Pints With Aquinas - BONUS | Jason Evert | The Matt Fradd Show

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with my long time friend, Jason Evert. We talk Chastity, Dating, Pornography, Birth Control, the AIDs Epidemic, Modesty, and how we can better love ourselves and others. __ Check out Jason's new Book: https://chastity.com/products/the-dat... The Chastity Project Website: https://chastity.com/ --- SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

G'day, Pints with Aquinas listeners. Matt Fradd here. I want to share with you a bonus episode today from my other podcast, The Matt Fradd Show. The Matt Fradd Show is a long-form discussion that I have with really interesting people on YouTube. I also then release it as a podcast on The Matt Fradd Show podcast. So you can either watch it on YouTube or listen to it as a podcast. So if you're not yet subscribed to one or both of those on YouTube and as a podcast, be sure to go do that. I don't always release Matt Fradd Show episodes on Pints with Aquinas, but I do occasionally, especially when there's been a ton of interest in it. You're going to absolutely love this episode with Jason Everett. Please enjoy and share it with your friends.

G'day and welcome to the Matt Fradd Show. I am Matt Fradd and today I'm going to be interviewing author and speaker Jason Everett, who speaks to around 100,000 people every year on the topic of chastity. We're going to have a great discussion about sex, relationships, modesty, the church's teaching on things like homosexuality, transgenderism and the like. But before we get to that, New Year's is coming up, and many people make New Year's resolutions. Well, here's something you might want to commit to if you are a dude. Exodus 90 is an ascetical program for men, where for 90 days, you give up things you'd rather not give up, like alcohol and sweets and things like that. And then you take up things

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The second group I want to say thank you to is Halo. Halo is an app that's going to help you pray. It's just fantastic. There's a lot of apps out there like Calm and Headspace, which maybe you've heard about, that help people meditate and these sorts of things. They're very well produced, but the problem with them is that they lead to new age practices and ways of thinking. The cool thing about Halo is it is 100% Catholic and just as well produced. Halo offers a permanently free version of their app which includes content that's updated every day and it also provides a paid subscription option with premium content but if you use the promo code Matt Fradd one word you can try out all the

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Really, it's fantastic. Check it out. Halo.app. Matt Fradd. All right. Here's my chat with Jason Everett. Lighting is the hardest thing we added that what do we add that for there were shadows and stuff yeah it creates a little depth yeah so it's so great to have you here thank you so much how many talks did you give today uh we had two today we had about a thousand high school kids in the

morning and about 200 at lunchtime and then uh one last night, then over to here, then to Louisiana tonight for two more tomorrow. Foley was at your talk last night. He said it was incredible. No. Yeah. Did that go well? No, it went real well. We had the talk last night and then followed by Eucharistic Adoration with Confession.

We invite the family. We kind of use the teens as bait to get the parents to show up. Because the parents are the primary sex educators. And so often they think, oh, I'll send the kid to youth group and he'll pick it up there. But we really want to get it to be a whole family thing to get that conversation started with the parents. So then after the talk, we tell them, hey, we've got seven priests in the next room. Take your whole family to confession now. So that way, instead of leaving like, oh, rah, rah, rah, motivational talk, they're going home from a chastity talk.

Their soul's as clean as the day they were baptized. So sometimes sacraments can do more than speakers. So you want to kind of take that in the power of the church. And that's what we're doing now with the evening talks. Okay. I was going to ask you, so this is different from your chastity talks that you've been given during the day at high schools. So what is this thing? Yeah, it's called Purified. And it's basically an event for the entire family, ages 13 and up. And where we have the chastity talk, and then we have a half-hour prayer and Eucharistic adoration with confession going on at the same time. Wow.

It's a two-hour thing, and so instead of just a talk, it's more of like a miniature retreat for the entire family. How long have you been doing that for? We've been doing it for a long time, but now we're just starting to make it a formalized process and getting it all cleaned up. Now you say it, I can see the logo or something that you put together for it. And then do you bring your books and materials? Yeah, everybody gets free stuff. Yeah, so tell us about that because this is so cool that you do this.

Yeah, well, we take up donations all year long to just give away free stuff to the kids. And so every year we give away hundreds of thousands of free books to the kids. We were talking in Virginia recently and I noticed as the kids are piling to the gym, I'm just watching them, and the girl sits on the bleachers, and a boy comes and sits down behind her, clearly her boyfriend, and he wraps his arms and legs around her,

kind of like an octopus. It's intense. At first, you could see she's enjoying the affection of his tentacles and everything around her, but then as the talk went on, you could tell she was growing increasingly claustrophobic of him. And then by the end, she's kind of scooting away. And then as the talk went on you could tell she was growing increasingly claustrophobic of him and then by the end she's kind of scooting away and then after the talk she came down to the resource table with all the free chastity books holding his hand they come up to the table and

she looks at everything and she says to him go away he walks away she leans into me and she's like what's that book you have on the 16 reasons to dump a guy and i'm like that is right here she says thank you very much so you know because people donate we're able to just give the stuff for free for the kids that's awesome yeah and so you do that your purified events and these events and the high school assembly so how do you do that do you just have somebody shipping them to these events you don't bring them with you presumably yeah so we'll see okay there's a thousand kids at this school you want to send 250 that thing 300 of these 200 of those and we put them out of the tables and the kids just clean it out.

It's amazing. That's beautiful. They walk in, they're like, oh, stupid sex talk. I need to do something like that because you go there and you make an impact. You want to kind of bless them with things like that, especially while they're inspired. And you'd be amazed. I mean, they gobble it up.

I mean, they're just piling it on afterwards. Do you find that the teachers are sometimes surprised? They're like, oh, I don't think they'll be interested in this, and then they see it. For sure. And one has said, why don't I just stand here and hand them to the kids and i'm like wait why don't you go for that and then he gave me afterwards like i felt like i was in a stampede yeah it's all disheveled yeah you know because you wouldn't and the kids don't think

it either that they'd be that hungry but i think it was steve jobs who says sometimes people don't know what they want until you show it to them. And I think it's the same thing with human love sometimes. You have to show them what chastity really is in order for them to realize the truth and the goodness and the beauty of it. So how long have you been giving chastity talks for? And how did you start doing it? It's been about 21 years, full-time chastity speaking. So when I was in high school, I started helping out on retreats.

Then I got to Franciscan University. I started leading high school retreats. And on the retreats, the kids would really open up about all the stuff that they're wrestling with. And then I, at the same time, did sidewalk counseling. So for three years, I was in front of an abortion clinic, just trying to give women other alternatives, choose life. And I just started to feel late. Like, why am I meeting this woman 45 minutes before she's on an abortion table why why

couldn't I have met her when she was 15 because maybe if she learned about chastity she never would have dated this creep to begin with and be in this difficult situation so I realized to save the most unborn babies I have to swim upstream but some people really had that gift for saving the babies I just didn't I remember one day a nun came and she's like, oh, can I help? And I'm like, give it a try, sister. She saved 19 babies in one day. Wow. And I'm like, what did you say?

Like, what's the phrase? It wasn't what she did. It was just who she was. Like that was the charism given to her. And I realized that that hadn't been given to me. While when I was speaking to the teens, they were really, it was clicking. And I was reading Love and Responsibility at this time.

And I saw this as like the antidote to this whole culture of death. And I realized, wow, I'm going to start delivering this love and responsibility message, TOB, to these high school kids. And they were eating it up. And I just fell in love with just the transmission of chastity to these kids. You just saw the light go on. And just so much of the suffering in their life had to do with the fact that this was out of place in their life, chastity.

And I started speaking a little bit more. And then I got a job at Catholic Answers in San Diego. And they said they wanted me to do theology and apologetics. But I said, you know, I can do that. But my heart's with the high school and college kids. And they said, okay. So I started doing more of those assemblies. And then it just started snowballing.

And then it took on a life of its own where before long it was 100,000 kids a year. Pretty much for 21 years straight now. So how many people have you spoken to over the course of 21 years? Have you kept count? I mean, in person, probably about 2 million in person. Wow. And then through, you know, podcasts and TV, you know, who knows. But, you know, sometimes you get wrapped up in the numbers, you know, like, God, I want to speak to 2 million this year.

And God's like, yeah, well, do you want to fast for 2 million? And I'm like, well, that makes me me hungry just give me a mic yeah and uh you know so but he kind of keeps your ground like hey you can reach far more in a rosary than you can on a stage so and then tell us some of the misconceptions people have about the word chastity and what it means yeah well i remember when i was in college we uh spent a semester abroad and we went to a castle over there somewhere, and I think Prague. At the end of the castle was like a little gift shop, and you could buy armor and chain mail this, and they actually had a chastity belt. I knew you were going to say that. And I wish I got it, because it had spikes on it.

There was like a padlock to discourage visitors or whatever. And I wish I got it, because it was such a perfect visual aid of what people think of chastity. It's this medieval, repressive idea of human sexuality, that that's not what it is. And people confuse it with abstinence, which means no sex. And they confuse it with celibacy, which means the state of not being married. And it's neither one of those things. It's a virtue that frees you to love, frees you to know if you're being loved. And so it doesn't really annihilate your sexual attractions or desires, it orders them. And so it kind of frees you to love, because if I can't say no to my sexual impulses, and then I get married, I'm not making love to a

woman. I'm using her body as an outlet for my lust, so I'm not free to love. And it also frees you to know if you're being loved. And I love one example, there's a girl came up at a public high school, and she's dating this guy controlling possessive abusive older guy treats are like garbage and I said just break up with him and she said I can't I've given him everything my virginity my reputation my friends I just can't let go I said look I know it's tough but just tell him just tell him no more sex watch what happens and she said okay I'll do that and uh and she took off her necklace and she gave it to me she said he makes me wear this he's so possessive and I said okay I'll throw it away for you and off her necklace and she gave it to me. She said, he makes me wear this. He's so possessive.

And I said, okay, I'll throw it away for you. And she left. And then five minutes later, she comes back, happy as can be. And she said, I dumped him. I said, that's great. That was quick. She said, yep. I told him no more sex.

He slammed his locker shut. He threw a book at me. He said, where's your necklace? She said, I gave it to the chastity guy. So you see what happened. It's like, it's funny. The same thing happened today. A girl, it's in my back pocket a girl came up today

gave me a ring of the guy who gave this to her and he started seeing her and then he's like hey I want you to send me some pictures and she's like

no he's like I really come on man like you know if you love me you'll you know take some clothes off

send me some pictures and she said no so he's like okay bye dumped her and she's had this so what is it what was this ring

as a ring he gave to her well did it mean anything like a promise ring or kind of thing it was i think it was he's trying to like give her love for the sake of getting it's an exchange of goods and services show you you mean something to me apparently yeah and you give me this and she's been wearing this long after they broke up because it's just been so hard for her to let go and today she's like take it you know now tell us what i know what you're going to do with this, but you tell the people what you do with these things. Well, I mean, I used to collect them. Oh, that's what I thought you still did.

I used to have like a whole pile of them. And my wife's like, you need to get rid of that stuff. That's like evil. Cause like girls would come up and give me like Playboy purses, belly button rings, birth control pills. One guy gave me his official Pimp Daddy membership card. Some guy gave me his Viagra pencil. I'm like, where do you get this stuff? You know, and it just started to pile up. And then,

you know, my wife is saying it's evil. And then I'm going through TSA and they're finding it at the airport. And like, you know, they're unzipping this bag and there's like Cosmos birth control pills. And I'm like, oh yeah, well, I need that for the young people I work I mean no I mean it's just just give it back to me like I remember one kid in Canada he uh came up after the talk and he uh and he's like you know he's like thanks man he kind of gives me those little secret handshakes and he hands me something my hand some crunchy little foil wrapper and he's like I don't want this anymore just can you throw it away for me I'm like sure I look and it's a condom I'm like okay I'll throw it out for you you know and i'm counseling other kids so i just kind of shove it in my back in my back pocket like two hours later i'm going through the airport and you know i walk through the tsa it's got like

some metal foil in the package and i walk through it's like and the guy's like well walk on through again he's like well come over here i'll scan you and he's like did it and you've forgotten completely yeah and he's like do you have something in your back pocket i'm like no and i reach it's like crunch i'm like oh no and so i grab it, it's like crunch. I'm like, oh, no. And so I grab it with my fist and I hold my hands out like, there's nothing in my back pocket. And then he scans my hand. He's like, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. And I'm like, and I open it up and he's like, I'm like, it's not mine.

He said, it's okay. I'm like, no, it's not. So then I throw it away. That is so funny because not only did he he find something but then you lied about it so you clearly were ashamed of it but did he ever write to the truth i don't know that is so funny oh yeah yeah because i mean we because i carry like a wig for one of the skits i do barbie dolls stuff like that and sometimes the tsa is going through the x-ray and they just kind of give you a look yeah good for you yeah yeah it's a new time holy smokes yeah how uh how has

your talk today changed from when you first started giving it are there specific things that maybe you would have said 20 years ago that if you tried saying today they just it wouldn't be heard because i mean so much has happened so quickly in the last couple of years you know i remember i think it was matt pinto who said he feels like the devil's making a run for it right now. Like there's just, everything has sped up so much. And just in the last half decade of the way things have shifted and changed. And so what I've tried to do is integrate into my talk

all the new forms in which the kids are struggling, where I'm going a lot more now into gender. I'm going into same-sex attractions. I'm talking about girls and pornography. Just stuff that 15 years ago, unfortunately, existed but was not on our radar. And so as chastity speakers, because nobody was talking about it, we just assumed, well, this isn't really an issue. And as a result, you had girls in the audience who were struggling with porn, and I'm hitting on the guys, guys, guys. Okay, now let's go over to the girls.

Yeah, I did the same thing. You know, and I did that for the longest time. And with the homosexuality piece, I never really brought it up because I didn't know how. Like, okay, how do I bring this up and talk about it for five minutes and just move on without opening a can of worms and creating more questions than I'm really answering? And so I said, I don't know how to just give a sound bite

on something that needs an hour and a half worth of discussion. And the kids that identified as LGBT would come up after the talk and be like, you know, the talk was helpful, but like, you really didn't talk about us. You know, how does this, how does this fit into my life? And I shared with them why I was wrestling with how do I bring this into the talk without raising more questions than I'm answering adequately. That's a whole talk on its own. And so I asked those students, the kids who identified LGBT, I said, would you pray for me that I would know which words to say? And they're like, we will, we totally

will, because we need to talk, we need to hear about this for us too. And so I just started asking their intercession and it bore immediate fruit. And I, stories started to come and experiences that I started tying into the talk. And then those kids started coming up afterwards, you know, and hugging and thanking me because no one's telling them that there's an alternative between gay pride and gay shame. Talk about that. Well, I think that the young people are basically told, like, you only get two options. Okay, you have experienced same-sex attractions. Well, that's who you are.

And so now you have only one of two options. Hide in a closet out of fear that if anyone knew you had those, they'd hate you and be bigoted against you. Or just come out of the closet. Embrace your sexual attractions or identity. Forget about God, the church, and the Bible. Do whatever you want with your body. Gay pride, gay shame, what's your pick? And there's just millions of kids that are stuck in the middle being like, well, I don't want to throw away God, but I don't want to live in shame because it's not like I chose this to begin with. I think I've heard you say that. Living in closets aren't a fun place to live. Yeah. And like, will people hate you? Yeah. I mean, some people will, you know, I tell the kids and you

see them on TV, they have their protest, God hates gays. And I'm like, no, God hates your stupid sign. You know, that's what he hates. And the, and the kid's like, wait a minute. Okay. Where's this guy coming from? He's not supporting gay pride and he's not supporting gay shame. And he can tell he loves me. Like, where's this going? And you can tell they're really intrigued and then you lead them into this idea of chastity is realizing that your identity is not your sexual attractions. Anyone who defines their identity by their sexual attractions

is gonna get real confused fast. Because like when I go home to the Atlanta airport in a couple hours and I see some beautiful woman who's not my wife, is that my identity? Nope. But if I think my attractions are my identity, I'll think my very personhood is being stifled if I can't express that in a sexual way.

So I think the first step we need to take is help to distinguish the attractions from the identity and to root their identity in what it is, which is they're, they're as a child of God, you're a son of God or a daughter of God, it's who you are. Attractions are something we experience. And so trying to explain, there's not like 58 kinds of persons. There's L, there's G, B, T, Q, this, that, that. You know, Facebook has 58 genders. Facebook in the UK is 71. Tumblr has over 500. You can be astral gender, not to be confused with astro gender.

What's the difference? One feels bright and celestial about themselves. And the other one feels connected to the stars. it's like oh my this is child abuse like telling a kid that like you could be one of these things and it's like good luck figuring that out yeah and so what i try to explain is like look we need to understand there's not 58 kinds of persons there's three divine persons angelic persons human persons that's it and if you're a human person you're either male or female, made in the image and likeness of God.

And then attractions are something you experience. They're not who you are. And so the kids never got this anthropology, and so they're being fed the anthropology of Snapchat, of just like, well, what am I? Well, let me just flip around and try to figure it out. And they're getting so confused. It's almost like someone playing D&D and being like,

all right, am I an elf? A high elf? It's like you get to choose your little thing. Yeah, yeah. No, and I mean, it's tremendously confusing to the poor kids because I mean, I remember hearing one guy say that his teacher told him that you can't really know if you're gay or straight

at least until you're 24, 25 years old. So this kid spent his entire teenage years afraid he's gonna wake up like on his 24th birthday and find out he's this or that and it's just like wow because we don't have that solid anthropology piece they're drifting out into space and i think it's what like vatican ii said that when god's forgotten the creature itself grows unintelligible do you for this reason do you shy away from using terms like homosexual gay or heterosexual or um lesbian well I'll refer to the word homosexual,

things like that, but not as a person. Like he's gay, she's lesbian, this, that, because that's not who they are. And this is not Catholic language. And I think any Catholic apologist or evangelist who starts adopting this worldly language is undercutting his own case. Because if you're saying he is gay or he is lesbian, you've already identified the person with the attraction.

He is a person who experiences this attraction. The attraction is not him. So if somebody says to you, but this is the most meaningful thing about me, I choose to use the word lesbian or gay, what do you say to that? Well, I mean, I respect their choice of how they wish to self-identify. But if they think the most important thing about themselves is their sexual attraction, they haven't discovered who they are as God's child. Because our sexual attractions are not something we're born with. I mean, there's no one-year-old who has sexual attractions. It's

something that evolves as we mature, but it's not who we are for all eternity. And anyone who thinks this is it for me, this is the most important piece of me. Maybe there's a really important, unfulfilled piece of you that you're seeking. I knew one man who lived an actively homosexual life, and then he realized, you know what? After all these years of doing stuff with guys, I wasn't homosexual. I was homoemotional. I was longing for the affection, the attention, the approval and affirmation I never got from my own father, and the world taught me to sexualize, you know, that lack of affection. And I realized that that wasn't the solution with partnering up with men.

I was longing for something that was a deeper need. And until that deeper need is met, it's always going to manifest itself sometimes in behaviors that don't satisfy. So when people come to your talks, have you experienced people being quite defensive around this issue, thinking that you're going to say one thing and as you say they seem a little surprised um what are those conversations like and how do they respond to what you're saying because at the end of the day and this is probably where someone will go like okay that all sounds lovely but you're still telling me i can't have sex with men like that that's what you're getting at so like let's just cut through those fluffy words

which might be meaningful yeah and and they're cut short by that realization you're getting at. So let's just cut through those fluffy words, which might be meaningful. And they're cut short by that realization. You're still saying that. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. In terms of the resistance, I mean, we've had it from faculty as well as the kids. I remember before one talk, a teacher told me, she's like, okay, this is in Canada. And she said, now, whatever you do, don't talk about homosexuality, gender, any of that stuff. Don't even mention it.

She said, I just walked into the bathroom the other day. There's a trans kid slicing his wrists open bloody in the bathroom. And if these kids hear anything that makes them feel even more isolated, but from their family and community, they're just going to jump off a bridge tomorrow. And so she said, don't even talk about it. And I said, well, can I just tell you what I would say? And then you tell me if you want me to say it. And I gave her the five minute spiel and she said, please say that. Please say that. And so as a result, the kids come up after the words and the hugs and talks and things like that. But, yeah, at the end of the day, when you have these longer conversations with the kids, because I tell them now, you know, what does this mean for me in the long run?

I tell them, go to the website, Chassis.com, click the button homosexuality, watch the videos, and read the blogs. They're done by people who experience these attractions and to their own surprise have found more joy in embracing the church's tea on sex than anything the world had offered them before. And so I encourage the kids, go to edeninvitation.com. Go to watch Desire of the Everlasting Hills, the third way. Because look, I have no authority on this. This is not my attractions. These are not my experiences. But if they see other people are like, yeah, same-sex attractions are part of my story. It's something I've always lived with. And I live this way, but I actually found more joy this way. I was happy as I knew how to be, but I've discovered a new joy.

They can pierce their hearts in a way that I can't. I think my job is just to bridge to show them, hey, these people do exist, and they're happy. They're not repressed, miserable. The idea is that I think it was Dan Mattson who said something effective. I feel like it's either a death by desolation or death by damnation. In other words, like, either obey the church and live a life of misery, loneliness, and repression, or disobey the church and go to hell. So pick your poison. You know, I remember you in one sense, it's almost like it's heaven all the way to hell and hell all the way to heaven, but it's not supposed to be

like that. And so these people deserve communion and love, but they need to understand that love does not need to be expressed in a genital way all the time in order to be authentic human love. And sometimes abstinence is a tremendous expression of love. And this is what our culture doesn't understand. That if a young person can learn, hey, abstinence with my girlfriend is not waiting to love her.

Abstinence with my girlfriend is loving her because I'm doing what's best for her tonight instead of just what feels good at the moment. And if a man learns that before marriage and then he brings it into marriage, he's gonna have such a stronger marriage. Like I tell the college kids, like the best preparation for me

for sexual intimacy in marriage has been chastity and abstinence before marriage. And it sounds like, well, why would that be the case? And I explained to him, well, for one, abstinence, whether you're like it or not, is going to be a part of your marriage, sometimes to a heroic degree. And, you know, I know people that, you know, I share with the college students how, you know, I know a guy whose wife had been sexually abused and, you know, the wounds of that started coming up in their marriage. She said, you know, I can't really be close right now. He said, it's okay. There's other ways, you know, I love you. And

a month went by of abstinence. Then it was two, then three, then four, five, and six months of abstinence went by, at which time he's really wrestling with God. Like, you know, Jesus, I didn't sign up for this. And Jesus was like, oh, actually you did. It's right there. But, you know, the guy's wounded idea of masculinity, that if I'm a man, a woman's going to be sexually responsive to me, was a broken idea of masculinity. And his wife was so frigid towards me, felt like less of a man. But then he realized by staying on this cross, I am becoming more man to my bride than any man has ever been in her life. And so instead of becoming petulant, whiny, distant, cold, or angry because she wasn't sexually available, he stayed on the cross.

And her affliction ended up healing him of his broken idea of masculinity and his sacrifice ended up healing her and so you can see how that understand abstinence is an expression of love would only strengthen a marriage and so I try to explain that even in same-sex relationships abstinence is not a rejection of love it's an expression of it. So the church is not telling people not to love. The church is the only institution telling same-sex couples to love. How has your message on this changed? Because obviously there's been a big evolution in the culture on this,

and you don't have to talk about this if you don't want, but I know that there was a particular school that did a petition against you, not having you in. That would be my alma mater. Was it really? What happened there? Well, there's an all-girls school and all-boys school right next to each other. And the all-girls school would bring me in every single year for Chastity Talk.

The boys just wouldn't. And so some of the alumni or parents or whatever, they're like, you need to have Jason come too. So they're like, okay. So I came, gave a talk for the boys. They gave a standing ovation. It was great. And then I didn't hear from them for like five years after that. And I'm like, that's kind of weird.

The boys really seemed to enjoy it. And then again, they started to get pressure. You need to bring them back again. You need to, so they brought me back and the talk went really well. And then after the assembly, the kids had a copy of the booklet, Pure Manhood, that we pass out. And it's got the imprimatur, it's the church's teachings. And there is, you know, a page on there on same-sex attractions.

And a couple of the boys were just deeply offended. They're like, wait a minute, you know, this teaches, you know, this isn't what we're learning. Like this, this says that what we're doing is not in conformity with God's plan for human sexuality. And this is hate speech and this is bigotry and Jesus, you know, Jason hates gays. And they started a petition. They put it on change.org for the, everybody condemned Jason's homophobia. And I'm like, what is going on? Like in the stuff they put in the petitions, not stuff I said or that I believe. And, and it just started this firestorm on the campus.

They put it on change.org. All these people started, I didn't know Jason was a homophobe. And like, and it was like, wow, you know, so I went to the school and said, like, like, I don't believe that stuff. And you know, you're, and it says your students and your faculty are behind this petition. And the principal kind of wanted to like, well, you know, kids are going to do what kids are going to do. And thankfully, the bishop, Bishop Thomas Olmsted, you know, was in support of me and had me come in, you know, to do the men's conference there just to show, hey, I endorse what this guy teaches. I mean, it was difficult, but, you know but it's kind of like a prophet's never welcome.

Totally. It was his own place. How have you seen Protestants do this message of chastity? Because I think it might be because they haven't been blessed by the wisdom of St. John Paul II, that when I tend to hear an evangelical speaker on this issue, it does tend to be more abstinence-based and less chastity. Why is that? And why is less chastity. Why is that? And why is the chastity message more effective? Well, I think the reason it is that is because, I mean, God bless our evangelical brothers and sisters, but they lack a theology of human sexuality.

Like, what is it? And as a result, you might have guys like Dr. James Dobson saying that masturbation could be okay, you know, because they don't, things like contraception. Because if you don't have a theology of sex, then, well, if masturbation could be okay, you know, because they don't, things like contraception, because if you don't have a theology of sex, then, well, if masturbation could be okay, and contraception could be okay, upon what grounds can you defend the other, you know, misuses of God's gift to human sexuality? But that being said, there are so many great evangelical brothers and sisters that are promoting abstinence in the public school systems, and trying to fight against the comprehensive sex ed curricula that are getting in there and making a mess.

And so they're doing a lot of great stuff. But yeah, a lot of it is just abstinence. Like, you know, abstain, say no, here's your refusal skills, and giving them some relationship skills as well, but not the full-feathered virtue of chastity, which covers, you know, your imagination, pornography, modesty, all of these other bigger issues. It's missing the full picture of this isn't something that ends in marriage. This is something that

has to continue inside of marriage. And you could have a person that's technically abstinent, but far from chaste because they could be like, yeah, I'm abstaining from my girlfriend, but you know, I've got a hoard of her pictures on my phone and we're still doing everything, but, and that might be abstinence, but it's not chastity. You heard of Joshua Harris, who recently sort of kind of distanced himself from the absence message that he once preached. I think I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Yeah. And then Boy Meets Girl.

Yeah. And one of the things that's kind of come out of that is this idea. I don't know if you've heard of this, but this idea of the sexual prosperity gospel. So we know what the prosperity gospel is. If you follow Jesus, you'll be blessed with health and wealth. But some people talk about this idea of a sexual prosperity gospel, that if you just save sex till marriage, you'll have a great marriage. And even in the Catholic space, if you avoid contraception within marriage, you'll have a great sex life. Even in my own life, I'm getting emails and texts from guys who feel like they've been sold that. And they look at their marriage, and it's brutally hard.

NFP is very difficult. They're not having a great sex life. Some of them have perhaps broken up or something like that. So do you think that you have fallen into that? I'm not saying you have. But do you think you or other chastity speakers in the Catholic world have fallen into that? Or how have we avoided it? Yeah, I mean, well, let's look at both of them.

One, the idea of before marriage, if you do all this thing right, everything will fall into place. And then the NFP idea, after marriage, we'll take them separately. I mean, the data is clear that those who abstain from sex prior to marriage do have better sex lives in marriage. Study after study after study shows the exact same thing. The most sexually satisfied people in the world, you look at the research, and it's married people who go to church regularly who entered marriage with little to no sexual baggage report the highest level of sexual satisfaction. So statistically, yeah, there is something that's not simply correlation but

causation. There's actual very clear trend here. That having been said, a lot of people say, okay, well, I just do X, Y, Z, and then I'm going to get my reward at the end. And I've read blogs from extremely disgruntled women who said, look, I did it all. And it's been a nightmare. And he and I were not sexually compatible at all. And they share, like, I was kind of raised with a very puritanical idea. Like, it's bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, good.

And so they were almost taught all the way up. It's dirty. It's gross. It's unholy. It's evil. Now it's bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, good. And so they were almost taught all the way up. It's, it's dirty. It's gross. It's unholy. It's evil. Now it's yours. It's like, wait a minute. How do I go from like, this is the devil's tool to like, oh, this is the theology of the body. Like, and it's because, you know, they may have been taught, well, that's a dirty body part. Well, like there are no dirty body parts. So they were taught. Unless you've been rolling in mud. Then you got a dirty body part. Yeah. But how do you shift from reverse into the fifth gear like that without something falling

out of the engine? And that's what happens is they did not have, in my opinion, an integration of the sexual desire of realizing, okay, I have sexual attractions that doesn't make me an evil person that doesn't make my body bad or her body bad. But what do I do with these desires? What do I do with these impulses? And, you know, training them in that and realizing, hey, these are good things. And human sexuality is a beautiful gift. And when that language is missing, and it's like, no, that's bad, that's dirty, that's evil. How do you switch gears? And I think that creates a lot of sexual dysfunction. And then also,

and this is something I'm starting to harp on more at the college students, is a lot and I know I haven't gone to Franciscan University of Studentville, awesome campus, you know, great college. But I was punched in the gut when I started to see how many divorces were happening of my classmates three months into marriage or just three years into marriage. And then it implodes. And it was just like, oh, them? No way. You know, they were praying the rosary and doing daily mass and now they're divorced. I can't believe it. And now, you know, trying to think like, you know, what was the root of this?

And something that's come to me is sometimes we over spiritualize marriage, meaning she's got a brown scapular. I have a brown scapular. You know, I did a novena to res and then I saw plants in front of my house that had a rose. And so I know she's the one. And what ends up happening is sometimes we use novenas as a replacement for discernment because we're impatient. Well, I want an answer within nine days and I want a yes or no, so I'm gonna bust out this novena and I'm gonna look for flowers all over the place.

And then I'm gonna, and a lot of times we think because we are in agreement in all things religious that therefore we will have a harmonious marriage. But you're overlooking a lot of human elements that seriously need attention. Like, is there respect? Can we argue lovingly? Do we know how to reconcile? Are we in agreement on finances? Like there's so many issues that aren't spiritual that just because you can

check all the dots on doctrinal agreement with your potential future spouse, it doesn't mean that it's going to be a harmonious marriage. And so that's why we need to make sure we're not discerning in isolation, going lone ranger. We need to do this with the influence of the family, accountability, spiritual director, marriage prep, all that. Because when it's just her and I and God against the world, you can have a very blurry image of reality. Yeah, looking back, I see that one of the great signs that I was going to have a beautiful, good wife, at least. I won't say a great marriage because I'm part of it and I could bottom out at any point. But, you know, one of the reasons I knew she was a winner was all my family and friends were like, she's incredible.

Now, I'm not sure if that's why I married her. They could have said she's horrible. I went, you're horrible. And I married her. But looking back, I see like people like, oh, my gosh, Cameron iseron is incredible you know yeah so that idea of not uh discerning in isolation yeah i sometimes think of like if you put a book three inches from your face you can't read the text and so it's the same thing in human relationships emotionally sexually physically spiritually when we get so close we can't read it we just can't just be honest but the people that are

several feet away they can see it so much more clearly and so we want to make sure we're tapping into their wisdom instead of just discerning in isolation and so to me all those factors play a role of like imagine i'm getting towards marriage and i i'm a very spiritual relationship with this person i've crossed all the t's and dot of the i's i've obeyed myself and stayed away from dirty sex and then now we're gonna get married and it's gonna be holy and everything's perfect um sometimes it doesn't now we're gonna get married, and it's gonna be holy and everything's perfect. Sometimes it doesn't work out that way, you know, and it's sad, but the problem isn't chastity. That's what's going on now is people think,

oh, well, chastity's the problem. Abstinence message is the problem. If only you weren't teaching that, then this would not have happened. Yeah. You know, but the problem is, it's not that the teaching was wrong, but perhaps the method in which it was taught was problematic and deficient. So they might have been being taught this sexual prosperity gospel instead of the truth and meaning of human sexuality.

I'm thinking of an analogy here, like to finances. If someone says, like, you've got to be responsible with your money, and here's how you do it. You're going to put all your money in this, and it bottoms out. But the problem isn't advice on money. Or investment. Or investment, yeah. Yeah. And it bottoms out.

But the problem isn't advice on money. Or investment. Or investment, yeah. Yeah. So to me, I think that's the fault that people could fall into is thinking, oh, see, that's the problem. You know, chastity is the problem. So what about after marriage then? Because I've had, you know, blokes call me up.

And as you say, you know, with regards to abstaining, it's like it's not as easy as they made it seem. They made it seem like it would be seven days. It would be really clear. And it's either like every time I look at my wife, she's pregnant. I know you have that gift, that superpower. No, I just get home from seminars and there's another kid there. I'm like, where did that come from? There's another one. But no, I mean, I know I've been guilty in that in my zeal to promote natural family planning before I really knew what it entailed of just like, oh, it's living the theology of the body.

And it's like going from honeymoon back to engagement. That's what people hear. And they hate that message now. Well, you know what it's like going from honeymoon back to engagement that's what people hear well they hate that well you know what it's from that's from testimonies of couples who had been contraceptive who switched to nfp who said we have a lot greater intimacy now yeah that it's not you know the pill or this or that or the condom and we've really found this new intimacy and so what happens is catholics find those testimonies like oh look here and then they hand that over to the engaged couples this is what you're going to find.

It's going to be like honeymoon to engagement, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. I've never met a Catholic couple that actually thinks it works that way. Maybe they would think that if their cycles were consistent. Because I think I experienced that a little bit. There was something beautiful about like, okay, not tonight. Like we have to wait. And then coming together, it actually was really great.

I think the problem comes in sometimes where people can't have, what do you say? Irregular cycles. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, I know many Catholic couples that got married and were on gung-ho NFP, and then the demands of it sat in. And it's just like, you know, wait a minute. We've been married for two years, and we've had four kids already.

And now we just had a kid, and we don't know when her cycle's coming back. Yeah. And so there's that always, you know, that one ovulation that happens before the first period. It's, it's kind of like God's shot of just like, Hey, I get one before you can really plan it out in case I want another one. But it can lead to just frigidity, fear, isolation, like just scare of like, I can't mentally physically take another baby right now. And it can create a lot of stress in marriage. And I mean, I know I've sold NFP to so many couples as I was up and coming of just, it's the best thing to slice bread. And you know, it is a blessing, but I failed to explain it's also a pain in the neck. It's also really hard. It's also going to be a tremendous sacrifice at times. And I think if we don't load that in to the apologetics of it, then when that cross hits,

they're going to think like, what's wrong with me? And sometimes I find chastity in marriage is more demanding than chastity prior to marriage. But God allows that because the graces of the sacrament will help us in that. But I find what often happens with NFP, it will bring to the surface a lack of a development of chastity in the individuals. It'll kind of bring it up like oil and water, where if you had a guy that, you know, maybe struggled with, you know, chastity a bit before marriage, never quite overcame it, then tries to do the NFP thing, and then it's like, wait a minute, this is way too much to ask.

And he might be like, NFP's the problem, or my Catholic wife is the problem, when in reality, the problem might be his lack of self-mask. That's okay. We can keep it running, but that's someone at the door. That's funny. This is the not advantage, the disadvantage of having a studio in home. He's an outdoor cat. The Matt Fred show outtakes.

Yeah. No, we got to keep this in. This stuff is golden. Neil, don't you dare cut that out. Who was that? It's your cat yeah i saw the cat ran up and i thought to myself i wonder if someone's with the cat and i thought no the cat hates everybody it's a cat it's a job turns out that cat was pretty cool um okay tell us how nfp is not catholic contraception okay yeah i mean that's i think the the idea that it is,

is the idea that planning births is immoral. And in a sense, birth control, meaning controlling births is not intrinsically immoral. And so just because the correlation of words, people think, well, aren't you just, what's the difference in birth control and controlling births, potato, potato. We need to distinguish NFP from contraception. Contraception is an act against conception, whereas natural family planning is simply refraining from, you know, an act. If a person's like, well, NFP is basically contraception. And granted, it could be used in that manner if they have a contraceptive mentality. But the means itself is not contraceptive. And I could say, okay, if NFP is contraceptive, when is the couple contraceptive? is not contraceptive. And I could say, okay, if NFP is contraceptive,

when is the couple contraceptive? Are they contraceptive by abstaining? Like, is that a sin to not have intercourse tonight? Okay, or is it a sin when they do engage in it? Like, when does the sin happen? You think through it, and it's like, well, yeah, I guess neither one would really be wrong. Neither one is contraceptive. But we have to explain that, yeah,

NFP, because it is so effective, could be used in a selfish way of just like, hey, I want to buy a boat and three more cars. And so NFP is so effective. That's what I'm going to use. Granted, anybody with a materialistic idea like that typically won't resort to NFP anyway because of the demands required of it. Whereas with contraception, you know, the analogy has sometimes been given between someone who wants to maintain a slim figure. And so they binge in food and then they purge out its effects. The analogy has sometimes been given between someone who wants to maintain a slim figure, and so they binge in food, and then they purge out its effects, and then you have someone

over here who abstains from the fatty foods and practices temperance. And granted, psychologically, I mean, you gotta be careful in comparing things to eating disorders. You gotta be sensitive in that regard, but it's an analogy that's often used in terms of binging and purging versus temperaments temperament uh which is you know temperance yeah which is required of natural family planning yeah that's a good take because i'm hearing people not just like in protestant circles but in like catholic circles i say no no no this is this is not allowed but that's an interesting argument that you offered yeah when

is the couple sinning yeah and i remember some people say well contraception i mean isn't it basically the same thing i remember janet smith saying yeah well if it's the same thing, then you should use NFP. Isn't that great? Well, that would be a big difference. Well, if there's a big difference in the means, there's probably a big difference in the morality as well. Yeah, that's really powerful. I want to talk about dating. But one thing before we go to dating. Sure.

With NFP, there's a myth that a good Catholics use NFP, bad Catholics use contraception. that a good Catholics use NFP, bad Catholics use contraception. No, the default position is not NFP. The default position is openness to life. And then if for whatever good reason we need to space out kids, then we can rely upon NFP. So there's this assumption that when you get married, you're going to use NFP. You know, you got a plan right away, just use NFP.

It's like, well, wait, wait, wait. The Catholic understanding is that children are the supreme gift of marriage. And unless you have a really good reason not to have kids, the default position is openness to human life. Because the weight of this decision, if you say yes to one child, you are literally not saying yes to one kid. Because you tend to, oh, another kid, we're going to be exhausted. And like financially, you are saying yes to generations. You are saying yes to descendants of yours that could be more numerous

than the stars in the sky. Like you have no idea. One human life could populate the beatific vision by a hundred thousand. And so God sees the big picture. We see the long nights and the diapers and the finances and stuff like that. But sometimes God wants to sneak one in there just because he knows not only that many lives could come forth from this, but who knows what that child could become one day. And maybe God just wants that one kid. Even though kids come from that one kid, he wants that one with him for all eternity. Let him have that one. You know, and maybe it ends in miscarriage or who knows.

But we've got to understand when we say at the dinner table, bless us, O Lord. Okay, great. He's our Lord of the dinner table. Is he our Lord in the master bedroom too? You know, we can't pick and choose which rooms he's Lord of. And so we need to give him Lordship over the most intimate part of our life. And it can be difficult and cause tension in marriage, even amongst devout Catholics. It can be hard and create isolation where it was obviously contraception would seem easier of just like, wouldn't this be so much more stress-free if we could just

generally be open to life and then, you know, and have kids, but at the same time fall back on that? It would seem that way. But in the end of the day, obedience is the key that unlocks a vault of graces that God wants to pour onto us. And if we have that key of just like, I will trust you even no matter what it costs me, he rains down so many blessings on us now i know there can be legitimate reasons to you know avoid a pregnancy but i remember you telling me a uh an anecdote of you at a barbecue and the man said to you you know when i think of all the stress throughout my marriage of of abstaining he's like if we have just never worried about abstaining what we would have had one or two more kids at the most? Oh, yeah.

Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. No, yeah. He was telling me, like, you know, they've used NFP and they've charted and this and that and this and that. And they ended up having a big family. And he just was like, I mean, if we'd never done any of that charting, what, we'd have had one more kid in the whole batch? But, you know, the church will never tell you how many kids to have. You know, but God will.

And so it's up to the husband and the wife and God to prayerfully discern this thing. Because, you know, God believes they're the supreme gift of marriage. And we just, we were marinated in a contraceptive culture where people like, well, you got three now? Well, you're done, right? I've collected all the genders. I can stop procreating. But it's just like this. Or have you? Yeah. Putting the tumbler, you gotta keep going. I gotta get like a 490 to go. You know, so we've just got to step back from the culture looking at it. Because I know when I go to Costco with eight kids, my wife, I mean, we are a spectacle. I mean, someone even looked at my wife once when she was at Costco. I think she had like five or six kids.

And they said loud enough so she could hear it. Why would anyone do that to their life? Did she say anything? Because your beautiful wife is not one to be short on words if someone were to challenge life what did she say anything because your beautiful wife is is not one to be short on words if someone were to challenge her did she say anything i don't know that she did you know but but i mean sometimes people will say it right to you and it's just like okay well which one should we not have had you know like you got your hands full and like better than empty terrible thing to say what are some of your responses to some of these comments

because i have one i want to share with you but do you have any yeah well sometimes, well, sometimes when they say, you know, I want to be charitable about it. Well, yeah, your hand's full. I'm like, better than empty. That's good. And, you know, people say, well, how do you do it with like three kids? You know, back when we only had three. And she's got like one kid. And I'm like, how do I do it with three?

I don't have to pretend to be a three-year-old sibling all day long like you do. Because they have siblings to play with. So you're exhausted because you have to pretend to be three-year-old all day i don't have to and it's not like having your first kid eight times that's right you know you get into it does get easier mac and cheese for six mac and cheese for seven potato potato so here's my line i was at a coffee shop in nashville and the barista said oh my gosh kids, don't you guys have a TV? And I said, if you think TV's better than sex, you're not doing it right. I don't know if that's... That was the end of that conversation.

That was the end of that conversation. But yeah, that's good. Okay. I'd love for you to talk a bit about contraception though. Why is contraception so bad anyway? There might be a woman out there who has irregular heavy periods and maybe the doctor tells her to get on, you know, the birth control pill or something like that. Well, there's nothing morally wrong for being on it for medical reasons. I mean, four doctors in a row told my wife she needs the pill. This is back when we were engaged. You know, terrible cramps, irregular cycle, she needs to be on the pill. And I said, look, I know this doctor in Nebraska, Dr. Thomas Hilgers, let's go talk to him. And, and, and he, I asked him like, how many girls need the pill for medical reasons? He said, thankfully, virtually none. We have all

the treatments and medicine today. It's just lazy gynecology. You're treating a symptom. You're not treating a disease. And so it's almost like if you had a headache every day and I'm like, well, here, five aspirin, you're good. You're cured. Yeah. Well, how come if I take away the five aspirin, my headache comes back? You're not curing a disease. You're curing a symptom. Yeah. You know, you're just treating that. And so he took care of her in one day and she was perfectly healed. Never came back, endometriosis. And, you know, it involved charting of the cycle

and learning, okay, what does she need here? And so there's so many other alternatives. So I recommend to people, like go to naprotechnology.com. You can go to OneMoreSoul. It's O-M-Soul.com, S-O-U-L.com. And they have a pro-life directory, find another physician, you know, get a second opinion. And, and because most women don't want to be on it,

because when a woman goes on the birth control pill, what I find, they don't know how it works. They have no idea that when you take a pill, it goes in, it digests, and what you're digesting are synthetic pregnancy hormones that enters into your circulatory system through your digestive system. It goes into your brain and it tells your pituitary gland, you ma'am are pregnant. So that tells your ovaries to, it inhibits ovulation. So that way, because when you're pregnant, you don't ovulate. And so it shuts down your ovaries. But what happens is the guy who invented it realized that when women are on the pill, they never have a period and they're not going to like that. It's not going to feel natural because they think they're pregnant every day of the month on these synthetic pregnancy hormones.

So I said, here's what we'll do. We'll give them synthetic pregnancy hormones for three weeks, and then we'll give them placebo blank or sugar pills for a week, which are just, there's nothing in them. Nowadays, they've added some vitamins in it to make up for the vitamin deficiencies caused by the other hormones, but basically nothing in them. Nowadays, they've added some vitamins in it to make up for the vitamin deficiencies caused by the other hormones, but basically nothing in these other ones. So you think you're pregnant for three weeks. Then you hit the blank pills, and your brain says, oh, I'm not pregnant. I had a miscarriage.

And you bleed for a week. It's not a period. It's a withdrawal bleed. You're withdrawing from pregnancy hormones. And then after the week, boom, back on the pregnancy hormones. So your brain literally thinks you're pregnant 12 times a year if you're on the birth control pill. Wow.

And when a woman goes on the pill, she experiences more than 150 physiological changes in her body, head to toe. I mean, her cornea will actually steepen and dehydrate. That's why women on the pill often say their contact lenses become less comfortable. It's actually changing the shape of your eye and dehydrating. I had read one journal of optometry, and it said that women on the birth control pill will actually blink 32% more often than those not on the pill. I said that at an assembly once, and some girl's like,

look, that girl's on the pill. She's like, no, I'm not. Cut it out, guys. Stop looking at me. So you don't want to judge people on their blink rates, but it changes everything. I mean, your mood swings, weight gain, all this stuff. And that's what I found. Women don't want to be on the pill, even for contraception. No woman wants to contracept. She might want to have sex without having babies, but she's never wanted to be at war

with her own anatomy in order to accomplish that. Just quickly, too, if you're on the pill and you experience those negative side effects, you're probably not in a place where you really want to have sex. Yeah, no, because bloated and gross. side effects you're probably not in a place where you really want to have sex yeah no because bloated and gross and oh no i mean the birth the depo purveyor shot is actually injected as a punishment into child molesters in the state of california now because it will decrease their desire for sex and are we giving this to women i don't know much i haven't kept up on oh yeah yeah yeah it's a birth control shot but veterinarians don't give it to dogs they said it's not safe for house pets

but they give it to women, plant parents. Holy smokes. I remember you talked about, was it Johnson & Johnson being sued for something? Oh, yeah. Now, Johnson & Johnson, I mean, they're the ones behind Implanon, which is the— No, OrthoEvra, which is the birth control patch. Okay. It's killed more than 25 girls so far. But they're making like a billion dollars a year off birth control sales.

Johnson & Johnson is a mega player in the pharmaceutical industry. And they've had major lawsuits. But because the income they're getting from all the contraceptives, they can just pay off all these lawsuits and funerals and whatever they need to pay for. And that's one reason they don't really market the birth control that exists for guys. Because they have male birth control pills, shots, implants, gels. They've invented all of them. And it works. But one reason they said they're... Yeah, they've invented them for men and they work, shots, implants, gels. They've invented all of them, and it works.

But one reason they said they're— Yeah, they've invented them for men, and they work? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the birth control pill for men was invented at the same time as women. But, you know, you've heard Janet Smith say it involves a slight shrinkage of the testes for the guys. Like, no thanks for me! Like, several of the women died. So they just adjusted the dosage, kept testing on the women.

Like, I remember one woman from Kenya, and I met her in Boston, and she told me, she said, I hate contraception, because she says, I remember a little girl, I grew up in a village in Africa, and the American pharmaceutical companies would come to my village, and they would give the women in my village shots saying, these are vitamins that will help you to have not too many kids. And okay, whatever. And then the women started dying and getting really sick. And our village chief thought there was a curse. And so he sent these women outside of the village so that they would die outside of the walls of the village because we thought it was a curse. And then now she realized we're being used as guinea pigs

by the pharmaceutical industry because they know that women in sub-Saharan Africa can't hire high-powered litigation attorneys to be able to sue the pants off the pharmaceutical companies, and we're being used as guinea pigs for the American pharmaceutical company, because it's illegal to do that to American women. Where's the outrage about that? Oh my goodness, and this has been going on for decades. I mean, just unreal stuff that's going on over there. And so, you know, what I find, like all these lawsuits, all this stuff, like they said

the pharmaceutical companies have the drugs and the pills and the shots for men, but they said one reason they won't do it is because men probably won't really take it because that's why I can't get pregnant. It's your problem. You take the shots. The second reason is men will be much more aggressive in litigation than women are. Really? So that the women have cancer and stuff like that from the birth control pill,

they're not as aggressive in going after the companies. Whereas if a man starts doing all this stuff, he will be much more aggressive in suing them. So they said to their shareholders and the profits, it's just not worth putting this out for the guys when we have an effective one that women can take. But all of it exists for men. Wow. I had no idea about this.

No, it's really good, I think, for women to learn this because it's empowering to be like, wait a minute, this is sexist it's always been this way you know i mean you look i mean contraception been around thousands of years they used to fumigate the woman's uterus with smoke um ancient egyptian papyrus so they would insert in the woman crocodile dung which would be actually safer probably than taking the pill so she wouldn't get pregnant they would have her small potions of sterility that included lead mercury arsenic and strychnine probably weren't good because she was dead so she wouldn't get pregnant they would have her small potions of sterility that included lead mercury arsenic and strychnine probably weren't good because she was dead so she couldn't

get pregnant 100 and then they would have women in the middle ages women who were amulets they were like superstitious amulets to ward off pregnancy they would include the liver of a cat or the earwax of a mule and they'd wear it around personally it's probably a good kind of I'm not getting close to you if you were in cat liver you know so whatever it takes but then like in the 1930s there's actually like women's cosmo type magazines that would recommend that women use lysol and athletes foot medicine in their bodies as a contraceptive and if we think that's just barbaric if

you look in the ingredients of today's modern spermicides it's the same stuff as modern household cleaners wow now do you find that as we are moving towards wanting to be a ingredients of today's modern spermicides, it's the same stuff as modern household cleaners. Wow. Now, do you find that as we are moving towards wanting to be a more green type of people, you know, like even my wife, we don't have spray on the counter that works. We have spray made of vinegar, lemon, and lavender. It's not working though. Like, you know, we've changed the way we've used all these household products because we're so afraid of getting negative chemicals in us. Have you seen a shift in culture against the birth control pill?

Oh, yeah. You have? Yeah, in an extent. But, no, I know what you mean. Like, I mean, spraying the counter. It's like, it doesn't clean, but it smells like my diffuser. Exactly. We need higher chemicals. But what's interesting is, you know, a good example of this is that, you know, in Denver and other places, they found that when women go to the bathroom, the sewage system is not designed to filter out hormones from water.

And so what's happening is the synthetic pregnancy hormones of birth control are entering into the sewage and entering into the water treatment plant and then they go downstream from the water treatment plants and what they're finding biologists were noting that the creatures that lived in the river downstream from the water treatment plant were having like their gender was being bent there were male fish with eggs there were female fish with testes there were trans fish all this stuff downstream from this, whereas upstream from the water treatment plant, the nature was normal. And they realized that what it was is these fish were being marinated in the hormones from birth control from the sewage of an entire city of women. And it was bending the gender of the fish, of the frogs, of all these things.

And then when they brought it to the environmentalist's attention, they're like, well, that gets in the bedroom and we're not going to go there. So basically throw the fish under the bus you know who cares about them as long as i can keep my contraceptives so it's really interesting they were real green until it hit the bedroom yeah paper straws but yeah but all this but you know some people are discovering you know fertility awareness methods in nfp because they want something you're a little frustrated like that like i've been talking about this for 15 years 20 years and. I mean, but it's beautiful because I explained to him, like, NFP taught me my wife's body's perfect.

She doesn't need pills, doesn't need shots, barriers. She just needs to be understood. So instead of, like, suppressing her fertility with chemicals to conform to our desires, we conform our desires to the way her body has already been perfectly created. So beautiful. This is sexual liberation. So beautiful. Like, the body's already fine.

You know, and I try to appeal to the man the manly desire in the men of just like, hey, if I know the pill could be harmful to my bride, okay, we're not taking it. What else is there? Like there really doesn't need to be a debate here. Like if this is better physically for her, then I don't need your philosophy and theology. Let's just do what's physically best for the woman's body. And so although it can be demanding and difficult and stuff, you don't have to worry about all the chemicals and you know even even well people what about the condom that's what i was about to ask you someone out there being like all right great i'm gonna do away with all that but the condom's fine so let's let's just use that yeah

um we all know from like what like seventh grade biology one sperm gets a girl pregnant what happens the other hundreds of millions introduced to one active intercourse it used to be believed that if the woman wasn't fertilized, they really didn't serve any purpose. But they found it's not actually true that inside the man's seminal fluid are dozens of biological ingredients. They're immediately absorbed into the woman's circulatory system. So literally within hours of intercourse, your hormones are through her entire body, in her brain, Your DNA is embedding in her organs. After intercourse, the woman's white blood cells will scour the surface of her cervix and bring the man's sperm proteins and DNA into her lymph nodes where her immune system will learn to recognize the genetic

type of that man's sperm. It says they'll actually develop a gradual tolerance to the antigen on that male's semen. It'll learn who this person is. And what they found is if a woman is deprived of this by means of a barrier method of contraception and then she becomes pregnant, the woman's womb will not have been accustomed to that child. So where she does get pregnant from him after being used to that, the woman's womb will actually recognize the genetic type of baby, match it to the genetic type of sperm that absorbed into her, makes for a smoother pregnancy.

What? They found once deprived of this, the woman will be more than twice as likely to suffer preeclampsia during childbirth, which is an elevated blood pressure risk. It's very dangerous to the mom. And so I'm sitting on an airplane typing from the Journal of the American Medical Association that was explaining this into a little book I was writing. And the woman on the plane leans over next to me. She's like, what are you writing about?

I'm like, let me tell you. And so I said, this is an epidemiologic study of contraception and preeclampsia. And I showed it to her. And she's like, oh, can I read that? And I explained it. And she says, you know, this is amazing. She said, you know what? My husband and I, she said, I know we just met, but I feel like I know you so well.

She said, my husband and I have been married for 10 years. We've used the condom between every kid. I had preeclampsia with every pregnancy. How come no one taught this to us in marriage preparation class? And you know, in the article even, there's many articles on this that actually talk about seminal priming for protection for preeclampsia. Meaning if you're using a condom, you're having unprotected intercourse because the man is not protecting the woman with the beneficial effects of the seminal fluid. Yeah. And not to mention the fact that the number one, what STD is what, and that's not prevented from. It's a human papillomavirus and it can cause cervical cancer

in women. And it's spread from skin to skin contact anywhere from mid thigh, mid abdomen, you know. So unless you're using saran wrap. Yeah. Yeah. It's not going to be effective. So you mentioned Africa a moment ago. Some people talk about condoms in Africa, and this will help AIDS not to spread and these sorts of things. Is there any truth in that? Well, what's interesting is the British Medical Journal reported that the higher the population of Catholics in any country in Africa, the lower the rate of HIV in that country. So it said whatever the church is teaching us apparently seems to be working. Whereas when you look at countries like Botswana and South Africa, where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have poured literally millions of dollars worth of

condoms over there, it's only made the problem worse. You're putting lighter fluid on a problem. And it's like, well, why? I mean, you would think that if you, I mean, if you're have like a prostitute with HIV and a man has intercourse with her and he uses a condom, I mean, statistically, isn't he less likely for the transmission to take place? He is on one act of intercourse. But the problem is with repeated exposures, that protection declines. Meaning if I had a 25% chance less of getting it, it's like if I flip a coin, 50% chance the first time. Okay, 50 the second, third, fourth. How many times can you flip it before it simply lands on heads?

It's a behavioral problem. And if you're not treating the real issue, which is the behavior, it's just a matter of time. In fact, studies have shown in Africa that condom usage is not a determining factor on whether or not a person is going to get HIV. The number one determining factor is the number of sexual partners. So you have countries like Uganda that once had astronomical rates of HIV, saw the greatest decline of HIV in any nation in the country because they promoted abstinence and then be faithful or what they called zero grazing, meaning you're not moving around a lot, and then condoms last. And what they found is they had the biggest decline of HIV in all of Africa. There's a Harvard research scientist, Green, and he said, look, I'm a flaming liberal. I don't go to church. I've never voted Republican in my life.

And we got this one wrong. You know, the church is right. Condoms are not the answer to the problem in Africa. And one thing that I found really interesting is if people simply abstain for sex for six months between sexual partners, AIDS would virtually disappear. How? The infectivity of the virus changes with time. Meaning, if I sleep with someone who has AIDS tonight, and I contract HIV, and then two weeks from now, I go to a doctor, I do the blood test, and they will say I'm HIV negative.

And the reason for that is when you, the HIV test is not looking for HIV. It's looking for antibodies in your body that are fighting against HIV. So that's what it's looking for, which means if your body has not yet detected you have the virus, the viral load is extremely high in your body and you're highly infectious. But with HIV, it can take months before your body even knows that you have it. During those first several months, you are extremely infectious. You infect one out of every three partners you sleep with. Whereas after your body detects you have HIV, then your body starts fighting against it. The viral load will drop down, your antibodies go up, and the test will detect,

look, you have it, your body's fighting it. But by then, the viral load has dropped, and then if you sleep with someone, then, like six months after having it, your odds of infecting them are one in a thousand. Which means those who are having intercourse most frequently and are getting this and transmitting it quickly are highly infectious. Whereas if you would just abstain for six months between partners, the problem would resolve itself. And that's one of the reasons that Uganda saw great success, because they were using a behavioral model instead of throwing condoms at a problem. And there has not been one country ever that has turned back this epidemic primarily from condom distribution. Wow, that's really interesting.

What do you say about a married couple, maybe the man finds out he has HIV? Can't he use a condom then? Or what's the solution? Yeah. The church has not taught that the condom, because in order to prevent him from getting HIV, abstinence could do that. It's not as if he needs a condom to not get HIV. And I'm saying, suppose he does have it. Yeah. No, what I'm saying is if he has HIV,

in order to keep his wife from getting HIV, he doesn't need to use a condom. He needs to be abstinent. But the thing is, if he's had it for six months, his odds of transmitting it are lower than one in a thousand per active intercourse. Oh, is that right? You know, if he's had it a long time. But the church would not say that,

oh, well, you have to use a condom to keep her from getting it. But then would he be morally obligated to cease all acts of sexual intercourse for the rest of his life? What if she doesn't want him to do that? Well, that would be something they'd have to discern together. There's also medication that can be used to incredibly decrease your chances of contracting HIV. So medicine-wise, we've come up with a lot of stuff that can really, I mean, right now

it's being used in commercials targeting men who sleep with men, saying like, if you could be a chance of getting HIV, make sure to take this. And so there's drugs that can really knock down your chances. What about not HIV? What about other, you know, STDs? Yeah. You know, what do you say to people like that? They're in a married relationship. Yeah. Is the man obligated to abstain? Yeah. In that sense, would you say, or? Well, it would be up to their discernment because all of the STDs are curable except the ones that begin with the letter H. So HIV, HPV, herpes, and hepatitis. Those are the four that we can't cure. Now just because you can't cure it

doesn't mean it's permanent. So you could get an STD that could not have a cure, but it could go away in time. And so with all the other ones, whether it's gonorrhea or chlamydia, those have treatments. They could take a couple courses of antibiotics, knock it out, you're fine,

back to normal marital intimacy. But with some of these other ones, they'd have to prayerfully discern. Because if they were to say, okay, well, we're gonna use a condom, and then that way, I'm not gonna transmit it. Well, I mean, you look at the studies coming out from the NIH, and it says the odds of risk reduction

from transmission of things like herpes, who's gone, it's about 50%. And so it's really simply a matter of time before these get transmitted but there are you know medications that can decrease the outbreaks and things like that and perhaps where can people go to see the research to this stuff because you've just laid out a lot of great stuff there yeah where can they go online to see you know these particular studies yeah well one thing because the the body of medical literature is so vast if you go to a place like PubMed that has all of this stuff,

what we've done at chastity.com, just click on birth control or click on STDs. Pick the article, pick the disease, pick the contraceptive method. And we have tons of research with literally hundreds of footnotes that you can just say, you know, cut paste, put that up there and it'll link you straight

to the article, the primary source document. That's fantastic. I just want to take a pause to say thanks to our third sponsor, Covenant Eyes. Really appropriate, actually, because all that we're speaking about today, Covenant Eyes is the best filtering and accountability software on the web. If you have a device that accesses the internet, you're going to want to have it monitored and locked down especially if you are either a somebody who struggles with lust and pornography or b you have children and want to protect them from the bad stuff it's just the right thing to do it's the responsible parenthood thing to do go to covenanteyes.com check them out right now when you sign up use the promo code mattfrad

that's one word that's how they know we sent you and you'll also get an entire month for free you can try it out for the month if you don't like it you can quit you won't be charged a cent but i don't think you'll do that we have it on all the devices in our house we don't let friends come over to the house if they don't have covenant eyes on their on their phones we don't let our children play at houses that don't have covenant eyes if you're sending your kids to a house that has a bunch of tablets and phones and computers that aren't locked down with covenant eyes they're kind of like loaded weapons and we're seeing the carnage that pornography is bringing about you know do the responsible thing get covenant eyes by going to covenanteyes.com right now don't put it off

that's the number one reason people don't end up getting it and their kids always end up getting in into grief with pornography or maybe why you keep relapsing is you're not decisive enough. So pause this video right now if you have to. Go to covenanteyes.com and when you go to checkout, type in Matt Fradd, one word, and that'll give you a month for free and you can try it out. Covenanteyes.com. I want to ask about divorced people. That's covenantize.com. I want to ask about divorced people.

We talked about that earlier. Because I think there's some Catholic people out there who, you know, they've been divorced, and they tell me that they feel like lepers. Like there's nothing for them. They just feel really embarrassed. And this has led some of my friends to like end up leaving the church because they've just felt so isolated. Has this become more of your ministry? Have you seen the need for that?

I've seen the need for it. Just a little closer. Yeah, no, I've seen the need for it because, you know, some of these people feel like they're just looked down upon because, like, I left my covenant or whatever. But in a lot of cases, these people are obeying the will of God. Like, they came to a very painful realization that what I had thought was a valid marriage was not. was a valid marriage was not. And, you know, and God made it very clear to me that to follow him, I need to, you know, begin the annulment process and go through this very painful purification, or maybe their spouse bailed out on them. And it was valid. Yeah. And it was valid. There's all the different, you know, scenarios that you could look at here. And, and sometimes the church will

rashly give an annulment to one spouse because he just wants it while the other spouse, like, wait a minute, we can work on this. We can work through this. And then they're left like, wait a minute, annulments shouldn't be handed out so carefree. What's the difference between a divorce and an annulment, for those who don't know? Okay, well, a divorce is a civil declaration of the separation of the civil bond between those two people. And an annulment is a declaration of nullity.

In other words, two people came into a church as singles, they went through a ceremony, and they left the church as two singles. Although they looked as if they had been married, there was an impediment to them forming that matrimonial bond. Whether they were getting married under duress, maybe there was lies, lack of maturity, an inability to really consent to these vows.

There could be a whole host of reasons, and even Jesus refers to this in the Gospel of Matthew. You know, he divorces unless the marriage was unlawful, commits adultery. And so, you know, there is an instance there in the Gospel of this. It makes sense, just right. I mean, you can think of the typical example of two people who go to Vegas, get hammered drunk, end up married somehow. Yeah, there's not a sacrament.

That's not a marriage. So if that's not a marriage, then there could be these, you know. And I think people that are maybe in that boat right now need to create ministries for one another. Like create blogs, create websites, create conferences, create groups within the diocese of, you know, divorced Catholics who are, you know, wanting to stay strong in their faith and meet other Catholics. And be able to share their experiences and the crosses that they're carrying because they're not alone and the church is their home and the church needs them, you know, and to minister to other people in the same situation. Because it's been incredibly painful. Because I mean, I've talked to some people that are going through this right now where

they had an abusive spouse and it's been several years and they're raising all the kids and the spouse is long gone and they're just starting the annulment process and putting the pieces of their life back together and feeling like, wow, I'm a 30-something-year-old woman who just had this dream of this Catholic marriage and all this stuff, and now I'm almost 40 and I'm a single mom. Life can be bloody brutal, can't it? Oh, yeah. To your point about starting ministries and blogs,

I couldn't agree more. Father Sean Kilcoley, who we both know, has ministered with some women who have been in relationships where the husband looked at pornography. And he'll now send them to chat with other women who have disclosed to father that their husband looks at porn. And this woman will take them out for coffee and start healing people left and right. He's like letting these women loose and healing these women. But yeah, a lot of healing happens when we use the wounds that we've received that have been redeemed by Christ

to then go out and shed light. I mean, that's kind of what I'm doing with pornography. I mean, I was looking at porn when I was 13. Like most weekends I'd go to a friend's house. I'd drink hard alcohol. Do you know this? Like 12, 13, 14 at a friend's house when parents didn't know about it.

She'd buy us pornographic videos and things. This was my teenage years. And I didn't know about it. She'd buy us pornographic videos and things. This was my teenage years. And I didn't know I was being robbed at the time until later on. But it's a beautiful thing when the Lord can begin to heal and then you can use that to heal others. Yeah. No, I mean, I grew up with the stuff in the sense that, you know, your friend down the street had it.

In my high school, one guy actually passed out porn for his locker to anyone who would vote for him as senior class vice president. I'm laughing only because I knew where that was going to land. Vote for Travis. I don't know where he is today. He's probably in Congress by now. But, you know, it was just everywhere. I mean, we were marinated in this stuff.

And like you, like, I didn't know. I was like getting these porn goggles glued to my face. I don't even know how to look at a woman except through the lens of lust. I was being robbed of all this. But like sometimes God allows us by our own free will to go through the desert. And so he can, you know, draw us back to himself. And then we become more effective apostles of the message. Cause like, Hey, look, I've been there. I made that mistake. And here's how to get out of that. And so I think people who are maybe in that camp of whether it's experiencing

sex attractions and pursuing chastity, or, uh, you know, I'm a divorced Catholic and I'm wrestling with this, you know, find the community, make the community. When I first moved to San Diego, I remember out of college, like I don't really know anybody. So I went to a church that I had, I heard had a young adult community and I got there and because I just wanted to find community. And I sat through the young adult mass at the end. Okay. And they said, okay, we got salsa dancing on Wednesday and we've got this on that. And I went up to the person, I'm like, do you guys have anything like religious here? Is it just like salsa and softball and all that? And they're like, no.

I'm like, like Bible study or Rosary? And they're like, no. And they're like, why don't you do it? I'm like, okay. So I say, okay, what am I going to do? I said, well, I want to get a community together. And so how would I get young adults to show up to Bible study? I said, I know what I'm going to do.

I'm going to do a four week Bible study on relationships. And then all the women will come. And if the women are here, all the men will come. And so before you knew it, we had 70 people showing up for a Bible study a couple blocks from the beach. And sometimes you have to create the community that you're complaining doesn't exist. Because maybe that absence is there because you haven't made it. Yeah. Back to this topic of porn, you heard recently that Kanye West, he came out.

He said he found porn when he was five, that it messed him up, it affected the way he looked at women. We're seeing more and more of this in the secular culture. Just to name a few. The lead singer of Metallica, James Hetfield, just narrated an anti-porn documentary called Chasing the Cardboard Butterfly. Chris Rock spoke about his divorce and said that porn led to that. He said he was messed up, found a lot of healing, he's a lot healthier now terry crews former nfl player and an actor pamela anderson yeah said those who watch porn are losers i wouldn't say that wow the fact that she said that yeah is russell brand yeah russell brand yeah it's like the truth the church has always taught in a general

way science is finally catching up with right yeah i mean we see this in lots of ways we just met contraception it's that way as well but yeah yeah and i think you know i've heard the analogy before it's almost like cigarettes you know back in the 60s it was cool it was fashionable it was harmless and then like the 80s came out like it does what to your lungs that's disgusting yeah you know because i remember growing up like you could smoke on airplanes and things like that isn't that crazy yeah but i think people what a cooler time yeah and yeah god willing you know hopefully people look back at porn like that like what people were 17 year old girls are sharing pictures over their phones because their boyfriends asked them like that's insane hopefully we're gonna get there but you know still people think it's

harmless and whatever but have you incorporated the what how do you talk about sexting yeah well i just i like to speak from stories and so i met i remember reading of this girl and this guy sends her a message and he wants her to send him some revealing photograph of herself and so he texts her like hey why don't you send me a picture of yourself with that voice yeah so so she gets a text and she's like oh okay she took a selfie of her face and sent him that yeah and he already knew what she looked like so he's kind of disappointed he texts her back he's like hey i didn't mean a picture of her face and sent him that. And he already knew what she looked like, so he was kind of disappointed. He texted her back. He's like, hey, I didn't mean a picture of your face. She's like, okay.

She took a picture of her foot and sent him that picture instead. Like I say, that's a girl who's going to find real love. And so I tell the girls, like if any guy ever asks you to send some revealing photograph of yourself, I just tell the girls, like I give you absolute permission to send him a picture of your completely bare hand waving goodbye to him. That's as much flesh as he deserves to see. Because like a real gentleman would never ask for those pictures, collect those pictures and share and distribute.

That's not a gentleman. That's a collector of child porn. Yeah, because people are making themselves pornography. How do you get that across as well? Yeah, you're choosing to become pornography. Yeah, you're becoming the problem. And it's because I think what often happens is many women want to offer a man

what he's least likely to reject, namely the physical. But the problem is what you win a man with is what you keep him with. And if you win him with pleasure, well, you can keep him with that. But he can get pleasure anywhere. Get off the internet, another girl. If you win him with your body, you can keep with your body. But like every woman has a body. I can't remember the last woman I met who did not have a body.

Me too. It's a repeatable asset. And so you've got to realize, what am I trying to win him for? It's a repeatable asset. And so you've got to realize, what am I trying to win him for? And so that's one of the beauties of chastity is it really brings a man's intention to the surface. Because does he really want you? Or does he just want the pleasure he's getting from you?

It's like a smoker doesn't want a cigarette. A smoker wants nicotine. Once he gets the nicotine, cigarette's history. And for a lot of times, the girl thinks, oh, he wants me, just like a man wants a cigarette. He doesn't want the cigarette. He just wants the high he gets from it. And when he's done, discards it. And that's why so many girls feel discarded. But they feel like, well, I just got to offer him something or otherwise he wouldn't want me for who I am. And I would even propose that some women even hide behind their nakedness, meaning that they want to show the guy what he's going to embrace about her. And

he's going to accept this because if he really saw beyond skin deep to my wounds and my hurts and my insecurities and my needs, it'd be too much for him and he'd run. And so I can't show too much. So I'm just going to reveal everything and I'm going to hide behind that. This is something I often say in regards to pornography that's to that point, that there's this irony that pornography is meant to expose, but it ends up suppressing the personhood of the performer oh yeah and this is one of those distinctions between naked art and porn in naked art you have this beautiful thing that actually expresses an interiority yeah and in pornography it's vacant and i've heard you say something about the playboy centerfold yeah yeah i mean essentially what's going on here is that

the porn star is the center of the attention but she's completely ignored because her body in a sense her sexual value who's eclipsed her personal value and to me the solution to porn is to love porn stars and to reveal more of them like you know pamela anderson you just spoken of you know she shared at the the canon film festival years ago how she, you know, gang raped as a young girl. Who is this? Pamela Anderson. Oh, wow. Jen Jameson also.

Yeah, and she was molested and she was gang raped by like her babysitter and all these things. And that's how she was introduced to sexuality. And it was just a world of hurt. Yeah. And so like, if you understand like, okay, this person I'm looking at in porn was abused as like a 12-year-old girl and then raped by all these people.

And I remember seeing Pamela Anderson on the Howard Stern show. And I remember he once said now, I heard once that like people say that porn stars are all molested and sexually abused. That would never happen to you, did it? Are you sure you're not talking about Jenna Jameson? No, this is Pamela Anderson. This same thing happened with Jenna. Pamela Anderson. And she, you know, oh, no, no, no, no, no.

But then years later, she came out and said, indeed, you know, she was gang raped and abused and all these things. And if you realize, like, I know some women who left the porn industry that I had read of that had had three, four, five abortions, and they just couldn't take it anymore. But imagine if when you're viewing porn, that you realize that this sexual act is creating a human life that's going to be aborted in four weeks. And this girl is suffering an incurable sexually transmitted disease she was molested when she was 12 years old she's completely drunk out of her mind now and she's going to spend a lot of the money from this shoot on some drug to

numb the pain how aroused can you really get from watching that if you saw the full person yeah that's why the porn industry exists to hide women yes and just oh good good line, right? That's true. What advice do you give to men and women right now who are watching this, who are up to their eyeballs in porn? Yeah, well, one, don't try to fight it alone. I mean, that's why you got Covenant Eyes and things like that are just fantastic. That screen of accountability.

You don't want to try to battle this thing on your own. But I would say like, let's say there's a guy who struggles with porn. You know, I would say don't date until you can get over your porn habit. What does that mean? Overcome your porn habit? How does one know when they've well i mean i mean temptations are always going to exist you know that that's going to be there but like i remember priest

saying there's a difference between having a bird fly over your head and letting it make a nest in your hair have you at least gone several months clean and strong yeah but under your belt instead of a relapse every three weeks like am i making progress and if i'm not well what are you doing to make progress? Are you seeing a counselor? Do you have a, are you going priest hopping? You know, we're going to this priest or that priest. If you keep hopping to different priests for confessions,

they can't smell the trail of your sin. That's right. And as a result, yeah, you might not have that injury to your pride of just like, I went to this guy, oh, I just happen to be struggling with porn this week. And what were they doing the last 58 weeks? Well, pretty much the same thing. Stick with the same good confessor.

I used to go to the Filipino priest who couldn't speak English well. Father Kwok. Yeah, and so we've got to find a good spiritual director because sometimes that'll prevent you to sound like, I don't want to have to tell this to him again. And so that'll keep you in check. You need that accountability

and also just devotion to our lady and just realize that this isn't just a physiological problem. It is. It's a psychological one. It's a spiritual one. It's a physical one. And we need to be addressing it on all these different fronts instead of saying, no, it's just spiritual. So just bust out a billion rosaries and that'll solve it. Yeah. Well, that'll be a big piece of the puzzle. But psychologically, are we dealing with my affective immaturity that

whenever i'm bored lonely angry stressed or tired i'm looking at porn on the phone yeah and when i'm in these moments of desolation i'm grasping to this false consolation instead of learning what to actually do with my boredom and loneliness to truly solve it and so that's why i have been a good counselor spiritual director accountability you're gonna get a team behind you we put a blog on the website called 15 tips to Stay Hooked on Porn. Oh, I saw that. Yeah. It's basically like a C.S. Lewis type approach.

It was excellent. Where I just put everything I could possibly think of. Yeah. It's just chassie.com slash porn is the link to it. And it's just like it gives the link to the Victory app from Life Teen, Covenant Eye, Strive, just all these different programs that are out there. Like the tools are there. Yeah, totally.

But I remember you telling me once that some guy emailed you and he's like i really want to break free from my porn habit you're like are you sure oh yeah i do so you wrote him this big long email of all these tips and then when he kicked it back to you is all the reasons why he didn't really want to do any of that stuff and it's like dude like there's a lot of that yeah cowardice is there someone there no yeah there's a lot of that cowardice yeah i remember meeting someone at a university conference and you know he was telling me how difficult it was to be free of porn and i was sympathetic because it can be very of course it's very difficult and i was trying to be very compassionate and i was suggesting things and everything i said you know he would say yeah i

tried it as to i don't have anyone in my area and at one point i i tried something out yeah i said well just go look at porn then just you don't have you don't have to not look at porn if you want to i mean we're in a hotel free wi-fi go do it and he looked up at me and went no i don't want to i went well quit being a like kid and like stop making excuses and sometimes you need that kind of jose maria slap yeah no i mean padre pio once a boy came to him crying because his girlfriend broke up with him padre pio smacked him in the face and said, be a man. That wouldn't work today. But sometimes it's exactly what we need.

Right. It's just like, dude, you're not going to die if you don't have this. I love it. And so with the pornography thing too, with women, we're coming out with a book by Kelsey Skok and Everett Fritz have written a book for women called Uncompromising. And this is for women who want to be free of porn? It's coming out in a couple weeks. Oh, Jason, thank you.

So it's on all porn and masturbation just for girls. Thank you. Explaining. Why is Everett writing it? Everett's a dude. Yeah, no, he's just offering some contributions to it because he's got freedom. But it's mostly written by Kelsey from a woman's perspective where she shares how, like, you know, she used to go to talks and they'd say, okay this is for the men porn masturbation and she'd be sitting

there in the audience being like okay i'm a freak yeah and then when she started sharing her story like look you know this is something i struggle with the women flock to her yeah i'm just like i don't even sin in a feminine way and it's like okay we got to heal this broken idea that lust is a guy problem and that modesty is a girl and you have audrey assad's talk is that on your website or your soundcloud pure freedom i would recommend every woman go listen to that it was an excellent talk she gave one of the things she said is when men struggle with porn it's like they're all in the cell together prison yeah they'll get out of here one day they're enslaved but at least they're together she's like for us women we're in you know solitary confinement yeah yeah so so thankfully, Kelsey's sharing her testimony.

And because the solution to these things is not the same for a man and a woman. That's been the problem of thinking, okay, this is how a guy breaks free from porn. Girls, just go do the same thing.

But it's different. The factors, the motivation, the cycle. They're like, I've had cold showers every day. Like Exodus 90. It's just like...

But for women, they need to understand, okay, how does my cycle play a role in this? How do my other relationships or being away from my family or the stresses and stuff like, and so she really takes it from this feminine perspective of like, hey, there's some factors here that nobody's talking about and how we can break free from this stuff as well. And that you're not the only girl who's wrestling with this stuff in youth group and in your college campus ministry program and feeling like you're living some double life.

And so thanks be to God, it's just going to be called uncompromising purity and it's going to be her story and how to break free from the chastity.com chastity.com it should be out in about a month so you mentioned the victory app which i helped create with life team fun story i was i was at strike the other day yeah high school in houston and um they they were saying you did such a great job i don't know know when you were there. One or two years ago. So I got to speak to 1,200 boys on pornography. And while I'm talking, I talk about the Victory app. Now, all those boys are issued iPads for school. Won't get down that rabbit trail.

But in a couple of clicks, one of the guys put Victory on 1,200 iPads that they cannot delete. All of a sudden, they've got, isn't that fantastic? It's awesome. So yeah, check out the victory app for those watching victory, the victory app.com or just download it. It's a way to break free of porn, but yeah,

that's great. Yeah. Cause I mean, so many of these issues, it's just like, well, that's a male problem. That's a female problem.

And I think we're evolving. So like even discussing stuff like male modesty. I want to talk about that. Yeah. You know, and it's a puzzling term because like we typically think modesty is clothing and yeah. How would I dress if I wanted to talk about that yeah you know and it's a puzzling term because like we typically think modesty is clothing and you know

how would I dress if I wanted to seduce like would I be a fireman or like a cowboy or like I've tried that people just laugh at me

it's like what about the village people like what is going on yeah I want to talk about this because I feel like there's kind of two pitfalls you can fall into one the idea that

only women ought to be concerned about modesty and then the other that only women ought to be concerned about modesty. And then the other, that we're exactly the same and therefore modesty has to be exactly the same with each. Thomas Aquinas talks about modesty in the Summa and he talks about it sort of like, almost like an arrogance in outward appearance and action. So if you were going to a soup kitchen

and you got all dressed up and bling bling and looking good and you know that's kind of immodest yeah yeah but let's let's talk about that what does modesty mean yeah well um modesty is a proper attitude towards greatness of humility and so it's the the greatness of the body is you know what modesty is i think of it as an invitation to contemplation so it's a woman at least when talking about what modesty is, I think of it as an invitation to contemplation. So it's a woman, at least when talking about feminine modesty, is inviting a man to realize there's a lot more about her than just her body. Because her sexual value is great and it's wonderful, but it's not the best thing about her. But because it's so intoxicating, if we see just a little bit too much of it, it can so easily obscure the value of the entire person. And so the virtue of chastity and modesty,

one of the things it does is try to order our human values. So yes, your sexual value is good, it's great, but your value as a human person is a greater good. And what lust is, is when the sexual value of the person supersedes their personal value. That's the best thing you have to offer, your sensual value. And so modesty helps to put these things in proper order. And so it's not saying the body's bad. And I try to point out to women that a lot of girls get a little ticked off when you talk about modesty because well if a guy has a bad imagination that's his problem and and i i understand where they're coming from because like literally for thousands of years the whole problem of lust has been blamed on the woman the body of the woman it's your outfit you're the woman caught in adultery you're the seductress but you really think it through the what of the woman, it's your outfit. You're the woman caught in adultery, you're the seductress. But you really think it through,

what's the cause of robbery? Is the cause of robbery the presence of jewelry in the window of the store, or the presence of greed in the heart of the robber? Oh gosh, you know. That's fantastic, what a great line. Jewelry doesn't cause robbery. You know, beauty doesn't cause lust.

The body's not the problem, the body's the answer. The body's the solution. And so long as we blame the body as the problem, we're missing where the real issue is, which is the brokenness in my human heart that I don't even know how to look at a human body without nothing but lustful thoughts. And so what modesty does is John Paul II said that in order for women to understand modesty, they need insight into male psychology of just understanding how easily, you know, a man can start thinking sensual thoughts if he sees a little too much. And so what modesty does, it kind of meets him in that psychology of just understanding how easily you know a man can start thinking sensual thoughts if he sees a little too much and so what modesty does it kind of meets him in that weakness and

helps him to right because we are our brother's keeper yeah that's the answer to what cain right yes yes you are your brother's keeper yeah and strictly speaking no you can't cause somebody to sin because that needs to be an act of the will but you can certainly lead them to virtue you know by the way that you dress you're speaking a a message. And so it's modesty is, is, is I think it helps a woman find the love that she really deserves. It's not about your body's bad. So when people, people probably have like real practical questions about this. All right, let's get super practical. Like what about, what about tights? What about bikinis? Like what do people, what do ladies ask you and how do you respond? Yeah. Well, I mean, one, I'll be blunt. Tights are not pants.

You know, tights are bare skin and a different color. You know, and your butt is not a billboard. Yeah. You know, and I don't need to see that much. In other words, you don't want writing on the back of it. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, if you want to wear tights or something, at least layer, you know, of wear something longer over top or whatever, people like, oh, but it's so hot.

This, that it's like, you know what? Yeah. I mean, the fashions are going in this direction, but like a bikini, I mean, I often like to talk about how the origins of this whole thing came. Yeah, it's good. The guy, Louis Rayard, was a French automotive engineer who invented the bikini.

He actually worked in his mom's lingerie business. And so he's the guy spending all day around women's underwear. And he thought, well, how do we get them to wear this in public? Let's make it waterproof and call it a bathing suit. And so he invented the first bikini, and he tried to get runway models to debut it in France, and nobody would. Because they're like, we're not stupid. We're not wearing underwear in public because it's waterproof. That's ridiculous.

And so he had to find a stripper from a casino in Paris to debut the first bikini because no other model would do it. And so eventually this thing became, obviously took off. But if you step back and think, well, oftentimes bikini is actually less fabric than underwear. And we, I think, well, we get so sucked into the culture. Well, this is just what people do. And, you know, it's, you go to the beach, it's hot, you can wear this, but there are good bathing suit companies like hermosa is a new more modest swimwear um fashion you know a bikini or not bikini it's a bathing suit company for women called h-e-r-m-o-z-a that promotes modest swimwear and i find a lot of girls actually like it like hey it can be cute and and attractive without having to show so much yeah yeah that's

really interesting um okay well but people want more specifics i suppose what about men like what do you say to to men here's what happened i was in houston recently and i was speaking to this woman who was you know making her child's dress longer for school and i said well that's good that's a good sign of a school in promoting modesty she said yeah but I'm a little frustrated with it. It's as if it's all on the woman. But I thought, well, I'm not really sure if that's true, right? Because if a dude wore a dress and we could see his underwear, we would also tell him to lower it.

Some of it's just about the fact of what exactly we're wearing. Yeah, yeah. You know, our physiology is obviously different. So, I mean, obviously this guy's wearing baggy jeans with his boxers hanging out the back. He's like, come on, I got to lift it up. You know, and, you know, I mean, I work out at a CrossFit gym. And it's like halfway through the workout, half the guys throw their shirts off. I do that sometimes, but I promise nobody is tempted.

You know, and I'm, you know, I'm working. I'm like, do I throw my shirt off? Like, do I need to throw my shirt off? You know, is that, I don't know how tempting I am to you're pretty tempting you're good but no you're right that isn't modest you know it's like do i do i need to do that like what is this really gonna help me get that overhead squat you know now that i have my shirt off there's that much more flexibility sometimes i think we over exaggerate the practicality of why we need to be modest oh it's so hot because obviously you need to wear something different when you're in the beach or when you're working out yeah i mean that's the other thing

like i understand if women are wearing tights and a singlet that makes sense in the gym yeah me and a woman at a doctor's office wearing very little but a gown right is not immodest exactly so there's a different context for each thing do you remember i sent you that advert of that bloke walking out of the beach and it was saying like we call uh we call them togs you know like a one piece of men's kind of tidy whitey what do you call that yeah european bathing suits yeah or australian sweetos and it was like this guy walking from the beach into the city and it was there's a voice in the background going togs togs togs togs togs undies and then it was like because he had walked into the city center so i mean john paul ii even talked about that

didn't he that yeah the appropriateness of dress is going to depend on the location in which you are yeah what you're going to wear when you go to saint peter's you know basilica in rome is different than you're going to wear when you're at the gelati shop down the street yeah you know and so there needs to be decorum in the different you know and discernment with each one but i think if a girl's thinking is this is this too tight Is this too low? Is this too revealing? You've kind of already answered your own question. Yeah. I want to talk about dating and how that's evolved since you started speaking 20 years ago, because the complaint I often hear, you often hear, no doubt, I'm sure, is women saying like, I don't get asked out or men don't, you know, they don't want to date. I see, you know, and I know so many beautiful women in

their 20s and their 30s who still aren't married. And it can be heartbreaking. I don't want to date. I see, you know, and I know so many beautiful women in their 20s and their 30s who still aren't married. And it can be heartbreaking. I don't mean to blame this all on the dudes. It's an epidemic. Because I think, and when I talk to women, like I'll go to a daily mass at noon downtown in some city while I'm speaking. And you see all these attractive, young, single, professional women there, devout. And the guys aren't anywhere around. Or you go to Catholic young adult communities sometimes. And it's, you know, four to one, you know, young single women.

And I think what's going on is in China, you know, they've had this one child policy for decades. And as a result, if you can only have one kid in China, you want a male. Passes on the family name, the males are esteemed so much more highly than the women. So the female babies are being aborted at an exponential rate compared to the male babies. Now that has been going on for enough generations, you have a lot of single young Chinese males that are looking for a mate and she's not there because they were aborted by the millions and they're looking around and they're gone. I think we're having the opposite problem in America because of pornography. That men have been emasculated to such an extent that the women

are reaching a level of marriage age and maturity, and the guys are 24, but they're 12 years old emotionally. They're still playing their video games at home. They're afraid to ask a girl out without an app. They don't even know how to ask the girl out. And so the women are looking around like, wait a minute, God, I'm ready to raise a family and start having kids and doing this, but where are the decent guys? They're hooked on porn and they're playing video games and they're just not ready. And so, but there are good guys out there

that aren't emasculated by porn, but that just don't know how to begin a relationship. They don't know where to initiate. And I think because they don't know what to do, they get a little bit frozen. And this is why you wrote this book, The Dating Blueprint. Is this out yet or not? It just came out yesterday. is going to come out we're going to release this episode i'm

thinking like friday or thereabouts so it'll be out it just came out right now so no matter when we release it it's going to be out yeah so tell us about this book and how you did it so we did the girls book how to find your soulmate without losing your soul and and all the girls like you know where's the book you know the where's the book for guys and guys like i'm like oh guys don't read guys don't read. Guys don't read. But then the guys kept asking me. Yeah, guys kept asking me. Like, no, no, no, we really need something.

And so I started to write the book for guys. And I just felt like the book was kind of missing something. Like its heart, its soul was kind of missing. And so what I did is I got online through Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And I said, girls, I'm writing a book for the guys. And I need your input. How would you want a guy to ask your input. How would you ask, how would you want a guy to ask you out? How would you not want a guy to ask you out? Hey,

let's say it's not going great. How would you want a guy to explain that to you instead of ghosting? And what kind of stuff, if a guy has in his life, do you want him to get rid of before he even asks you out to begin with? So I asked these tough questions because I realized like men do really well if we have specific guidelines. Absolutely. And if we're spoken to in generalities, it's meaningless. Be a gentleman. Be a gentleman. You know, like my wife says, I need more help around the house. I'm like, hmm, house big. She's like, take out the trash.

I'm like, now this is a conversation. So I realized with the guys, well, what they're lacking is specifics. And so I went to the girls to get the specifics because they expect the men to know it, but they don't feel it's their place to tell them. Now you should have done this that way. And so, but I told the girls, hey, you tell me and I'll tell them. Boy, did the floodgates open. Did you do this on Facebook? Where'd you do it?

It was on Facebook. It was on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. And literally within hours, the women, more than 1,500 women had submitted more than 30,000 words of content. Which is longer than the entire book was at that point. But it was gold. And I was going through this stuff. And I'm like, man, I wish I knew this when I was 20, you know, and I and it was just so I put all their advice into different little boxes. Okay, this is asking her out. And this is this and dating etiquette and this that. And then I just started picking the best quotes from all of it. And I can't believe

how much I learned through the whole process from beginning to end. And just the harmony between what all these women desired, whether they were posting from Brazil or the Ukraine or America, it was all the same problems and it was all the same longings. And so in the book, the third chapter is the longest. And that's where I get into because the first chapter is like, okay, I asked the girls, what do you want the guy to get out of his life before he asks you out four to one the most common response is porn like don't ask me out until you're done with that stuff and so the first chapter goes into that second chapter is like discernment when should you date and who should you date and i kind of give them this little grid like right girl right time wrong girl wrong time how do you know which one you're landed on and you know those questions of when and discernment dating then the third chapter is kind of this is how to ask her out and that's the

meat and the soul of the whole book where we walk them through the dating etiquette from a to z you know how to ask her out and and the input we got from the girls in that chapter was gold so what are some of the things that they said to you on facebook and instagram what did you learn well i wrote some of that i just wrote two pages of some of this stuff. First thing, like, they do not want to be asked out in a text message. You know, this one girl said, let me just say. It's just four Ys, and it's all caps. So the Kelly Pekor School of Texting, you know what that means.

Let me just say, the easier it is to ask a lady out, the easier it is for the lady to say no. I was like huh and so when a guy asks her out through a text message girls see it as cowardly and insincere because you're hiding behind a screen and so when a guy asks a girl out face to face there's a couple benefits one it shows you have a little bit of confidence so that makes you a little bit more attractive but also it makes her feel more attractive because she's not stupid. She knows you're putting it online. She knows you're facing rejection, which means this guy values me enough to face the fear of rejection face to face, which makes me feel special. And so as opposed to he's hiding behind a screen, one of the girls was interesting. She said, if anything, I'll decline

the offer if he asked me out through text even if i do want to go out with a guy only because he asked out over a text now vice versa if a guy were to ask me out in person and me not want to go out with him i'd probably give it a shot just because he was confident enough for the challenge yeah and so that was the first gem is it needs to be face to face okay um second thing that i found interesting the clarity women wanted you to say the word date when you ask them out. Okay. Not, hey, you want to hang out sometime?

We can get some coffee. You want to get some coffee? We should get together sometime. Because the girl's like, hang out? What does he mean? Because girls overthink everything. And so like, what is he asking for? I just want to point out that you just said girls overthink everything, and that's going to be a takeaway from some angry person.

It's in here. That is true. Leave it in the comments section. No, that was something a girl said. Oh, okay. so blame it on her yeah one girl said lots of blaming women continue that's what it's all about the matt frad show um lots of guys will ask us if we want to hang out no we don't want to hang out we have plenty of girlfriends to hang out with what we want is for you to take us to do something fun that allows us to get to know each other better one girl said do not say do you want to out? I've heard several guys ask me that.

And it's so frustrating because I'm wondering like, are we just two friends getting together? Is this a date? Is he trying to pursue me? What is this? It's so confusing. I just wish a guy would say, hey, I'd really like to get to know you better. Can I take you on a date?

Because quote, being vague does not exactly make a girl go weak at the knees. That is a very good line. Oh, it's gold. And then so no texting. And then you got to use the word date. Third thing a very good line. Oh, it's gold. And then so, so no texting. And then you got to use the word date. Third thing is no intermediaries. Basically don't ask your friend, ask her friend, if she likes you. Okay. Look, sixth grade is over guys. All right. And one girl said, look, our relationship is between us, not the extra people around us. Be intentional, be clear,

be courageous. Um, another thing when a guy risks it it shows even if he's nervous it shows he has some confidence one woman said i can't even imagine being with a guy who won't take any risk and so you've got to be able to have the guts to put it on the line instead of hiding behind tinder you know to buffet the blows of rejection another one is a planet um women do not want to go on a movie for a first date. Universally. One girl said, movie? No. Just no. Alright then. She said,

if you go on a date with me, take me somewhere where we get to talk and actually get to know each other. You can't do that in silence for two hours at a movie. Date? Go on a movie third or fourth date. Not the first or second. Excellent. That's really good. This is my favorite one of all the feedback of 3000 words. Do not Matt Fradd offer a Netflix and chill or take me to a sketchy

warehouse or some weird lot and tell me about your felony record. Speaking from experience. So the moral of the story is if you have to tell a girl about your history of incarceration, you want to take her to a fancy dinner, not a sketchy lot. Or at least a public place where you can't murder her. Exactly. She doesn't have to fear for that.

So you never know what she's been through. I asked the girls, like, what's one thing you'd want a guy to stop doing in his life? And one girl put on there, she's like, not going to the duck pond with your ex-girlfriend. I'm like, okay. Yeah, you're like, I'm not sure if that's one thing I'm going to tell everybody not to do. Nope, actually I did put it in the book. This one was interesting. She said, pace yourself.

She says, don't tell me you want to marry me. Call to marry me. Discernment is done with the person, not for or about them before you even date. And so this idea that I'll do discernment and then I'll choose you, instead of like, no, no, no, we discern together. This is a process. Now, if she says no, I remember you got to take it gracefully.

Paul Kim once said, hey, look, if she says no, that's fine. You've just narrowed down your search for your future spouse by one person. And to me, if she says no, it's kind of asking a girl out is kind of a win-win because you either end up with a date or you end up with clarity, either of which is better than being uncertain and alone. And so you got to put it out there. And then the last couple of things, one, no ghosting. Yeah. This is a new term that old people like me have just heard about.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And ghosting is when you express an initial attraction and then you kind of lose interest and fade into oblivion. Yeah. And for girls, it's torturous because it's like, okay, where are you? Like, do you like another girl or are you just just really busy did you get abducted by aliens like what exactly is going on and what's going on is the guy doesn't really have the character to have a hard

conversation and so i don't want to hurt her so i'll just disappear but that's torturous to the girls because they end up you know for months thinking like what did i do wrong like is he coming back what is going on yeah you, she would much rather him say, I'm not interested anymore. And that's what they said. This was great. She said, an ending to a relationship should be just as intentional and clear as our first date.

And so what's interesting is like, if I want to ask a girl out, it requires some vulnerability, some honesty, some courage, some confidence, sincerity. But that's kind of easy to muster up because there's something in it for me because I might end up with a date. But how about when it comes time to saying goodbye?

Am I willing to be honest and sincere and all these things when there's nothing in it for me? There's only in it something for her, for clarity. That's a much better mark of a gentleman. And it was funny while I was writing this whole thing, I had quit my gym because I wanted to find a new one. So I was trying out all these different CrossFit gyms and trying to switch over to that. And I got free memberships for a week in three

gyms and I was trying them out and doing all this stuff. And then I picked one. I'm like, I really like this one. It was the most intense. There's a Nike commercial film there. The trainers were awesome. And then I was getting these texts from one of the managers of the other gym. And he was like, hey, Jason, just want to check in and see if you liked your free membership and you want to join. And I had the text and I'm like, oh, I'll answer that later. You know, because I'm not joining his gym. And I'd work on the book. I'm writing about no ghosting.

And then the text comes up. I'm like, I'm like, wait a minute. I'm doing it. Like, I'm a grown man and I'm ghosting the manager of a CrossFit gym because I don't want to have a hard conversation. I said, you know what? I'm doing it right now. And I texted him.

I said, you know, hey, I really appreciate, you know, the training, the sessions. I had a good time. But I ended up picking a gym closer my kids school i wish you all the best two minutes later text me hey man thank you a lot for you know let me know i really appreciate that yeah and i'm sure that is a common occurrence of men not writing back or women not writing yeah because that's an awkward conversation you don't want to have it yeah and we need to grow up and have them yeah because we can't all marry everybody you know not every relationship is going to work out and what you're doing is you're freeing up that person to find someone who could be a better match for them. Instead of dragging things on in this lack of clarity.

You know, but one girl added, she said, don't then pop back in when it's convenient for you and use me as your emotional fidget spinner, as my friend put it, whenever you're bored. Meaning, if you're going to break up, at least commit to the breakup. put it, whenever you're bored. Meaning if you're going to break up, at least commit to the breakup instead of floating back in and out and leaving this girl wondering for six months, what on earth is going on? And so a big piece of all this is intentionality and clarity. And it's funny when I was writing it, I kind of had this flashback. I dated this girl in college for two years. We had a wonderful, awesome relationship. And as it was kind of coming to a close and we were breaking up, we're still really good friends. She shared with me, you know, Jason, one it was kind of coming to a close and we were breaking up we're still really good friends she shared with me you know jason one thing that kind of bothered me when we dated um for these last two years is that you never really asked me out and i'm like

and like outside i'm kind of playing it cool but inside my brain is like fact checking like cnn like cnn during a trump debate like he said what can't be wrong find the find the fact so my brain is like fact checking like no i know i must have asked her out like when we went to florida when she met my parent like i and i like huh she's right i never asked her out and then i kind of thought huh i did the same thing with the last two girls i dated in college i dated three girls for a total of five years in college and i never asked a single one of them out and it was one we were in tribe on wedding rings and what had happened what is trying on wedding rings with a girl and you never asked a single one of them out. And it was one, we were in tribe on wedding rings and what had happened is trying on wedding rings with a girl and you never asked her out.

I never asked her out, but we were dating. We were dating for two years because it just evolved into it because I'm like, we're friends. Now we're hanging out with group friends. Now we're going to kind of go solo. And it was obvious to everybody in the world that we're dating obvious, except perhaps to her,

you know, and then by within a couple of years of it is obvious. Yeah, we're committed, but I realized like, wow. And I wasn't trying to avoid commitment or rejection. It was just like, Hey, we just kind of morphed into a dating relationship. But this is pandemic where people right now, we have a culture of single people who pretend like they're dating. We have a culture of dating people who behave like they're married. Now we have a culture of

married people who think they're single. Everything's out of order. And so we need to quit sliding into the next stage, meaning, okay, I want to be with that guy. So I'm going to hook up with him and then maybe he'll commit to me. Oh, I really like this person. And now we're dating. We'll live together before we get married. We're not deciding into these stages of relationships with clarity. We're just, just morphing from one into the other evolving. But I think we want the clarity, but it involves guys knowing you need to be intentional intentional i think one of the things that prevents men from asking women out or proposing to them is that we want to keep our options open you know um i remember i called my mate mark bennett in brisbane i'd moved to texas where my wife well now wife was living i had uh bought a wedding ring

but i was still not sure and i gave him a call and i said mark i'm just not sure mate and he actually said what the hell are you talking about mate she's better than you anyway you should ask her out before she figures that out no joke i proposed to her that night but what would your advice be to a man who's you know discerning but too much yeah yeah well i mean one thing is that freedom exists for the sake of love. It exists to be given away. And men have really bought a false notion of freedom, that if I give myself, I'm losing myself.

If I commit, what if someone better comes along? If I get a girlfriend, I'm tied down. If I get married, it's ball and chain. If I have kids, it's game over. This is all a very broken idea of freedom. The church says that man will only find himself in the fullest giving of himself. And at the end of the day, you got to roll the dice at some point. You got to cast it. You got to put all the chips in. And it's going to be, you know, an investment of sorts, and it's going to be a

gamble of sorts, but it's a leap of faith because there will always be someone else that comes along later on that might seem more attractive or more alluring. And, yeah, it's bound to happen. But that's why marriage isn't a feeling. You know, it's a choice. Like, I've chosen this, even though it can feel like a crucifixion at times. And there might seem like easier options that are out there, you know, until further notice, Christ is telling me to stay on the cross. And so, yeah, you can't do this paralysis by analysis.

A lot of guys do this not only with girls, but with seminary. Meaning, you know, they're like discerning themselves into oblivion of just like, is this an apple seed or is it an orange seed? Is it an apple or orange? It could be an apple, but it does. Dude, put the stupid thing in the ground and see what grows up. You know, meaning go to the seminary, ask her out. The most overlooked aspect of discernment is

action. Yes. And that's what's missing. They want to think it out and get it all figured out when sometimes you just need to go and you need to ask her out, take her on a date, get to know her, see how it works out. And sometimes I remember hearing one guy, he asked a girl out and she's like, no, I'm really not interested in you as more than a friend. Okay. And he waited a year and he asked her out again. And she's like, no, no, remember, interested in you as more than a friend. Okay. And he waited a year and he asked her out again. And she's like, no, no. Remember, I just see you as a friend. A year ago.

Okay. And so he waits a year and he asks her out again. And by then she had gotten to know him better. And she's like, okay, we'll go out. She fell madly in love with a guy. They got married. They have a family together. Now, usually that's not the way that things pan out, but it's a fact that like, you got

to ask, you got to try, you got to initiate because just because you ask a girl out on a date doesn't mean you're dating. This is something that paralyzes a lot of guys at Catholic campuses. Yeah, that's good. If you're in a Newman Center at a Catholic college where everybody knows every year, Steubenville, Ave Maria, or whatever, it's like, well, if I ask her out, everybody's going to think we're dating because we just went on a date. That's interesting. Yeah, I like that.

No, there's a distinction. Just as you have to clearly ask her on a date, you have to clearly ask her to date, meaning boyfriend, girlfriend. So just because you took her out for a milkshake in a movie or whatever, doesn't mean that you're her boyfriend. And so the culture used to be like that,

where I remember meeting one grandma and she told me that her grandma told her, never go on a date with the same guy two Saturdays in a row because that might make him think that you actually are interested in him and so but back then the availability was like that I mean women would have dates every weekend they'd go dancing with guys it's just the culture I mean I know one grandma she got 10 marriage proposals in five years wow in the 1940s it's where it's the way it was and I kind of start the book with this because

my grandpa was like part of the greatest generation. This is a guy at the age of 20 was flying an airplane in World War II into thunderstorms deliberately at night time to avoid Japanese aircraft. He was flying once 300 miles behind enemy

territory in Burma delivering a cargo load of barbed wire to an encampment. And while he's flying, the engine dies and the plane starts plummeting down towards a place where there's, you know, Japanese troops that if they were to land, they'd be slaughtered immediately. They kept no prisoners. And so they start unloading all the barbed wire, throwing it out of the back of the plane to try to lighten the cargo late, you know, as the altitude is sinking and this whole thing's plummeting and, and he starts praying and engine turns back on, he pulls it out and they were able to get out of here and he lands and he

gets home and like, and he's doing this at the same age that I was playing ultimate Frisbee in college. And so, so imagine when these men and i'm talking how many of these guys came back 16 million of them were in world war ii yeah and they came back knowing asking a girl out is not a risk getting shot down by the japanese over burma is a risk and so they came home knowing what matters i want to ask out my my high school sweetheart we're gonna have a family

i'm gonna start a business i'm gonna you know, and they just boomed. I mean, the productivity of that generation was huge. I think because they were put into this furnace of suffering to like, what is, and they saw their friends lose their lives and they came home with such a purpose and mission that is utterly lacking in today's millennials in this generation because we haven't been forced to grow up that fast. But I think we need to kind of return to that intentionality of like my manhood was given to me as a gift you know to make a gift of myself to another well i'm so glad i got married i was 22 years old i

think and i'm really glad i mean i know we don't all have that opportunity but i'm really glad i did that because it enabled us to kind of grow up together and mature together and maybe you want to ask you though should should teens be dating anyway which might sound like a provocative question but i was asked this recently when i was speaking at a steubenville conference like some advice for teens dating my honest advice was i don't think you should be dating because i know what they mean by date like unless you're a teen who's open who's in a place where you can be married so you're 19 or something yeah but other than that like i don't think it's a good idea yeah what's your thought and so i would distinguish teen versus high school because teen you could be speaking of a 19 year

old right yes exactly um so we're talking about high school kids the happiest high school students i've met in the world were students who told me they saw no point whatsoever in dating in high school because for a couple of reasons one the emotional maturity level at that point like if a girl might feel emotionally mature enough to date, well, she's surrounded by a bunch of high school guys that probably go home, play video games, look at some porn, you know, and come back to school the next day.

I met a high school boy once and he told me he goes home on Saturday, he watches 12 hours of pornography, goes to bed, wakes up on Sunday, watches 12 hours of pornography, and goes back to school on Monday. He said, I don't even enjoy it anymore. It disgusts me, but I don't know how to live without it.

Now imagine he asks out your daughter the next week. He would destroy someone in that relationship. And I'm not saying that every high school boy is some porn addicted walking hormone, but the maturity level, spiritually, emotionally, what happens when a girl dates most high school guys, you don't wanna hang your coat on a hook that can't bear the weight.

And oftentimes a girl gives their heart to the guy, on a hook that can't bear the weight. And oftentimes, a girl gives their heart to the guy, and then he just drops it on the floor. And she's like, what's wrong with me? Yeah, she wasn't really the problem. You know, the fact is that dating exists to find a spouse, it's marital discernment, in a sense, it's a job interview. And if you don't know what you're looking for in a candidate, you and you don't have the guts to say no, you could end up making some really poor hiring decisions and so let's say a girl in high school meets a good guy and hey they can make an awesome couple great and they start dating then graduation hits oh great he's going to ucla next year yeah you know and i'm going to ave maria yeah now we're gonna have some long distance four-year relationship while he's meeting 30 000 college

girls and she's meeting 50,000 college guys. Then she gets a job in Houston and he lands a job in Atlanta. It's like, what's the point? There really isn't one. And so a lot of times I find high school kids get blindsided by graduation. Like they didn't even know it was coming. And then it hits and it's like, oh, wait a minute. You're going to live 2000 miles away for the next several years.

And you don't want to pick your college based on where she's going. That's not the right discernment with college. And so it just creates such a difficult dynamic. And what I tell them is, look, long-term, long-distance relationships are pretty hard to work out. Long-term, long-distance friendships usually stand the test of time. And so if you really want this thing to go the distance, focus on the foundation of friendship. Like the biggest...

That's a great point. Yeah. I mean, you don't hear people say like, how do I maintain a long-term friendship? No. If you're friends, you probably will be. Yeah. And I think the biggest building in the world is the Burj Khalifa over in Abu Dhabi. Yeah, I've been there.

And under it is hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete. And to me, that's like the friendship foundation under relationship. And so if you're not dating, you're not just waiting until you can be in a relationship. You're pouring the foundation that needs to be underneath the structure of love. Whereas when you just take off immediately into romance, you often miss that foundation. That's why many of the girls when I did the dating interviews, like how important it was for them to be friends with a guy before the relationship begins. So I recommend to the guys, hey, and the girls, like just focus on the season of friendship because then you really get to know this person. Like who really are they yeah like how does this guy if we're friends and there's

no romantic kind of uh you know intention i get to actually see who you are it was like with that with my wife my wife and i were serving as missionaries and neither of us had plans on dating each other one day so i actually got to see who she was she wasn't trying to put on a good face for me yeah you know and so you get to know like how does this guy treat girls he's not attracted to yeah does this guy share my morality or just kind of respect my morality you know and what about the girl like is it just basically what she looks like what if every girl looked just like she does what would draw me to her yeah does she bring out the best in me is she because would she be a good mother yeah i mean i heard one priest he said look if you marry a woman of virtue, you're going to have a happy life.

But he said, if you marry a woman, no matter how gorgeous she is, if she does not have virtue, you will have a miserable life. Yes, yes. And so that's the season of friendship. You don't get fogged over and your judgment is easily when you're just focusing on the friendship first. So here's my fear for this book. My fear is that men won't buy it. Like Trent Horn wrote a book called Persuasive Pro-Life. And I can't think of many it like trent horn wrote a book called persuasive pro-life and i can't think of many people better than him to write a book like that i'm sure it's excellent

but when he tries to sell it or he tries to tell him here's this book yeah no i get it i get that abortions so what's your fear for this book i want men to read this i'm opening this up it doesn't look formidable it's you know look there's some pictures yeah so i mean what's your plan to get this out there? And do you think it will be successful? The Matt Fradd Show is my primary means of marketing. I'd like to apologize in advance. What I found is like, I wanted to write a book.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. And to me, this needed to be written because men want to date rightly. They want to be noble. They want to be honorable, good men. And they want to do things right. But they really don't have any idea when it comes to dating. Ask them, be a gentleman.

They'll be like, what does that mean? Open the door. I don't know. But to give them really concrete, like, okay, when you take a girl on a date, pick her seat for her. Not because you're telling her where to sit, but if it's a beautiful view, give her the view. There's no view. Man takes a seat facing the wall so she knows during dinner your attention is on her not on espn or the cute little hostess yes and and it makes the girl feel honored and you tell us young guys like oh that's good that's good that's good they just

want specifics yes and so that's what this book is it just gives them the specifics and so when i was writing it i was like well i wonder if i do a book on how to date if people are not gonna buy it for their kids because they don't want their kids to date but my pitch is more that like we've been telling the kids for so long everything they're not supposed to do don't have premarital sex don't look at porn don't have an abortion don't go habit don't clone don't you know all the stuff like but okay great then they get to college and like oh great i know everything i'm not supposed to do with a woman what am i supposed to do oh we didn't cover that good luck kid. It's time we actually teach them what they are supposed to do in relationships if they're going to build healthy, happy ones. Yeah. This has been awesome. Any final words before we begin wrapping

up? I would just ask all the viewers and listeners prayers for our family and for all the kids that we speak to, because I get to see these just unbelievable, beautiful conversions on a regular basis. And I know who I'm indebted to for those conversions. And it's not my funny jokes or good talks, or it's the people who intercede for our ministry. You know, I told the priest once, I said, I feel like I'm buying souls with other people's money.

You know, people have invested so much prayer in our ministry, and it's just brought a lot of fruit. So I just want to continue to ask the viewers, prayers, fasting, chaplets, adoration, anything I can get out of them to be offered for our family and our protection, our ministry, which is me and the world to us.

First time I met you was in adoration. Was it really? Do you remember? No. I think we were in London. Okay. So I was living in Ireland at the time. You were giving chastity talks.

Okay. No, we were in northern England, Lancashire, I think. Yeah, yeah. And I was in adoration, and you were about to kind of pray before going up to give a talk. Yeah. No, I remember having met you there. I didn't know it was in adoration, though. Yeah, yeah. That's cool, uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. And I was in adoration, and you were about to kind of pray before going up to give a talk. Yeah. No, I remember having met you there. I didn't know it was in adoration, though.

Yeah, yeah. That's cool, huh? Yeah. So I would beg the listeners, just please keep the prayers coming. And then books like this and all the stuff we do at chastity.com, you can get the hardcover if you want one copy. Yeah. But we sell them in bulk for three bucks a piece. Oh, that's brilliant.

So that way, youth ministers, campus ministers you know on college campuses there's study questions for every single chapter so a men's group could sit and study this while the girls study the soulmate book yeah and just take a couple weeks go through the whole thing and uh and hopefully it'll be a blessing and give them the concretes that they've been looking for i'm so glad that you're doing what you're doing so thanks thanks so much. Oh, that's been good, Matt. I've known you for what? 15 years now? 15? Golly. At least, I think.

Well, let's think. I met you in Ireland. I've been married. No, I've been married 16 years. So it'd be more like 14. 14 years, yeah. Still a long time. Yeah, who's counting?

All right, cheers. Well, God bless you. Keep up the awesome work here. Thanks. All right. Thank you so much for watching this chat with Jason Everett. If you are one of my patrons, you can go over to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd to watch the post-show wrap-up. We do these on our videos just as an extra bonus

to our patrons to say thanks. If you want to support the work that we're doing here, go to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. As soon as you do that, you'll get a ton of free things in return. We send you signed copies of books and stickers and beer steins, and you also get access to all this free content. You can right away go and watch the post-show wrap-up videos that I've done with Peter Kreeft, Timothy Gordon, and everybody else. So go check it out, patreon.com slash mattfradd. Thanks so much, and don't forget to subscribe below.