a feminist without also supporting the transgender movement this this ever increasing like this have a decreasing Circle size of people who are allowed to think in the right way just means that by virtue of that you're going to continue to cancel people left right why does it have to um escalate like that why can't it just stand still because the more insane the thought gets you know the more radical and insane the thought gets it's like the more how it's it's I guess I guess it's a constances is it something like a sort of severing from reality and then a drifting well it's like it's a constant I mean I guess it's a constant kind of Circle of like who's the most depressed it's the oppression Olympics right so like how can you become more and more and more oppressed you have to find that group which is more and more and more pilloried like or perceived to be pilloried or you know marginalized within society and then you have to like highlight that group as the as the group which is the group that everyone needs to identify with and if you don't identify with it then you're going to get canceled right so it's it's the constant quest for oppression right I guess that would probably be where I see it as coming from right like people people are not oppressed anymore right like if you live in America you live in the most free Society in the freest country on the planet and so you're inventing oppression because you you you want to excuse poor Life Choices well I mean individuals can be oppressed well of course they can I mean you know what yes they can individuals across the whole world are oppressed um are you are you suffering from oppression in America in the 20 in 2022 like you mean in a systematic yeah group way exactly in like a systematic like for example you know if if you are individual like if you're gay in America there are laws designed to protect you from being marginalized by employers right these laws exist so what oppression there's even an entire month to celebrate it absolutely yeah and um so like what how are you being oppressed you know like how are you being systematically oppressed you know pretty much every corporation every major corporation has identified with with your section of society like as you say we have an entire month to do it you know every every uh every corporation seems to bend over backwards to cater to whichever group it is that is now allegedly exclaiming oppression right so uh there's very few groups that are actually oppressed within American society you know by contrast if you're a Christian in Saudi Arabia or you're a Christian in the Middle East good luck trying to build a church you know like Cardinal Zen I mean it's just you know there is genuine examples of Oppression all over the world where groups are being oppressed and tortured and killed and locked up for their political and religious beliefs America is not a country where that is happening but this invention of the system of Oppression this invention of the suppression narrative is critical to the advancement of the left skulls which is you know a a portrayal that there are like two groups which oppose each other whether it be big short fat thin you know whatever it might be black versus white all of this Narrative of um systematic oppression or violence of one group towards the other is critical to the left making you believe that there are other parts of society that want you to fail right and as a result you should put your faith in government which is the ultimate Arbiter of truth right so remove God certainly from the equation put your faith in government the government will guarantee your safety as a marginalized depressed group this is this is the kind of the root of a lot of the left's narrative hmm Bishop Baron talked about this the other day when he talked about Foucault and um he talks about this when he said you know like Foucault's thought has influence and this is also what Jordan Peterson has argued um and I think that there's some truth to it although to what extent one can say that it's it's just a a direct stem from Foucault's thought I I don't know foucos thought well enough to know whether or not it is accurate but um working upon the assumption that those Minds have done their homework you know there's there is probably some truth to it um but also there is it's it's it goes deeper than that it's it's a Marx it's an engelian style of thought you know this is this is what was written in the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie um were the opponents with the with the inevitable and fatal opponents of the proletariat and now really what you've just done is you've evolved that kind of language to cater to you know whether it be black versus white or you know tall versus short or Rich versus poor or whatever it might be you know the necessary construct of power groups within Society is critical to understanding that the government must step in right so this is and that's where we are now hmm yeah this this idea that if objective truth doesn't exist then what is what are we doing when we're communicating and then communicating becomes an act of manipulation it's not me conveying something true to you that your mind can grasp and submit to yeah it's me trying to make you do the thing I want you to do yeah and so that's when speech becomes violence yeah which in itself is a nonsense term like why do yeah speech cannot be violent I mean why because I mean it can hurt your feelings it can make you feel bad it can cause depression perhaps it can speech is powerful but but actions define actions have to be The Logical outcome of speech right so if actions become violent one can say well your speech is inciting violence I see but speech itself cannot be violent as soon as you've crossed that Rubicon you start to move into the world that social media is in right now which is this subjective arbitrary decisions as to what can and cannot be said right and at some point there therefore you are having to call like if speech is violence then somebody has to regulate speech and then who regulates speech right and this is where every this is where every totalitarian government in the world gets to right so like you know your speech is you know kind of coming after the government in one form or another so we're going to shut you down right you know you're you're perceived to be an enemy of the national interest right and so therefore we're going to shut you down and this is what the left is doing now with their allies in big Tech which is exactly where we've got to you know they've suddenly started drawing these arbitrary subjective lines as to who can say what and what can be said um and then of course at that point you've kind of already lost because you're going to get canceled at some point you're just going to get kicked off social media platforms you're gonna you're gonna be relegated to having to fight against the system a kafka-esque nightmare where you cannot understand the bureaucracy that has relegated you to to being canceled um your your this is what I mean that the circle gets ever smaller like you've already seen this on social media you know you've seen people on both the left and the right who have expressed opinions about whether it be vaccines or whether it be health care or whether it be racism or transgenderism whatever it might be um all of these people have started to be canceled right and so there are people on the left who have been canceled there are people on the right have been canceled Naomi Klein um you know she wrote the shock Doctrine talking about like how free market capitalism has effectively been hoisted onto the Western World you know she's a big anti-capitalist she's also vehemently anti-vaccine she was you know she was an advisor to Clinton's government she was kicked off Twitter she was banned permanently from Twitter um you know obviously on the right there's plenty of examples of people who have been kicked off um and and that means that the social media businesses have effectively crossed that line they have now started to believe that speech is violence and therefore we must shut it down and we must control what speech can be said and so you're already in that like Paradigm reality where people are gonna you know you're gonna force people offline and this is the very frightening thing because this is actually the most frightening thing in the left or the the kind of authoritarian big Tech don't understand this and this is what frightens me the most is because when you when you push people offline when you push people into into into the world where they they feel like they can't say what they want to say it becomes the the dark place from which bad ideas germinate right and that is like really terrifying because then those bad ideas never get to see a good idea and the only way you can defeat a bad idea is by showing it a good idea because if you just leave it to grow in the darkness you know dark things grow in the darkness and and so you then end up with this horrible world where and I mean you've kind of seen it in Germany right I mean this is this is something which I've talked about before which is like in Germany Holocaust denial is illegal which is nonsense why why should the denial of a of a of of an historical event be illegal now of course one could argue well there are lots of reasons in Germany why this is the case you know because of the because of the sensitivity of the topic in the past but as a result you now have a huge section of German society that doesn't believe the Holocaust ever happened right so you've got millions of people in Germany who deny the Holocaust because Holocaust denial is illegal and and so this is and and explain to me how you think that happens so they're getting sort of shut out of public discourse and then they're communicating with each other why is it that this thing is how is it growing if the the methods to communicate this false idea namely the Holocaust Holocaust never happened yeah uh denied them so I mean this is this is the this is the this is the inflection point between um totalitarian governments and actual repression of people right we live we I'm going to kind of try and break it out into like a a triangle or like a three different sides of the argument so basically um we live in a western we live in the west which allegedly makes this appeal to free speech as an organization we haven't yet got to the point where people are literally being put in camps and taken away like the Chinese Muslim population right because we because we have said the wrong thing we haven't got there yet yeah right now you know I would say there was a strong like there was a strong push towards people who did not get the vaccine to kind of be put into something which resembled something and it was not it was not a pleasant it was not pleasant to witness we haven't yet got to the point where people are being taken away and put in camps so but what you have got on the flip side is you have got the totalitarian control of the mediums of communication so you've already got the Tata term control of mediums of communication in the form of big Tech you haven't yet got the government taking people away and you have got a legal speech right you've got like take the Holocaust in our thing right you've got this illegal speech you've got the means you've got the control of communication but you haven't got the kind of in theory the three normally move hand in hand totalitarian control illegal speech yes right like camps camps something right yeah so you haven't got this third party which means that people are still able to think what they want to think and this is always where totang governments fall down because at the end of the day you can only hoist a lie onto people for so long before like the innate before God breaks through or before the the innate like freedom of the human mind knows that something is wrong I mean this is like every story about the Soviet the decline of the Soviet Union talks about this basically we're just it was just nonsense like making people believe fiction just the whole time like we have to meet this quota you know I've read plenty of books about the last 10 years of the Soviet Union it's always ridiculous they're kind of entertaining if it wasn't I mean they would be entertaining stories if they weren't so sad in some ways because you know millions of people were dying of hunger and starvation where These Guys these Regional officials would just be set arbitrary quotas by the Kremlin and then you know they would just invent the numbers and they just say yeah we've made 48 000 tons of of wheat this year when they'd only made like three right and so the Kremlin would be like great we've got 48 000 tons of wheat coming from you know the you know the oblast of wherever and uh and then of course nothing would nothing like that would come and then you know people would be short rationed and then they would die of hunger over the winter right and this this was happening the whole time um so it's it's to to go back to the original Point like you you've got this system now but again the Soviet Union the Soviet totalitarian governments had absolute control they had the means to execute people they controlled illegal speech and they had the the control of the mediums of communication we do not have that final third side of the triangle and so as a result you have people who are being kicked off forums online by controlled media you have illegal things like in the UK this is happening as well the police are turning up at people's houses to ask them why they're tweeting about transgender that's not happening yep you know that happens quite frequently now in the UK um but you don't have this kind of end goal what are you seeing here in the states you've mentioned Germany with Holocaust denial transgender talk police show up yeah what's the states so the big differentiator between the states and the rest of the world and this is you know one thing that I I pray it never changes hate speech laws right the very time hate speech is a nonsense right the very terminology of that is complete falsity because it comes back to this idea that speech can be violent which is a nonsense right you have to have the ability to speak freely if you do not have the ability to speak freely you will never get public discourse right you will always live in fear of speech repression right and so the UK the US does not have hate speech laws but people will push back against that maybe and say I'm not sure what you mean I want to but I don't fully understand because speech can be hateful can't it yeah but you you have to be able to offend people with your speech right I mean speech is naturally offensive I don't like you right like your hair looks funny yeah you know like your beard is stupid right your jacket looks yeah I'm just I don't think any of these things I don't like you um but the point being is that like okay so none of those were really that offensive but let's just say I don't like you because you're white right okay well so now have I crossed the line like I don't like you because you're straight I don't have we crossed where do where does the line get drawn right and so speech again it comes back to this whole point you have to have free speech if you don't have free speech somebody is setting the rules at where that Free Speech yeah lines right I mean this is one thing about parlor right it's like you know I I've never made an editorial decision about the content on our platform never once have I made a decision right because in my mind and the mind of all the management of the business it's like the the the sliding scale is so far up here you know we have Community guidelines every platform has to have Community Gardens we don't allow pornography you know we don't allow Financial doxing we don't allow allow you know like uh you know this like Gore you know Gore or excessive violence right but the amount of content on the platform that actually violates those rules is Tiny right there's plenty of stuff we do allow that you would never get away with on Twitter right I mean people go on there the whole time and post you know I mean I I get a selection of it and it's pretty disgusting stuff but like they're allowed to say it there's no law stopping them from saying and this is the point if you start to regulate that and start to say okay you cannot say this then where are those people going to go that's yeah that's what I want to get to they're going to go offline they're going to they're going to find other mediums of communication you haven't yet got that place where you're taking them away to camps yeah and trying to re-indoctrinate them so they're going to find other mediums of communication other methodologies of communication they're going to go into the dark places of the internet and they're going to inculcate themselves unchallenged with a set of beliefs that you do not want them to be right yes and that's like and you know that's actually why I fear the most for like you know I fear for Europe because Europe has a bad history with extremism and and like Dominic Cummings who I'm gonna tangent here but Dominic Cummings was one of the political advisors on the brexit campaign and he has a checkered reputation let's put it like that um but one of the things that he said which I really think is the most interesting thing is that you cannot like you need to hear the music basically and you need to listen to what the music is saying and here and the reason he was big Pro brexit was because he was like we need to give the people this voice they are desperate to express themselves and not just another general election of meaningless politicians on the on the soapbox but a genuine political expression of how they want their country to be ruled right because if we keep shutting them down and and and jamming them into the face of the globalists then you're gonna you're gonna end up with a revolution that is going to be far far uglier than a quiet revolution of 17.4 million people voting to leave uh transnational you know economic block right and that and that Revolution that's going to come in 20 years time is going to be blood and it's going to be violent and it's going to be painful right and you're kind of like well you know I mean you again you're seeing this in Europe already like what's happened in Sweden you know like you thankfully the Swedish people are now voting to express their discontent with the way the ruling government has has allowed they've you know the Swedish Democrats are now the one of the largest parties they they have taken a very strong opinion about the integration of one million uh economic migrants um and alleged refugees from you know North Africa and Syria into a population of 13 million right and you're taking a million people out of a population of 13 million people you're obviously going to get societal disconnects right I mean there's a huge differentiator between the cultural and and religious beliefs of people from transcontinental you know like thousands of miles away and Sweden which is you know a relatively Placid Nordic country in the north of in the north of Europe with a climate which is substantially different from the one that these people are coming from um and what have you got now you know it's it's now bog standard for grenades to be going off in Malmo which is a southern city of of Sweden it's now very you know like it has one of the highest rape incidences in the whole in the whole of Europe no Sweden I mean these are the kind of cultural problems that you will get if you just go you know what we're not going to have this debate and we're just going to shut it down wow and so that and then and then in the long run this is where I'm going with this point you will get this very you'll get a backlash which you cannot control and that is going to be the most violent and that's going to be the danger point and that's that's what's scary that's why you need for expression because if you shut people down for so long eventually they will they will take to the streets in a way that you cannot control right or that you cannot it's not even about control it's about allowing for people to say what they really think so then how do you have Community guidelines and it not be shutting people down I mean you slide the scale as much to one way as you can right okay that's that's what we've done I mean that so let's talk about Paulo let's kind of can I get can I use the restroom first oh yeah sure let's we'll take a break and then we'll come back to talk about parlor too much coffee yeah me too [Music] see you nodding yeah okay go go Pig I want this I want this break to be as short as possible foreign [Music] Chesterton and Co cigars this is a company that me and some mates started here in Steubenville Ohio and this Friday is our grand opening I know not everybody can fly to Ohio but we're going to have several thousand people on this Main Street just outside those doors for Oktoberfest here in Steubenville we have a street party uh every uh every month during the summer and spring in Autumn I love that and so it's going to be we're gonna be celebrating Oktoberfest and yeah we're really really pumped so yeah and you've brought some cigars I did which we will smoke at some point but we didn't want to begin with them because it's more like uh once the flow of conversation has been established yes that's right he's into them but you can tell can't you there is a difference you've heard me say this that the conversation usually begins an hour in yeah that's right it's just it's an awkward thing like this is you want to get to know each other and then kind of like figure out where you're going where the conversation is moving and not just that there's the record there's the realization that there are people behind screens and keyboards who are watching this all around the world that's very strange normally I'm one of them yeah like over a thousand people watching right now imagine if there's a thousand people just sitting out there guys so bizarre yeah it's a weird unnatural experience it takes yeah it takes a while until you get to forget about it and get into it I love your show thank you I really do I think it's it's a you know coming back to that conversation station before we broke it was like it's it's a conversation that these are conversations that people need you know like long-form content everything's a sound bite these days and it's so tiresome because it's it's yeah it you know like the Twitter character limit is kind of the Twitter character limited is responsible for the cheapening of public discourse right because you can't express yourself in a long format right and you know one of the reasons I love your show is because like first of all you have guests on who like are very outside the traditional sphere like it's not just kind of the Fox News speaker circuit it's it's um or like you know CNN speaker circuit for that matter it's it's much more like its theological heavyweights right which for me is fascinating and you know I love that because that was kind of what I was immersed in um from from for many years but then also you have conversations first you recognize your own need for for Grace like you're very good at this Matt you know one of the ways in which you like you talk about yourself I mean like the number of times that I've heard you say you're a coward is like ridiculous I mean I you know there were some there was a series of episodes where I think you mentioned to every show um and I just found that really interesting because a self-recognition of One's Own weakness is like such a powerful statement um and the people you have on are equally like recognizing their own weakness and their own need for Savior and that then there is for salvation that is a result of the fact that these people have a have a living relationship with with the Lord Our God you know and that's like I don't think you get to that point of humility until you have that relationship um because like you recognize your own need for forgiveness you recognize your own need for for salvation no thank you when did you hear about pints let's turn this into a show about points when did you first hear about it I you know the YouTube algorithm um which knows you better than you know you yeah pretty much it's kind of terrifying I mean I I was I just came across it one day I think I think who you I think you were doing some interview on like church history or something and and I I have watched quite a few videos on church history on YouTube and it was like you may like this and then it was like pints with Aquinas and then I thought the name was funny yeah pints with Aquinas because I was just like well like that's quite an unusual name in vino veritas that's the whole yeah well pints is unusual like Americans don't really understand the concept of a pint whereas British it's like a point is synonymous with a glass of beer yeah exactly it's just it's kind of a you know it's like the hand-in-hand recognition of this thing so I was like oh that's kind of unusual pints Aquinas I was like okay there's a lot going on here there's a lot to unpack just in the name you know and so then I became interested and then I've watched pretty much every video I've ever done it's awkward because like I was so excited to kind of meet you and get to know you and then I'm aware as I'm sharing things with you like I have really long podcasts you probably already know this just stop me if I've already said it but one of my favorite things to do and was in the past is just chatting with people in pubs yeah I love that I I love I don't love the drunkenness I don't like people being drunk or any that's obviously a sin and I wouldn't encourage it but to be but there is something about someone who's had one too many yeah and the truth starts to come out like they want to tell you that their daughter hates them and they don't know why yeah or they can't stop looking at porn and you know they've never really told anybody I I just love that Honesty yeah you can get to sometimes I I find that to be and that kind of comes back to what we were saying earlier like uh it's just one of the things that the Hallmark of our face you know is that confession the sacrament of confession just brings such brutal honesty with it and you can't escape your own sin you know and there's and this is kind of one of the things that I would say that that the Protestant church has got really badly wrong um is just like there's there's a malformed Theology of of of I don't want to say grace because that's not quite actually what I'm looking for but it's it's like a malformed Theology of of penance really it's kind of where I I would I would say that the Protestant church has gone badly wrong because there is no face-to-face confession um there is no there is there is a a vague requirement that effectively you confess your sins in prayer to God but like we all know that left to ourselves our own ego is going to yeah like Dodge that bullet as many times as it can right there's so much about Catholicism that is just so suited to our human nature yeah you know like I've spoken to Protestants who say that they began to understand the intercession of the Saints when their wife died say and they would find themselves walking about the house talking yeah to their deceased loved one and I suppose you could look at that and say well these are all sort of uh Fallen human issues that have worked their way into the church and have thereby perverted it or you could say that maybe it fits our human nature like a glove as it were and so yeah to sit before another human being and to Bear your soul like you're not there to celebrate what you've done well you're there to say what you're most ashamed about yeah it's almost like if you if the church didn't have that we'd have to invent it somehow yeah or how do you live without the Blessed Mother uh it seems like again that would have to be something we'd have to come up with because it seems so natural yeah there is something so beautiful about Catholicism yeah I mean there absolutely is and I mean that was another thing we spoke about Mary earlier as well and I just think that that's something which like it's a huge aspect of Marion theology that I don't think is the the Protestant church or my experience of the Protestant church is that it has a has a poorly defined Theology of um not so much the body but it I would argue that that is quite poorly defined by the Protestant church but also I would say that um the Theology of and I'm going to tread on a land mine here in terms of modern day words but gender um and what I mean by that is that there really isn't like if you're a woman in the Protestant Church there's no there's no I mean there's Christ right but there's no like a vision for Womanhood there's no the the vision for Womanhood is really Paul's letters wives submit to your husbands right and and of course that's theologically accurate but it's more that there's like who is the great heroine who is the great female figure in in the prostitution there isn't one right there they don't have the Saints so there's no soon Teresa of Avila there's no centralizer there's you there's no there's there's no Joan of Arc there's nothing right um and then there's no Marion theology so in turn there's there's no one to look to in the Bible right I mean Ruth is about as good as again Ruth and Esther are about the two who are about as good as it gets um and so I think this I mean and here I'm just kind of pontificating on my own opinions but um what a better thing to do that's what the whole point of the show is yeah and um but I think one of the things is that like our culture our Western like post Protestant secular culture has kind of you know like all things with a poorly formed basis you know it's now it's now kind of malformed totally into just a like a generational issue with the Theology of gender right and as a result like we don't have very well defined ideas of what it means to be a man what it means to be a woman in modern day Society because we have this kind of Hangover of the Protestant past which has these poorly formed theologies um when you look at the Catholic Church's teachings you have this unbelievably beautiful figure of Mary who like is filled with grace you know and it's like it's and and she's such a perfect I mean she the first person of the church you know she's just this wonderful character who uh English Protestant poet William Wordsworth called her our tainted Nature's solitary boost that's a beautiful way of describing it yeah that's beautiful that's that's that's a very glorious way of putting in um and that for me also changed the way that I perceived women you know when I became a Catholic it was like that theology started to affect the way that I viewed Womanhood not that I had any experience of Womanhood but I just I I could see it clearer you in my mind's eye and my own theological understanding and also then of course you know it's complementarity it it works then in turn with the Theology of Womanhood complements the Theology of what it means to be a man right and that that synthesis is so much more clearly defined you know by the Catholic church and and the bringing together of those two relationships the bringing together those two bodies um is so much clearer in Catholic thought than it is in in modern day Protestant thought which I find to be intellectually shallow with regards to this so that was something also where I I was drawn to it you know it was like wow this is a very powerful theology that I've never been exposed to before you know I know we have a lot of protestant listeners some are considering Catholicism some aren't I was in uh I was in Iowa last week and I was just at a restaurant and someone said hey are you pints with Aquinas no I'm Matt frad and I run a shirt yeah and uh but he was a Protestant listener and uh so I I guess I I guess I'm cognizant of how they might be discussion well it's not the polemical it's that no one is longing to be part of a group that they feel continually bashes or demeans them which isn't what I hope is coming across here because one of the things I love about converts to Catholicism such as yourself from protestantism is that you you can I'll let you speak for yourself but Protestant converts Catholicism often speak with tremendous affection for how they were raised and gratitude for the formation that they had and deep respect for the faithful Protestants they know I mean that's certainly true in my case um one of my dear my best friends how gross is it that you can see my socks I shouldn't have pointed it out now yeah let's chat decide you what on the socks yeah good um okay well I'll just I'll flatten them for people if it's making people throw up um yeah my best friend's mum converted and then became Protestant but she loves Jesus Christ and she would spend like an hour in the word every morning and there's just so much I can learn as a Catholic from her and I know certain Protestants who I suppose I would say are far more Catholic than many Catholics that I know oh so as I say okay being political okay saying I would like you to become Catholic but I also know the experience of Protestants who are listening well I know what it's like as a Catholic who tries to benefit from say an orthodox podcast which I get a great deal from and you just like why are they keep talking about us like what just yeah you know why do you get ready well I mean for me it's because it was such a defining feature of my life you know and that's and that's right and that's why I was just it it was everything I knew you know it was it was you've had Protestant ministers on on your show who have converted and you know I've heard them talk about it quite a bit as well but it it for me it was look I wouldn't have become a Catholic without the upbringing that I had you know there's no doubt about it I mean I was I was I was deeply immersed in faith and my my parents are deeply faithful wonderful fantastic loving Christian people and many of them many Protestants I know still to this day like occupy that space where they do I mean there are things that the person church has absolutely got right I mean like evangelization you know like I mean talk about talk about like an overt approach to evangelization like we we as Catholics need to learn from their from I mean the missions which went on at schools at universities like you know they did a campus crusade in England many years ago like after after I left Oxford but it was you know it was spearheaded by Evangelical churches who were just like we need to get people to hear the good news of Christ you know and like you know I I wish that like I found Catholics who were you know as like fiery in terms of their mission to evangelization um you know and and a knowledge of the scriptures I mean that is incredible you know like I was immersed in the scriptures from a very young age you know I mean I was we'd spend every morning Reading part of the scriptures and you know what that entailed was you know a deep knowledge of the Lord in in Holy Scripture um Peter craff has a line when a maniac is at the door feuding Brothers reconcile and we began talking about the maniac of leftism yeah and uh yeah it seems that we've got to be willing to take allies where we can find them to band together to fight against this nonsense and Insanity that's being pressed on us from every side 100 and I mean and I mean you know you're finding that in society to this day like you know a belief in God is Central or I believe in in God in Christ is Central to to the idea of having to conserve anything at all yeah like why why are you a conservative you don't believe in God I don't I you know I'm sure there are plenty of atheists out there who will start to you know who probably be like well because of this and because of that and I'm like yeah you know there's there's there are there are economic reasons why it's sensible to hold fiscal conservative positions of course yep um you know and I'm sure there's like one can argue the basis of if you want to say that economics is the basis for the rationality of all social and governmental decisions that you make um you can try and do that but it becomes a very reductionist argument very very quickly and it becomes very utilitarian very very quickly um so you need to be aspiring to conserve something cultural and deeper than just pure numbers right like why is it an issue that like why is abortion an issue why is family break down an issue yes there are good economic reasons why you can try and justify that but like the concept of the family unit is not just an economic reductionist model it shouldn't just be that it should be much deeper than that it has a spiritual plane upon which it operates so if you're truly a conservative and you're saying okay well I support the family you Protestant Catholic Orthodox alike all of these all of these groups will draw from the same inspiration the family is a god-given unit which is blessed by him and is the perfect vehicle in which to raise children and have a fruitful life of marriage my dad always jokes I mean he he said this line to me many many times over the years which is being a Christian is a massively unfair advantage and and and I think that that's really very true because when you start to break it down you you have a free gift of Grace which is extended to you through the Hands of Christ Jesus and you have uh all the blessings that entails you know the end not to say your life's going to be perfect when you're a Christian of course not you know we're still falling we're still Sinners we're still make mistakes uh and the world is fallen and makes mistakes but you know fundamentally like you have the you have the core unit of your life you have that Center Center unit of your life is has been put into into right format right which is that God and not you yeah the center all right thanks Thursday thank you well you're being handed food the chat was very supportive of you um airing out and being as comfortable so now everyone's asking for pints with Aquinas socks everyone's like please please God don't take your pants off well that's just for our local support join join locals yeah for a pantless Tuesdays before we talk about parlor and what happened and and what's going on today I want to mention one of our sponsors hello h-a-l-l-o-w hello is the best prayer and meditation app on the web for Catholics and non-catholics alike hello.com slash would you remind me what did you put could you do me if I put the link in there I think it's hello.com Matt when you sign up mad frad is it Matt Fred how do you know is it is it really whatever every time I forget italy.com check it out and just remind me here um they've got everything from it'll help you meditate help you pray the rosary I'm happy to give hallo complimentary shout out to do it it's brilliant you use it yeah I think it's one of the best it's one of the best apps I've ever come across it it really really is it really is I mean all right let's listen to Scott Hahn's sleep story from Romans ready good evening and welcome to tonight's Bible story my name is Dr Scott Hahn I mean that you could be listening to that it's like a deeply melodic voice he's got yes there's a ton of sleep stories meditations that's wonderful he sounds like a BBC presenter from the 1950s yeah good evening yeah yeah and that's why we've got to smoke three cigars a day and we'll eventually get that right um or a pipe permanent and they've got yeah they've got kids stories you can listen to that I play for my kids at night the tale of Saint Nick is one of them Christmas Story it go check them out you've got did you check it out is it hello.com it's all at hello.com Matt go there three months yes you get a lot of stuff too if it's not paid too if you want to just try it yeah you can just try it out but make sure you when you do want to sign up go to hallow.com I was wrong you were wrong I was wrong I thought you were right and when you sign up you'll get three months for free so you can try it out but make sure you sign up over there because that way hello will like me more and keep paying me to talk about them 100 yeah that's right and the day they stop I'm selling my own meditation yeah it's just going to be me in socks yeah I don't know no I promise I won't do that but anyway hello good it's a beautiful app I mean it's it's very well designed beautiful interface I was like stunned when I came across it so I came across it in the early days like four four years ago or something yeah and it was great then and it's just increasingly got amazing since yeah um Paula you're the CEO of parlor for my sins what happened in the beginning with parlor because it felt like I can't wait to get I'm sure you know this story just as well as anybody else on the planet yeah because it was like we kept getting told well if you don't like all the cancellations if you don't like the whole left-leaning platform start your own yeah and then Paula showed up and then it was canceled by Amazon Google and apple tell us about how that happened yeah or are you so bored you want to listen to The Sleep story let's just play Scott Heineken um so yeah Paula was founded in 2018 and it was pitched as a free speech alternative to Big Tex you know kind of Monopoly on um on on social media and it was founded by um one guy called John mates and a woman called Rebecca Mercer um and it had some moderate I would say it had slow pick up in the beginning um you know for 2018 and 2019 it was kind of a handful of people who were using the platform as a free speech alternative it's it's direct competition was Twitter you know that was that was it was going after the micro blogging style of content not video content not kind of Facebook style groups but really that's that kind of micro blogging style of interaction um in 2020 you had this kind of triple whammy of uh of national and Global events which triggered this huge Exodus of people out of traditional social media because of censorship so you had first of all the black lives matter George Floyd riots well first of all sorry you had covert right and so questioning the covert narrative right became like a huge censorship opportunity for Tech Giants then you had the black lives matter um content which you know again was a huge census opportunity and then you had the election so you had these three kind of seismic Global events which um just meant that so many people got shut down on social media I mean my wife was fact checked to the nth degree on Facebook and all this kind of stuff I'm surprised that she uh hasn't been canceled or wasn't after that yeah she did a video on George Floyd yeah I've got 163 million views it was crazy yeah where she taught that where she tore the George Floyd narrative to Pieces um wow and I'm so surprised she didn't get banned for that yeah I mean it was kind of I mean legitimate death threats for that oh crazy I mean yeah oh yeah it's poor yeah I mean it was it was it was not fun I mean I know these people say they get death threats and sometimes I wonder you know how so there's you get one guy who called you and said something mean and then you say you got death threats to make yourself seem like a hero but no you actually got um so I I would divide the category of like threats against high-profile figures into a couple of buckets there's kind of like the generic death threat that you get like I want to kill you online um which is you know pretty much power for the course yeah like you know 15 of the comments which are online um and you know you just kind of like you brush those off because most people never bother executing or following through um executing nice yeah exactly um then you then you then you get then you get the kind of next evolution of that which is people who do start to plan to follow through they normally get picked up by law enforcement pretty quickly um so we got calls from law enforcement um talking about like actual what they call Clear and Present threats like real threats um people they've identified individuals who are you know clearly a danger to to us or to my family and then you get the third bucket which is kind of the mentally challenged like the deranged who normally with them it's kind of gone into a stage of like they believe a narrative that they have constructed in their own mind about the person that they are threatening and that narrative is normally something totally Fantastical like there was one guy you know he believed that he was in a relationship with Candace you know like he perceived that everything she said was directed at him you know it was kind of completely nuts and normally those people are like the people that I get the most nervous about right because that's just kind of like you they're unpredictable you know like I mean there was a woman who set up a GoFundMe to kill cancer right and you know she was trying to buy weapons and plane tickets to how much money did she raise before hopefully it was banned it was like 11k I say hopefully yeah and of course and then you know whoever's donating to that campaign in turn is like well you obviously that is unbelievable like you want to really get rid of cancer um so you know the FBI picked that up pretty quickly and there were other law enforcement who got involved um we now live in Nashville you know and we have a very good relationship with the local what's your exact address yeah sure it is what's your address so you know that was kind of like something which um you know we we just became very aware of um what does that do to you how do you wake up drink your coffee and hang out with your kids when stuff like that's going on that's next level I feel like a lot of people on social media complain when someone's a little mean to them but they probably have no idea what that is actually like I mean you know I I I get nervous for my children I think that's really what I get no I get very scared about that um you know that's kind of it's quite trying sometimes I mean most the time because I I'm very you know I'm counting when counters and I first met her career was still in that kind of evolutionary phase you know it wasn't quite where it is now which is kind of like you know turning up with a Kanye West's fashion show in Paris wearing a white lives matter t-shirt you know it's just like um it wasn't there so in turn her and I have you know evolved together with regards to like a I would say what's described as like the threat Matrix right and so the threat Matrix in turn has evolved over that time and um we've obviously had to ratchet Security in turn I feel very comfortable now with the security that we have we have a full-time Security operation you know it's it's not just Personnel it's they monitor online for Threads they scan the dark web they you know they they pull data from a lot of different sources they're in regular contact with law enforcement um you know we just have a very we have a finger we have our finger on the pulse of the security threat profile against us we have an incredibly Advanced security system at our house which covers everything from infrared to motion sensor to high security doors to shatterproof glass to a full-time residential officers like all of this kind of stuff so how many times a year do you just want to quit this and recede into the background well it's funny because you went hunting in Namibia and um I spent in my business career I spent a lot of time in sub-Saharan Africa um like Zambia uh South Africa um you know that part of those parts of the world and I've long had an affinity with Namibia and just the remoteness of it sort of because you don't have like it's the 186th least populated country on Earth and so you can just you know we could just go there and none of this would exist yeah you know nobody would have a clue who Candace is nobody would have a clue who I am it doesn't make any difference you know it's just like you're just at peace with nature and a God you know and that's it um but it's probably at times like that that you're reminded that you believe the Lord has called you to something yeah I mean and that is something yeah yeah exactly yeah it's a dangerous thing for those stepping out your front door um you know and it's kind of that's where we are now in our life a little bit it's it's that comes back to that that path to lay before my feet like you know I think that the Lord has called us called Candace she she is definitely called to something you know like I mean even if if she retired tomorrow she would have been called to what she had achieved what she has achieved now I mean she is she is the most incredible she's terrific I've ever met a mother honestly if she had invited me to go with Kanye to Paris I would have asked you to do this solo I would not have hung out here for you yeah but okay you began by saying we had these these events like covert and black lives matter that's led to this that's right yeah so you know that 2020 was the year that like Paula suddenly it it kind of was the you know the The Golden Child of the Free Speech movement at that point and um people flocked to the platform particularly in the aftermath of the election um and the fact that people you know thought that the election was was stolen um and so that that narrative became like an over I mean it went from a platform with under a million accounts to 11.3 million accounts signing up in the space of two months right how many of them were fake they were pretty much all real well right I mean we had it total we have it still to this day we have about 16 million registered accounts 16 yep 16. I purged in August of last year um 250 000 Bots that we we identified on the platform Bots are very easy to spot by the way this is one of the reasons because they always have like ridiculous email addresses it's always like it's just yeah ridiculous email address you know I mean people have ridiculous email addresses they do but like normally the domain name is the giveaway right so it's not like Matt at you know whatever it is uh it's like I hate the Jews at gmail.com that's it it's normally Gmail at ihatethejews.com that's it's something very predictable like that or there's a lot of like fake Chinese domains which also get registered um and so this is why I say that Twitter is just lying to its investors because like there's if they really wanted to clean them out they could 100 clean them out they know where they are right I mean Katy Perry one of the most followed accounts on Twitter has 108 million followers but her pinned tweet has like 3 000 retweets I mean it's just nonsense like what are you are you saying these people just signed up once and then disappeared well that means they're not a real account right this is the point you're actually a fake account your robot account hence the reason elon's got this big dispute with them right now in Delaware Chancery Court so um then what happened was on January the obviously January the 6th there was you know this big protest in DC and then the whole country went nuts and we're still dealing with the Fallout of that right now um and Paula falsely was scapegoated as the platform upon which the whole of January 6th troubles was hoisted why falsely because every analysis done in the aftermath demonstrated that parlor was not the platform used to host the majority of content around planning for January the 6th do they know what was Facebook right every study has proved this every study has proved that Facebook was the overwhelming platform that the majority of of January VI was planned on in fact Paula was not just a minority it was a significant minority but it was a threat it's growth at that point was a threat you know to suddenly go from a nothing platform to having 16 million accounts in a very very short space of time um to being perceived as like a free speech Challenger to the hegemony of the Global Tech oligarchs was was like oligopoly was like a it was you can't have this we have to shut it down right and so content violations like content moderation was cited as the reason despite the fact that we there had been all the all the concerns around content moderation had either been addressed or were no different to other platforms that operate in the Space Twitter or Facebook or Instagram um and so the platform was de-platformed by not just Amazon Google Apple but about 19 other service providers um and you know Nile Nile Gallagher and The Spectator the UK spectator wrote you know it was like the most stunning demonstration of Big Tex power ever to exist right wow and it's true because no company had ever been digitally de-platformed in the way that Paula was just booted off into the Wilderness were you associated with them at the time no what was it like for those folks it was chaos um you know I came in rapidly after that I came it was it was kicked off in January the 10th the former CEO was sacked by the board on January the 29th and I was brought in at the end of February and to help restructure the business and and how did you all get back online and did Amazon and Google yeah I mean it was a lengthy process so there's several different stages to getting back online to getting literally just back online right you need to find a new hosting provider yeah which is um you know data centers serve as private Cloud we've just staged an acquisition in this space we just bought a big private Cloud hosting provider out of California with data center operations as well because I I now want to be able to take our narrative and go and Pitch this to every other business that I think is going to get canceled like the Catholic world is in the eye of the storm right now this is no doubt about it right I mean if you're a pro-life anti-trans organization in America your days are numbered um Neil would you put a link to my Rumble account in the description I'd like everybody to please go and subscribe over on Rumble and watch these shows over on Rumble because you were saying to me that the other day like your days are numbered here yeah you think that's yeah I think you are I mean I I would definitely I think you've you've got at the moment you know you're small enough I mean you've got a you've got a great show I love it you know I watch it every week but it's under the radar right now it's under the radar but when you get big enough the target will grow on your back and then you will platformed because you're saying things that defy the narrative and that you know is just I mean I I will put money on it you know if I was a betting man I would put money on it but I just I every organization is gonna is is gonna suffer this you know this is the problem right now is that we live in this era of mass cancellation and censorship um and so you're like the trans issue it's going to get it gets flagged the whole time you know you misgender people you're gonna get you're going to get kicked off um you you're pro-life the abortion the abortion debate has not yet kind of triggered the switch but as the viewpoints get more extreme on the left it will become more of a Hot Topic issue I thought that after Biden was elected that maybe the temperature would decrease and they would the left would feel less threatened and cease coming after us that doesn't seem to be what's taken place yeah I mean yeah I'm struggling to find an appropriate metaphor in my head but it's like you know I don't Biden was not there Biden was not the cold dose of water on the Raging Fire you know in my opinion you know his track record you know is not one of peace and Reconciliation no in in many ways I would say that and I didn't think that the temperature would decrease because he was that I thought the temperature might decrease because they would think we're no longer under threat from Trump yeah we have everything we have big Tech we have well the universities the courts are still outside and so that's that's obviously what's caused all these issues um particularly around social teaching but of course what Clarence Thomas and and Brett Kavanaugh Justice Kavanaugh wrote this in his opinion when he was talking about Roe versus weird is that that this court does not have an opinion on abortion he literally wrote that in his opinion right um and it's just the blinding ignorance of people who who argue this on the other side you this court has no opinion on abortion it's not about abortion it's about the state's rights versus Federal intervention right and this is the whole point you can still get an abortion in America right I mean go to New York like they're now going to the opposite extreme they're now you know legalizing infanticide because it's perceived to be under threat it's like it's not it's a federal it's the federal intervention on um states rights and that is that that is the Nexus of the whole debate right and this is that that is what people don't understand they think somehow the court has an issue has an opinion on social teaching you know the court is there to interpret the Constitution and the law it's not that issue edicts on social teaching um anyway so back to back to parlor yeah so it went back online it got back on how damaged was it oh how bruised and beaten up and how salvageable was it yeah it was are you still trying to figure that out a year and a year and 10 months later no I mean it it was a very it was a damaged good there was absolutely no doubt about that um it was it was the worst business I've ever seen when I when I took over um because of the chaos it's it's to the to the non-um tech mind or to the non-tech world it's like there's a startup attitude right there's a startup mentality which has kind of move fast break things try and get things back on you know just try and change the narrative very quickly this company was a startup but now it required the Monstrous restructuring effort that was needed to actually get it into fighting shape right so you were both restructuring a startup which is highly unusual highly unusual like I can't really think of any other startups of public recognition that had been restructured right there are small startups which go bankrupt the whole time and then they get restructured this was a startup with a national brand and profile with a huge footprint in terms of social media presence for us for a for an early stage company that had zero like zero finances and needed to be restructured in the midst of it in the midst of Carnage raging around it so that was kind of the environment into which I stepped um at the end of February beginning of March of 2021 and you know I back him when I was working in banking in London like it was you know it was kind of rule of thumb that you would just work ridiculous hours all days of the week um you know I literally went into the office on Christmas day and you know one of one one of the years I was working there and and I can honestly say that last year was harder in terms of the work than any other year I've ever worked it was just brutal um and on top of that we just had our first kid we'd moved States we'd moved I was still really transitioning my life from moving countries from the UK you know there was there was just it was it was a tough year it was a really tough year and the Lord was gracious and kind and helped sustain us through it and um you know without him it would have been really difficult I just it would have been really tough to do that without the Lord I think um tell me exactly how Paula is better than Twitter we don't sense a speech I mean if you if you want a simple one-liner that's it um you can have free conversations right would you live in would you rather live in a totalitarian Society or a free Society it's basically the difference right Twitter is a totalitarian Society but presumably you ban people and you censor certain things um we we as as I mentioned earlier the community guidelines uh are like like out rule Financial doxing um pornography um Gore violence but apart from that the worst you're going to get is a troll filter applied to your control filter yes so basically if somebody puts like we have we have a moderation system now which is quite complicated but I believe serves our users in the way that they want to be served so you can go on to parlor and you can put pretty much you know with the exception of what I've just outlined in terms of community guidelines of like Financial doxing um you can pretty much write speech that you would never be allowed to write on Twitter um and it will get permitted and it will get allowed but if the if the moderation system that we have in place detects that your essential aim is just to write offensive terms right so let's just say you drop the n-word several times or you know you're you you're just using a highly derogatory term over and over and over again that will then get flagged it gets sent to a like a human moderation system and the human will then look at this and say okay this person is clearly just trying to troll right other people and it's not providing any like useful dialogue and then what happens is your content doesn't get removed and it doesn't get Shadow banned it just we put a splash filter over the top which says like trolling detected and you can still click through and see the content if you wish to do so but it doesn't it doesn't take you down and we I mean I mean the number of users we've blocked or banned I should say it's like peanuts in handful and those are mostly people who are just putting up pornography which is kind of like you know is that a full-time job just taking down pornography oh yeah you know we have several we have 30 jurors who sit in a jury system that moderates appeals so people appear on the autism and then we have three full-time like moderation employees at the business when I used to work at covenant eyes yeah somebody had to essentially determine whether or not the things that were being flagged as pornography were pornography yeah and they have a system that sees a uh very low resolution yeah image of that page so as not to expose these poor people to these images yeah and they were also uh free therapy was made available to them weekly during office hours I mean what's that like for your people having to see this disgusting stuff yeah I mean someone's going to do it yeah exactly I can see why it's kind of like the police officer who has to determine whether or not something was child pornography nobody wants that police officer exposed to it but somebody has to do it yeah I mean we we you know we try and put as much through the computer Learning System as possible so that the the actual exposure to it is um is de minimis to humanize um you know one of the moderation guys I've walked past our desk a few times and you know I've seen things that I know that she's having to view and I mean it's just well I guess I guess to some extent it's just they're used to it you know there's there's a kind of professionalism about it they get on with it they crack on you know it's it's it's done well um it's done sensibly and just they get on with it yeah it's a tough I mean it's a tough it's a tough job I mean uh how I presume you don't want to be seen as a right-leaning platform presumably you wish to be open to everybody who cares about Free Speech how are you seeking to make that known yeah yeah I mean that's something that I constantly you know battle against which is just that well you're just Maga light you're just Trump light you conservative light and it and you know in some ways there's a couple of answers to this one of which is like we've always we our influencer programs which we try and attract influencers onto the platform through we reach out to both left and right you know and I've always and there's actually a there's even an evolution of that concept which is that comes back to what we said earlier as that concentric circle of opinions which is which is politically acceptable to the left gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller you know I will only agree with you if I'm a black Trans disabled lesbian gendered whatever like you know it's just that that circle gets so small that at the end of the day it's like there's only like five people in it right you know and So eventually what that means is that like everyone's going to get canceled right so this is what I joke about the whole time I'm like listen they're going to come for you one day like it's just it's it's good it's gonna happen because that circle is getting ever smaller um you know like so if that person first of all like I kind of make that pitch to the left I'm like listen you're gonna get you're probably gonna get canceled by your own team one day you may just not see it yet you may be willfully ignorant of it yet but may as well start an account yeah yeah exactly yeah exactly what's the harm right um you know we did events on Capitol Hill where we tried to encourage Congress people to come and I invited everyone you know I was like left and right you know we've AOC come along you know let's let's Get You On Let's Get You On parlor um you know I like to kind of make the pitch that parlor would be as appealing in Franco Spain as it would be in Soviet Russia you know it's like it's kind of like whatever side of the political aisle you fall on like there's a view for free speech in both societies you know like there's a need for it um other than Free Speech why should somebody choose parlor over Twitter is it better in other ways because one of the things I hate about Twitter is how it TR it forces you to truncate your message well yeah we have a we have a 1 000 character limit instead of 240. and obviously Twitter's only went up to 240 after it was at 120 for a very long very long time um I mean in terms of product features and upgrades I mean one of the things that I often talk about and this is now like moving strongly this conversation into the tech sphere but I I think that when Paula was founded in 2018 the free speech is a business model business idea was very new and now there's a lot of players in the space yeah there's a gab there's truth social there's Getta you know there's all these other platforms competing for this space um but one of the Hallmarks of all of these platforms to some extent is that they're trying to win a battle that I think has already been lost which is that if you look at Twitter and Facebook they've got 16 years and like Facebook is a 500 billion dollar business market capitalization business Twitter is a okay it's much smaller it's a 45 billion dollar market capitalization business but we've got huge cash reserves and massive development teams Twitter employs 6 000 people I employ a hundred you know it's just like Facebook is multi you know it's it's like they have a map in Facebook's office where they they change the color code of each country as it falls to the like the dominant the march of the inevitable Facebook Empire right like as more people in that country like when the majority of that population of that country is is on Facebook the color the color map of that country changes right it's like the market game of uh what's that game called like Risk risk yeah exactly it is a bit like that you know and so conservatives as a whole like the free speech-minded people because I don't want to use the term conservative when you're talking about yeah the platform neutrality but we're trying to win a battle for this space which is like you know we're going to be this big you're going to be like less than one percent yeah in this Empire of of totalitarian Tech right so instead of trying to win the battles that we've already lost of yesteryear like we need to kind of focus on the next fight right okay so and so my opinion here and you know this is something which like a lot of people haven't yet kind of embraced or I guess it's still kind of On The Fringe but the next battle is going to be in the blockchain space in the blockchain space what is that crypto okay right um and so you're already seeing this happen right it's just that people aren't aware of it yet you know like web3 as it's called which is the Embrace of crypto the Embrace of the blockchain um like blockchain Central platforms crypto centered platforms are already starting to centralize and like web 3 is supposed to be this great project for decentralization of the internet and in turn what's happening is like the move of the platforms is becoming increasingly centralized right so like there are these Leviathan companies now emerging out of the web 3 space which are centralizing all of this data which is exactly what happened in web 2 right so we all freely went to Facebook like nobody gave Facebook the the crown upon you know like the Caesar's Throne it just it became the default platform in the same way like there are platforms already becoming the default platforms of the web 3 movement so in my opinion The Next Movement needs to be like of these Free Speech platforms and this is what we're doing at parlor like we're making a big product move into the crypto space right because I want to make sure that we not just have free speech now but have free speech in 20 years have free speech in the generation to come and the next generation is going to be blockchain crypto it's it's just inevitable right because there is so much movement into that space by technology right now and of course then you know people say well you know crypto markets it's all just a big scam it's clearly not you know I mean there are obviously like every nascent industry there is clearly a scamming element to it that's clearly a grifting element to it um and much of that has been exposed with the price of Bitcoin and all the major cryptocurrencies collapsing this year but in general like but markets do that the whole time markets correct like that is what happens in markets in fact it's actually a necessary process that that happens um and what you do is you flush out the weak movers is creative destruction this is the Austrian School of economics in practice um you you get a lot of these um like weaker players leaving the space and then you get a much more solid foundation upon which a more prosperous crypto economy can be built and so that's the next generation of the tech world that's the next generation of of like where social media is going so in the long run I want to make parlor a very friendly crypto friendly like what I'm nicknaming like a decentralized social crypto social right that's kind of what we need in the Next Generation because that's the fight of five years time so are you that concerned right now about convincing people why they should be on parlor instead of Getta or gab like what's the difference between parlor getter and gab yeah there isn't really there isn't a huge difference right I mean I would argue that Getta so I mean you know taking a 30 um easy shot across the bars of my competitors so getter is um controlled by a man called miles clock and he is a quote-unquote dissident Chinese billionaire and you know one of the things that I say is I'm never quite sure how you can be a distant Chinese billionaire given the fact that he's the only one um and yeah I think that the ties and get it used to be a Chinese language app right this is not this is not well known um by many people and so as a result there is um like a historical Legacy that that company has with with mainland China which I think probably as a free speech platform I'd be very cautious about and it's also well known that get a sensors viewpoints which which don't correspond with Miles quarks um or at least this is in my opinion this is where this is something that has been raised many times by a lot of people that I've spoken to that getter and this has also been nationally circulated in the press as well that get a get a shutdown accounts which criticize miles Quark right so it's kind of free speech for some but you know kind of free speech for me but not for the kind of thing you know it's it's there's a there's a degree to which you're allowed to speak freely until you say something against the owner of the platform um truth you know I think that that has had its own yeah tell us about this yeah true truth social truth what is it it sounds terrible uh are you on Truth social first day truth social so this is Trump's thing yeah that's just right I know nothing about it except those words that I just spoke yeah yeah I mean it's truth is you know in many ways was was supposed to be Trump's return to social media which it kind of is I mean that's that's really what it is um and so you know as a result he's picked up a lot of users from the domestic like the U.S market who miss his voice in the National conversation right and so that's kind of the the Hallmark characteristic of that um I'm not sure if it's International appeal if I'm honest like if you're a European politician why would you want to be on Truth social because that inevitably means you have to carry the baggage of explaining why you're on Truth social right um so I think that truth social's main user base is probably going to be um the U.S domestic Market it's probably going to be like U.S consumers who Miss Trump's voice but I think it's International appealers perhaps a little bit more limited than something like parlors is which you know we're supposed to be we are Viewpoint neutral we should have as much appeal in Nigeria and Iran as we would do in we actually have quite a large number of Iranian accounts we actually have quite a large number of Saudi accounts um we you know it's it's it's appealing overseas as much as it is appealing in the domestic market right so you know I would say that like those two platforms I mean like gab is an interesting one let me just say about gab that people seem to be as enthusiastic as gab as the author Bros are as enthusiastic of Orthodoxy yeah like I can't tell you how many comments we get become Orthodox I'm like well okay but like sure but that's not a great argument it's just a statement and when I said we're going to have you know you want to discuss parlor in part good gab there's a lot of people who are very fired up about gab why is Gab so fantastic Andrew toolba um what's that Andrew is he Catholic is he I thought he was just Christian I'm not actually sure what his Catholic I could be wrong people in the comments section will let us know what's the name what gab yeah is it two B's or one no it's one B yeah I'll say this about gab I have a lot of respect for gab um I the reason I have a lot of respect for gab is because you know we engaged with the like to resurrect Paula you know we went through the we went through the the nightmare of getting Cloud hosting back up and then we had to negotiate with the app stores and yeah you know we had to do all of this and I think the gab just basically stuck two fingers up to the whole Tech system and was just like we're never gonna get back on we never we don't want to be on an app store because that would imply that we have to you know do some content moderation um so they just kind of gave two fingers up to the whole Tech world and uh and as a result you know like they just do that thing you know and I kind of respect that uh so you can't download a gab app no you can't yeah because you can't get it through the app stores because they refuse to engage with any kind of moderation right um and I'm and I'm paraphrasing here and people will fact check me and say well they do have content moderation and I'm sure they do I don't I I don't use the platform but what's that is that the only yeah there you go so what's that what do you say pornography right yeah that's good so I mean they're you know like as I say I kind of I respect their unwillingness to engage with the with with anything to do with like the tech world I mean personally that's you know that that isn't that's obviously a decision I haven't taken you know I think that we I think that to change to change the narrative we need to be in the narrative to some extent like we need to be in the conversation I don't think we can just exist Silo ourselves over here in this own world and just and expect to have productive debates like I think we should you know I I think we should engage with the App Stores um like I've been asked this question before in conferences like what what do you think is the next like boundary which we need to overcome um in the tech world and my answer is always the mobile phone like we need a new phone you know we need a new phone which is not controlled by Apple and Google like this is the this is the kind of the next like and I'm sure there's a gazillion of people trying right now yeah I mean so Eric Prince has done this thing called unplugged phone he was the founder of Blackwater which is a well-known private security company you know he he's doing this phone called unplugged there was a guy called Eric finman who did a freedom phone um which you know had some moderate success I mean there are people trying to do it but it's it's like what you actually need to do and this is getting pretty technical now but like the operating system the OS that you operate on is really that is is the reason that Apple and Google have such a monopoly or duopoly on this on this whole process is because they operate the operating systems so Android like can you name me an operating system which is not iOS or Android no exactly so like Linux is one right and um then there's various Chinese ones which I don't think are necessarily going to be any better than Apple and Google in fact probably 10 times worse um but like there are a few operating systems but they are really clunky like I've tried I I have done a pretty deep dive in this area and like I bought weird wonderful phones which nobody's ever heard of um and like tested operating systems across the board and tried to find which ones are the best ones and you know it's like a convenience is the ultimate utility it's like right we always come back to Apple and Google because they're the best right and that's the reason they're the best because these are multi-trillion dollar businesses which have invested a fortune in develop operating systems that we all love and enjoy and not only that but like if you have airpods if you have yeah an iMac if you have whatever like it just sinks you know it's just so easy and that's the whole point but this comes back to and like you know this is points with Aquinas so I want to link it to spirituality but convenience is actually can be an enemy right like yeah the convey like the broad open wide path leads to destruction the narrow hard path leads to Salvation and like we as a as a culture which feels threatened by the rise of progressive values need to start taking that narrow path and we need to start making decisions that are uncomfortable for us to make what does that look like it means deleting Facebook it means deleting WhatsApp it means deleting Instagram it means deleting all these things unless you have a platform big enough where your message is changing the narrative you need to like we need like you need to delete Gmail you you need to delete everything which is which which what do you use I use protonmail is that good it's an encrypted emails like ask yourself this why can email be free because I'm the product correct right you are the product right and if you're using Gmail you're you're using I'm I know I'm gonna do all this and then regret it in a week but let's let's go but like this is this but this is what I mean we need to start making you think I should get off Twitter Instagram and Facebook well like I I mean yeah I mean you know I start with Twitter Twitter is a Twitter come join parlor like who cares about Twitter anymore I mean it's just overrun so while we're talking about Twitter at the time of filming uh Elon Musk which I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that whole situation but he has recently said that his original offer is back on the table uh the Twitter stock is up 12 and has been halted wow so thoughts on that whole thing what do you think I mean maybe I don't know but that's not good for you motivation I bet that's not good for him allegedly has something to do with his you know being free speech or something like that is what I've heard is part of the acquisition idea yeah he wants to turn Twitter into a free speech platform right and this is like Jack Dorsey when he founded Twitter said we want to be the Free Speech wing of the Free Speech party right which is so ironic given the content censorship that happens on Twitter right and I mean now Paula's business parlor is now a much bigger company than just the social media asset this is what I was saying to yesterday you know we've now we completed this acquisition we have these large we have a very large data center operation we're probably going to do another acquisition in this space you know we're doing right so we have more we have a big crypto operation now yeah I mean the social media and this kind of comes back to the point like I believe there is a value in the social media asset of parlor absolutely and I believe that we can still fight a fight which has not yet been fought which is this crypto fight but there's also all these other competitors out there and congratulations to them and well done on people taking the initiative to grow a business which is combating a desperate societal need right so you know whether Elon I mean I raised some points at the beginning of the Elon Twitter kind of debacle which I think are very relevant you know first of all which is that like the bot issue is a real issue right and there is a huge issue on Twitter with Bots and so you know like he has to deal with that the second thing is that um there's a culture shift and Twitter is like the Twitter is the Twitter is the Vanguard flag waiver of the woke Brigade right it's just it it's like it's where all the leftists hang out right I mean they all love Twitter and the reason being is because it never senses them and it only senses their opponents right I mean like the number of conservatives who have been given strikes and barred and banned and kicked off most famously the president of the United States of America like how much more evidence do you need right and so the reason that the work Brigade loved Twitter is because it Hillary Clinton's staffers went to work at Twitter I mean it was it's it's kind of well-known that they are I mean Facebook is nowhere near as bad as Twitter in terms of censorship yes it has a censorship problem but it's nowhere near as bad as Twitter and anyway so if Elon does buy Twitter like commendable that he's taking upon himself and staking his own cash to try and resurrect this entire platform he's basically going to have to fire all six thousand employees right and start again because it's just like every employee who works there Jack Dorsey said this in Congressional testimony why does your platform have a bias on the left and he said the reason being is because we hire from California and the majority of people in California are on the left right and it's it's like a self-fulfilling cycle of Vice you know it's it's it's you're based in California the people you hire are woke the people they in turn appeal to are woke people the people they look to hire are woke people the viewpoints they put out uh woke like all the kind of all the cards align right and all of those things combine with each other to produce a very very woke business and this is why the Supreme Court has in turn issued an opinion Clarence Thomas wrote just Thomas wrote this opinion which he said that section 230 which is The Shield behind which these tech companies said in terms of their differentiation between a platform and a publisher The Shield that they bear is only worthy of bearing if they can demonstrate that over time they haven't exercised consistent subjective opinions and Twitter I don't know anybody on the left or the right like some of the best respected Tech journalists in the world have said to me in private Twitter is clearly a publisher it's not a platformer it clearly is making subjective decisions right and that's the truth and so that as a result you end up with this like I don't understand how they're still shielded by this broad-based immunity that they're that they're allowed to pledge hmm so if if Elon does get Twitter would you be kind of like disappointed in the short term but excited in the long run well I think because of the damage it would presumably do to parlor as soon as people heard I mean I for like a hot second got back on Twitter I feel like the damage I mean like we saw some we saw a lot of people create you know like conservatives as a whole saw a lot of people create accounts after Elon announced so I feel like the damage I feel like what damage has already been done right so the people who still use parlor like you know the the hundreds of thousands of monthly active users we have you know are very they kind of love the platform for just the fact that it's a different corner of the internet you know they the we poll our users pretty consistently and we we find that lots of people just enjoy it because it is different you know they don't want to be on Twitter um in the long run like what do I think it has I mean in the long run I think that it's very good for society if a major Tech platform like the healing of society needs to take place the healing of society needs to it can't take place under the current leadership of the tech Titans right because the the current leadership of the tech Titans has no like they're not interested in free speech they're not interested in this debate right so I think it's a good thing for society what it means for our business you know as I said we we I saw the writing was on this wall a long time ago so that's why I've Diversified the portfolio of and and really my focus now and has been for some time it's growing the platform in terms of hosting and data centers operation that we we focus on to this day Neil I have a parlor account if I think it's parlor.com Matt frad would you mind looking that up and putting that in the description if people are on parlor I guess that's the other thing that's difficult right is to kind of convince people here's another thing yeah you should join yeah it just sounds so exhausting well back in the day it was but if you're if you're retreating from one yeah and then you know expending energy in another that's that's probably well back in the day it was here's the only one yeah and now it's like here's another one right because another is like five platforms me we clout hard Minds all these other platforms has there been any attempts to try to bring together things like gab and parlor and um not really no I mean not from a like an m a perspective not from emerging acquisition perspective we haven't really engaged in that conversation with with any of our competitors but you know I mean I'm sure it's I mean like locals which I know you're on um which is slightly different to what we you know it's not microblogging it's more like long-form deep dive content um you know that was bought by Rumble which obviously is now a public publicly traded company um so that was I when Rumble bought locals I thought this is it we're off like now the big sector roll-up consolidation is going to take place and then nothing happened so um you know I think everyone's just trying to make it on their own maybe this news will elicit something like that I don't know I mean we'll see what happens let's take a break come back light up a cigar okay and uh keep chatting great [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] please [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] all right we're back all right okay you want to talk about what this cigar is or should we not mention it I'm going to keep it private okay the Trinidad Lopez it's the Trinidad Lopez is what this is talk talk to me it's a great tell me about it wonderful wonderful cigar you're gonna love it it's quite mild I would say it's like uh it's got a good flavor to it but like it's also not will we get banned from saying where it's from I don't I don't know so let's not say yeah it's just not safe keep it just keep it under wraps is this this is a is this a butane yeah ah glory to Jesus Christ when did you start smoking cigars um probably when I was about 19 actually yeah that's kind of how did you get into it but I didn't really get into them for the first I mean nobody enjoys a cigar at 19. like nobody enjoys it yeah it's just it's it's like something you do because you think it makes you look cool yeah and you're just like I don't really understand what I'm doing with this thing but I'm gonna do it anyway and then the first time you have a cigar you inevitably have a mind-numbingly bad head Rush that's what happened to me yeah and then you probably throw up so I uh I started with pipes because I was living in Ireland at the time there was a lot of old men who smoked pipes I thought it would look cool and they got the grape just be careful that's really close to that um um and then we got that great Peterson's pipe store in Dublin if you've ever seen there I've never been to Denver just really nice pipe so that's I got into it that way um I just don't look cooler I guess yeah and then uh why is that funny um but then my father-in-law smoked cigars and I just like the idea of it so I would I would sit with him and smoke them and I don't think I ever enjoyed them really I like the idea of it more than I enjoyed it yeah it was like dostevsky until I loved Dostoevsky yeah yeah um but I remember the one time I went from pipes to as pipes to Cigars my wife was out with the kids and I she was for an overnight somewhere so I thought yeah I'll get a cigar a bit of scotch and I smoked it like I smoked a pipe because I mean in order to keep a pipe lit you've got to breathe quite yeah you have to pull pull the pipe pretty hard and I got really sick yeah all of a sudden it felt like the back of my legs were sweating oh yeah and it felt that way because they were yeah and I and I thought I don't want to question my body like I presume it knows what it's doing but I can't for the life of me imagine how this is helping yeah and I I nearly threw up it was awful so my my dad like he tells these incredible stories about trading in like the city of London in the 70s and the 80s when when smoking was just half the course like everybody smoked right and and and not just it not just everybody smoked but like the whole institution of the financial district was set up to accommodate smoking right like every restaurant was smoking there were like there was a trading ring um like one of the open outcry trading rings which are really all gone now but this trading ring used to have this giant copper bowl in the Middle where people used to flick their cigarettes and cigar butts into this copper bowl in the middle of the trading ring during the during the open trading sessions and he he my dad has I never seen him smoking cigar isn't it he gave up smoking and he and I asked him about it once and it was kind of a fascinating it was like I mean I I felt sick him telling me how he gave up smoking which I said you know I was like how did you give up and he was like well you know I went through stronger forms of tobacco to make myself hate it right oh and so I was like okay walk me through that so he went from cigarettes where he was smoking like you know a pack a day or two packs a day or whatever two cigarillos which are the kind of like they're more like us they look a little bit like a smaller cigar right and then he went to Cigars and so I said to him I was like well you know how many cigars were you smoking a day and he was like well I was at the end I was smoking five cigars a day for how long for like three years it's so impressive and I was like and I and I was I was just like this is incredible and then I said I was like well you know just thank goodness you weren't inhaling them and he was like oh no he's like I was inhaling five cigars A Day right and he lived to be a hundred yeah he's 78 years old and he ran a marathon you know he never he's never stopped but it was just like my word I mean the the concept of that the Head Rush that one would experience would just be brutal I mean just he did that in order to give them up yeah because then he tried it for three years like after three years smoking five cigars A Day come up with a new tactic this isn't working it's not working seven a day yeah that's right well I think he started off in like one and two and then my mum also complained about how like bad he smelled the whole time yeah uh let's talk about objections to tobacco smoking so before we do what's the so I guess I don't understand so he just smoked more and more so that he would hate it yeah so basically like so I'm going to get drunk every night that'll work he smoked more and more and more and more until it became like so he just he hated everything about it he hated the constant smell the head rushes that he was getting like hey I do not see how that would work no neither do I read this is like I mean a terrible way to quit smoking having never done it I can't vouch for it but apparently what did your mum go through during those years fives and gas but this will take us what an hour yeah hour and a half yeah this is a good cigar an hour so I mean but they but but it was also as I said like this accommodation of the whole smoking culture like he smoked cigars at his desk in the office yeah right and you sat there with a cigar in his mouth in the office right and so as a result like you can see why it would be so much easier to do that right because if you don't have to like go outside or you know accommodate for me no smoking zones you can just sit there and just chain smoke right which is what he did basically which is what you can now do in Steubenville Ohio by coming to Chesterton although we won't allow people to smoke cigarettes yeah yeah yeah someone came even if you roll your own someone came in the other day because we're doing a soft launch before Friday with the big launch do you mind if I smoke a cigarette no you can't do that yeah a wise move cigarette smoke smells disgusting we're a cigar smoke yeah yeah that's a good point of it it's a much more refined smoke yeah and it's Leaf yeah it is these are my leafy greens yeah it's good for me okay what's that it's one of your five a day like in brittness it's writing about five a day you know you have five Leafs of leaves green and green vegetables okay so here's a question for you yeah what's the question so we were talking about this before the show when you moved to the United States yeah like what what are the things that as an Australian I mean I find it fascinating that you're an Australian living in Steubenville Ohio right like it's just kind of you know it's not and you're a devout Catholic and you're involved in like this this whole show I just find fascinating it's kind of one of the things that Drew me into it but as a member of the anglo-sphere there are certain things like I I just when I moved over here I found them totally bizarre and now I'm interested in what they were for you yeah well I moved to Houston Texas which is a whole other so I think the things that struck me was there's a number of things that struck me I tried to Rattle them off real quick uh how big the portion sizes were of food how nice waitresses were and then I realized that you tip them we don't tip in Australia yeah I think they're trying to bring it in but it's it's kind of weird hey what if you just paid me more even though you've had no history of ever doing that no I don't I don't want to do that at all so is that I remember he's just shocked that everyone was doing nice um yeah they go capitalism there was no incentive for people to be nice in Australia just buy the freaking thing um how big cars were I also noticed that in America you either had like really new cars or like really old cars whereas in Australia it felt like everyone was kind of driving a middle of the range kind of car right which probably says a lot about Australia right a kind of classless society um or allegedly I remember the fact that mail came six days a week depressed me interesting like not five days but six days interesting I remember my boss asking me what day I'd like to take off and that depressed me um oh uh prescription drug commercials are illegal in Australia yes and so watching those things was so weird yeah same in the UK you know like those uh like erectile dysfunction meds like Viagra yeah yeah yeah you want to be like Superman like yeah that sounds awesome and all these happy images and then the different voice comes in and rattles off the things that you may or may not get rectal bleeding suicidal thoughts and while but while they're saying the most horrendous things people are people are skipping on a beach yeah it's like it's so confusing that was weird terms of conditions apply none of these products may actually affect your erectile dysfunction it's a really quick fire rapper okay you'll find this very interesting so in Australia cricket obviously is massive we've got to talk about this we will as it is in England now Aussie Rules Football I'm told was invented to keep the cricket players fit in winter so it's sort of like Gaelic football a little bit more violent and it takes place on a cricket pitch on a cricket oval right so growing up in South Australia the two main sports are cricket and Aussie Rules Football both of which are played on an oval because of that you would if you're at school say like let's go sit out on the oval like oval just became synonymous with large patch of glass where games are played yep so I was in Houston with my wife and we were dating at the time and I was walking back to her apartment or something and I said look there's some filler out there on the oval she said the what I said the oval and it occurred to me that you don't refer to large patches of grass as ovals because none of your sports take place that's a very specific yeah yeah that was really interesting yeah that's an interesting one what about you um arugula what is that oh the the pub yeah because it's rocket in England oh what about uh all the different words we say differently yeah like cilantro yeah that also completely baffled me it actually took me a while to figure out exactly what cilantro was and then I mean like don't trust it yeah it's also funny another word for cilantro coriander oh right yes so it's one of these like herbs where you just find I mean I know all the kind of weird like there were a lot of americanisms which just took me a while to adjust to now now I now I speak both I can interchange freely um but there were a lot I like the portion size that's a great one you know like again just the size of everything like America's big it's just big big trucks everything big houses big everything you're like everything is Big you know it's just in England it's like 10 times worse I mean Australia 23 million people living in a land mass you know rustly comparable to the continental US yeah exactly you know so it's just they've got a lot of space over there you know there's lots of space okay admittedly a lot of it is desert but yeah there's a huge amount of space to do things if you want to same with the US England you've got like 65 million people living in a country half the size of France right and you know roughly the same size as like you know the north Northeast not even the same size as the Northeast like much smaller than the Northeast you know I forget the comparisons like half the size of Alabama or something anyway so you know you've got you've got this everything's squished in England you know everything is just squished and small even fridges you know you come here the fridges are massive cereal boxes are huge yeah yeah I know and now when I go back to England I'm like wow this is like ridiculous what is this portion size yeah what is this I mean I think it's funny is in Australia we call trucks Utes yeah and and we call if you refer to a truck it's one of those ones with uh you know like a freight truck like a Mack truck or something we call them Utes and y'all call them trucks and now I see why because your utility trucks or your Utes ah you yeah and then there are also other things like oh their chocolate sucks yeah American American chocolate is awful it's true that's true that's right sorry for one of the one of the interesting things definitely like the British in me it finds interesting is that like and I'm generalizing here so you know forgive me for my mass generalization here but like there are a lot of Americans who sort of still had like had the belief for example that George III was deciding the fate of America right and um in general like they Americans had this view of kind of the monarchy like we ridded ourselves of the King right and I just was kind of like hang on a sec you don't actually think that George III had any actual power do you because he wasn't he was a constitutional Monarch for hundreds of years right this is the point the monarchy had already become a constitutional monarchy by this point and so there's a kind of not a great sense of like what the English Parliament the English government ruled the 13 colonies it was not the yes in nominal figurehead status in the same way that the king of England now is the head of state of of England but he has no power right and this is the whole point like Liz trust just slapped down Charles attending some climate Summit right because she's like I don't want you going to a climate somewhere and telling people what you think because it's not what you're supposed to do anymore in the same way that like William Pitt the younger told George III what to think and what to do right and so there was this kind of General conception that somehow the monarchs of England still exerted some power right and I'm like no they they this is why we had a civil war England had a Civil War which actually claimed as a percentage of the population far more lives than the American Civil War claimed um seven percent or seven to eight percent of the English population was wiped out in the English Civil War um you know massive battles and eventually accommodated and obviously the execution of Charles the first we literally chopped off the head of the king and we had a commonwealth the Republic of England for 12 years a commonwealth of England for 12 years um until the monarchy was restored right because people hated the Commonwealth so much and they hated Cromwell so much so that sense of perception of history is just something that I've come across quite a bit kind of interesting yeah there was a there was about two hours in the middle of a night during the Biden uh not yeah Biden and Trump sort of back and forth we weren't sure who was going to be president where I considered moving back to Australia really remember just things just felt it just so unbelievably turbulent yeah I know I mean there was that time where there was like this uptick in preachers who were saying the end of the world is coming and yeah a bunch of Catholics jumping on that bandwagon and yeah it's kind of understandable it felt that way yeah so it was yeah we do live but I am glad I live here yeah yeah same I mean I mean I'm applying for citizenship right now actually are you really yeah I'm intending to do that I have a green card currently I mean it's it's I love America I mean I think America is like there are some things there are times when I'm just uh messages to Candace I'm just like I absolutely love this country like I love it I love what it stands for like it gets me emotional like I have a deep-seated love for the freedom that this country cherishes so much you know and it's just like you you can't find that free expression like it's kind of funny because you know operating in the political circles that we kind of move in you know I go to a lot of these conferences and there's always these kind of like slightly wacky you know like people who come dressed up as Abraham Lincoln and you know wearing the like it's like the Maga hat on top of the Maga hat on top of the Maga hat you know and I'm just like and I kind of I just in my heart of hearts I I love these people because they they're so Brazen in there yeah like they just they're just like this is who I am and I'm going to embrace it you know and it's just and they don't care and I love that because in England everyone's so kind of yes yes got to be reserved and you know and and that's and this is kind of why I actually didn't really Blend or mesh very well with British politics was because I was far too Brazen in my opinions like I remember this MP Member of Parliament in Britain once gave me a book and it was just called War and he was like this is for you because this is this is how you think this is he was like you just think about the fight and I'm like and I think this was kind of many years ago now but it was it was funny that he gave this to me because I just thought that is kind of a little bit who I was at the time you know it was in the midst of the brexit turmoil um which was similar to the kind of trump turmoil over here but then when you come over here you just find this political culture which just Embraces exactly who it people Embrace themselves they embrace the country that they love it they they embrace the kind of the Second Amendment they embrace all the Amendments they embrace the freedom that this country has brought you know this is one of the reasons like they don't have hate speech laws over here because it's nonsense you know and like they embrace the freedom of speech right and it's written into the Constitutions literally written as the first amendment um and so there's times when I just think wow like I just love this country you know it's just it has given so much to the world what would the world be like without America it would be a terrible Place it'll be a dark place a much darker place than it is right now the America is still that that like country that so many people aspire to be you know in the same way that the church is the beacon on the hill like this is what I was saying to you yesterday like for me when I came into the church I just was like overwhelmed with joy you know it's just C.S Lewis like talks about when he became a Christian and I I love that mentality that he kind of he describes it when he became a Christian he was like there was nobody who didn't want to become a Christian more than me you know and he won he was like dragged kicking and screaming and for me it was kind of almost the exact Paradigm opposite like I I came into the church and I I felt overwhelmed with just this kind of joy and love for the church that I you know had had kind of aspired to of course then went back into the world and you know I lost that love but in the same way that I think the church has that beacon on the hill which which stands as the great Testament to truth um and is and is the bride of Christ America is like the country that still has that uniqueness to it that no other country in the world has people get nervous when Americans start talking like this because Americans do tend to talk about their country with a religious fervor that other countries don't understand and which sounds alien and not just dramatic but um yeah over the top or yeah yeah I mean it like yeah it can be there's there is a but I think because it's given so much to the world right and this is an American and America has never really suffered like what I would describe as like a a global defeat right it's never really suffered it's never suffered a a crisis of Consciousness right in the same way that Britain pretty much every country in the world has suffered a crisis of Consciousness one could argue well you know Vietnam was like a crisis of Consciousness a little bit but you know it didn't Shake America's like unchallenged Global hegemony right and to that extent you know I think like what's happening now in American politics is shaking that the corruption which is internal is drawing attention to the corruption of America of the American political cycle and that is shaking America's belief in itself the hyper polarization of American politics is displaying to the world the Deep divisions in the American national psyche right now you know there's a huge like there is there has never been a time this country has been so polarized and it's kind of it's kind of frightening well I mean one of the things that's good about polarization is that at least more than one group is speaking yeah because in Australia it feels like you don't have a personality or a group that has the power and influence to mobilize a significant contingent of the population yeah in the way that whether you agree with them or don't agree with them Fox News Daily wire and these others do like people really feel like they have a champion that they have a voice whereas in Australia it feels like every single news Outlet except Sky News who from what I can tell talk a great deal about American politics they do yeah maybe they talk about Australian Politics as well I don't follow them um I like what I've seen there but yeah just people are quickly dismissed as uh crazy yeah if they don't fall in step with the sheet of music that all of the news outlets are singing from you know is it like that in England yeah very much so I mean so while the polarization feels and maybe is it definitely is at times very chaotic and scary it's like well at least there's a clash of ideas happening whereas in Australia those who would seek to oppose the covert lockdowns were just written off as idiots yeah I know when I spoke to my folks I was like wow we are from different countries yeah because my parents bless them would speak of the covert lockdowns and vaccine mandates they would speak about the country the way children speak of their parents they would say they're doing what's best for us you know yeah or they were just even little things like you know covert shut down all these businesses yeah I'm like oh my gosh like we've both drunk the Kool-Aid here perhaps because yeah I would never speak of the government with that kind of yeah reverence I know and that was the same in the UK now the Nationals unlike Hayek Hayek in the road to serfdom you know his famous book which talks about like I mean really it was it's kind of interesting book to study in some ways because it it it was never written to be the seminal work that it became he never intended for it to be it was actually kind of a side project for him in many ways and then it became like this huge book which you know attracted like Global publicity and um one of the things which he writes in that book is that it takes it's never kind of like very very rarely does a national psyche change by Revolution like it it it's the drip drip drip drip of evolutionary thought which changes National psyche and like I would say that that's happened in Britain like Britain has lost touch with its own freedom and so it's just moving slowly towards an Ever increasingly authoritarian State you know like you are seeing in real time you know people like getting cut down online arrested by the police for misgendering people and in conversations on social media you know hate speech laws which are becoming ever more stringent you know Britain's just lost touch with its own Freedom it just doesn't you know that my generation in Britain doesn't view freedom of speech as an important requisite for a functioning democracy it just doesn't I would imagine if you polled Americans freedom of speech wouldn't necessarily be prized among those who are say 30 years old and yeah they've done some polls on this and terrifyingly like there's it's it's not it's not a majority yet it's still a minority but it's a ever-increasing minority of people who view freedom of speech is less important than you know like safe spaces as it were where do you see this going I mean you're not a prophet maybe you are I'm not a prophet nor I am the son of a prophet but if you were to sort of speculate yeah one possible outcome yeah where do you see this going in the United States yeah it's a I mean that is you know it's it's something that kind of keeps me up at night you know like what future does our society hold like where are we going and I mean this comes back to the spiritual life this comes back to the Divine Life you know because it's like I think that if you just take a pretty bleak view of there is no God there is no salvation there is no um you know there is no eternal life then you could just hopelessly write off society and say well we're all doomed you know it's just the end of the world as an eye kind of thing but if you believe that God is Sovereign if you believe that God is benevolent and benign or you know omnipotent omniscient um and his hand guides the whole of creation then one will be able to say he is working out his will for society through these tribulations and turbulence and I think in many ways like I'm very hopeful as a person I mean I which is kind of counter-intuitive to being British because British people are generally terribly pessimistic about everything and complain um mainly about the weather and about the greatness of the clouds but I I would actually say like through all of this his will is being worked out through all of this you know the church will find her way and um in some ways like this is kind of counterintuitive but like you the night is always darkest before the dawn you kind of need the the times of deep Darkness to show the world what the world is on the brink of so that it can be pulled back from that Brink right and I kind of think we're there now or at least maybe I'm wrong and maybe I you know maybe we've got another 10 years of terrible you know like social upheaval to go through before we can get there but you know for example the whole transgender debate you know I think that there's a I think that there is a Rubicon now which is being crossed like most of society as American society is kind of like okay gay marriage you know Happy Days like those you know Love Is Love kind of somewhat meaningless platitudes um you know but but they're kind of they were okay with it yeah but now it's like you're butchering our children now you're butchering children now you're like mutilating children to do to achieve your socially engineered goals you know this is not acceptable and like and you know I mean I always love it when they I kind of love it when they attack the church right because it's like you're attacking an institution which is promoting peace and charity and love and Faith and Hope right so how dark do you have to be to attack that institution I mean I saw the other day like I kind of I kind of find these guys pretty entertaining the satanic temples of America sued uh the Supreme Court's decision on Roe versus Wade saying that abortion was a moral right right and um I always think it's pretty entertaining when the satanic temple does anything because it's like how dark do you have to be that the satanic like how how far down the rabbit hole of desperation do you have to be that the satanic temple is coming out and attacking you you know so it's I think we're getting to that stage now where we're reaching a kind of a precipice from which we will pull back right um so but what we do need you know you need a healing leader you need a healing president to some extent you need like reconciliation in in the party space and then there are some people that I just think that you like you've got to let them be them and they're going to demonstrate the worst of themselves to the rest of society and that will turn other people off you know like I think there are some people out there who are just so far down the progressive Rabbit Hole now that like I'm not sure whether they want or even engage in discourse anymore but let them be them you know just let them continue because most again it comes back to that Free Speech idea like most people are not going to Aspire to that kind of they're not going to Aspire to mutilating children it's just not what they aspire to so if you let these people talk about doing this it will inherently turn other people off I hope so yeah yeah the fear is coming to love the prison coming to love the restrictions and championing them and not even seeing yourself oppressed that's scary yeah who do you do you think DeSantis will run and win I no I don't know right now I mean I think it's a very difficult like I think is there any Catholic at this point in history who can say not still with the Democrats I felt like for a while we were holding on to that yeah and you know certainly if you live in a district where you've got two Democrats running yeah you might have to choose one over the other but yeah the Democratic party as a whole is so antithetical to what we want as Christians I love the way Jimmy Aiken put it when I asked him who he was voting for last time he said I'm going to just vote for who I think hates me less I thought that's a pretty low bar but I like it yeah yeah I mean you know it's what I would say about Party politics in America right now is that it's depressingly uniform which is that you know for example I think there are some there are some candidates running on Democrat tickets who when I look at them as individuals I'm like you have all the Hallmarks of being a great person you know like you've expressed solidarity with the poor you've promoted social Vision which I like I don't agree with your economic positions but like I agree with a lot of the social ideas that you come out with um like you know they don't take a position on or they that some of them are pro-life you know rather than pro-choice but then you look at their voting record and you know it's just that depressing uniformity as soon as they get into the house of reps they fall in line with the Democrat Party and vote for the most nonsensical pieces of legislation that I've ever seen come out of any house right and it just it's it's like it's and I mean in in in in this very state in fact in Ohio you've got two candidates running for Senate um JD Vance and um Tim Ryan I think it's Tim Ryan I could be I could have got his first name wrong I'm pretty sure his surname is Ryan and you know JD the reason JD Vance is ahead in the polls is because even though Ryan is saying the right things and saying you know like I stand with the the blue collar workers of the state then JD just says well look at your voting record you know like you voted for every piece of nonsensical lunacy coming out of the most Progressive elements of this party so how can you say on one and that and that's kind of the point like they all just fall into light when they get there you know and and like that's a symptom of conservative versus liberal mindsets in many ways like the conservative mindset like conservatives generally believe that the individual like should exercise their own rational thought pattern to reach a conclusion which in turn means that many different thought patterns emerge because like by virtue of just being like an individual you like conservatives don't always just agree that's kind of the point they all disagree with each other like I've seen plenty of debates on the right amongst conservatives who've fundamentally disagree with a lot of things like I was telling you about this Backstage Live the other night which in the daily wire did where you know like there were differences in opinions in how to treat the problem of pornography um you know that's a virtue of a free thinking mind the left's mindset tends to be more collectivist it tends to be like okay we must all fall in line and vote with the state right and so as a result you get far more you get far more people just falling into line and voting according to like the collective group think right and that's and that's what's depressing about uh about that you know you've got to tell us what it was like having lunch with Donald Trump if you're allowed and how that even came about because I have never had lunch with Donald Trump yeah he was I mean he's Trump is Trump is a trump is exactly what you get on the tin you know he's exactly how did it even happen so I mean Candace was doing quite a lot of work at that time with the White House and you know I think that it was kind of seen as like a thank you for everything you've done yes in some ways so you got an invite yeah an invite and we had lunch with him and he was just he he's hilarious I mean you know he really is a very funny guy he's he's he's funnier offline I would say than he is online like I think he turns himself down a little bit online um which is kind of remarkable when you think about it but like he is very very funny guy like um you know he he was going through the impeachment ringer at the time the first impeachment ringer at the time and you know he was lambasting the mainstream media's coverage of him which was pretty standard I guess but you know he was just very funny and he's a great I mean he he really is just he's exactly what he says I there's so there's so many politicians you meet who are different they're different people like they're two different personalities they're Jacqueline Hyde you know and you can see it the whole time interesting and he is just nope he's exactly the same you know like behind closed doors as he is in the televisions and you know like you can tell when he's giving a speech when he's reading from the teleprompter because because it's really good because He follows his like he follows his lines and then he'll and then he'll suddenly cut and he'll go to like his off the cuff remarks that's right and those are always the funniest parts right because like those are the those he is funny I remember my mates John Henry and myself that's who I went hunting with him and I were at his folks cabin up in Georgia and we were looking for something to watch and we watched you know the first five minutes of four different movies and then we watched like seven minutes of the office and then we were like you know let's just watch like Trump videos on YouTube it was like funny bits and he was funnier and more entertaining and his one line is it hilarious I mean that like during the campaign Trail when he was when Hillary Clinton like said you know yeah how awful would it be if someone with a temperament of Donald Trump was in charge of law enforcement and before anyone like Mike drop moment he's like yeah because you'd be in jail you know it's just it's it's just so it was so good like it's just funny and it's just like quick off the mark and it shows to be to have a sense of humor one has to be intelligent right and this is something that I always baffled at like how could people call him an idiot you know the guy is a billionaire um you know who's he made a success story of his life he's beat Hillary Clinton yeah who became president of the United States when 98 of the entire mainstream press and media were stacked against him and every civil institution in America didn't want him to win right I mean it's just and he actually talks about that you know I think I don't know whether he's talked about it in public but like he was always pretty funny about it he's like everybody who basically said I could never win is now trying to give me advice and I'm like why would I take your advice you basically you wrote me off you you all wrote me off as somebody who could win um so that was kind of pretty entertaining but he he's just a really funny guy I mean he really is you know do you think he's going to run again for president and do you think he should I think I'm going to give a politician's answer to that question um which is not an answer um so I think that this is how I've noticed that every kind of political pundit that gets asked a question on Fox news or CNN they always begin their answer to this ready here it goes look [Laughter] look listen uh here's a strong word yeah exactly with an answer that's incoherent and soft have you ever seen the game with look have you ever seen the film The Campaign no it's pretty funny it's like this Will Ferrell comedy movie which was came out in 2012 and I would describe it as somewhat prophetic because pretty much uh like so many of the their policies and viewpoints of that film then became reality like the slogan of one of the campaigns it's it's supposed to be in the 14th District of North Carolina there is no 14th session they just made the 14th District of North Carolina for this election cycle and like one of the policy points is scrapping Daylight Saving Time the Senate has now voted to scrap daylight saving time there's a campaign slogan for one of the campaigns in this film which is bring your broom because it's a mess right and of course that has strong resonation with drain the swamp right um and it's just it's just quite funny like there's a scene in it where Will Ferrell gives an answer which is absolutely the worst answer you've ever I mean it's just it's not an answer there's no possible answer to the question and it's just such a perfect politicians and then Zach Galifianakis who plays his opponent in this film um you know gives another answer which somehow makes it seem like he's answered the question by basically just saying to the other person look look yeah pretty much like cam Brady just gave the old DC dip in 12 right which is like he just danced around the question and then he proceeds to give an answer which dances completely around the question as well so it is quite funny like politicians have an expert way of doing that in answer to your question does Trump I mean I think he's made it clear that he's probably gonna run you know that's that's that's probably true um you know do I think you should I mean I like I'd like to think that he is thinking that he should do this if it's the best thing for the country you know and you know I I I'm always nervous when politicians do use their own ego as justification you know and like I just think it's like where are we in the cycle now that you know like is this ego or is it the best thing for America you know I I don't know um Will Ferrell I like his movies but so much junk in them yeah yeah I mean there's very little what do you what what is your opinion about like are you a film Watcher are you like beginning to be more and more I think I I I I probably have ADD if that exists right and find myself bored over almost every movie I've ever watched and have quit almost every movie I've ever watched really interesting yeah like this I enjoy I can do this another three hours sitting and watching a movie I like the idea of it and then I turn it on then I get bored and I stop but there are certain movies I've been watching lately that I've actually really really enjoyed like one there's a there's a movie called and maybe you can look it up or you know it three Billboards out of something something Missouri uh I think that's the best movie I have watched in a very long time I've never seen it yeah you should that that's an X I watched that with my wife and I just I was stunned at how good it was who the Cohen Brothers or one of the cohens McDonough I forget his first but it was one of the cohens I think look it up oh yeah yeah it's uh oh look it up are you still wrong well yeah that and um also I've been watching like I I never watched Hitchcock movies until about a year ago okay isn't it unbelievable never saw a Hitchcock okay so it's not Cohen yeah director all right I'll never question you again but um silence um yeah so the first Hitchcock movie I watched was last year was it called um that was good I really liked that one but I like the one where that strangling happens and they bury him in not bury him they put him in that uh uh what do you call it um coffin they have a dinner party on top of the bloody thing who's a hello Cameron okay what is that movie called uh is it called the Rope you're like I don't know you've given me no context how could that possibly yeah what are those big chests they kill this guy at the beginning they put him in a chest and then they serve a dinner party on that chest I I you came in once and we washed it together and basically the whole film is one continuous shot like two or three times it breaks but very seamlessly like someone's back kind of comes past the camera and it's but it's it's brilliant you should watch uh I think it's Hitchcock which is Wait Until Dark oh it is I may have seen it it's one of the most frightening is this the Blind Lady yeah I the blind lady in the basement it's all one shot that's right and it's just and there's a scene at the end without giving it away if you haven't watched it go and watch it brace yourself you know it's it's I just remember these it was like terrifying I mean it is terrifying and it's a great I think it's Hitchcock yeah it is Hitchcock and it's a great film I mean just beautiful yeah that was excellent I love that so you're an old movie person you're like an older movie have you seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy I love that yeah just to fact check I guess it's called Rope Rope okay good yeah you're right yeah thanks yeah yeah I was telling him that I don't I talked to my wife and everybody who's watching I I was telling him I don't really like movies I get bored with them you convince other people I'm very good at convincing that sums me up yeah yeah I'm quite a big movie person what's your several favorite movies well I the Lord of the Rings trilogy was for was for my team have you watched any of the Amazon Lord of the Rings I watched I haven't and I'm choosing not to so yeah I was I was like yeah I watched the first couple of episodes the reason being because so every review that I read when it came out was universally appalling right it was like one star yeah and then they turn off the reviews they die on Amazon they did that's right yeah the dialogue and then I had some friends in London who messaged me being like Oh it's actually pretty good and their opinion kind of counts like mean something to me like I trust their opinion on Films um so I was like oh well like okay now now I feel like I have to give this a shot right and then I watched it and it was appalling is that how so oh just like I would say on so many levels so I it's really it's kind of difficult to describe but you know when you watch The Lord of the Rings the trilogy there's a realness to it like the graphics I mean I I was I was really obsessed with those films when they came out didn't look like a video game I went to New Zealand like I took I dragged my mum and dad to New Zealand to 2004 we went to hobbiton we went to places they filmed Mordor like all of this kind of stuff because I just loved it so much and I thought it was gorgeous and beautiful and then in learning more about how they made the motion picture you then learned about all this technological Revolution that they put film like cinematography through like they created this engine called Unreal Engine which was um how they designed like the Orcs in the bath like the Uruk eye for the Battle of Helms Deep they instead of getting 10 000 extras they had to get you know they they did this computer engine it was kind of fascinating and then the first like it was kind of a funny story because when they made the film and I'm going to get this wrong but like this is the essence of what they were saying is that the engine was so smart that the urakai distinguished that they were going to lose the battle and so started to run away like long before the end of the battle right and so they had to reconfigure the artificial intelligence to make it so that they couldn't run away right because they were like these people are not acting rationally they're driven by fear and Desperation and they're ruled by Sarah man and all this kind of stuff and but when you watch the film now this is true to this day you know you don't get the impression of this kind of like like what I call is like Cosmic screenplay like this kind of weird computer Graphics you know gaming engine type screenplay you get like uh it feels very real like I look at the scenes of them riding the horses into battle you're saying the trilogy the trilogy yeah right when you watch the rings of power it all feels CGI like everything feels CGI there's just no yeah I don't feel like anything's real the dialogue is also appalling like it's just a point and of course then it's overlaid with all this woke and I did not know that there was a um black transgender Muslim abortion doctor elf that I don't yeah I mean that was weird it was like a curveball for me yeah yeah I mean this is the point like every single woke stereotype is fulfilled is that right now I haven't watched it I'm never going to so you tell me it's just like nonsense of like you know I mean okay you can argue well listen it's a fantasy world so why does it matter I'm like yeah okay you know but but you have to draw people in to try and make them believe that this could be real when you just insert every you know the rainbow Nation Under the Sun you know into kind of yeah into into lothlorian you're like this doesn't make any sense yeah and you know you're being preached at that's what's annoying yeah like if it happened naturally fine yeah but you know that there's a quota yeah exactly it's like what happened like are you saying that the Lord of the Rings things which is set you know if you watch the films after you've watched the rings of power you suddenly think that somehow these ethnic you know homogeneous groups became like what happened in the intervening two Millennia did all the elves suddenly become white you know it's just like it's it's this kind of weird like it's just it you know that it's being ran down your throat in terms of the work of corporatism and that's just really tiresome and boring um and of course it's the reason that woke films and woke like Productions are doing really badly right now um and then you get something like top gun Maverick which is shamelessly self-promoting of America um you know and it's like never watched it but I heard it was actually oh it's great I mean it's great it's just a fun it's it's a fun movie it's what movies are there to do they're a pure escapism they're designed to let the Mind relax and that's exactly what it's there for and that's exactly what it does you know and it's just it's nice that you don't even have to like get drawn into any kind of woke BS which is being stuck in as a subject this one ring is it doing well is it how do we no idea how do we from the outside gauge whether or not it is I don't know I mean it's it's also a slightly unusual thing so Amazon is a multi-trillion Dollar business which can afford to blow 850 million dollars on the production of a single series if it fails it will do them as literally zero half right because they're just so rich that they don't even care right um Netflix all the other streaming services are under massive pressure right now like Netflix is down I want to say 70 in the last year because of Amazon because people are not interested in yeah there's a there's a variety of factors one of the reasons being everyone canceled their subscription after covert right because it was like everyone's signed up for covert and then everyone canceled after covert so you get all these people who just sign up and then the office left yeah I was like why would I have it anymore is there any reason I don't know and then there's also now a plethora of like alternative streaming services which have just cropped up right so like everyone's got a streaming service now like peacock who yeah you know daily wire plus like every everybody's got their own kind of plus you know ESPN plus CNN tried CNN tried invested 300 million and it crashed um you know it was a complete failure so you know it's like not enough airports to subscribe exactly so yeah I that's so funny you say that I've said this before I'm like I wonder what CNN's real viewership would be if every hotel and Airport turned them off I wonder though if the success of Maverick and the potential failure of uh the ring of power that's what it's called right yeah so proud I didn't know that um is gonna just wake up a kind of capitalist machine to start creating what we want to see again or if it's just not going to learn the lesson and continue to tank I think I think like the parallel economy is now you know for years it was that's a kind of Unwritten there's a forget what the name of the law is but there's some kind of like mythical economic law or actually it's a political philosopher philosophical law which basically says that if an institution doesn't start out avowedly conservative it will eventually become left right and that's kind of what's happened with all like this is what happens this is what's happened with Disney you know and Disney is now is is any sensible parent ever going to let their children watch a Disney movie again without thoroughly vetting it first yeah it's done you know I'm so bored of Star Wars I can't even tell you yeah and I was a huge Star Wars fan when I grew up you know it was like formative films in my early years was like the Return of the Jedi you know it was just a huge it was an awesome film and everyone loved it and now of course it's like overrun with woke nonsense and um this is this is the thing like I think as these institutions move for like Netflix is already taking actions to stop it's not right yeah so they scrapped like I think it's really funny like Meghan Markle and Prince Harry you know signed up to do this big Netflix series but who wants to watch anything Meghan Markle produces like why on Earth would you want to watch that no offense to her I wish her well but no not me it's just it's going to be mind-numbingly dull and basically preaching her own story of victimhood all over again right which nobody's interested in nobody thinks you're a victim you're you're literally you were literally a princess and not in the way that Trump is literally Hitler yeah no you're literally a princess in the way a princess is a princess literally a princess um and so you know they've started canceling all of these woke series that they signed up to do you know the the like these series that they agreed to do at the height of the pandemic when their stock price was you know astronomical suddenly seem far less economical and sensible to do now that their stock prices like collapsed and their profit margins are shrinking and they've got all these competitors out there so they're going to be because ultimately like this is the great thing about capitalism is that it's consumer driven right so this is why I was saying earlier like delete Gmail delete these I'm going to do it yeah yeah but does this protonmail thing that you're talking about does that have a calendar yeah it does yeah yeah does it have Google Docs no it doesn't yeah weird yeah is that what you use yeah yeah I mean it's I again like you pay for it right but that that comes back to the point because like you have to pay for these things like why would you I mean it's a bit like if you're not paying for it you're the exactly it was kind of funny like I I commended you yesterday in my mind I commended you and now I'm going to give you the verbal Commendation but you said I want to pay for the daily wire because I actually want to support that organization it's like I agree like I want we should this was after you offered me and Scott Han free subscriptions like no I can read this is what I was like I'm sure I can find a way to get you a free subscription oh yeah um and sorry I don't know if I should have announced that I know that's fine we should be telling everybody that you've met that you'll give them a free free subscriptions but yeah no it's like I absolutely yeah want to pay yeah we do that's what I said I want to I don't want I don't want a free subscription yeah yeah no but the point that's the point like you you you you actually defeated me like you intellectually defeated me very quickly there which is that I want to support organizations which which value what I stand up for right and this is this is what I mean by the parallel yeah right so the parallel economy is now emerging and all of these massive corporate institutions which subscribed to the work to workest ideology you know which have now bent over backwards to accommodate all of these variety of um like Progressive ideals are now being punished right and now they've left themselves vulnerable to being like attacked openly by companies which is being started with the view to I really want to know what conversation took place at Harry's raises the day after daily wire released their razor Jeremy's raises do they have any sense of how that affected them I actually don't know I know that I know that it was like an incredible success in terms of a product line launch we I mean I have it I have a beard and I have it yeah I think so I'll probably I'll shave soon and I'll use it yeah but I mean like it's it's great to see you know that that kind of stuff is great to see because it shows we can win yeah in the cultural space and it shows that what we're fighting for has mass participation like people in people want these products it's not just a case of like let's um sell something that nobody wants Yeah we actually want to sell things that people want and we can do it just as well and better I love how they put it in the advert like stop giving your money to people who hate you yeah and give it to me instead yeah exactly I don't hate I don't love you but I don't wish you any specific harm or something to that effect yeah I mean and that and that's and that's why you've got all these companies cropping up now like that's why you've got glorify cropping up which is banking you know for for like conservatives you've got all right so just real quick get rid of Gmail yeah quit Twitter what else I mean you probably could a lot of things but like realistically what else should I be doing WhatsApp why WhatsApp because it's owned by Facebook and it's compromised let's open by Facebook yeah who's owned by meta who's owned by signal signal yeah yeah signal is a great alternative uh messaging app signal is a really interesting um like I would say test case or it's kind of a really interesting business case because it was invented by this guy called Moxie Mullen Spike who's a cool man who's uh great like one of the world's preeminent cryptographers and um he was I mean I don't know the exact story because I'm not him and I don't know the kind of corporate narrative but he he gave signal to the signal Foundation which is a 501c3 not for profit and the reason he did that was because he was in the same way that sir Tim berners-lee when he invented the world wide web made it naturally decentralized rather than centralizing it in one place Moxie gave signal to her not for profit so that it would never be run and then sold in the same way that WhatsApp was sold for 19 billion dollars to Facebook right um when WhatsApp was sold it had like seven employees it was sold for 19 billion dollars right and um signal you know has mass Market participation now I use it the whole time I know loads of people who use it the whole time and it's you know you you don't have to worry about it being sold to the highest bidder because it's run by a non-profit right and you can donate to the signal Foundation which I do um and again because I want to support that organization because I want to support that course because I believe in on I believe in encrypted Communications private communication should be kept private you should be allowed to speak freely in the on your phone like the digital device now has become a listening device you know and this is the problem like it's not even a listening device it's just a it's a data collection agency you know it's it's like you're just giving away your information for free like this is the irony of social media is like in 100 years time when a thousand years time when they look back and they're like how did this technologically beautifully Advanced Society with philosophy and you know the great writings of the ancient world and how did it end up in serfdom it's like well if we freely gave away in control of Our Lives because of convenience to technology right and that's going to be the answer they give because it's like we just hand over this information like why do you feel the need to put a picture of your lunch on social media because I want interaction with other humans I want affirmation you want that's the key word affirmation you want the affirmation that it provides and in some ways this like pints with Aquinas making it spiritual it's the it's the religious replacement it's the faith-based replacement that our society so desperately craves and this is why social media will always leave you feeling Hollow because you need you in some ways like you need I've said this to Candace before and like we've talked about this quite a lot like you need a healthy offline life to have a healthy online life right you can't just have in isolation you can't have one without the other like there's a reason that depression and anxiety are on the rise amongst young people it's because they're not fully formed individuals who are not approaching social media from the perspective of like I have a full formation in faith or I have a full formation in in like philosophy and and and experience and you know I I am a fully formed person instead they're approaching it as like this is the vehicle through which I will receive the philosophical and necessary affirmation that my my ego craves yeah right and so they get end up in these terrible places where when social media rejects them they end up you know committing suicide because they're not because they they suffer on the back end of this diatribe of indignation you were on Facebook I presume did you quit it and how how did that happen when did it happen 2015 and what was the final straw for you um I was asking myself the question that why I was getting out of bed every morning and being angry I was I was angry before I even got out of bed and I was just like why am I doing this to myself I was like why am I why is that because of arguments you were getting in or just because just because the yeah things that I was saying I didn't I was never a real big Facebook poster like I never posted a lot on Facebook I never posted you know uh uh I never kind of uploaded my thoughts I just used it as a forum to to download news really in many ways but it was annoying me I mean it was just it was seeing endless amounts of drivel in times of that's how I feel about daily wire well you see endless amounts of dribble I do on their blogs these days it feels like they're just catering to our basis desires at this point really it's interesting I enjoy listening to Matt I enjoy listening to Ben sometimes I like your wife a lot but I'm starting to see that on their blogs if you go to dailywire.com it's it's a lot of it's becoming drip I think it's just it makes sense it's like this is what people want to click on and yeah we'll go there right now we'll see maybe I'm wrong yeah I I must confess I don't read that Vlog so I don't know well yeah speaking of things that make you angry I mean political news will do that yeah and that's but so but that comes back to the the point you have to have a healthy offline life to have a healthy online life you know you you can't produce them in isolation and actually this was something that that daily wire Backstage Live was talking about when it talked about when they had this debate on pornography it was like well okay so in the instance that you go and sit in a room and watch two people having sex is that somehow different to watching pornography because no like we constantly as conservatives argue that like the online realm should also be a reflection of who we are like offline not the actions from one world should necessarily cross over into the other like that's one of the reasons they censor people on the left is because they're like Trump said this offline so we're going to shut him down online but it's more that you you have to say like can you really isolate the peop the person that you are online like why is it acceptable to go online and say death to Candace Owens like why is that acceptable but suddenly if you like if you said that in the street and you just shouted it out walking down the street that's the kind of thing people think you're nuts or they'd take cover or they seek to protect her exactly like but but on the online world this is totally fine yeah why is this totally fine because we've divorced the reality that online life is the same as on and this is like why the church why a fully formed faith is just like it's so needed in this world right now because not enough people have that on like have a spiritual life which is formed and cogent and coherent here's what I mean on daily wire here's an article the Great British baking show judge recalls drowning a bag of kittens as a child sweet thanks daily wire uh uh Carl lager Feld Lagerfeld Lagerfeld he invented called distinct distinctly hateful to specifically fat women yeah whatever work left-wing tacolitis Babylon B email provider abruptly terminate service all right that's interesting yeah I guess that's probably the thread there that's the needle they're continually trying to thread right they want to they want to make a difference they want to change culture at the same time in order to do that they're going to need you clicking on things that you want to click on I don't know yeah I mean in general I would say that I mean I'm the same it's I'm not different I mean I tell Neil Wright to take out clips of these long conversations that that seem most interesting to people and yeah well I mean by that comes back to the conversation about like gab for example you know like do we think that we can influence culture by sitting outside it like in some ways there's a Biblical reference there like Christ called us to go and make disciples of All Peoples not to just go and I mean not just like obviously think there's a beauty and there's a place absolutely and I a you know incredible commendations to those who go and seek them a nastic life but we're also called to make disciples of all peoples and to go out and evangelize the whole world like as a result do we just sit in an ivory Tower and and hope that people come to us no like the mission the great missions I mean the martyrs that have been made through Mission are just incredible when you look back at history you know starting with the apostles right starting with Saint Peter um up to the North American Martyrs yeah and I mean to this day you know Christians are martyred in the Middle East consistently um and you know that is done because of that missionary spirit that is that is taught by when I asked Matt Walsh Uh something's the effect of why he won't quit Twitter he said he wants to continually use their platform against them yeah like why would he stop doing that that was a good answer yeah and there's and there's a logic to that like engage this is why I say and you know I mean the uh the person who has the great analytical mind will have realized that something I said earlier you know contains the subjective element in it which of course makes it a very dangerous argument but I said you know you should quit all these things unless your platform is big enough yeah and it's like well who decides if your platform's big enough you know like I have a thousand people it's big enough you know and so you know I don't have a perfect solution for this yeah there isn't a perfect solution for it you know there is like to what extent I would say that Candice has 100 I would say that you as well like many of the commentators out there have changed the discourse in a very positive fashion like you can't always predict how influential your program is going to be but like Matt for example and Michael and yourself and Candace like all of these commentators have changed the discourse in positive ways and as a result like you could definitely argue well like listen I need this platform because I'm changing I'm changing culture like you know I mean I think about like I I love I love the fact that you didn't quit YouTube because otherwise I wouldn't have found you right and so you know like as a result you know I and I really enjoy and what I said about your show is true like I think that this long-form format with people who sit outside of the normal political sphere yeah like priests monks you know great thinkers like this is more of what the world needs we need more like in-depth long-form discussion about the spiritual life because the spiritual life is the only thing that's going to heal the online life like well I mean my life in August was so much more interesting than it is now that I'm back online because I joke I say it facetiously but I mean it uh it sounds like an obvious point but I learned it at a deeper level let's say that the world didn't need me to know what Biden did or didn't say or tried to say and failed at yeah what Pope Francis recently said like yeah it turned out the world was just fine with me not knowing and me just praying with my wife and going to mass and being with my kids yeah and it's this idea of this you've heard of the circle influence versus the circle of concern yeah and the more concern you put into that uh yeah into the circle of influence the more that grows but yeah when you're concerning yourself with things that you have literally no control over yeah well and that comes back why did I leave Facebook for that reason yeah it was it was concerning me with things that I had zero control over and making me angry about it and it was just net it wasn't positive for my mental health like it was just it was negative and I didn't need it it was a distraction um and so you know that's kind of why I got rid of it all because I just thought I don't know why I'm doing this why am I doing this to myself you know and that's kind of like Candace did this analysis recently or there was it wasn't heard in the analysis but she talked about it on her show which was um youths which were thinking that they were becoming trans youths and actually doctors who were seeing the children at an early stage in this progression of thought removed their phones and they removed their social media and nearly I mean I I think it was every single time although again I I don't know that for a fact but I think it was from what I understood it was every single time they did this the youth ended up saying I don't know what happened to me I was in some kind of yeah psychosis first sure yeah I'm so glad that our kids don't have social media yeah why the hell would we inflict that on them and and and you know like the great irony I mean like the great irony is that the tech Titans who are sending their kids to schools in California are sending them to schools which have no technology like what do you what do you make of the fact that the people the leaders of the industry are sending their children to schools without any technology why do they why are they doing that because they know the damage that their own institutions are doing on society right and so it's it's that's a that's that should make you ask questions if nothing else you know yeah yeah I'm so glad we live here with other families who are on the same page it would be a lot more difficult that's beautiful yeah so for those who may not be able to hear that my wife just said that our kids are with 50 other homeschooled kids here in Steubenville running around a park doing a nature study with magnifying glasses and binoculars so freaking cool homeschooling's so great it's so much easier than you think don't you think I think we've learned over time that I mean I know you do the bulk of it so I shouldn't be sitting here saying that but like in that we had a lot of stress going into it like if we don't get this right we're gonna screw up our kids it's like no just gosh I mean how many times has like like I think you took Peter to Holy Mass one weekday and he found an injured bird and sat with it that's so much cooler than anything you would do all day at a public almost Catholic schools yeah or our daughters yesterday um I I I drove I was driving home and my son and daughter were walking down the road my my son was carrying a chicken and my daughter was carrying a cooler with a kitten wrapped up in a blanket homeschooling do you know how much more well-rounded my children will be than if I had have sent them to some stupid soul-crushing school yeah the on the offline life my daughter doing backflips on the trampoline just being bored and I I I'll be honest I think there was a time where I heard parents touting homeschool when I didn't think we could do it and I felt threatened by that and I felt judged by that and so I'm trying to find a way to say it without making anybody feel bad because I understand that there are good Catholic schools and there could be good reasons to send your kids to school of course like I understand all that but I guess what I'm trying to say or at least maybe I don't need to say it it's I'm not trying to State it to anybody it's just something I'm learning is that life can be easier than it currently is it's not like you know what's difficult send your kid to school and also tell them that they can't have a smartphone like your cable be a social leper by the time he or she is eight yeah like but life could be easier like you could move to a Rust Belt town like Steubenville or wherever else and buy a house for the price of a vcr and and homeschool your kids where they won't feel like freaks because there's other beautiful wild families you're good it's easier doesn't have to be that hard yes my wife has also said that she's good at homeschooling when she pays somebody else to do it so we're like hire college students to come and help but well when they do different it's just life can be easier yeah it's the same thing with giving up your phone I think this is the question I'd like to ask when I give up technology and encourage people to reconsider it is what level of inconvenience am I willing to embrace to live a more peaceful life that's the line and that's that's the same question that I asked that's right yeah how long before you we start to choose the narrow harder path right I mean the the the path to hell is open wide and easy like and when we lead I mean you know if Christ like for freedom I have set you free you know it's like what does that mean like we were slaves to sin what does that mean like what does it actually mean you know when you sit down and really analyze what that statement means we were slaves to sin because sin is enslaving it captures your soul you know like I think of those years between Mike that those confessions right and the sin that I lived in in that life like it was it seemed easy and it seemed like it just it was a very easy convenient selfish existence and yet by the end of it I was more dead spiritually than I'd ever been with with like you know that's why I say Lord show me the path before my feet because I just I I knew that was not the life and that's like where Humanity ends up when the God is I right yeah maybe one way to think of it I'm just trying to think here is you know one promises freedom and gives enslavement yeah one appears to be enslaving but offers Freedom like my burden is light come to me you are weary and burdened I will give you rest you will find peace for your souls rest and peace is available on the Narrow Path yeah and it's not on the broad path I mean Bishop Baron actually said this like a couple of weeks ago in his Sunday Sunday sermon was like um like this there was a 30-second there was a 30 second clip in the middle of his Sunday sermon I just I I replayed it like five times because I just thought it was so powerful it was like this is the beauty of the Divine Life we get given it by God and then we give it away and then he gives us more and again I'm paraphrasing here but that was the essence of what he was saying yeah and I just replayed it again and again and again and again because for me that has been the truth which has just hit me over and over and over again that like glory be to God because he is like when I didn't want it he gave it to me and then I gave it away and then he's given me more you know and he's like He blesses and He blesses and He blesses and he's good to his people I mean this is the thing like coming back like the synthesis of story lines where my dad was said you know like being a Christian is an unfair Advantage it really is like it's such an unfair Advantage because you just get blessed with the Divine Life you get blessed with this life where he gives and he gives you so much and like it doesn't seem like he's giving you so much but he but when you take a step back you realize that he is that is exactly right and it just it is like it's such a path and when you when you're thinking for yourself when you want when you want to be king of this world you know like the Bible talks about it I mean Christ talks about it he's like you know those who seek to preserve their life will lose it and those who seek to lose their life will keep it one thing I think of continually is how the pleasures of this world in light of my let's say increasing Union with Christ they appear like as charmless as neon lights at sunrise yeah like at night they attract you yeah but as the sun begins to rise you ever been downtown all night at six a.m I've done this like a few times no not now but you know it's just like they lose their cheer there's nothing attractive about them anymore and I think to myself if if Christ hadn't have come to me I would be not in trouble with the law let's say yeah I wouldn't be uh a bad citizen in some obvious sense I'd just be bored out of my mind I'd probably have a kid or two out of wedlock with living with someone maybe at this point I'd tie the knot because of social convention yeah and I'd be one walking around wondering what the hell it's all about yeah yeah and that's absolutely right I mean the shallowness of the of the life and I mean that's that again comes back to social media like why do you need to be fully formed as an individual because to be thrust into a world where you're speaking with hundreds of millions of people in an online Forum you're going to suffer the slings and arrows of a fallen world over and over again in microcosm relentlessly you know you're going to be attacked for positions that you believe and hold I want to offer a question to everybody who's watching right now if I uh if I if I make the decision to quit Twitter I would like to it to benefit other people as well and I think it will benefit them if I get off Twitter just because I wouldn't be no I don't think but I I wonder how many watching right now would be willing to quit Twitter if I did like if I did a stream and once we reached a hundred people like it'll be a little a little Exodus well I'll go over to parlor or no we'll just get off entirely right get off Twitter how many of you watching right now in the live chat would quit Twitter if that was the rule once I get 100 people I'll just I'll deactivate it publicly let us know in the live chat or if you're watching this after the show tell us in the comments below would you what would have to happen for you to be willing to get off Twitter because there's always a good reason to stay but here's the thing ever since I've got on locals which I just love Matt frad.locals.com I ask everyone to go check that out not only is it a much more pleasurable social kind of experience what's cool about Paul uh well you can tell it's cool though what's cool about locals is that you have to you can access the content we put on locals but you have to pay to engage yeah so if I do a live stream in the morning I do most mornings anybody can watch it but if you want to comment you have to be financially invested in 10 bucks a month or something like that and so what that does is it eliminates trolls yeah and people try to give each other the benefit of the doubt because they're part of this community that's intentional and so even when people are saying things that others disagree with or even when they're saying like overtly uncatholic things because they're just trying to figure out this Catholic thing people tend to give them the benefit of the doubt yeah it's and it's really elevated the discourse I love it so much but yeah I kind of want to ask people that like what what would have to happen for you to get off Twitter because even though I've got a significantly less amount of people that follow me on locals it gets way more reached than when I post on Twitter yeah we've got like what 58 000 people who follow me on Twitter or something right twenty thousand might be Bots I don't know but I post something I might get a few retweets or something yeah why am I why are we doing this yeah it's like this it's almost like my wife gets a little upset with me sometimes because I I hate technology I mean it's ironic but I I'm frustrated by it so often yeah if we're sitting together and we're trying to chat and her phone beings I'm like like turn it off or I'll physically turn it around on her right yeah maybe that's my stuff conflicting with you know I got to be more patient as well um but you know the times that and she's really good on her phone I don't want to give the wrong impression that she's kind of addicted to her phone or something like that but she'll say well I just need to do this thing right or I'll say that too let's use myself as an example I just need to quickly check this I just need to I just need to get back like there's always a good reason that's why you're doing it is because you perceive it to be a good reason it's just that the reasons you check your phone 8 000 times a day are interfering with your life and so I'd love to hear people in the comments section tell me why you think it's a good idea to be on Twitter there's always a good reason you could offer I think one of the things people will say to me is like you're you can do good on Twitter like you can proclaim the gospel on Twitter like if we did a mass Exodus who would be there to do it I'm not convinced by that argument um well that comes back to the point about the fact that like you know what what that comes back to the kind of totalitarian control right and so you know what hope do you have for a platform which fundamentally at the end of the day is controlled and subject to very restrictive like covenants in what you can say yeah right and that becomes an issue because at that point you're like this is why I say everyone's on borrowed time because like you're all you know everyone's living on borrow time and you've just seen a number of so here's the thing like the conservative side of the debate has decided that transgenderism is the hill upon which they will die finally right there are so many Hills behind us that we should have died yeah there are like there were mountains which we which we should have thrown our swords down on and some conservatives did and you know they suffered the consequence of that but the transgender debate is the one which appear appears to be this hill upon which they will all die and so as a result the Banning is getting worse and it's getting more aggressive and it's getting faster um and as a result like you know it's only a matter of time before everyone is banned if you have an opinion about transgenderism which defies the narrative you're going to get banned so like what is the point on being on Twitter there isn't one right now you know there there's only one like Candace is the same thing she's like it's boring Twitter is fundamentally boring because they keep banning all the other conservatives so there's just no one to talk to anymore or to the person who says but what if you could reach that one Soul then I could say something in reply which is sort of a argument at absurdum okay well you should be on every single social media platform then yeah because there's always the possibility that you could reach that once all so why aren't you on all of them don't you love Jesus don't you think we're called to proclaim the gospel yeah say that again yeah there you go that's a good point that's a great yeah for those who can't hear Thursday's saying if that line of the Gospel where our Lord says if you go to a place and they don't accept you shake the dust from your sandals yeah it would be better if that town and there's someone being like but what if it is the one person yeah it would be better at that town had never been yeah you know thought of I think because I think the other cool thing about me getting off Twitter is if I can encourage 100 people to get off Twitter with me yeah that's a hundred Better Lives I've just improved yeah you know we have to vote with our with our you know fundamentally this comes back to the rise of work corporates you have to vote with your pocketbook and your online life is part of your pocket yeah you know so you need to say okay like I'm not gonna you know I've decided that I'm not going to watch Disney anymore because I don't agree with that corporate institution you know I'm not gonna sign up to Twitter because I don't agree with that corporate institution like all of these companies are you're kind of buying into the whole I mean like I'm trying to you know the next big one in my life is Amazon like I want to cut Amazon from my life good for you know and so like I have people who work at parlor who are like fanatical about not buying things from Amazon yeah because they're just like well we need to get we need to stop using Amazon every time meet people in Steubenville meet new probably do you shop on Amazon or do you not want to out yourself anymore I still have access to my point right we can't yeah all right let's I have some questions I asked my folks is it all right go for it on locals what they would like to ask George farmer here we go I don't know what they're asking I haven't seen these so is it okay if we just think of this as a lightning round because we have like 30 people here okay uh we should cut this is uh weave 88 we should call these long-form discussions mats suckers another guest into talking about Lord of the Rings I was wondering I was wondering how long we've been going okay that's it wow uh Joey asks there's some great hair going on here LOL delete Gmail as it's on YouTube but I love that you're using their platform against them yes protonmail has a calendar signal is a great app don't have Twitter it's like a thousand points this person's trying to wrap up into a comment appreciate it uh Emma says is it possible for a Catholic who uses social media and follows politics to keep interior peace if so how yeah I think so I mean I think I think she's she's hitting the nail on the header which is that it comes back to that online life offline life you know like if you're a fully formed individual who has a great relationship with the Lord who um you know is fully formed in the interior life or at least is trying to become fully formed in the entire life can you have a healthy engagement with online the online world I think yes you can right I just think the majority of people are not like that right the majority of people don't have that fully formed offline life they are seeking through social media the affirmation that they so desire that the human ego desperately craves right they're not seeking affirmation in the lord they're not seeking affirmation in God they're not seeking affirmation in the church they're seeking affirmation from posting pictures of themselves wearing you know very few clothes yeah on a beach in you know the Bahamas well great but that doesn't really that's not gonna that's not gonna build you up as a person on your deathbed you're not going to think wow I really wish I'd posted more pictures of myself on a beach yeah exactly you know you're going to think I wish I had a living and breathing relationship with the Lord my God Neil would you let me know if we get any super chats and just read them out if we do Colin Carr says what are your thoughts on the dumb phone anti-social media digital minimalism movement I've grown to believe that it's impossible for any social media app by its very nature to not be predatory and dangerous curious about your thoughts on this two questions there yeah so the latter about social media and the first about the dumb phone so they're I'm kind of fascinated by the dumb firm movement a little bit I haven't kind of wrapped my head around it fully um you know I think that there's a strong like there's a really good reason to seek it out which is that people are just increasingly turned off by the amount of technological intrusion in our life I think the dumb phone is a very I mean I I'm if I don't you know if I didn't run a social media company I definitely I I definitely am of the opinion that not tomorrow but at some point in the future I am I am migrating my life towards that outcome right I would like to be in a position where I don't have to have a SmartPhone I would actually prefer a dumb phone that's kind of where I'm going um I can see it in my own minds I can see that that's where I'm ending up um you know I hate the intrusion of the phone and what you just said about conversations with your wife or you turn it over I I hate that about myself like when I'm constantly being pinged by people and bothered by people it's just it it it drives me nuts it means that like my peace is Disturbed my inner peace is Disturbed do I think that it's possible for any social media business to to kind of be non-predatory yeah I think it is you know I I think like you know Shameless self-promotion here you know I I don't think that parlor is a predatory platform you know we we kind of pride ourselves on not being like I Want to Be Free Speech I want to be a free speech platform which allows people to express themselves freely like I don't I don't view my users as like a as like a means to an end have you I view the free speech of the of the of the world as like the end right and so providing that platform tries to allow them to get to that end right Jacob asks George I have seen you at my Latin Mass Parish in Nashville and just really wanted to ask what got you into the tridentine mass hopefully the church will be real rebuilt soon and have beautiful liturgy in a very beautiful Church the Latin Mass yeah I mean I do go to Latin Mass um I love I love the I love the traditional Mass I really I really find it just so beautiful um and for me there's a couple of things that really draws me to it so just to be clear I also go to Navasota because it's difficult to find Latin Mass every day um and um one of the things that really draws me to The Latin mass is the sense of apostolic continuation which is that there are there there are parts of the Roman Canon there are parts of the Latin Mass service which have effectively remained unchanged for centuries for like almost thousands of years and I love that Apostolic continuation for me that was a big part of my conversion was the knowledge that through the pope of Rome one has the continuous unbroken line of Peter's successes from Christ that uniform single thread of apostolic continuation which runs from the apostles all the way through to now Aladdin mass is also a part of that and I really love it for that reason I also think and this is something that you know I'm not sure whether most people agree with me on this but um that doesn't matter but you know I think that there's an element of like the Tower of Babel in the post Vatican II world where like I went I was in Hungary earlier this year in Budapest and I went to mass at a church in Hungary and I thought it was going to be Latin mass and it was actually in Hungarian and I didn't understand a word of it now that's not to say that if I turned up without my missile I would have been able to understand everything in Latin my Latin is not good enough to do that but there's an element that I know when I walk into a church which is practicing the Latin Mass anywhere in the world that I'm getting the same service anywhere in the world so in some ways we the Latin mass unifies and brings together a church which is now divided by you know thousands of languages yeah flavory s says I know he is not his wife that's good but I would like to know how he responds to the would you mind me asking this question I'm sure you're tired some answering questions about half of your wife but how how uh he I would like to know how he responds okay to the criticism that she is a grifter when she calls the celebration of the end of slavery lame I don't know what they're referring to maybe you can fill us in Juneteenth um what's that or maybe something like that I I I I I would need to this word grifter talk about grifter so Candace and I actually had a joke which was like when we first got together you know the number one comment underneath like the trolling coming underneath most of her posts was like grifter's got a grift you know that was like grifter's got a grift what is grift I think I know what it means it kind of means like uh drifting along with that Which is popular oh no no it's more like it's like financially scamming people right and so it kind of means like you're just grifting like you're just basically there's a bunch of safety Catholics have been calling me a grifter oh really yeah yeah interesting so basically it means that you you've kind of sunk into the whole of like doing things just because it's making you money right I guess is how I would describe it um well I would say like you know my response to the kind of grifting comment is like my wife you know came from nothing she's a highly entrepreneurial woman who's built you know a platform for herself by taking incredibly courageous and bold statements in a world that lacks courage she has balls bigger than most senior politicians she says things that the world is thinking but the world is but politicians are too afraid to say like you know there were very few people who challenged the covert narrative at the early days and she was one of them and like there are very few people who challenged the vaccine narrative at the beginning and she was one of them she calls out BS whenever she sees it and I as a result I don't think I don't you know when if she was grifting you know I'd like to think you know I'm a fallen human being like everybody else but I'd like to think that I have the intellectual honesty to call that out um from her and you know there have been times she and I have disagreed on policy points of course we do like we're humans um but I also think that she she has done things and she's made statements and she's been Courageous where so many other people have not been there's probably a lot of jealousy of those who look at your wife and see how successful she is and it would be much more convenient for them if she was a quote-unquote grifter than someone who speaks her mind and people who are willing to pay to listen to her on daily wire plus that sort of thing you know I mean you get two schools you get the jealous school and you get the the people who actually want to make the like make the world a better place you know and I mean she tells the story about Dr Ben Carson you know former Secretary of uh Housing and Urban Development under the Trump Administration and like Dr Carson is one of the nicest men I've ever met in my life I mean he's just so sweet I mean he's so gentle his demeanor is like a gentle soul and um you know the first time he met Candace like there were a lot of there were a lot of conservatives out there who were like you know yeah kind of attacked her from her own side you know talked about how she was just a grifter and all this kind of stuff and when we met Dr Carson I remember him just being like Candace I just I I love you I just don't know how you've been able to do what you've been able to do like I've spent my entire life trying to convince the black community that they don't need to be signed up to a political belief system which has oppressed them for 60 years and I've never had any success and now in six months or in two years you've been able to turn around an entire narrative and actually completely transform the way Black America views itself um and like you see more and more black conservatives coming out now which is just fantastic and like kudos to them and you know like black set you know has has been a huge movement part of that movement uh in terms of promoting like a a a Breaking of the chains with regards to the end of slavery like I don't know that exact comment so I'm gonna have to kind of take a rain check on that question I don't know exactly what that's referring to um you know I think her viewpoint is that black America swapped out like known slavery for like government slavery in the 60s when this when like the big Society Act was signed into law and welfarism became the like predominant method methodology that like black America became enslaved to the government again but just kind of didn't realize it so you know I'm paraphrasing there and I don't know the exact specifics of that particular quote but that's kind of the general direction of her narrative around that um Heidi says should Catholics and other Christians be involved in developing and or testing artificial intelligence so that there is representation of our views or should we stay away from its development entirely oh Heidi great question um listen I think that I'm going to come back to that earlier point that I made I think Catholics need to be involved in every aspect of of wildlife like I think we need to get involved in I I don't believe in just sitting apart and saying we're going to wash our hands of this and just let it be what it is I think we need to be involved I think we need to have our viewpoints made like the fallacy of the argument that somehow people can't take their personal life into the political life I find very entertaining you know like this is one of the things about religion in in the UK is that when you enter UK politics you're somehow basically told that okay that's great now your faith has to stay at the door it's like what a what a lunatic argument like why of course it's not going to stay at the door why would it stay at the door like everyone carries their personal subjective life into their Business and Professional and political life that's just what they do right I mean like we're formed as individuals to think about issues because we've been formed in certain ways like I as a Catholic obviously think about things in certain ways because I'm a Catholic right so like in the same way I would say that there are aspects of um like National secular life where it will be difficult for a Catholic to have a like I don't you know you've you said to me yesterday like you've talked to more people about porn than you know almost any other person on the planet and like I think it'll be difficult for a Catholic to work in the pornography industry you know like and and realistically think that they could change that for better right but I at the same time think that like artificial intelligence is going to be a huge part of the future of this world yeah um so it will be good to have Catholics in that who who want to influence it for the better for those who are watching who are in Interfaith marriages like uh if you don't mind me asking like how has that been you know maybe praying with your wife or seeking to share your faith with your wife who does not yet share it and yeah you know what's that balance between trying to share this something that's the most important thing in your life with the most important person in your life but at the same time wanting to respect their freedom and not turn them off by being so maybe enthusiastic or pushy we had a super chat about that too did you okay thanks Super Chat yeah I mean you know I think that there's there's a passage in one Peter which talks about share your faith with gentleness and respect yeah and um you know like what stands out in my life as the best example of of of of Christian Ministry it's it's the lived example it's not the doers I do but don't do as I you know do as I it's the do as I do and I I'm going to tell you what I think but I'm also you're also going to do what I what I'm living my life by right the actions that I'm professing are lived out in reality like I think it's the most powerful for anyone who's in an Interfaith marriage is that the most powerful witness you can provide is the life you lead right so a life of Holiness a life called to Holiness a life which is marked by like a sacramental profession um you know I attend Mass almost every day you know like I I try and get up in the morning I spend some time with the Lord I pray I read the Bible I read I normally read a a snippet from a Christian author um you know I try and say grace before meals I want to raise up I mean we're going to raise our children as Catholic you know I I think and then and then I think also like the purity of the faith is a really important witness because there's the witness that I can lead as a Christian and as a Catholic in my home and then there's the witness that the church itself provides which is that and this is why you know I fight for the church Purity and teaching and Doctrine which is so important because like one of the things that has destroyed the Church of England for example is that the homily you're going to get from your service on Sunday is basically the same as any left-wing newspaper editorial right we can't just say okay we've got to adopt the latest Trend as the trend which we're going to preach on like nothing will destroy the church faster than just an adoption of whatever the cultural conversation is right now we need to remain consistent and hold on to the Eternal truths that have been made known to us right and that is why it's so important that we don't get caught up with adopting like whatever the latest nonsense is in terms of church teaching right and that's why that the synodal way in Germany is so dangerous because it brings to the it brings to light the idea that church doctrine can change because cultural times have changed so we as Catholic needs to fight for the soundness of church doctrine and we and we need to lead by example through lived Holiness in our own lives did you watch the documentary the social dilemma no okay well I won't ask you about it I will ask you about Matt Walsh's uh excellent documentary what is a woman what did you think about it and do you think think it's going to significantly change that the discussion of the trans discussion in this country and elsewhere I think it has done already yeah I think it's it's it's it's it was almost in some ways like a a seminal moment in the debate am I right in thinking that that documentary did better for the daily wire than the three or whatever amount of movies they've put out I I don't know the numbers of the demand but I imagine so I mean it was like it was huge I mean it was it was it was huge yeah huge it was just huge um these people wonderful people huge people but he he he shattered I think the narrative that this was like an industry which was just what they describe as gender reaffirming right which is just a leftist you know word salad to to basically cover what their actions are and of course his interviews you couldn't pay actors to seem that stupid on camera you really couldn't they wouldn't be that believable stupidity I know God bless them and Lord convert them and yeah I don't mean to attack any of those individuals but they they would just they had clearly like what did that one Professor say to Matt um that language of truth rejective truth he just well it's it's true I mean it's just impressive it's the Pontius Pilate it's the quarters you know it's like what is what is truth you know it comes back to the same argument like one of the great things about the gospel is that you know Ecclesiastes everything nothing is new Under the Sun right you know it's like the same like there's Pontius Pilate saying what is truth at the trial of Christ and here we are 2 000 you know two thousand years later and we've got exactly the same questions what is truth like you know and it's you've the the devil has taken many forms but he always but his form is always deceit you know like it it always is the same lies and deceit which come out at the end of the day and so that's where we are right now you know we are just in that same spiral of lies and ultimately like this is why I say look at look at the promises of the left like this this is this is why I believe that I don't think Christianity is either left or right I don't think it's it's Christianity should be above that you know it's it is above that it's the Eternal truth of God it's neither it shouldn't be political but you know the way that we're the way that it's seeing now like what are the promises of the left right now if you're an environment if you're obsessed with environmentalism you won't have children for the sake of the planet you won't fly anywhere you won't see your family right you you you naturally shut down your family life or your potential to create children and fulfill the beatific Vision By by you know celebrating the fact that you're only going to have one kid or something like that right and then you don't want to travel because you don't want to pollute the environment so you you you don't go and see family if you're signed up to feminism you don't have children because you won't get married because you don't believe that men and women have any difference so why should you bother um if you if you sign up to the transgender debate you're willing to mutilate yourself you know I mean it's just it's a it's a never-ending Cascade of lies and deceit which end up in human misery yep well put any other super chats or things we should respond to um we had a Super Chat uh just now from redemption's reach that says there's another group that hates the other and then says uh Candace George matineal etc for being brave enough to speak the truth they subconsciously wish they could some people are just afraid to do the same as such they persecute the truth teller which I guess isn't really a question um I had kind of a question for George so it it seems to me that um social media platforms have all these kind of General guidelines and rules like you know don't defraud people know pornography on these um so I think that in the Fallen nature of humanity if you give people these kinds of social media platforms it seems like the truth doesn't always rise to the top naturally and the rhetoric of the technology sometimes like overpowers uh I guess like the classic example against freedom of speech is like what if there was a news agency that just put out like false stuff all the time and then it somehow became immensely popular do you think that that like something like that couldn't happen um because it seems like yeah I don't know what are your thoughts on that on like the algorithm of what what's being shown what gets interactions what makes things show up in people's feeds doesn't always seem to naturally coincide with people want the truth and are you know drawn towards what edifies so my my answer to that is is um something we were discussing yesterday which is that the whole model of capitalism is based on the on the idea that we as rational human beings can make rational choices right that's that's pretty much how every economic model is built the simplistic view of this would be what I was saying to you earlier if Kroger raises their prices and Walmart doesn't then people will naturally defect from Kroger to Walmart because they're going to get the same product at a cheaper price right that is the that is the rational basis upon which our economic system is built now one could argue humans make irrational decisions the whole time so therefore it's a false it's a false idea that we should base rationality but we have but if we are to give the individual any responsibility in that in decision making in their own life then we need to allow for freedom of choice what does that mean in answer to your question it means that people should be able people need to discern the truth right like Reagan famously said trust but verified wasn't actually Reagan who said that it was the KGB um and the irony being is that we should trust but verify don't just believe everything you read go off and do your own research you could say okay well that takes time but yes but again this comes back to like the hard path right it's not if if you're just spoon fed information and you have no discernment or critical thinking to discern what is truth then you you're in a very dangerous position before you even get online that's my point right your offline life needs to be fully formed you need to be able to have Discerning faculties to be able to make rational decisions like in the same way that if you were irrational you will continue to shop at Kroger and eventually you would end up poorer because of it right in the same scenario that I just outlined you should make rational decisions based on what you know about news organizations based on Research you've made yourself like we live in a in a highly connected World those decisions are easier to make because there's more information but it also requires more discernment to find out what is the correct information right and again like it also comes back to how you formed your world view like are you a fully formed human being in the offline life or are you just getting onto social media because you think like you know I really want to see like you know I want to see pictures of scantily clad women okay well then you know like maybe your offline life is not fully formed yet you know that's a great answer thank you where are we at how long we've been going for almost up here seven minutes away from five hours oh my gosh take that Sheamus Cochran wow Sheamus bad luck yeah and Trent horn yeah Sheamus be trend yeah he did that's right and there you beat Sheamus yeah and it's felt like a Breeze by the way it really has I mean uh because we're gonna finish the cigar I presume well I've finished mine oh look at you but you haven't finished you know I was afraid I'd smoke it too quickly and then uh and now and then we'd be in trouble yeah no one wants to see me go green and throw up or maybe they do because the algorithm now that would great make some great content yeah um what's that content what content more content um I want to let people know if they go over to mattfred.locals.com and become a supporter we just released a six-part teaching series from Dr Ed fazer on Thomas aquinas's five ways um it's very good and if you go to mattford.locals.com and sign up right now you get access to that immediately as well as we have a quarterly newspaper that we send to you free of charge once you become a support annual supporter you don't even have to pay shipping we will ship that to you even if you live in Namibia or New Zealand um and we're pretty excited about these the reason we created the newspaper was so that people could leave their phone in their drawer go sit in the sunshine or on their deck and have a smoke or a drink and just more calmly read deep edifying thoughts and so we're currently in the process of printing our second newspaper for fall which I think will be shipping out I'd say within about three weeks so you still have time if you go to matfred.locals.com become a supporter and then there's a pinned post at the top of locals that invite you to give us your address that's the only way we can then make sure that you receive one of these newspapers that cool that's great who would have thought I'd have a Lover's paper I love it yeah I still read a paper newspaper yeah what do you read I read the Wall Street Journal on the weekends um menu for the business I think it's it's it's it's pretty good business coverage I'd say you wanted to talk about cricket oh wow like how many more hours do you want to go I mean a test match is five days would you miss it I love I don't like sport but I love Cricket so I guess I love sport yeah I I don't I don't what do you love about it what do I love about cricket there's so many things I love about Cricket as you mentioned people may not be aware but traditionally a cricket match will last for five days so what is it like 9 A.M to 4 5 p.m it's normally 11 A.M to 6 p.m 11 A.M to 6 p.m they stop for tea someone comes out with a car sandwiches so good so it's just a leisurely game that's always exciting it's probably similar to baseball I mean Cricket's the father of baseball really so Cricket's certainly better than baseball obviously but in that like every bowl is exciting right so there's the there's it's like it's not continually exciting because that would get fatiguing but like here comes another bowl and like here we go here we go that's a six here we go he's out here we go nothing it's yeah that I really like that a lot yeah um and I just like the culture around it like if you know Australia you're playing England test match you know for the next five days yeah your people are talking about this and because it's such a slow game you can go to work come home and like not much has gone on like two people got out or five people got out and now it's this or whatever yeah I really really enjoy it what about you what do you like about it yeah I think you hit a lot of the nails right there I mean it's it's a wonderfully strategic sport which is like it almost seems impossible that it could be strategic over five days but actually it's highly highly highly exciting yeah like that the development the weather aspect which is always fun like you've got you know it's just a it's a beautifully balanced sport in many ways and you're quite right it's like it's it hasn't yet well the the 2020 style of the game has definitely um you know moved Cricket more towards the kind of like instant gratification like yeah how can we very disappointing how can we get as many people in there as possible but like the Indian subcontinent which is the biggest Watcher of of of of of cricket and has the biggest League you know is obviously the kind of consumer demand for that but the Test match series like the Tesh map test test match cycle is just it's wonderful I mean every match in England is sold out it's hugely popular tell them about the ashes series and the origins of that ah the ashes have you heard me talk about that oh no I haven't actually so my understanding is and you correct me since we have the Australian and the Englishman here is that when England First lost to Australia to those bloody convict Colony uh that Bloody convert Colony they took the stumps and burnt them and put them in an urn and said Cricket is dead that's right another circuit England and then what happened and by the way how many minutes till five hours uh because I've got something I want people to type into the comments two two minutes if you watched this five hour show I want you to write suck it England no don't write that no what should we have no right suck it England into the comments so we know how many people actually stuck around for five hours this is a horrible you could watch this this is a horror and then type George farmer sucks no no no just just in the suck at England suck it comma England exclamation marks if you want this is ridiculous horribly biased you know glory be to God um no but you're right the ashes series became this like Hallmark series between England and Australia and now every four years every yeah there's the ashes series I thought it was four might be wrong I don't know and they play for a replica of the urn that's the truth yeah that's right come on I mean to understand how important this is the body line series of I forget what year it was but the body line series which was part of the ashes became a diplomatic crisis between England and Australia like ambassadors were called to respective heads of state because like the way that the bot the body line was this style of bowling from Fast Bowlers where basically deliberately targeted the body of the batsman rather than like aiming for the bat um which is now by the way a very common tactic obviously that's like part of the game but when it was first developed it was considered to be like this great travesty in terms of how like people uh perceived it and um and so like ambassadors were called you know like the Australian prime minister was outraged that England would deploy this tactic of Bodyline bowling and all this kind of stuff so it was just it's like it's a great sport I mean it's just a beautiful sport like more people I've always found this funny I said this yesterday it's one of the most watched sports in the world like the second most watched sport in the world after soccer right because um because the whole of Pakistan India Bangladesh Sri Lanka all of these countries watch it and it's just so popular yeah all right changed my mind we shouldn't say stuff to England you should never say something like that I apologize but hey I think in five it's too late now like in five hours of filming I do think that was the worst thing I said yeah and that's pretty impressive yeah type instead Aussie Aussie Aussie do we have many people who watch for the whole five hours but I have been watching innocent said their butt hurts from sitting for so long it's amazing there you go the cultural crossover that no one knew they needed yeah map for our George farmer there you go I love it that's five hours so wow congratulations thank you my friend um fantastic this is really enjoyable it's nice to get to know you yeah likewise it's been a pleasure glad you exist glad you're doing what you're doing thanks man you too I love pints with Aquinas I'm just going to say that thank you it's just awesome thank you so much I I am so honored to to to be able to do this I really enjoy sitting down with wonderful folks and shouting it's just such a joy for me yeah um and continue to seek like if I can offer you a word of encouragement please continue to seek out those people whose voices don't get heard like I I just love that about your show I think that like you know I the sisters the fathers the priests the monastics that you have on this show just offer like a richness and depth that like it's just it's wonderful I feel nourished by it like I feel like it it fills my soul because you meet these godly people like I was kind of like I was sort of embarrassed when you ask me because I'm like I have nothing to offer you know like I'm just not why would I be interesting well how do we get in touch I don't understand how this happened then through Michael Knowles I think yeah he emailed me and said you want to get in touch and then what happened did I just say go on my show okay pretty much yeah that's right yeah anyway getting to the bottom of the barrel now yeah give us your best joke no that's uh I hear your American accent too well there's lots of different American accents but like you choose one you got the the southern accent and keep them Deep South you know more good old boys from Tennessee you're in Deep South that's that's about as good as mine I like that I like that little whistle you got yeah yeah I mean it's quite funny living in Tennessee it's just like not somewhere I ever thought that I would live you know when I was growing up it was just like Nashville seemed as alien to me as you know Timbuktu and now that I live there I just love it and I can't imagine living anywhere else like I can't imagine living outside of Tennessee at pretty much all for the rest of my life and there's other states now that I've also fallen in love with like the mountain states I just think are absolutely gorgeous and as I said you know like this country is just beautiful I've never been to Alaska I want to go to Alaska this is my first time to Ohio you've ever been to Dollywood no I haven't is that in Tennessee yeah that it's just down the road oh I love Dollywood I've been there three times for the kids absolutely love it I hate theme parks like the way I would never want to go to Disney I can't imagine no I'd never be people I respect enjoy going I'm not saying it's uh but I just could not but there's something about Dollywood that is exciting but also spacious and peaceful they don't play top 20 hits they they play more yeah she's done some incredible things with her I mean like one of the funny things when our daughter was born earlier this year there was a knock on the door in the in the hospital oh yeah and it was like these women offering free Dolly Parton books and uh and I sort of dismissed them out of hand and then somebody afterwards was like no they're really good like you should actually read them because they're all about family and all about promoting growth and I was like oh wow that's that's that fills me with encouragement that free books in the hospital are being offered out which are like encouraging family growth and stuff like that so yep okay to Accents Tennessee oh best joke he is I I'm afraid I won't say this joke very well but let's give it a shot there's this uh grieving Widow standing at her dead husband's funeral and that's it no and uh and and next to her is the dead man's best friend right and they're both there at the funeral and she says to him would you mind saying something you know and so he approaches the ambo and just says one word plethora and then he sits down and she says thanks that means a lot that's very good it might be my favorite joke that's very good what about you I don't really have any good jokes I'm not like I'm like I used to know other jokes but I've forgotten most of them now I mean I'm sure I could rustle up a couple but like now I now I seem to occupy the you know kind of quite lonely space of dad jokes oh yeah it's good it's a good world yeah here's one sometimes I bring my knees into my chest and lean forward that's just how I roll nice yeah nice yeah you're welcome yeah there was a picture of a farmer standing in a wheat field the other day in this guy and there was the the joke was like um this guy isn't just standing in a cornfield he's outstanding in his field a terrible terrible joke like awful joke but when you're in the mood for a bad joke yeah sometimes it really hits the spot right it does it's quite funny yeah all right well better take you back to the airport yeah God bless thanks everybody for being here so Aussie Aussie Aussie that's how we know you've watched five hours yeah beautiful

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 332,601

Keywords: aquinas, catholicism, catholic, pints with aquinas, matt fradd, theology, debate, religion, st. thomas aquinas, thomas aquinas, philosophy

Id: IrbxAZaY2Uo

Length: 302min 48sec (18168 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 04 2022