Pints With Aquinas - Catholicism, Body Building, and Yoga w/ Roxie Beckles

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

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So Thomas Aquinas wrote Daily Meditations for Lent. And so what I'm gonna do over on matfrad.locals.com is read those meditations and release them every day throughout Lent. So if you've been thinking, what's a cool way I could prepare for Easter, this would be it. Go over and support us at matfrad.locals.com

and you'll get a bunch of free things in return. One of those free things will be daily meditations for Lent. Matfrad.locals.com. Thanks. Do it. We're live. I got these cups from Guatemala. Oh, that's wonderful. And somehow I brought them here without shipping them.

That's great. No, they're very nice. They look very... like South American, actually. Have you been to South America? No, but I mean, I'm around a lot of the culture. You know? It's so lovely to have you on the show. Thank you., but I mean, I'm around a lot of the culture. It's so lovely to have you on the show. Thank you. Yes, I forget where I was.

I think I was catching a bus from one terminal to another in New York City. Why are you making that face? Oh, New York City. Okay, I thought something terrible was happening. It's not that you have a terrible, exasperated look on your face normally. Anyway, oh yeah, it was in New York City. And I don't know what if I was on Instagram or YouTube, but it was so great. Yeah, yeah, wonderful. It's been really cool to see it.

Yeah, that's I mean, that's divine intervention right there. I'm from New York City. Nice. See that it's like, I first I went to New York City. I remember thinking I finally found a city that can keep up with me. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. And then when you leave New York City, and you go anywhere else, maybe not LA it feels like everything is in slow motion Well, no, everything is in slow motion for me in LA. Yeah, but then I go to New York. It's too fast for me now I'm like, I love that. LA has slowed you down. It has that's how interesting New York City is if LA is slow Yeah, like I literally go to New York City just to get my bearings back to get that like electric energy And then I'm like, okay guys, it's dirty here and there's rats and it's too much.

I need to leave. I miss my car. I must be like that. Oh, no. Well, what is L.A. like? Because when I went to L.A., I remember thinking there's no down. They didn't seem to be a downtown walk-friendly area. I went to Hollywood Boulevard thinking that would be somehow glamorous. I had to have three showers in the hotel when I got back. Yeah, that's yeah.

Hollywood. Actually, L.A. does have its walkable areas. You just have to know where they are. And but I mean, it's it's Los Angeles is a wonderful city sightseeing wise. Beautiful weather, beaches. You can go from the beach, the mountains to the desert in like, you know, a couple of hours, right? But it's just when you live there, there's just the things that bring it down, like the politics and that, you know, otherwise it's actually a pretty cool place. You know, I mean, I enjoy it and but to raise a family,

it's not some place I would want to raise a family. I used to live in San Diego. Okay. For three years. Okay. I used to work at Catholic answers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I get it like the beach, the ocean, the beaches, the ocean, the weather.

It was so lovely. But I remember going to LA and thinking this is why would anyone want to live here? Does a lot of it have to do with connections? And I don't mean to crap on your hometown. No, it's not my hometown. And my hometown is Brooklyn, New York. So I just I'm just a transplant. But I think it has to do with you have to get to know the locals because then it's a

different experience than knowing like people who came there for the industry. That's a completely different dynamic. You know, and then it's just getting your bearings about your your your your every day like, you know, where do you go to the gym? Where do you go to church? Where do you go to, you know, what's your vibe? What do you do? You know?

And I think once you find that, it's a lot easier, you know? But otherwise, it's, LA is a very, can be very seedy, has a very seedy underbelly, and it's very easy to get lost in there. And I've seen a lot of people just... How? Well, I mean, a lot of people come there for the entertainment world, right? And the entertainment world is very predatory. That's why, I mean, I came out there for the entertainment world and I was like, okay guys,

I'm done with this. Really? I'm retiring. Good. But it's just... What do you mean? What were you trying to... I went out there for acting initially. I mean, I was a professional dancer back in New York and I'm like classically trained ballet and everything. Yeah. And so I got into acting while in New York. I got into more theater and I wanted to do a little bit more film and television, probably come back to New York

and start doing more Broadway stuff, right? So I came out there and I got a dance agent like right away. I didn't mean to, I just went to an audition for fun and they just signed me on the spot. I was like, oh, here we go. I was a body double for Serena Williams one time for a commercial. I was a body double for Serena Williams

in a commercial, I can't even speak. So I did random things and then I just, there was an interesting moment where my agent at the time, this was before Beyonce had her big tour and I was a where my agent at the time, this was before Beyoncé had her like big tour. And I was a huge Beyoncé fan at that time. And she hired a lot of dancers from my old school, Alvin Ailey back in New York. A lot of Ailey trained dancers.

And so they knew my background. Like, okay, we're going to send you in for a private audition because you're hiring dancers. And this is like the first round picks. I should have been extremely excited. I was like, you know, guys, I don't want this anymore. I just, I just tired. I'm tired and I just don't want this anymore. I just, I, I'm just tired. I'm tired and I just don't want it.

Why were you tired? Were you doing a lot of little things? I just think I stood the, the, the entertainment world just started to get very disillusioned for me. It's like when I started to realize that the audition process is never ending, like you're always having to prove yourself. You're always having to keep up with an image and, you know,

succumb to what other people's views and desires are for you. Just kind of like, and then no financial stability in the middle of any of this, right? What were you doing for work? I was personal training. So fitness has always been in the background. So I was like, all right, guys, I'm gonna go be a bodybuilder now. See you later, Faze. And actually, they kept me on after I started competing and stuff. So that's how I got the Serena Williams job. On the spot, they hired me, like just sight and scene. They're like, oh yeah, that girl, she's got a great body, let's go ahead.

Yeah, it looks like Serena, go over there. But Serena was like taller than me and bigger than me too. So it was kind of weird. Did they do anything to adjust for that? Yeah, well, it was just like mostly like hand and like my lower body for footwork for tennis. So actually the commercial, it wasn't that raunchy which is funny, but I wasn't.

But the other character in the commercial was kind of like, she had like a sports bra and this is back like 10 years ago. So the, I guess it's the FAA, FCA, whatever, the federal whatever, the censor people. They're like, this is just cannot be on television. Oh, yeah. But it was. But when you go back and look at it, it's not that bad. Yeah. The girl just had on a mid-drift and she probably had a little cleavage, just a little. But, you know, back in the day, that's how different the media was that they

saw this and they were like, oh, we can't hear that. Whereas today, with that, where today would have been fine. It would have been all over the place. They would probably put it on the Super Bowl, you know. Which is nuts because 2000. You've seen the Dolce and Gabbana ads. I have not seen it, but I can imagine how it must be. Oh, I don't want to. So that was what they, you know.

Are there many people who try to go to L.A. to get recognized who are doing things like this and who are even getting spots like you did, who then just go, no, I'm disillusioned. Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably, I mean, it's probably 50-50 because a lot of people moved to LA for the opportunity. And if you're not prepared, if you don't have any connections, if you don't know anyone, then it's really hard to make a way in LA, especially now, where social media makes chasing clout

and being famous for whatever. It's like people aren't getting into it for the art. I was there because I loved to act. I loved dancing. I was there for the art, not to become famous, right? But to see what I had to do just to pursue the art and how I had been hit on and this, I was just like, I'm not coming out here for the casting couch. I really don't want to do this.

So it's just kind of like, that's a, that's a real thing. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I just felt like I didn't want to sacrifice my integrity and my morals just for a gig. And then I, um, but I also had fitness already in the undercurrent and I knew that I could go forward with that and have a lot more fun on my terms, as far as like making money and doing what I love and just, you know, cause I've always known, I've known very many things as a precocious child.

I just knew that like somehow, like whatever it was that I would survive to like live in the world, that it would be things that were inspired by the talents that God gave me. You know, so fitness was a really great talent of mine, dancing, like, and I had all this idea to inspire people. So that's kind of where it all fell in place. You know, they must take courage to be like, you know what, I'm done. Yeah. Especially if you're fighting, if you're getting any kind of attention. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was more, it was scary because I

felt like more, I was more worried about being seen as a failure in the arts. You know, did I fail? Did I quit? You know, and oh well. So okay, so you grew up in Brooklyn? Yes. In a Catholic family? I did. Did you go to mass? And oh, did I go to mass? Man, I was at mass every day. Yeah. Did I go to math? Man, I was at mass every day. Yeah. Because of school? Yeah. Well, yeah, cause I was in Catholic school since kindergarten, all the way through college. I graduated from Fordham university of all places. Right. So complete Catholic education. So, you know, when you're in, when you're in Catholic school as a kid, you got daily mass, you got the nuns. I had nuns. Okay. I had the whole, I had some habit nuns as well. Yeah.

So it was that whole experience. And yeah, I mean, my faith has always been central to my life. My mother to me has been one of the most holy people that I ever know. It's just like I had a very complicated upbringing. Like it's very, it's a long story, but I was raised by my godmother's family. So, but she to me has always been one of the holiest women that I ever, she's praying constantly, always in, you know, going to mass and stuff like that.

And I just reading scripture, like I never thought that I can measure up. Like I was just like, wow, like, you know. So it's funny that today I'm kind of like that way. It's like, well, how did that happen? You know, so. What is her opinion of your YouTube presence? Oh, she's so delighted.

Absolutely. My whole family, you know, because my whole family is pretty religious, actually. You know, I've got some pastors and, you know, people in the church and just, you know, and when I say that, I mean, like more Protestant. But everyone is so proud and so happy and just like so supportive. So that's that's one of the good things. So when you say God was kind of the center of your life always, was there ever a reversion?

That was my experience right when I was 17. I kind of encountered the person of Jesus Christ and it ruined my life in the best possible way. Did you have anything like that? Yeah, I did actually like. So I grew up my whole life as this good girl. All I did was go to ballet class and fan practice after school.

Literally, that's all I did. I didn't date, didn't go out with boys. I went to all-girls school. There were never any boys around anyway. So I was actually discerning becoming a nun at some point in high school, like I was really like, I love God and I think I wanna be a sister. But then I wanted to be a ballet dancer more.

So I wanted to become a ballerina. And so after I went to college, of course, now you're out of the environment that fosters all of this like Catholicism and like morality. And now you're in the arts world where everything is just like free and just like, you know, and I didn't get taken up into it in a crazy way at all, but it was just like, I stopped going to mass.

You know, I stopped really doing the things that put me in practice with my faith. And, but I never stopped believing. I also encountered the discussion like, oh, you're a Catholic? That's evil. The Pope is a reptilian. What are you doing? Black people aren't Catholic.

So I'm like, okay, world, what do you have to offer? Show me what religions do you have? Let me go explore and see what that's all about. So I kind of was doing that for a while. And in New York City, so there's a lot of options on the table. Tell me about it. and see what that's all about. So I kind of was doing that for a while. And then- And in New York City, so there's a lot of options on the table. Oh, tell me about it.

I mean, they stand on the street corners, like yelling at you basically, you know, if you're not a part of that. And that's the Hebrew Israelite, that's a whole other thing. But anyway, yeah, so I had a reversion experience in a way because there was a point maybe about about five years ago now Where I started having that call is this while you were in la while i'm in ellen

It's called to just come on back like All right. There's like I should start going to church again. Like, you know, I should really like start There's just something on my heart. So of course it's like Why would I be a catholic though?? Because Catholicism is so and so evil. So let me go to this church in LA. A lot of my friends come from the Kojic Church, the Church of God and Christ, which is a very large black church. Very well known.

I mean, their services are fantastically amazing. I just, I mean, out of full respect, I mean, I did get some spiritual food out of that. And especially like the gospel music. Oh my gosh. They've got some of the best gospel in the world. Really? I gotta look these people up.

Oh man, like the Clark sisters who are a major, like a major gospel group and artists themselves, they come out of that tradition and like just a bunch of people. So you know, I'm in that surface like, okay, got the news. But there was a experience that I had where we were having communion and you know, they start passing the plate around and stuff like that. And everyone takes the host and well, it's not really a host but just the wafer and the juice thing and they pop it open

and everyone takes the communion at the same time. And I'm sitting there like, oh no, like this isn't it. Interesting. Yeah, I was like, like I know what the E oh no, like this isn't it. Interesting. Yeah. I was like, like I know what the Eucharist is and this isn't it. So it just felt at that moment for me like, okay, you, you gotta go back home. So I found myself at my current parish and I've never turned back. Wow.

Yeah. And do you have a good local parish? Oh man. Cause it could be dangerous, right? Like you leave this wonderful, powerful environment. you go to the closest parish near you, it could be hit or miss. Right. Well, it was a hit and it was by the grace of God.

I had heard of my parish is Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. And I had heard of this parish because of a friend of mine way back in New York, when we're talking about our faith and they were from LA, and he was like, oh, you're a Catholic, I'm Catholic too, what church you go to, blah, blah, blah. And they told me about the church that they went to, where they, you know, were part of out in LA. So that name always stuck to me.

And it so happened that they weren't too far for me, distance-wise, you know? So I, first thing I did, I was there. And I think what drew me to know that I was in the right place, because by this point, we're getting into like, I think, I think I just started going like right before the pandemic really started. And you know, LA was on like, we were on the worst lockdown in the country. I guess.

Yeah. What was that like? It was it was great at first because you know, it's like, oh, yeah, you know, I'm going to pick some cookies at home and I got my plans. I'm doing all this stuff. And then it's just like, I'm going to die. So especially as you probably got the sense that other parts of the country were lifting restrictions. Well, I mean, that's the thing. Like when you're living in the L.A. bubble, you're getting the you're getting one side of the bubble.

So it's like, you know, we have to what they say, squash the curve, whatever they were saying about the curve. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But whatever it was. Yeah. Whatever nonsense. I don't know. Like stay in your house. Everybody in New York is doing it. You know, everybody's staying in the house, getting the house. You know, look at those people in Florida. They're going to get sick and die. Of course, all the entertainment industries are in these far come from these far left places. So if you're watching television, you're also here. Yeah, it's like getting in your house. We're all in our house, you know, in our mountains and die. Of course all the entertainment industries are in these far, come from these far left places. So if you're watching television, you're also here. Yeah, it's like get in your house.

We're all in our house, you know, in our mantans and hills, you know, whatever. It's cool, right? No. Anywho, so it was at that time that I actually started to watch the masses online from the parish, but also I started watching Father Mike. Oh, Schmitz.

Yeah, I was like, I was into his, you know, mass services as well. So the moment they let into his, you know, you know, mass services as well. So the moment they let us free, you know, and I, and I make it, I, I make fun of it. It's like, um, it's like, they give us a free, they give us a free, like, like we were freed slaves in the, you know, in California. So the moment we were set free, I'm running to Good Shepherd and we still had all these restrictions and all this stuff. And the thing that really set my heart,

like this is the place to be, was our pastor, Father Ed Minyoff, he had come in, in the procession. He was the only one because there was no procession. It was like no altar service, no altar, no nothing, right? It was just him coming in. And it was the first time in years, I'd seen a priest lay prostrate on the floor on Good Friday.

Just boom, I was like, oh, this is home. I am not leaving. Are you kidding? So it was just a moving, moving, moving time for me. And so I've been there ever since. The next year I did RCIA as a sponsor. And that was really like edifying for me. And now I am there. I'm one of the coordinators with our young adults group. And so I have a very active role within our parish community so it's home to me. And this is coming from someone who actually loves traditional orthodox Catholicism because that's what I grew up with.

You know, the smells and the bells, like that's what I know. And so I love the Latin Mass and I would love to attend one on a weekly basis. However, my call within my parish is so strong that I kind of just park it home there. And I go to TLM with, you know, a very close group of friends of mine who I consider family. We like to go there maybe like once a month or so. But yeah, so. It is funny to see what has become cool in Catholicism,

if you wanna put it that way, just from a strictly crass secular way of looking at the church, right? Like, I felt like back in the 90s, it was just pianos and drums and things like that. And maybe that was what some young people wanted, but I don't know anybody who is under 50 who wants that anymore.

Maybe that's just my bubble, right? Maybe there are people who do want that. But even those people I feel like are really drawn to the reverence and the silence. Yeah, amen, yeah. Well, I mean, I think it might depend on a number of things because I can say that growing up in my parish in

Brooklyn, I grew up at St. Xavier's. It was a beautiful physical church structure. Yeah. My, my childhood experience is very, okay. Do you know Sesame Street? Everybody knows Sesame Street. So it's, Sesame Street is based on like a conglomerate of different Brooklyn specific neighborhoods.

And I grew up in one that was kind of like a Sesame Street. Like I grew up in Park Slope, okay. Very Pertursk, trees, you know, you have the park. And in the middle of the neighborhood is this church, Saint Xavier Church. And it's got the elementary school, that's where I went to elementary school. They have Saint Xavier High School.

I went to Cathedral High School in the city. Graduation was at Saint. Patrick's Cathedral. Did you believe that? Amazing. So my experience in growing up in this parish, first of all, is very Italian, very Irish and Italian. So I grew up with the Irish and Italian Catholics. And we had just very reverent masses.

Like I was speaking to the pastor at our church, Father Ed, one day I was like, you know, I remember, I don't know why I had this vivid memory of the monstrance. Like we had this huge monstrance in our church and may you so always bring it all the time. The incense going, you know, bells, the holy water. It was just an experience when you walked into that church, it just, the smell, the environment, the smokiness, it just took you to this other world place. You knew you were in the house of God, right? And for me, that's what's missing

in a lot of churches nowadays that are within the, a Novus Ordo kind of tradition. So I grew up with all of these memories of kind of this, it was just like the straddling the line, I think, of the major changes that would happen because we're still coming off the brunt end, like maybe 20, 25 years after Vatican II really went into like a full effect.

So our parish, I think, was still catching up. There's a lot of old people there that were veiling and just like doing the thing, you know? So we had like some masses where they had had the guitars out and it broke out in pandemonium. Like, what are these guitars doing here? What are these?

So it's like, as a young person, I'm just kind of like, okay, whatever. I didn't care. I was just like, I'm here for God. So I think now in my later years, I see the beauty in the traditionalism. Like I'm not the guitar mask girl, I'm really not. But I can understand how there may be some people

that do connect with that if they did not experience it. I think once they experience something different, then it might wake them up to like, whoa, like this is like full on like Catholic tradition. This is really what I've been missing. So. For me, it feels like as the world seems at least to have grown increasingly secular and pagan

and our sacred spaces have shrunk and shrunk, when I go to a sacred space, I need it to be different. Amen. I wanna go somewhere and kiss the earth and thank God for his blessings. And if I go somewhere and we dress the same as we do out there and we speak the same and we speak just as loud and we have music music kind of like what we listen to, but way inferior. And if

the jokes are from the pulpit, but they're not even that funny, I just like, I want something different. I feel like there's a lot of people who are more and more like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you were in LA, how, like, I know you said it was that moment with communion, and then you said you were listening to Father Mike. How important did, say, Catholic YouTube or help in your reintegration into Catholicism? Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, it was an important, very integral part of it because at that point, I just think I was just craving something deeper. like, deeper, you know, at that, it became like, I just wanted to know more about my faith. Like, it's one thing to be catechized as a child, and to learn all these things, like religion classes, like from the time you're in kindergarten until like, whatever your last schooling.

And it's interesting because when I was in college, I was in the dance program. So our dance program is with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. And that's like one of the leading modern companies and schools in the world, right? So I think, man, I'm gonna get lambasted for this. I think that Fordham kind of had to do some kind of a deal

with the devil with the dance department because we were not required to take any theology classes at Fordham University, okay? And then we were not required to take any theology classes at Fordham University. And then we were also at the Lincoln Center campus, but most of our classes were happening in the studio. So when I had my academics, I was in the actual Fordham building, but my dance classes were all in the dance studio, which I don't, you know, listen, that's what I got there for. But my theology stopped at that point.

So I'd been catechized though from kindergarten to 12 at least. But you forget all that stuff when you're an adult, you know, you really do. And so, and then things are just, I needed that faith for, that adult faith formation. I needed to go deeper. I needed to find specific answers to things that I had on my mind or wanted to know even more. It's almost like for me it was like the head knowledge had to connect with the passion and my personal life. Right. I had to make it my own.

Exactly, exactly. And so I had found like Catholic answers. I found Trent Horn, I found you. I found like, and then, I mean, I have to stop and say for one person who was very instrumental in all of this Is dina from a catholic wife? I don't know who that is. Oh, you don't know who that is I need to listen. I just shouted her out. Yeah, you need to go find her. You're just fantastic dina Barca from a catholic wife. She is one of the women that I found when I was looking into veiling

And she had spoken so well of it. I look it up. Sorry. Could you how do you spell dina? D e e n a dina's getting a shout out. Look it up. Sorry, could you... How do you spell Dena? D-E-E-N-A. Dena's getting a shout out. Yeah, right? She deserves a shout out. D-A-R-C-A. Uh-huh. A Catholic Wife is her channel.

We'll put her in the description. Yeah, right? Is this live? Yeah. Oh, wow. I gotta be ready? Blabbing away, I didn't even know we were live. I was like, are you kidding?

I don't know what's going on. I listen. I listen here. Did you just think we were about to go live? No, I didn't even know we were live. I was like, are you kidding? I don't know what's going on. I listened. I listened here. Did you just think we were about to go live? No, I didn't know what was going on. I thought we had the countdown and like, you know. That's a good thing though. That's what you want.

That's why in the beginning, I was kind of talking really quiet like this because I wasn't sure what was going on. I was like, oh, wait a minute, I think we're live. Let me sit up straight here. I'm so sorry, I gotta be more. Sorry, I thought I said, and we're live. I obviously, let me drink my coffee on the straw.

This is my little thing, guys. Don't be weirded out. Yeah. So this is not the first time this has happened. I have had a conversation before and about 20 minutes in, someone said, sorry, are we live? I'm like, yes, I'm sorry. I figured something was going on.

I had this thought that, I don't know, like big introductions on podcasts are kind of like the 10 minute introductions to movies back in the 80s. You know, you'd sit through it, you're like, why isn't it? Yeah, it's not necessary actually. Why are we, I just, you know. It's not necessary and it's also not good for YouTube. They want you to actually start right away.

There you go, boom. So, there you go, so. Well, it's just so people know, we have your link to your excellent channel in the description. Fantastic. Hold on, fantastic hold on no I put it in there So, let's see here so you go by that black that black Catholic chick Yes, that you have eight point You have 8.69 thousand. All right, gang, here's what we need.

By the end of the week, I need to see this at least 10,000 subscribers. Come on over for the shenanigans, guys. Yeah, click the link, head over, subscribe. There are lots of shenanigans on my channel. You have no idea. I have no idea. I'm tamed, okay? You guys have no clue.

I edit out a lot. Let me stop. All right. But yeah, what was it? Okay, so? You guys have no clue. I edit out a lot. Let me stop. All right. But yeah, what was, okay, so that Dina lady and others. Yeah, so like she, when I was really getting that deep call to veil, I found a video that she had done like an interview or something like that. And then I followed her channel and that was very instrumental for me. And I mean, the reason why, it's funny because you watch people online and then you kind of,

when you're always in the comments, you're commenting on things they say, you kind of build a little rapport, right? So when my first video, well, this is the joke. This is the running joke. The video that most people saw, which is like, I'm a black woman, this is why I'm Catholic, that was like the second video.

The first video was like a random short I threw up there like months before. Like just like, hey, 25 people watched it. That's great, wonderful. But she had seen that second video, the official first, and she shared it on her network, on her channel. And so like, it was after that point that, you know, the algorithm started picking things up.

You saw it and then you shared it on yours. And just like, you know, she was really instrumental. So her channel was really great. And then Christopher West, oh my West. Love, love, love. Tell me why. Because theology of the body just makes sense on so many levels and when I connected it to fitness, oh man, I am just shouting from the rooftops like guys, you got to hear this. Tell me, tell me about this because then what we're going to do is we're going to send this

to Christopher so he can watch it. So tell us about this because they're gonna send this to Christopher so he can watch it So tell us about this connection between so I mean again It was it was a call for me to get deeper in faith and one of the things I'm a single woman Hi guys, I'm single Young Catholic match cuz last time Thursday crapped all over Catholic match and complained about it But we put him in his place and he started one up. I still think I hold my opinions. I'm just using the service despite my as a mercenary. I'm there for a woman. So there you go.

Go find Thursday. But can we get you a account or you don't like the idea of online? Okay. Okay. So I'm Los Angeles. Let's go. Let's get to the real deal here. I'm in LA.

Okay. Yeah. So first of all, there are not very many... Okay, let's go back. There are Catholics in LA, they're all Sino Catholics. It's like Catholic in name only, Sino. C-I-N-O. Ah, cool. They're Sinos. Like Rhino, Republican in name only.

Yeah, I don't really know what that is either. R-I-N-O. Yeah, exactly. Republican in name only. Ah, that's what that means. Rhinos, yeah. Thank you. I call them Sinos, right? Catholic in name only.

Ah, love it. That's what that means. Rhinos, yeah. Thank you. I call them sinos, right? Catholic name. So it's like cultural Catholics, of course. And you know, this is a long story, Matt. Listen. Well, this is a long form show. So you say as much as you want. I am unapologetically Catholic, like, and I believe in all the Catholic things. Like I believe I'm pro-life.

You know? Yeah, okay. Like I go to mass, I pray. I like, you know, I'm not afraid to profess about Jesus Christ here, okay? And I'm expecting a man to have a similar walk. It doesn't have to be identical, but it's important, right?

And if you're looking for a marriage, it's like you have to understand what that means, particularly as Catholics or from a Catholic standpoint. What does it mean to love your wife, like Christ loves the church? What does it mean to respect and submit to your husband? And I had to explore all of that as a single woman, first and foremost.

So coming across Christopher West's work and what he did with Theology of the Body, it just made everything make sense. Why sex is important? Why it's sacred? Why it's why, you know, I mean, you know that fornication is wrong, but why? What's the reason behind it? And how can it be better? Right. So when I started to discover all of this stuff and started to really So when I started to discover all of this stuff and started to really read the scripture and see where, how many times, like the Bible is so corporal. It's so corporal from the beginning to end. When God created Adam, he breathed life into his essence, into his body, right? His body to make him come alive. He took Eve from his, the side of his body. Everything that we got, Christ gave up

his body. We're asked to pray with all of our bodies. There's so much corporalness to prayer. And I'm like, man, we're going through fitness, being sold lust. Look sexy, attract the right mate, all of this outer stuff. Do we get in shape to feel better, to look good, ego, vanity, right?

All of these things that were sold in fitness So get in shape to feel better, to look good, ego, vanity, right? All of these things that were sold in fitness are actually being twisted up into our vices. And that's why people are not able to stay on track with it. It's like if everything that matters to being in shape is all superficial, or it's all linked to like how just the appearance, right? Although there are some people who do it for health, but let's go even deeper. How can we connect this spiritually? When you finally get that, then you start to see people,

my clients are able to change their bodies and keep that change for the long term because we're changing their mindset, their habits, their behaviors, their patterns, and even their connection spiritually with so many of them. So the theology of the body work that I started to go into from the standpoint of looking at it at one thing, turned into this whole other thing that I'm so excited to profess about.

So let me simplify it so I can see if I understand. Are you saying like there's this difference like in the secular world, often it's like get in shape so you can look hot. And you're saying no, there's a new way of looking at it as well as like treat your body as a temple of the Holy Spirit because of your dignity or something like that. Right, exactly. Exactly. is a temple of the Holy Spirit because of your dignity or something like that. Is that the- Exactly, exactly. And like I started to,

like when I go into my own workouts, because there was a point for me, even being a professional bodybuilder, even, you know, and I competed at the highest level. I cannot wait to talk about that. Because that is so far removed from my existence or my experience. And that's an interesting thing

because it's all vanity, right? And it's highly lustful. But that's the whole thing. We'll talk about that. We'll save that for the second half. Yeah. Okay. But so like, to be back to T.O.B.

Yeah. Right. So the thing is that we, where am I going? I forgot. Well, I interrupted you. I'm sorry. But it's this idea of like, we, you said it was helping your clients as you took this. Right. Because you just think of things in a different perspective. It's like,

again, it's instead of looking at how can I be better for the exterior to just look good, feel better, look good and all that stuff. How can I do this for life? I'm going to have this one body until the day I die. I can decide for myself if I'm gonna go into the grave sliding in in the best health that I could have been at hopefully 90 something, 100 something years old, or I'm gonna go into that grave decrepit and broken and in all these things that don't, some of it's outside of your control.

Let's just put that out there. Some people have illness and it's not your fault. But even still, how can we get to a point that's your normal that makes you mobile, that makes you feel amazing, but also how can you do all of this through Christ, especially when you have chosen to follow in his ways. So how can we connect this to you?

And that's kind of what my inspiration is. Yeah, and the Catholic view that you are your body is somewhat alien, I think, to the secular culture's understanding, which is basically you have a body maybe. Right. And what you do with your body therefore may matter, but it may not because it's not the real you. But if I am my body, then it starts to make sense that if I begin to treat it better, then it's going to affect my moods, it's going to affect how I think and study and pray. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I keep coming back to a specific scripture. I have a lot of scriptures that are my favorites, but when I was at my lowest point, and I think that's what I was connecting, and this is kind of like ties it all together. There was a point during the pandemic where I just lost my mojo to work out. Like, I just couldn't do it.

I was on the East Coast, I was isolated from my family, they're in New York City, so I'm in LA, we're in these two locked down places, can't do nothing, right? And so I started to feel really isolated, anxiety, depression, all these things, because I'm a social person, especially in the gym, it's like that's what I live in the gym, always there,

couldn't go to my places and do my debauchery around the gym, not debauchery, I live in the gym. Always there, you know, couldn't go to my places and do my, my debauchery, you know, around the gym and not debauchery. I mean, like, you know, I mean, nothing bad guys. It's shenanigans, shenanigans, shenanigans. So like, just, you know, doing my workout thing, but it, and I couldn't get out. So it just really was like, Oh man, I just got really depressed. But what, what I found was John 15, the vine keeper. And again, it became so corporal. It's like thinking about Christ living in you and you living in Christ, right?

And just like what that means, internalizing him in every way, shape, and form, even in working out. And now, before I train train or while I'm training, like I pray the rosary during my cardio, actually Innovator Roxy here, I've got rosary like prayers that I've created. I'm dropping them on my channel.

Have you released videos about this? Or you're about to? Okay, there's a second one that's already ready to go, but I haven't had time to edit it. I'll see that this week. So what's the idea behind it? The scriptural rosaries is what I saw. So, OK, I always have a story.

Everything I do in my life is connected. That's good. So I have a story. So, like, OK, so of course, you know, what did our what? What did our lady tell us to do at Fadima? What did she say? She said to do what? Pray the rosary every day. Right. So I realize and then I'm watching Taylor Marsh. She's like, if you're not praying the rosary. Every day, right? So I realized, and then I'm watching Taylor Marsha's like, if you're not praying the rosary, you're not on team. I gotta get on team.

I wanna be on the team. I wanna be on the team. I gotta get on team. He's so right on team. I gotta get on team. So like around summer of last year, once again, my good friends, and let me just name them, Michelle and Alois and Mark,

their family unit, daughter and her mom and her stepdad. We started praying the rosary in our parish. It wasn't even anything, it was something that we did together before the 10 a.m. mass, because that's where we go. We'd go into a little Mary garden and pray the rosary and then go to mass together. And we extended this to the whole parish

for everyone to come pray the rosary with us 9.15 a.m. And then we go. So the rosary became an integral part for me to start off my entire week and just to start doing every single day. And for a while I was using the Halo app. Now listen, Halo does not sponsor me. Like I just-

They do sponsor this episode though. This is really helpful actually. You better go sign up for Halo now. Halo.com Slash Matt Fradd. Go get yourselves some Halo today. So, but it was very much like, I love Halo by the way. And so I love the daily rosary.

And I would normally do it while I would take a walk and stuff, but then when I started to get, again, the corporal fitness and bringing Christ in, and I'm listening to the Halo app, I'm trying to do a little cardio, I'm like, I need a beat, you know, I need a little something something. So, the first group.

You don't want a soothing voice while you're trying to work out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's like, I need a little, but when, at the rosary that we do on Sundays in my parish, like we take turns of who heads it and when I head mine up, I like to do a little scriptural rosary. I like to, you know, we usually play the glorious,

of course, on Sunday, but then I like to find like, little pieces of scripture that would inspire, you know, to go along with. So I took that idea, I dropped one on the channel and then I was like, I need a fitness one. So I created a fitness one. Oh man, I've been listening to that for like, it's been like maybe two weeks now, but it has been fantastic.

So I can do my cardio. It's got like this like like very Lord of the Rings kind of like you know like how cool is it on your YouTube channel now well it'll be on there on Friday or something when I finally put the video together but the audio is my member section so you can remember the channel but like um yeah so I just really got into the habit of that and then that's really cool yeah so would it be kind of music that you might work out to anyway? But you just well, I'm gonna I have the idea to create a different like one. So there are ones that are like for regular prayer, like the one that's on my channel

right now. It's to like some royalty free like Gregorian chant like music that I found is just very like surreal and angelic and all that, very Catholic, it's very amazing. But then I was like, my fitness people, listen, we gotta do the rosary during your cardio guys. So here's your fitness rosary. And all of the scripture is like, all the corporal ones that I really love, like worship God with all your body.

I beat my chest like it's a slave. And like, it's so amazing. Like Romans 12, one, and then first Corinthians chapter nine. I forget. It's a bunch that I picked. So it just really like fires you up. It connects you to Christ. And then the music for this one is the Lord of the Rings, kind of like really epic. Yeah. Dramatic classical. But then I'm going to do one that's like, you know, that has a little bit of a rock.

This is going to be a little bit. And it's royalty free music. So it's royalty free music. So it's not like there's any like secular like lyrics. There's no lyrics. So it just, it works. It's fantastic. Okay, so you've got this music pumping in the background

and then you've also got the scriptures, but are you saying Hail Mary? Amen, it's a Rosary. And then are you, yeah, that's fair enough. And then are you pausing between each Hail Mary to say the scriptures or are you saying at the beginning of each decade? Well, it's usually like, so right where you would announce the mystery, then I would announce the mystery, read the scripture, then your Allfathers Hail Mary, you know, all that.

That's a wonderful idea because, you know, I meet these people who are better than me and they go on runs and they say they're going to a rosary run, stuff like that. Yeah. I always wanted to be that cool. Yeah. But the idea of doing that and you've got this kind of motivational rosary taking place. I love it. You know, I prayed for God to just work through me. And this is the funny thing about how all of this started because I did not plan a Catholic channel, guys. The fact that I'm here is crazy, okay? Because I didn't plan for this at all, what I prayed for. And it's like, you plan God laughs, right?

That's what they say. So I was like, all right, I'm feeling really disconnected from my fitness stuff because now I'm really starting to move away from the vanity of it all. I'm really starting to distance myself from bodybuilding itself as a sport. And there was a part of me that thought at one point I'm really starting to distance myself from bodybuilding itself as a sport. And there was a part of me that thought at one point

that I needed to get back into it to get my mojo back. I actually went to our pastor and I asked him, I was like, you know, I'm having some conflicts because I can't compete in the division I used to be because I'm too small and I won't use steroids. So there's this other division called bikini that I would be good for, but it's very immodest and I just don't feel comfortable with it. So we had a conversation about that and I decided I didn't want to

do that. Right. So I needed something. So I pray his advice to you. He told me I should do a new, maybe you can do something that's really inspiring. And he's into bodybuilding fitness. He'll tell anybody I wrote a diet for him. Okay. Father Ed, I'm going to out you right now. I wrote a diet for him and he tells everybody on his his client. And he's like, all right, he's my client. He's like, that's my coach. He don't be following that diet, not all the time. Like Father Ed, everybody invites him out to dinner. He's like, you see this belly, I gotta go to dinner.

And you couldn't get the steak and salad? You can't, no? Okay, cool, that's cool, that's cool. But his advice was that I should, if it's definitely, obviously it's moral conflict. I mean, he's very straight-laced. Like you would think this guy in the middle of like Beverly Hills with like sugarcoat stuff. Oh no. I mean, he has a way of delivering God's message in a way that's just straight down the plate. And isn't that what we want? Yeah, absolutely. Like you as a coach,

your clients don't want you to sugarcoat things. They want you to say things because you believe that they can be better. And don't we want that from our priests? Absolutely. And that's why I really have such a great respect for him because it's like, I can only imagine how tough it must be to pastor in the middle of Los Angeles, right? Where it's like, people want that easy Catholicism, you know? But he's like, look, the church is pro-life. So Jesus Christ, this is what we do.

And he has no qualms in saying certain things. And so I really respect him for that. And he does it in the most understanding, compassionate way, right? So we're having this conversation. Of course, he's like, well, look, you know that this is like a modest, you know this isn't really something

that you probably should be doing. He's like, maybe you can channel it and do maybe a photo shoot or something like that, that may be very taste modest, you know, this isn't really something that you probably should be doing. It's like, you know, maybe you can channel it and do maybe a photo shoot or something like that, that may be very tasteful, very modest, and still give you that satisfaction of achieving something. So I considered it and I took it to prayer. And so instead what happened was my whole buyer started

to really get up with the scriptural connection with fitness. And so that's kind of where that led to. But yeah, I mean, I keep losing track of what I'm talking about. So you had that fitness channel. That was the first thing you had. Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. So I didn't pray for this. I prayed that the Lord would just simply inspire me. I just kept saying, I kept reading John 15. So I said, I just need you to speak to me,

speak through me to your people. Whatever it is that you want me to put out there, that's what I need you to just inspire in me and I'll just do it. You know, I'm at your, I'm the handmaiden of the Lord is my favorite thing. I am the handmaiden of the Lord, do with me as you will, right?

So I prayed that and then I put that video up on my second channel and it blew up. My Catholic channel, that Black Catholic chick, was initially supposed to be a place where I talked about spiritual fitness. Who knew, right? So I created this thing, the four pillars of fitness in my fitness business. Like in order for you to truly be able to get to your best physically, your best health, you have to consider the four pillars, your physical fitness, which is something that everybody does, right? But then there's your mental fitness, your emotional fitness, and your spiritual fitness. Now, I'm highly aware that on my fitness channel, which is a more, of course, secular channel,

right, that I have people of all walks of life on there. And boy, were they very vocal. Some of them about when they found out I was Catholic. Oh, man, I got a lot of backlash about that. But, you know, you probably also got backlash from Catholics about your bodybuilding. I get backlash from everybody from every side. Listen, I'm from Brooklyn, too, so I'm so quick to pop off. I had to really learn how to get that back.

And there's some people in the audience right now like she was mean to me. I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I really am. Don't be sorry. Don't apologize. Hey, real quick, sorry, could you point that up at your mouth? Oh, I'm sorry.

We need more direct speech. That's why people love you, I think. I'm sorry. Did you guys not hear me this whole time? No, we can hear you. It just sounds better. Yeah, it sounds better if you're talking to the front of it.

Oh yeah, because of course I don't know how to use a microphone because I have my own channel. Why would I do this correctly? But yeah, you got some, so what kind of things did they say? And how did they find out? So they found your other channel, and your Catholic channel.

Yeah, because, well, my two channels are connected, of course, to like one umbrella of a Google account, right? So it's like, I have my Google account, and you can just open little other channels on the right So so I think what happened was because I had that other channel and then I opened a second channel Whoever was on the first channel. They just like oh she's got another thing So the algorithm starts sending things to people right and I did say, you know a couple of times Oh guys, I have another channel over there. It's spiritual fitness. I don't know what I'm doing with it

Just go over there and join it. You know? And so I had a bunch of people from my audience, which is a mixed crowd. It's an interesting crowd that I have on my fitness channel. I'm not sure if it's all people that are necessarily into fitness based off of what they watch, but it's an interesting segment. But I had a couple of folks who came over and who continue to come over to my channel who are black, who are very adamant about telling me how wrong I am for being a Catholic because black people aren't Catholics. And I'm just like, what is this? I've learned now not to argue with people.

I tell you, right? It's proverbs. We should talk about this. We should talk about stuff we've learnt to do and not do on YouTube because there is like an initiation. Like, I remember at the beginning, negative comments would really shake me up because you don't walk through your day encountering people who tell you that you suck. Maybe they shout it from a car or something. People don't come up to you and explain to you in great detail why it is you suck and why it is you need to know that.

So when that starts happening on social media, it can be really, it can really rock you. But yeah, at some point you just have to learn to get over it. Yeah. Well, I mean, I had gotten a lot of that anyway, being that I was into bodybuilding. So when you're a woman who's into bodybuilding, whether you use any kind of performance enhancers or not, like you just look really extreme. I mean, I was super lean. I wasn't like huge, you know, I wasn't like massive. I was not in any of those divisions or anything like that. But I was drawn in and just really like lean. So you look bigger than you are.

And of course, if you have like zero body fat, no, not zero, but low body fat, obviously that's not a very quote unquote feminine thing. And women are not typically built like that. So it's like, oh, you know, you look like a man. And I'm like, I didn't care about any of that stuff. It's like, whatever, who cares? But you talk about my faith, that's so personal.

You know? Yeah, because you did ballet, bodybuilding, so you're probably used to being judged because that's part of the thing. Yeah, it's like bring it on, I don't care, whatever. But you talk about my faith, I'm just kind of like, whoa, like you're just now judging me on something that's completely false, first of all, because you know nothing about Catholicism. And then you're just being really mean about it on top of everything else and

telling me that I'm stupid and all these other things. So I've learned to ignore it a bit and not engage it. I think that's the number one thing you can tell when someone you can usually tell when people aren't speaking from a place of goodwill Yeah, yeah, I've had to learn how I'm still learning. I'm a work in progress And I'm a sinner and I just try to you know, I've been in confession one too many times with the okay That's me father for I have sinned. It's been two days since my last confession because Yet again, okay I hope I'm not on the internet yet again. Okay. So like I've gotten better.

And now I just have decided that I've made the conscious decision. And it's funny because this is something that Dina was talking about recently on a video on a Catholic wife about, I forgot, calamity, she called, I forgot what it's called. But it's when you... Calumny.

Calumny, yes. And I was like, that's me. I really have to, and I already knew consciously, like don't even engage. Like we already monitor the comments and actually we recently turned, we, myself and my assistant, we turned it off because there's just so many to monitor. Oh, so you don't take comments and you have a chance.

I know I do take comments, but we, at the beginning, I made the decision to say, OK, hold all comments for review. So that way all of this anti Catholic, I don't want it on my channel. I just don't like, listen, I don't mind. Who derails the conversation? Yeah. It's OK to object or to disagree. The other thing is you've got a community of people there who are coming to grow in their faith and to support each other.

And you have someone come in injecting poison, then it becomes all about responding to the poison and not about an encouraging environment. And at some point you lose that tactfulness sometimes. So I made the decision, I said, okay, we will not hold the comments necessarily, but there's a layer of like, you know, where they can hold potentially inflammatory comments and it can be extra strict. So I put that on. Yeah. But I just made the decision like, I'm not going to even engage at this point because I just get tired of it. How many times are you going to ask me, do you pray to Mary and worship? How many times do I explain this? Like, so it's like, okay, go, go Trent Horn

and go ask him over here. Go call in the Catholic answers, they'll tell you, you know? So I just don't engage anymore. I just can't. It's not worth it, not worth your energy. No, it's not. I barely look at the comments anymore. Yeah.

Okay. But then, why is that a problem? What? Because you check up daily. No, I don't. I don't. I used to, but then I just stopped caring. But then what happens too is you have a community of people that start responding for you.

Oh, yes. That's great. When people have questions about Mary or whatever. Yeah. I mean, I have a, in the short amount of time, I have really built this amazing community of folks who like support my channel, who watch my channel. I have a member's section. They watch, they sign up for that. And then here's how God blesses, because remember, when I was praying for him to speak through me, I was praying for my fitness stuff, I didn't mean this.

So I was praying like, Laura, just speak through me, whatever you want, you know? And then the Catholic channel started to take off, but now I actually have people that have watched this channel that have come by way of seeing your channel and found me or Dina's channel found me and then they contacted me about coaching for Fitness and so I have some people that I've just Taken on in the last couple of weeks that have come by way of finding that

My other channel and so it's just all just been so amazing Just there are some amazing people out there and you can't let the few bad apples out there spoil your bunch. So when you said people say you shouldn't be Catholic because black people aren't Catholic, what do they mean by that? I mean, if you were to try to interpret that in the best possible light, what's the... Just have a little sip of that old coffee there and then... Well now. So, okay.

I think that in today's time and culture, you have a lot of people, a lot of black people particularly who are very much into speaking very strongly on certain social issues, number one. And number two, kind of like really finding what they feel is their stolen identity. And one of the things that they feel has been forced upon black people through slavery is Christianity, right?

So to them, it's like, you know, they'll say you worship white Jesus. That's why I did that video about like me changing the photos in the back of me, which were originally Elizabeth Taylor Mount, Marilyn Monroe. Okay. All the Catholic's like, you can have that back there. So I was like, fine, fine. Everybody was listen, I'm going to Jesus and Mary, but they're going to be black. So I made a whole parody video on that. But like, so I'm sure a lot of people didn't realize it was apparently, no, they didn't. And they were, of course it was overly sensitive people, but it's okay. It's all

good. It's all, I don't, you know, I'm here for the fun shenanigans. That's right. So we clearly have to name your channel that at some point. Black Catholic chicken shenanigans. So like I, so there's that thing. It's like, oh, you worship white Jesus and like Jesus, you know, whatever. Anyway, so they, there's that whole thing. And then you have a lot of folks who feel that there are other religions that are more suited for us that are more closer to what our ancestors are,

that the Hebrew Israelites believe that they are the original people of the Bible and that everybody was black in the Bible and all these things, and that if you're following Christianity, it comes from Constantine and this, not, and it's just like, all right, folks. And then, you know, you have other people who may be Muslim or, you know, a lot of black people who are involved with the Nation of Islam.

And I have great respect for, listen, I have respect for people. I'm not going to force my beliefs on you. I'm just not. And I just really appreciate if you don't force your beliefs on me, you know? And so I get that people have their own relationship with Christianity in a way that they see it as negative, you know, they see it as oppressive and all these things, but that's not my experience.

So I cannot take that on and say that just because of the color of my skin or my race, that I should think a certain way, I should be a certain way, I should be a certain way, that I should see the world a certain way. And I'm not gonna deny who Christ, Jesus Christ is because you're not happy with that. I get a lot of flack online

just because of my social avatar here. Being a black woman, being a dark skinned black woman, being a dark skinned black woman with natural hair. It's like, I'm supposed to walk around the world with my fists in the air like Angela Davis and be a social justice warrior over here on everything. And so I kind of, when people find out that it's like, first of all,

she's Catholic, then she's conservative in her beliefs and stuff, it's just kind of like, whoa, this is too much. So they have to tell me about how wrong I am, how asleep I am and all this stuff. So it's this constant thing. I don't care. Say whatever you want.

I'm not, this is, this is what you get. You come over here. This is what you get. You don't like it. Yeah. You know, it's funny. That means something very different in Australia. What does that mean?

So this is called in Australia, this is called the forks and it's on par with the middle finger. Oh my God. Isn't that funny? So I was like, good for you giving them the forks. And she went peace. So when my wife and I were dating and we were at my home parish in Australia

and everyone was giving the sign of the peace, my wife did this to my bishop, right? Cause I don't know. And my bishop was like, well, that's the first time somebody's given me the forks. You know? That's so funny. Speaking of Cameron said in the chat,

those are her cups and please don't break them before she gets home. Love them so much. She's watching from Guatemala. I guess so. Someone's hacked into her account and spoken exactly as she would seeing these cups. There's also a very odd emoji that I've never seen before. So I feel like it has to be Cameron. What does that mean? Because she doesn't know how to use emojis? are very odd emoji that I've never seen before. So I feel like it has to be Cameron.

What does that mean? Because she doesn't know how to use emojis? No, it's just like it was, it's an emoji that only I think she would use. Like nobody else would find it. Oh, all right. It's a compliment. It's just a weird one. The other thing too is like none of the things that you've just said are logical. Yeah to say black people aren't Catholic, therefore you shouldn't be doesn't follow at all. To say there's some ancestral religion that is more true to your ethnicity, that doesn't follow that it's true. To say that because you look a certain way, you have to hold political beliefs, that doesn't follow either. That's a big one. That's a big one. That's a big one.

Yeah. Tell me more about that. Not being a black woman myself. Right. I understand the pressure and then living in LA. Well, I mean, I think that there are some substantial things that I think that the black community faces that are unique to our experience, particularly in the United States. Let's just say black American experience,

because you can't just say, because the diaspora goes across the entire world. But within the United States in particular, I mean, there are some issues that people are very passionate about, and rightfully so, right? I don't know, I mean, I care about these things, but it's not, I've never been a type of person to put on a cape for anything and just like go out in the streets and march and make a big deal. It's like if I'm going to change something, I'm going to do it in the voting booth. I'm going to do it with my money. I'm going to do it with the ways that I can contribute to the things that will that will create the change that I hope for, you know, and the fact that I'm not so vocal about these things that I care about or that again, that they're not necessarily things that are expected of me. Yeah. I'm not expected to be a black conservative. Like

that is just taking away someone's agency. Yeah. Because you look like this, you ought to be speaking like this. Oh yeah. I ought to speak the way I want to speak. Oh yeah. That's unacceptable. Yeah. And I mean, I've even had, I call it the devil's blue app. It's Facebook. I had to get off the devil's blue app because I was always in Facebook jail. Like, like, listen. Really? What were you, do you mind me asking?

How do you- I go with people online. That's just crazy things. Like, for instance, the other day, I was telling my best friend about this, there's an actress who is a, you know, very popular, well-known black actress right now. And I don't watch television.

I haven't watched television or, I don't really watch too much like movies that much anymore But like I haven't watched TV specifically in about maybe Two and a half years or so so I don't know who's out there Okay But I just saw a picture of a woman and Lindsay Lohan and I know Lindsay Lohan of course like I love all her movies And stuff and we all know she had like a huge problem She's gone from the media for a long time, right? But she recently came back out and this is like the first picture I've seen of her

So I said on this picture that popped up on my feed on on the devil's blue app I was like, oh I was like, I don't know who the other woman is. I was like, but Lindsay Lohan looks amazing She looks great. She looks healthy that well and she looks amazing, she looks great, she looks healthy. That's, that's a firestorm. I was called out my name, I was called every derogatory name you can call a black person by other black women because of just a statement that they felt

that I was undermining a black woman, I didn't know who she was, that I was uplifting Lindsay Lohan and I'm just like, I just said she looked good and healthy, like why are you questioning like my whole entire identity and just everything, telling me I'm not black and all this other stuff, just because I said something nice

about a woman of another race, you know? And forget about political talk. I mean, you know, if I'm not out here saying that I feel like I'm oppressed just because I'm black and I live in America, it's just like, whoa, whoa, whoa there. Like, what do you mean? Like, you know, systemic racism and critical race theory.

Like you should be like all about that. I'm just like, all right guys, what's for dinner? Where's the nearest Starbucks? I need a coffee. What's happening? Oh, am I, am I, am I messing up? No, he does. So I should have told you this.

I should have told you that we started streaming number one. And. I should have told you that we started streaming, number one. And then I should have told you that sometimes Thursday walks around and fixes cameras while we're on stream. I'm just breaking everything, guys. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's yeah. Things are nuts, man. Things feel so crazy.

Yeah. Um, I think, I mean, Lent starts tomorrow. Oh yeah. We would all do much better, I think, if we just decided to get off our political news feeds or social media for Lent. Yeah, yeah. Because it just sort of like two dimensionalizes people, which isn't a word, right? It does. It's just like, you have to be like this because you look like that, which is exactly the thing we were trying to move away from. I thought, right? Absolutely. Now you've had this great, I saw this video, I was watching it this morning about how either you changed your mind on abortion or maybe you began to realize why you were pro-life. I

wasn't sure which, but... A little bit of both. Because I've always been on the side of abortion is wrong, right? It's just wrong. I don't, it's, it, and I think that it was maybe, maybe it's just, just again, like Catholic upbringing. It's like, you know, like contraception is wrong and abortion is wrong, so you don't do it. Like, and that's, you grow up. Right, another reason, it's just kind of what you're taught. So it's just like, oh, okay, yeah, I believe that chore.

You know, yeah, life is precious from cradle to the grave, awesome. But I didn't go into the why. And then when I started to explore the why, then it made sense, right? So I was always like, oh, I would never have an abortion because this is in the past. I would never have an abortion because it's wrong.

But if another woman did it, I wouldn't, you know, whatever, it's her business, her body, her choice, you know, that was really my position for a long time. And I just, again, you start to learn the why. Why is it wrong? Why do you feel that way? Like what's really the truth behind that? And for me, it's again, coming back to

what do you believe about life, right? That life begins at conception. And everything that I understand about science, because as a personal trainer and as a fitness professional, I've studied kinesia, no, I wanted to know, kinaom- kineseo- kinetomy. That's what I said. I studied kinesiology, I studied anatomy, I studied physiology, I studied the endocrine system because I just wanted to know how to help my clients in the best way, right? And so here I am faced with all of the science that I know and I know that life begins at conception. It just does. Right. So at that point, it was just like, wow,

we advocate for so much with abortion being healthcare. But there's also, now this is where my experience as a black woman comes in. When I started to learn about the city history behind Planned Parenthood and Margaret Singer and what her actual ideals were in presenting it to the black community, how she did that. I was like, how can I support- Spell that out a little bit for those who are watching who may not be unaware. You don't have to be an expert on it, but what are you referring to?

Well, it's interesting because they denied it for a long time, Planned Parenthood denied Margaret Sanger's past as a eugenicist, right? And I think during the pandemic, because this did not make the news as much as it should have, but the New York location in specific had her name on the outside of Planned Parenthood. They removed it because of her past.

They could not hide it, right? So they had to remove it. So that tells you a lot about what she was really all about. She was a eugenicist. She was about, they were about exterminating black people or people that were disabled, people that were just not the shining examples of passing on their genes for humanity.

So she used black leaders, she went into the churches, she went into communities to really push this message forward that, hey, this is healthcare, you know? You live in poverty, this, that, the other, like you should probably like, you know, think about this as women's healthcare. You don't wanna bring children into this world that you can't take care of, right?

So then that, when you look at the numbers and what that did years later, why are black women, the leading number of abortions when it comes to these procedures in the nation, right? And a lot of it does have, there are so many factors, there's so many factors and layers to that that we can, like, to unpack all of that right now, that'd be like another, be like another show, right?

But the gist of it being that, how can I support a movement which at the seed of it, at the heart of it was about exterminating people that look like me and my offspring? Like, I can't do that. Like that's just insane, right? And then to start noticing that when you go into the cases of rape and incest,

because that's the one thing that people say, well, the rape and incest, right? Well, I mean, it's such a minuscule part of abortions in general, right? That it doesn't count for the whole others that are having these procedures done, and they're not falling into that category. And if you want to say that contraception is failing, then why don't we have a class action lawsuit against these, you know, condom companies, these birth control companies, you know? So it just started to think, I started to think this does, does it not make sense? It doesn't. And so I err on the side of just saying, I can't straddle

the fence with this. It's either you're either one or the other. There's no way you can straddle the fence. And that's kind of where I stand with it, you know? Yeah. I just, I feel like we should say, even though it goes without saying, that if you're somebody who's watching right now and you've had an abortion, ah, my beautiful sister, you know, there is forgiveness. There is mercy. You want the stupid things you've done. You want the sins you've committed. It's like we've been raised in this society that has lied to us ever since we were young. You know, me personally, since I was eight, I was lied to by pornography, right? That's when I first stumbled upon it. Here's what sex is. Here's what women are. Here's what women are for. Here's what marriage ought to be. And it's something similar where

you've got all these movies and TV shows and big tech lying to you about abortion. I mean, you were raised in this. And so in some ways, like I know we have personal agency, I know we have to take responsibility for the bad things that we've done or have paid other people to do to us. But in some ways we are a victim in this, in this, right? Amen. Absolutely. And so like run to confession, you beautiful daughter. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, especially for today's culture, you know, any one of us who's born after the sexual revolution and stuff like that. When we were taught so many things like crazy,

like when I was coming up as a dancer in the ballet world and stuff, and even in the acting world in a way, but I really felt this pressure in the dance world, our teachers, as talented and amazing and legendary as many of them are and were. I mean, I remember there just kind of being this this known, the silent thing. Like, you don't settle down and have kids and get married if you think you're a serious artist. Like you your whole life, your body, everything is like for the dads, it's for the art, you know? And I fell victim to that. Like, really thinking that, like, and I did, I had to make a choice. It's like, if I'm going to be a serious artist, if I'm going to try to get into these companies,

I'm going to try to do the things that I want to do, I'm going to have to forego that life for the art because I want to be taken seriously. I was, we were gonna have to forego that life for the art, because I wanna be taken seriously. We were all lied to in that way. I think that our culture in general, they do that with women in all aspects. You don't even have to be an artist. It's like, oh, you get your education, go to school, go for your career.

You can do all that stuff later. Nobody's telling you that, them eggs, honey. Time waits for no man or woman. You know what I mean? So I think that women get put in this position where it's like, okay, I have these dreams. I have these goals. I don't have a way of necessarily supporting myself on a child or this is bad timing.

So the only thing to do that makes logical sense is to terminate the pregnancy because that's what society told me to do. Like to put it off and wait. Cause you're lied to on both accounts. You're told you won't be taken seriously unless you dedicate your entire life to this. But then on the other hand, you're told and it's essentially, you know, marriage is essentially a misogynistic institution and you'll end up being a kitchen slave if you went down this route and no one will respect you and who would want to be

a stay at home mom anyway. That's why I have such respect and admiration for women who are like, I'm a homemaker. Oh yeah. Beautiful. It's wonderful. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting because when I- Reclaim that, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that beauty of that. And I meet women of all walks and stuff. And when I have women who talk about being, you know,

oh, I'm just a stay at home mom, it's like, no, you're not just, like, you are a homemaker. That is amazing. Like, and you should be proud of that It's nothing we've quoted him before where he says some the quote, you know it Do it. It's a Feminism is mixed up with the idea that a woman is free when she serves her employer, but a slave when she serves her husband Yeah, that's it. I mean that's the one right? Yeah, that's it And then I know and Eslen talks about, scraping plaque off someone's teeth in a dentist office,

like somehow that's liberating. If you're at home tending to your children. Never heard that one. Anthony Eslen's the boss. Have you ever read him? No, I haven't. Oh, yeah, he's unreal. And I think he can travel anymore.

So I think we have to go to him. He's a Catholic intellectual. He wrote a book called Out of the Ashes, which everyone read. Yeah, I don't know that sounds familiar I have not read it. Yeah. Yeah, I was trying to find the quote and the first thing that came up was that book So what out of the ashes? Oh, yeah Yeah Yeah So reeducating ourselves man, it's hard when you're being lied to constantly. Well, yeah

Although I kind of feel like big tech and Disney and everybody else is overplaying their hand at this point. When I grew up, I was in like the age of like Metallica and like rebelling against the man. Like that was the thing. Like you would question authority. It feels like things have changed a little bit for me in my world. It feels like it's like maybe the ancients, maybe tradition has something to teach us now since we've all cut ourselves off from that. To the point where I pointed out the

other day that my son, who is not compliant by nature, like he's a firecracker. He's confirmed. He can confirm, right? He said to me the other day just randomly, he's like, yeah, I gave up watching Disney this year because of all the stuff they're pushing on us. So it's almost like the opposite. Like the woke left has become what Christians were said to be back in the 70s, 80s, 90s. Boring, sensorial, preachy. I'm like, I don't, I don't. Please stop preaching to me. Right. I think a lot of younger people are feeling that way about the sensorial left Hollywood big tech.

It's like, just how about leave me alone? Like you said, let me just, I just want some dinner. Right, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there are interesting reports and numbers coming out that are showing this trend. I think they say that the younger generation now, the Zs, right, they're less- Is that you?

That's me. All right, well, they're less sexually active than the generations before them. And that's a big testament because they are, they're... Oh my gosh. I think it's because they're awkward. Well, that too. Like all the Gen Z's are looking at porn in their mother's basement. I don't know what's better. They don't know how to talk to each other.

I honestly don't know what's better. If y'all were fornicating or just like jerking off to porn. I think part of it is that. We both look at him. Give us the answer, Genzie. Yeah, yeah, what's going on? Do you want the, like, okay. Yeah, give me your unabashed, unvarnished answer. Okay, cool.

Both are evil. Don't get me wrong. Because I haven't thought about this at all yet. Oh, all right. Well, that's good. But as you know, like 70% of the time when I haven't thought about something at all and then I go for it, I'm not super will be added out later I think I don't think it's just the advent of pornography I think that's a large part of

it I do think another part of it is that whether or not we want to admit it, the sexual liberation ethic has failed to some degree for my generation. The myth that you can be totally promiscuous and have no negative effects down the road. I see, we don't believe that anymore. I think that it peaked at the millennials, but it did enough damage to Jen to families with Gen X parents because of the divorce rate and the, you know, over half of the kids I went to high school with, for example, the

parents were divorced. It was just normal. Or normal or and you know they had four parents because they had a stepmom, a stepdad, a mom and dad and so without ever saying it I think some people have started to realize that you need to be more careful when a lot of people in my generation have realized that they need to be more careful when picking a life partner because they don't want to end up to the point where they might freeze a little and right they freeze a little and they're scared because they don't want to end up like their parents where they might freeze a little and right. They freeze a little and they're scared because they don't want to end up like their parents did where they don't want their kids to grow up with four parents that, you know, each pair despises the other because they, you know, that it was hard for them.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was listening to something. Um, actually I was listening. One of the things I was listening to earlier was new polity, which is the podcast that Thursday told me about across the road. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. But, um, there was something else that had followed that. And it made me think about this very topic actually this morning. I was like, it's interesting because the generation Z's like their parents are like the ex people, like mid to late ex, Generation X somewhere in there,

and the exes are the kids or the boomers or whatever. So, and the boomers were the ones that were really out there that got into all the debauchery of all of the revolutions. It's like, okay, the 60s, the 70s, we're going to Woodstock half naked, whatever we were doing, right? All the time, right? Studio 57 was really cool. Is this Studio 54? I don't know. Whatever thing was, right? Everything's so cool back then, right? And they were the ones who were really coming about in this whole revolution and evolution of life and society, thinking that all of these things that they

were instilling, all this free love and this, not, and like, divorce rates went up and all these things, like these were things that would liberate our children and give them so much choice and so much like edification to do anything they want in their lives. And it's like, then you start seeing the millennials and the Z's being born and now the baby Alphas. It's like, and you're realizing how this whole thing was a social experiment.

And now we're just seeing the effects of this like 50, 60 years later, like, Whoa, hold up a second. Like this went awry somewhere. Right. And I think that's what, that's what we're seeing. It's like the younger generation. It's, it's hard for you guys because the thing is, everything is so hypersexual. Everything, like from the music, videos, you know. Instagram. Instagram, oh man, right?

Everything is in your face and anything goes, right? And these kids are experiencing things that even at our age, like we'd never really experienced before. It's just kind of like mind blowing in some ways. Like I, childhood for me was like, go outside and play. Like you're not watching television. You're not playing video games. That's where the weekends or whatever, go outside,

figure it out, imagine something, figure it out. Read a book, do something. But the kids nowadays on the whole are not exposed to that. So they're constantly getting this messaging in. Oh, I remember what it was. So I was watching the news today and there's this thing called conscious parenting has been all over the news this morning.

Cause I always love to watch local news when I'm in a new area. So they're like, we're gonna talk about conscious parenting. How great it is and how it exploded since the pandemic. All conscious parenting is, is literally parenting your children. Don't put them on social media. Because the opposite would be unconscious parenting. I just looked up the definition.

What is it? Child rearing philosophy that encourages parents to make mindful, emotionally intelligent decisions in raising their children. What was the other option? I don't know. What is going on here? Right? So it's no wonder you've got these kids pushing back because it's like they're seeing that this is insane, you know? But here's the thing. It's, I don't know what the numbers are because you have so many kids that are just indoctrinated with this from childhood and they're going to the universities and they're coming out all these crazy ideas. So the numbers are because you have so many kids that are just indoctrinated with this from

childhood and they're going to the universities and they're coming out all these crazy ideas. So you have some folks that are just like Thursday that are fantastically, you know, detaching themselves from this and like your son detaching themselves. But then you have a whole throngs of others that are just really all in it. So I don't know. Listen, folks strap in. It's going to be some shenanigans. Okay. Well, I remember this coming home to me a couple of years ago when I was asked to give a talk at a big Franciscan university conference. I'm not sure if you're familiar with these youth conferences happen around the

country. They get like 40 to 60,000 teens. They're amazing. All these kids on their knees before the Eucharist hearing great Catholic teaching. But I was asked to give a talk on how to date as a teenager. And I was looking at the script and I'm like, I don't think. Yes. I was like to give a talk on how to date as a teenager and I was looking at the script I'm like, I don't think yes. I was like, I think you should date Well, it depends what you mean by date to be fair It does depend on what you mean by date But my point was I think if you date you'll just fornicate so don't be an idiot

I said that because I just like needling the teens. I like being a little provocative I said that to about three, 3000, maybe 5000 teens. They all started clapping. And I actually thought they misunderstood me. So I reiterated it. I'm like, oh, my gosh, like, I don't understand these children at all. Because if I was 16, when I was 16, if someone said you shouldn't be dating, I would have booed them or I would have went like, that's over the top.

But I've got all these teens in front of me cheering because they, for some reason, got it. Well, there's nothing there's nothing left to rebel into. Yeah. You've got to rebel into orthodoxy. What else is there? Yeah. And I think also maybe it was a different culture, right? Because I mean, dating, when you think about it was, I mean, even till like it really went off the rails, let's say in like the, the,

the early to mid 2000s where dating just went this weird way. But still up to that point, people were still getting married and having children and settling down like that was like the outcome. Even this is one of the most awful TV shows in all of history. Very funny, but awful. Friends. Friends.

I never really got into it, but of course I know it. You know, I treated. If they treated fornication the way they treated cigarette smoking, namely evil, it would have been a much healthier show. But like every episode is all about fornicating, fornicating, fornicating. And it was just, it's just a lie. It was just a lie. But even in that show, they had to make them settle down. So even there, there was this belief that, well, eventually you settle down. Whereas today it's like, we've become perhaps so disillusioned because we're treating people like objects. We don't even see that as an option.

Right. Right. No, you're right. I mean, it makes me think of that show Sex in the City, which was really popular, right? I'm going to tell you a funny story real quick. Why? Do you know the story? Do you know? And you because I know sometimes you've you've watched the show. So I haven't heard this way. My wife showed out one of the actors in Sex and the City. Really? In a way that only Cameron Fred can. Such a great story. I don't know. I don't know who the character was.

It was the same fellow. Big. Oh, wow. He deserved it. Big Fat Greek Wedding. He's the guy who played in Big Fat. Well, I don't want to. I don't mean to, well. So, my wife, you and my wife, we get along really well because she's just extroverted and powerful and beautiful. I just, she's great. I love her. She's amazing.

Yeah. She married up, but she's great. And we're at this pub in Houston and she sees this guy from Sex and the City. And we're like, ah, gosh, like how sad. What a crap show that it's like, yeah, I'm going to tell him. I thought she was joking and she wasn't joking. And so she went to talk to him and there was a like a little throng of women around him. And I'm like, OK, I guess this has happened. And so I was just like sipping my beer, looking occasionally in her direction.

And when I say shoot him out, I don't mean she was a jerk. Yeah. But she just said, I really liked you in this movie, but I just think it's really sad, like what you're doing right now. And I think you could probably be doing a lot better. Oh, my God. Yeah. That's like intimidate. Able is like Chris Knoth. I think his name is. Yeah.

Chris Knoth is Mr. Big. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out. I don't think he was in my big fat Greek wedding. Maybe you thought the word big because his character was Mr. Big on the show. Right. He was like a complete jerk. Right. And of course it says that there was a guy named John Corbett in both. And if that's not correct. Oh it's fine. It was some dude. Yeah. He's he would definitely be the character that deserves the chew out, right? So like, but you're watching these shows

and like that's what they're promoting. So was that a show you got into when you were younger? I kind of watched, I mean, that was like more like in my, I don't remember when I was watching it. Like I didn't watch it while it was like on, on, but I started to catch reruns later on, right? And so, you know, it's just kind of, not that you live that life, but you kind of, you live vicariously through the things that you see on television, you know, it's just kind of that you not that you live though that life But you kind of you live vicariously through the things that you see on television in the movies

It's like oh, you know, it's like man that mr. Big he's so dreamy. He's such a jerk He's so cute I so want a guy to treat me like like I'm trash and then walk away from me in this No he's like they give you they feed you this weird Hollywood Hollywood fantasy because she was obsessed with this guy. And then of course the rest of the show is about promiscuity. So these are the things that started to really change the culture in a major way.

So I heard somebody say this recently because the dating world, and I can see why kids nowadays would be averse to it because it's so messed up nowadays. It's because someone had said this on one of those crazy podcasts, okay? There's a lot of crazy podcasts out there nowadays, okay? And one of the guys- Going to the corner.

Yeah, well, this is good crazy. I'm talking about like debauchery, like real debauchery crazy, okay? So one of the guys, and I was just like, whoa, when he said this, I was like, you must be insane, but I know now he said that dating today is for sex. It's not for relationships, it's for sex, because what are people doing?

Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, next thing you know, you're sleeping with somebody the first time you met them, then they have the three date rules type of thing. It's like, it's not about forming relationship, right? And then you've got the dinner dates, I'm not gonna use the word they use, it starts with a W've got the dinner dates that the I'm not going to use the word they use. It starts with a W with the dinner girls who like dinners and hitting dinner.

Right. And then you have, you know, guys, it's just everybody. No one is thinking about, oh, let me date to get to know you, to have a relationship with you, that we can possibly get married. Culture tells you don't get married, don't have kids. So what's everybody doing? So I the the Generation Z today not wanting to do this, I get it, I get it. Because if this is what the outcome is, and that everything that you're seeing that is sold to you as perfection is rooted in,

again, it's the vices. What does social media tell us? That we want luxury, you have to be wealthy. If you're not making like $100,000 a year as a man, you're worthless. If you're not, you know, telling guys especially that like the thing that signifies your masculinity is how many women you've slept with, right?

All of these things and for women, validate yourself by showing everything online or sleeping around. Like this is how you validate. It's less averse, all of these things. This is what make relationships. Why would you want to date date why wouldn't you want to just crawl in a hole you know grow a long beard for the guys you know ladies just cover yourself up fully head your head to toe and just be a hermit like it sounds like the best option you know of

escrow Jose Maria Escrow no oh my gosh you're gonna love him here's saint Jose Maria Escrow listen to a couple of these quotes listen to this this. Purity, they ask and they smile. They are the ones who go on to marriage with worn out bodies and disillusioned souls. Boom! Another one. There is a need for a crusade of manliness and purity to counteract and nullify the savage work of those who think man is a beast and that crusade is your work. Amen. Okay. I have to love Jose Maria Esquivel. So he's the founder of Opus Dei, if you've ever heard of that. Oh, yes. Okay. The name. Yes. Okay. Yeah. He writes in kind of spiritual maxim styles or aphorisms. Yeah. Um, he had this other line where he said, filthy talk makes us comfortable with filthy action, but the one who knows how to guard the

Something like that, but that was to your point about sex in the city It's like filthy talk makes us comfortable with filthy action So does exposing ourself to like shows that glorify fornication and you might think you're separate from that somehow But it's making you more comfortable that life. So are you familiar with the so you were just talking about this There's a scientific study. I just pulled it up um and They did a study recently and it showed that the more partners you have it actually lowers the amount of

the neurochemical production in your brain that Makes pair bonding for life easier so like it is scientifically proven now that the more casual or the more sexual partners you have, it is going to be physically more difficult for your brain to bond with your spouse. Yeah, yeah.

Because when you think about the physiological things that happen during sex, like, and again, this is where my nerdiness about the body comes in, in the whole theology, the body is why it all makes sense. I'm like, yes, and again, this is where my nerdiness about the body comes in, in the whole theology of the body. It's why it all makes sense. I'm like, yes, I understand that. Because it's like, why is exercise,

why do some people get really hooked on exercise and really love the lifestyle, right? It's because you get this euphoria, right? You know, the runner's hot, you get that, the dopamine and the serotonin and all of these endorphins start running through your body, and you get hooked on that sensation and it makes you feel good.

That's why exercise is great for those who have depression, anxiety, because you have that suppressed hormone and now it's becoming elevated, right? And if you're someone who is, your addiction to feeling good is through lust, is through sex, is through the carnality, right? You're getting that hit, you're getting that hit,

then you're getting the oxytocin, right? So you're constantly getting that hit. Your receptors are constantly going off and getting this flood. And eventually, just like anything, your body gets used to a certain thing. Your tolerance for it gets higher and higher. So you need more of a hit, more of a hit

in order to be able to, for it to work. And if you're not getting that hit from that one person where it's supposed to be able to, for it to work. And if you're not getting that hit from that one person where it's supposed to be coming from, that sexual bond is supposed to bring you together. So now you're getting it from this person, that person. You're getting your heart broken. I don't care what, I mean, you guys are men, so maybe you can talk differently.

But for me, like a man who's highly promiscuous, it's like, they say that, oh, guys can just do whatever they want, because they don't get emotionally attached, but it's like, that's just not even how your being is. So there has to be some level of something that gets taken from even you when you're having all of these sexual experiences that are not connected to women.

That you care about. Let me answer as a man, and then I wanna give you a quote about women and have you respond as a woman. Okay, please. So I think it's obviously true that the only thing that can conquer a desire is a stronger desire. It's not shaming yourself, it's not guilting yourself, it's only something that's

stronger. And you think, well, what could possibly be stronger than a man's desire to lust after a woman or to objectify a woman? And I think a lot of people will say, well, there really isn't, but it seems to me obviously true that there is. And if you watch some of the movies that men really love, I don't mean like or find titillating or find funny, I mean it resonates with them. I think what you often find is a main character who is a strong man who is willing to forego his life, you know, for the love of a woman or for a country or something larger than him. And I think that it's like Christopher West talks about in the theology of the body. It's like our heart is like a deep well. And sure, on the top of that well, you might have a thick layer of sludge, but it doesn't end there. Just go deeper and deeper and you will

tap into something life-giving and good and masculine. Yeah, absolutely. And what's sad to me as a man is that the word masculinity has been tainted. It has become, for many, synonymous with, what would you call it? Chauvinism or petulancy or that. Yeah. When it's like, no, the world is not suffering from toxic masculinity. The world is suffering from a toxic lack of it because the solution to men who will not stay by their women, who will not remain faithful, who will not treat people with respect is precisely masculinity. That's what you need. You need manly strength for that. All right.

Here's a quote for you from Edith Stein. She says, do not accept, well, here it is. The world doesn't need what women have. It needs what women are. What do you think? I think that's true. And it's funny because this is something I, this is one thing that sent me on an even deeper level of spirituality, faith, adult faith, faith formation. What does it mean to be a woman? Outside of the fact that of course, part of that is our physiology, our physical bodies, that differentiate us from men, but what's deeper than that? What does it mean to be a woman in the eyes of Christ? And so it gets to the essence of just who we are. Nurturing creatures, carrying creatures, that's my stomach.

I hope you guys didn't hear that. My stomach is growling as I say that, right? Nurturing creatures, carrying creatures, we are life bearers on this planet. Like there's so many, we're creative. We are so many things that we can add to just the world and our families and just our husbands and our children and everything that I think that that gets lost in today's culture. So I can,

I can understand that because it's about the deeper thing, the intrinsic intrinsic value. It seems to me and feel free to push back if you disagree that that feminism or much of feminism is saying we need what women have, you know, be like men as opposed to recognize women for what they are. And it seems like transgenderism is in some ways, at least in part, an attack on women where it's not like, well, you can be like men, it's saying, well, you can be a man actually, exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think is perhaps why we're seeing this return to tradition and this return to authentic men. We're trying to grope for it, right? And sometimes it looks weird and awkward. And you see this in men, right? Where it's like, we're grasping for the accidents of masculinity because we're trying to figure out what the

substance is. And so there's a lot about beards and I'm somebody who owns a cigar lounge, but cigars and things like this, right? Where it's like, we just want what our grandfathers seem to have. But of course, the accidents of masculinity without the substance is just a show. It's just a larp. And I'm sure the same is true for women. You look passionate about this point. Feel free to interject if you want. I'm just very happy that's what you're saying. Because I think that is, and I think so, without the actual substance, the accidents can seem contradictory. And that's why we have masculinity gurus like Jaco, who are like the opposite of guys like what's the the bloke from Romania who just got arrested.

Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate. Right. Like they seem like they're contrary to each other, right? But they're both actually, and they're both missing it. They're both missing the mark. I don't know much about Jocko, so I couldn't speak to it, but. Jocko Willink?

Yeah, I know who, I know some about him. They're both missing the mark, right? But they're both grasping at an accident of masculinity, right? You're not putting them in the same camp, are you? I mean, from what I understand, Andrew Tate is a spinster. at an accident of masculinity, right? You're not putting them in the same camp, are you? From what I understand, Andrew Tate is a spinster. Yeah, no, he's a bad... I think Jaco also misses it.

How so? That he's like, it's all about like, his entire form of masculinity is like, I think it's almost like the toxic fitness. You might be able to speak to this better, but it's like, like every morning, like if you go to his Instagram page, every morning he posts like a picture of his watch, like I woke up at 4 a.m. And then it's like, the sweat,

and then the next post is his sweat on the ground after his morning workout. And it's like- I don't know why, but I need to look that up. That's like not- It's the affectation of it. It's not like- But it's not to say that that's incongruent with masculinity.

Jason Yeah, but the other thing he does is he hosts a podcast where all they talk about is war stories. Mason That's kind of cool though, isn't it? Jason I mean it is, but that's not the substance of masculinity. The substance of masculinity is not like, yeah, and then I killed this guy, and then I killed this guy, and then I killed this guy and then I killed this guy and then I killed this guy and then like my buddy died and it's like it takes masculinity to do those things. But that isn't masculinity. But you'd agree with that.

I'm going to defend Jocko who I don't know. He would agree with everything you just said. See, but he's like if you get on and you're like, I don't think. To me, a clear sign that someone is lacking the the substance of masculinity Is well, let me put it this way, right? So in the Summa Theologia Aquinas, it's a translation of the Latin of course, but use the word effeminate Mm-hmm, and he says that man So I might be kicking a hornet's nest here

But he says that men who are effeminate are men and and that that's different to feminine It's not like it's not an attack on women but he's saying that the men who are a feminine and men who cannot do their duty and Take the path that's that's easier over there over their duty. And I think that that would be a big part of it Anyway, I had a thought it bugs me just because he's lacking religion Yeah, like he wants to find out about to hit on. Yeah the problem that I see with and there's there's the men's Version of masculinity and then there's there's also the female and that's very popular nowadays talking about how to be more feminine How to be you know, but the way that that that these talking points are coming from are from the dating perspective So it's a lot of what I call dark femininity.

How to be more alluring, how to get men attracted to you, how to get a man to do this, how to get a high value man, and all that stuff, right? So you're seeing these talking points on both the men's and women's side, and they're all harkening back to this time before any of us were alive, right? Like, oh, our grandparents did that.

Your grandparents also went to church every Sunday. Your grandparents also prayed and read the Bible. Your grandparents, they were not perfect, you know? And there's a lot of things that went along in society at that time, but your grandparents' culture, that's what was the norm. Your grandparents' culture upheld religion and spirituality and believed in God and we

don't have that. So once you stripped all of that away, now you're trying to fit a circle into a square peg. It's not working and that's why it's not working. Like a lot of these guys are out there talking about women need to be submissive. You need to submit to a man. No, sweetheart. You know, the Bible says that I should be submitting to my husband,

not some random boyfriend, not some random man on the street just because you have testosterone. Right. No, that's not how it works. Right. So if there's a lot of missing things. This is kind of what I meant when I said we're kind of groping for the essence of masculinity, femininity, masculinity without religion becomes it's somebody in the comments just said that it's without its true end. Yeah. Yeah. And I but I'm sure like you perhaps see that and you can talk to

this on the side of women as well, where it's like, we've got to go back, we've got to go back. But then it then it does the same. It has the same problem that the left has in that it two dimensionalizes you and says, well, as a woman, that means you must be like this and like this. And I think part of the reason people like my wife's podcast, for example, is that she doesn't fit that stereotype woman, but she's ex beautifully feminine, right? Right, right. And would say that she's submissive and in the most beautiful, powerful way, you know, competent, she's competent. People hear powerful and they think

dominating, but competency is I think what we're after. But right. hear powerful and they think dominating, but competency is I think what we're after. Right, well that's why I had to. How do you see that happening? Do you see women on channels kind of telling you to be a certain way? You're like, I think you're missing the point. I see that you're groping for something good,

but you're still off base here. Amen, absolutely, because I, okay, so there's an interesting connection with this for me because after I had finished, I knew that I was going to be bodybuilding anymore professionally. Like I took a step back because I reached my ceiling as far as how far I could push without steroids. Right. I was just looking at my divisions like, Whoa, these ladies are going too far. Like my family is already freaking

out about me. Like being too lean is like girl, like no. So I was like, yeah, I don't want to lose that, that essence of what out, out, these outward femininity is. no. So I was like, yeah, I don't want to lose that, that essence of what out, at least outward femininity is, right? So I started to get into these channels. I talked about like femininity and womanhood and stuff. And I love vintage. Like I've always loved the 1950s, like the, just the look and all that. So when I was like revamping, like just my style,

I went very 1950s. If you go back and look at some of my stuff, it's like very like, they called me Melanin, Run-Roe here, okay? Cause I had the whole thing going. Right. And so I started to follow a lot of people who were kind of in that genre, that feminine, like, and it was always the same thing. It's like, well, if you're feminine, you have to talk really soft like this because feminine women don't raise their voice and make this box of what womanhood meant. And I'm just like, this is not it.

So I started to step away like, you know where I'm gonna go for my source? Let me go to the Bible. And I was like, oh, look at Ruth. Look at Esther. Look at Judith. Look at these women who were powerful women. One of my favorite analogies that I love to link up

is about Ruth specifically, right? Because you have a lot of different talking points. Number one, the talking point that like older women are like useless. If you're over the age of like 25, 18, whatever they say in the mantle sphere these days, that you're useless as a woman. The whole- Don Lemon. Did you hear what happened with him recently?

Oh, Don Lemon? Oh, he got fired, didn't he? I think. Sorry, we shouldn't. We shouldn't say it as much as we're saying it, but. I thought he got fired months ago and then I found out he didn't. Well, I know he was on a morning show, but he spoke out against. Who's that Sheila who just said she wants to run for president?

Oh, Nikki Haley. Yeah. Yeah. He said something like, well, you're not in your prime either. And then his two women co-hosts were like, what do you mean by that? Exactly. Yeah. He said something like, well, you're not in your prime either. And then his two women co-hosts were like, what do you mean by that? Exactly. I got to start watching more TV. And so you get that.

No, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Yeah. So like one of the things that I that I always kind of point out is that, well, in the story we have of Ruth, right. And why I love Ruth is because. For everyone that wants to say that women had no place in the Bible, you're so like oppressed and all these things. I mean, of

course, certain things you can probably twist it like that, but women were powerful in the Bible. But she, it was through her, her womb and her lineage that Christ, his, that's where his ancestry came, right? Because Ruth married Boaz. Boaz was the father of Obed. Obed was the father of Jesse. Jesse was the father of David. Where did Jesus come from? The house of David, right? So from that lineage was that connection directly to Christ.

But at the same time, who was the woman who ushered all of that through? It was Naomi that was like, hey girl, go on to Boaz. Let me tell you what to do. Go on, put on your best clothes, put on a little perfume, go sit on his threshing floor. I mean, an older woman who set the, who, who mentored this younger, you know, you mean Ruth wasn't that young, but like still she was young enough to have a child and a lineage to go ahead

and set this amazing thing that would bring us to Christ. So it's like, I looked and like, well, these are real women. These are the feminine, this is femininity in action. This is strength, this is beauty, this is grace, this is humility. The blessed Virgin Mary, come on. Imagine being a teenager and you're just chilling out, mind your own business one day and this angel comes up,

like, hey, guess what? I mean, this is my version, guys, okay? He's like, hey, guess what? Hail Mary, guess what? You mean, it wasn't, this is my version guys. Okay. He's like, Hey, guess what? You know, Hail Mary, guess what? You gonna have the son of a God. You gonna have that? She's like, what? What? You know, fine is cool.

Do what you need to do. We need a Roxy translation. This is my version of the Bible. Great guys. But it's like, could you imagine she was scared? You see this angel, right? And he's gonna tell you like, Hey, you're gonna have a kid.

And this kid is like gonna be the man that changes the world. And you say, you don't say, oh no, this is too much for me. You say, I am a handmaiden of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to his will. Like that was your answer. Like yes, submission, like, is your strength. So it's like, wow. And it's active.

It's not passive. That's the thing. Like, receptivity, like, you think of the sexual act, the receptivity of the woman is an active receptivity. It's not a passivity. Amen. It's in her active receptivity that she gives her gift of femininity and allows you in. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's like, every example I needed of femininity was right there. And that's when I saw, wow, all of this other stuff, this is so dark. You know, cause you're now, you're just equating femininity to serving. To the accidents of it again. Right, exactly. There's something to that.

Right, right. And nobody wants to talk about this. Cause the moment you start bringing religion into it, it's like, oh, you know, but you cannot demand the things that are, that are of God. And you cannot demand that and put it in the hands of man and think he's gonna be able to do, and then I say man, I mean human, humanity,

that we're gonna be able to do the right thing. Like we need the guardrails. We need the way, the truth, and the light, you know? How many times you post on a YouTube channel? Is it like, are you trying to get out a certain amount of videos every week or? I would love to, you know, it's pandemonium trying to run two channels and a business at the same time.

So like right now it's just like me doing everything. So I, but I, I, I stay consistent about like once a week, once or twice a week, but I also got hip to doing shorts. So that kind of like feeds them off to like, okay guys, here's a little something. How did you get so good at editing and thumbnails? Cause they're excellent. Thank you. Well, when I was back in college,

I used to work in the computer lab, right? And all I used to do was sit there, and they had Photoshop and Adobe Premiere. Well, no, Premiere wasn't out by that point. But they had Photoshop and stuff. So I just learned how to do that, learned how to create websites and all that stuff just in my free time.

So it just had been something that I just been practicing and practicing and I have a very artistic eye like I used to draw and paint when I was a kid. So I think that just like translates to me with the thumbnails like speaking of YouTube I watched like folks who talk about YouTube channels and how to make them better. You know there's a lot of really great channels out there that really talk about okay this is how you need to do your thumbnails. This is how you should edit. This is how you do.

So I just started to put things in action and here we are. Can we try to give some advice to people who might be running a YouTube channel or who might want to? Absolutely. Because there are certain things that I keep seeing and I'm like, oh, please don't do that. That's not going to work. So let me throw out a few things that I think I've learned. And you tell me if it resonates with you or if you disagree.

I like the idea that the thumbnail stops the scroll and the title gets you to click. So I used to make the mistake of putting the same text on my thumbnail that I did in my title. And once I realized, no, it's the thumbnail that gets you to stop, then I realized, well, that's not a good idea. Also, big, big images like like like you do, like big eye catching images, not and to try to when you're coming up with a thumbnail to realize that a lot of people are watching these on their phone. So what is this going to look like when it's this big and the text you're putting on the thumbnail isn't even able to be read? And then sometimes you put the text in, but the time stamp or the time overlaps with the

thing you're trying to convey. So that's not a good idea. What else? Yeah, I think those are great. Those are wonderful. I got a really interesting piece of advice that a lot of like top level like content people who take notes Thursday. Yeah. These are people who have channels that are specifically about how to do YouTube better.

Right. And I don't want to name drop because I don't know if I can name drop like on here or not. But like, okay. Like one of them is channel makers. He's really good. And then there's vid IQ. They're excellent. Nick Nimmin, Roberto Blake. These are the guys I like watch constantly, right? And they always talk about, okay, so when you create your, before you even do your video, like create your thumbnail first and then do your title, or at least have them at the same time,

but the thumbnail should be first. So that way, whatever it is that you, once you do your script and you sit down and you're talking about it, it all just relates so that way when they get, when you get the click, you've got to be able to keep them there, right? So if you create that stuff first,

know the title and the thumbnail first, then sit down to record, it kind of all flows together. So I thought that was really helpful. That's excellent, yeah. It kind of guides your artistic approach as you're creating the content. Yes. It all of guides your artistic approach as you're creating the content. Yes. It all goes back to the thumbnail. I like that. Yeah. And then when you're talking about titles, don't always think about like, oh, how to pray the rosary.

Like you want to think about something that's going to first of all create interest. Like for instance, the, I forgot what I titled my, my scriptural rosary. I didn't call it like scriptural rosary. It was something like how to increase Christ in your life with this rosary. Things that excite that will cause someone to click and want to actually see it because that's what the algorithm plays on. It's better to get your traffic from browse

and suggest it than just search because search is only finite with the audience. But browse and suggest it will be people actually will come back time after time to see your videos. I thought that was really helpful. And then with the actual videos themselves, in editing style, is to keep the pace moving. Every three to four seconds,

you should be changing your frame, whether it's zooming in or zooming out, using V-roll, the kind of music that you use and paying attention to that, that can all drive a video forward. So those are all the things that I try to pay attention to in addition to the ones that you just mentioned. I also like the idea, I think it's been helpful for me to realize not to bury the word that you're trying to, don't bury it at the end of the sentence of your title, because it gets cut off sometimes. So you're trying to say something and the very thing that you're trying to get people interested in is buried there.

Right, right, the key word? Yeah, the key words. And the other thing about the title is to keep it 60 characters or less, because that'll stop it from getting cut off. So like, you know, you want to really just make sure that whatever you have to say, that you get it in the 60 characters and that it's just something that'll make people say, huh. And then boom. The other thing I found is, and it seems so obvious, but the things I'm excited about, other people tend to be excited about as opposed to, well, let me, how can I make people think this is exciting? It's like, well, just if you made it exciting, if you like, not just exciting, but just interesting

and worth listening to doing those things is what's going to get people to click. But I have to say though, I've been interested. There's been more, I've been coming across more videos lately of people who seem to be going against all of this advice and are doing fantastic. And it's usually I like these videos of these fellows who are just like sitting out in the field, just like sharing their thoughts. Right. And there's no intro and there's no music and there's no quick, quick, quick, quick. It's just like favorite guys right now is Wrangle Star.

And he does that. I want him on my show. Let's get him. Star is so cool. John Wrangler School. That guy? No, no. I think it of you. I know D on my show. Let's get stars. So cool. Yeah Wrangler school that guy You I know here John quick Wrangler's guy used to be a he used to be a wild land forest firefighter, okay, oh wow, and he he now just kind of Runs his homestead and has his manservant, Jedidiah,

and lives with his wife. And he just makes videos on like how to do cool man stuff, like put a new head on an ass. It's relatable, that's what it is. And like when you get to the point, like you don't need introductions, you don't need anything fancy. Even if you sat down in front of a camera,

you don't even need all the things, all the bells and the whistles. If you have something that people can a camera, you don't even need all the things, all the bells and whistles. If you have something that people can connect to, that's the most important thing because this is what this is all about. Right? You can't compensate for that. Right. I'll tell you, one of my favorite channels, and this is insane, but it's this guy.

His name is Nate the hoof guy. And he goes into different farms and he scrapes the hoof of cows. And they'll be puss filled and all this. But he's trying to find like where the injury is on the cow and like to relieve it and like scraping. I love it. It's like imagine pitching that to a TV network 30, 50 years ago. We're just going to scrape some cow hoofs. That's what we're going to do for like six to 12 minutes.

And yet I'm sure he's very successful. Oh man, he's got like millions of views, like hundreds of thousands of people. And like and we all love it. It's just you're fixated on this cow scraping thing. And it's just, it's the relatability. Like you don't need all of that. I have some videos where I'm just sitting down talking to the camera relating to my audience and they do just as well because you're talking about something that people

are interested in and you're being authentic at the end of the day. And that's what's really important. Yes. I've been told this. I haven't verified it, that it used to be the case that YouTube would, you know, it would make your video pop up more if it was clicked on, you know, and that was the, that was the primary indicator of as to whether or not this was a successful video. But of course you could just, that, that just lends itself to click bait. You can come up with something, everyone clicks on it. So then they added interaction with the video and then how long people are watching the

video for. So to your point that you don't have to have these quick camera changes and this really fancy music and this really great setup if what you're saying is interesting and people are sticking around that thing's going to... Yeah. Yeah. YouTube has become so intuitive now and I have to really credit them for this because if you look at the back end for the creators, the creator studio, like it's fantastic because you can see so much data and if you know what to look for, you know how to make

things better. Like one of my favorite markers for a success of a video and this is something that they push out themselves and say that you should pay attention to is the first 30 seconds. Like you want 70% of your viewers still on the video at 30 seconds. And then to go forward, you want to have as close to 50% of the viewers for the entire video as much as possible. Now, if you go down to like 40s or something, that's great. But if you can maintain like half your audience throughout, depending on the length, you know,

once you start getting longer videos, of course, that number is going to go a little bit lower. But if you can at least get the first 30 seconds, get them hooked and then a steady line, then you know, you got a great video and you just need to keep replicating whatever it is that you did to make that kind of success. He is the pitfall of that though. The pitfall is you can imagine somebody, let's say like a Catholic personality who like starts doing these videos and he's talking about what he believes in and what's interesting and they're not doing that well. And then one day he does a video where he just talks about how awful these bishops and Pope Francis are. It's like, that did well. And then all of a sudden it's like the temptation for all of us. I'm not putting out anyone in particular. This is,

this is, this is true for all of us, whether it be in the Catholic space or I'm sure exercise space or whatever is you just end up becoming the puppet through which the people talk through and you just keep changing that one thing did well so I keep replicating that and I think that's something we all have to be on guard against it's like is it about clicks and views well yes I like that it feels good more income comes in through YouTube or is it about how do I communicate what I think I'm being called to communicate?

How do you wrestle with that? Of course, absolutely, because that happened on my other channel, actually, and it happened again. I have to watch out for it. Whereas there were certain topics that I had spoken about that had caught, especially when I started talking about obesity, and I was talking about it in the black community, particularly talking to black women

because we have a high level of obesity in our community. So that's a huge talking point, again, in the manosphere section of YouTube, right? The manosphere, that's like the men's masculinity, you know, all that other stuff. Yeah, that's what that's called. And in the black manosphere in specific, that's a huge talking point.

And you have men and women talking about this. So if I put out a video that talks about obesity in black women and how do they make that better, you get all those folks over here and they're all watching stuff that has nothing to do with my channel, right? So then they'll watch a video or two and you'll get all these subscribers and all this other stuff. And then boom, it takes your channel because when you start releasing videos that are actually on par with what you do and not just a one hit thing that just hits the algorithm, they're not there for that. So they start falling by the wayside. Right. The temptation is, well, maybe I'll rebrand my channel and start talking about obesity. Well, the same thing started to happen

when I started. Obesity is something that I is a hill that I will die on because like to me, I have had people in my family, of course, who are, who deal with this and like, you know, my wanting to help them or just women in general, like regardless of their race or ethnicity, but the whole body positivity fat acceptance movement. I mean, there've been women that were influencers in this space who recently have died. Like it's been crazy.

So I will do a video and I'm super compassionate about my message. But then you get the folks that are really like crazy about this and these channels that are really hard on this topic and as they do it for more sensationalism, right, so I put out a video or two about this and then of course you get that whole sector of folks coming over, so it's like oh great. So if I talk about eating healthy and protein shakes,

oh you guys don't wanna watch that, but the moment I talk about obesity, it's like, oh, great. So if I talk about eating healthy and protein shakes, oh, you guys don't wanna watch that. But the moment I talk about obesity, it's like, here, you come out the woodwork. So you have to keep a pulse on that, right? The virility, virility is good. Is that a real word? I don't know. I don't know, it is now.

Virality. Virality, but that's not the same. Virality. Virality. Yeah, virality. Virality. That's a, it's a good thing on one hand, but it's a double-edged sword because it's like,

you're gonna have to keep feeding the monster and the monster is the algorithm. And the thing that drives the algorithm is always gonna be controversy, it's always gonna be things that are sensationalist, right? So you have to walk that fine line in knowing if you decide to cover those kinds of topics, how do you do it in a way

that's gonna still get your message across and still like, when you do release other stuff, it still keeps with the audience. So you can't just give into it. You have to just kind of like skirt the line all the time. I want to press into that as a, as a personal fitness trainer, how do you navigate that? Because you do have this body positivity movement that's just like, I don't know, fat is beautiful.com is probably a website and it's something that people might say. How do you navigate that? Because you want to be sort of sensitive to people's struggles to lose weight. And even maybe their inability at some level to

lose weight, because they have a life and they have kids and not everybody can spend three hours in the gym every day and not everybody has the money to eat as well as they could. So how do you, I don't mean condemn obese people. Right. So how do you how do you I don't mean condemn obese people. I mean how do you condemn obesity as a thing. In other words this is not healthy. This is not good. Right. At the same time be loving and how have you found that. Well interestingly enough I've been kind of against the grain when it comes to fitness for a very long time. Fitness for years. OK. And so my platform in general has always been kind of about like combating the lies and the myths that we see

in the industry when it comes to diet and training anyway, specifically when it came to like women. So I think that me having that reputation, like it's like, oh, she's no nonsense. And she's going to tell you like it is, but she's always going to do it with compassion. That's kind of always been my thing. Okay.

So when I decided to look at this issue, seeing how far it's growing with the push on social media and realizing like, Hey guys, like let's wake up here. All of you that are saying that you're healthy and obese, like there have been literal studies and here they are. Let me lay them out for you where yeah, you can be young and you can be healthy and obese at the same time, but it always catches up to you. It always does study after study shows this. And it's like, we have such an urgency now

that like, I don't have time to be stopped. Like, listen, these young 20 something year old, 30 something year old women in about 20 years from now, if you don't die, then you're going to be regretting trying to now get yourself healthy after years of like doing all this stuff. So I don't care. It's're going to be regretting trying to now get yourself healthy after years of doing all this stuff. So I don't care. It's like, I have something to say,

but I'm gonna say it with as much compassion as I can. I'm gonna go ahead and rip the band-aid off and say, hey, look, don't get mad at me. Here's what the studies say. Here's what the reality is. Now let's go ahead, not just end the video there. Let's give you solutions. This is how you fix it.

Let's acknowledge that a lot of you are dealing with trauma. You need therapy, you need a dietician, you need a trainer, and if you can't do that, this is some other avenues to get that done. And I think that's the approach that I have that allows me to stay grounded in this, not go on a lambasting tour of like, you know, disparaging people just because they're overweight.

You know, that doesn't help anyone. You know? Yeah, no, you know, disparaging people just because they're overweight. You know, that doesn't, that doesn't help anyone. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I don't know. Growing up, when I heard the word obese, I had an image in my mind of what that looked like, namely like really fat. But it seems like today has the definition changed because I've met some people and they

say they're technically obese. I'm like, you don't look it. You just look kind of fat or pudgy. But you know, no, I think it's The definition hasn't changed and what do you might know that with me that yeah, it's 30 plus BMI It has to do with the BMI, but I think more people we see are more overweight Well, so obese looks less fat than it really is because we see less normal healthy weight Well, and that's the thing too because we have a huge obesity crisis, not only in the United States, but across the world, right? So now our eyes are getting affixed to seeing people that we would consider normal are actually

overweight because if you looked like years in the years past, again, nostalgia of the yesteryear, obesity wasn't necessarily a thing because people were more active, people ate healthier, people didn't eat out all the time, they weren't eating preserved foods and all this stuff. So body mass indexes were a lot more normal than they are today. When you get used to how our societies change, body sizes change, and then what we see as acceptable in the society in general changes.

So it skews your perception, right? So I think that's what's really being at play here. Awesome. Hey, let's take a break. And then when we get back, I want to actually talk more about that, about how you might counsel somebody who's obese, how we could begin to lose weight and get healthier. And I also want to talk about bodybuilding. And then we're going to take questions from our local supporters.

So there is a link in the description below. Click that. We always prioritize our local supporters. But if you've got an interesting enough question, it in the live chat and if it's sufficiently interesting Thursday we'll save it and we'll ask that as well. Try Locals all caps for a free month. Yes if you want to support us go to matfrad.com slash locals click the link in the description below and if you type in try Locals I know you just said this but in capital letters no space you get a month free and you can try it out.

If you don't like it, you can quit. Sweet. Any sinner. Is capable of being a great saint. And any saint is the realization of this power that there is in each and every one of us. For good and for evil. The good Lord would have us lay hold of what is worst in ourselves. Do not think that people who have virtue and kindness and other great talents

just came by these things naturally. They had to work out them very hard. Any sinner is capable of being a great saint, and any saint is also capable of being a great The The secret therefore of character development is the realization of this power that there is in each and every one of us, for good and for evil. The good Lord would have us lay hold of what is worst in ourselves. Do not think that people who have virtue and kindness and other great talents just came by these things naturally. They had to work at them very hard. I'm sorry. Any sinner is capable of being a great saint, and any saint is also capable of being a great saint. And any saint is also realization of this power that there is in each and every one of us. For good and for evil. The good Lord would have us lay hold of what is worst in ourselves.

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to God. I really need to start paying my guests to do the ad reads. It is really cool though, isn't it? I like it because it makes prayer, maybe this is the wrong thing to say, but it does, it makes prayer easy. Because it's very easy to make the excuse not to show up, right? Or not to have the time. Oh, I don't have the time to do the rosary. Guess what? If you've got 10, 15, 20, 25 minutes, honey, you just set it right there. My favorite one, I think her name is Anna or something. I'll let Anna do the rosary with me. Okay, we do the rosary together, okay? She's great. And she's great.

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What a guy. Check him out. Hello.com slash Fred. Sweet. All right. Obesity. Yes. Losing weight. Mm hmm. How do you lose weight? I think I know. Yeah, well, I mean, the the.

How do you sorry. It's OK. Because, you know, sometimes like people come to you and they ask you a question and it's like they don't mean it. It's like when people say to me like, how do I quit porn? And I give them some advice and they don't want that advice. We want something else that's just, is there a pill I can take? That kind of thing? Do you find that too, that it's like...

Yeah, all the time. I mean, it could be because it's hard at the end of the day because, alright, the easiest answer is... Stop eating. Yeah, eat less, move more, right? But what does that mean? And how do you do it, right? Oh, you mean you have to have discipline. Oh, you mean you have to have consistency, effort.

It means you have to sacrifice and forego certain things. It means you have to change your habits, your mindset. It means you gotta, for some of you, going for the trauma and healing that and getting to the root as to why you turn to excessive eating. For some people, when we're talking about obesity in particular, a lot of times,

you have people who are dealing with not only a host of hormonal issues, because that is a real thing for some people, but also overeating and eating disorders and disordered eating and stuff like that. So you have to get to the root of that and uncover all that. And that's the hard stuff that people just like,

okay, just give me a pill. If the pills worked, if the quick fixes worked, then we wouldn't have a fitness industry or diet industry that's a multi-billion dollar industry that gets rich off of your naivete. It gets rich off of you staying stuck. It doesn't want you to have the answers, right? So once you start to discover the answers for yourself and you learn how to do things for yourself, that's when you

become free. And when I say free, you start to not only lose weight, but you keep it off. So it's a long story, but it's the thing is, it's a hopeful story. I have a client right now. I'm actually working with two clients who, uh, what one of them started off as being very obese in the case of what science and doctors would say BMI. She just lost 100 pounds or over 100 pounds. Mind you, this is an online client that I have never personally met face to face. You know, of course we've zoomed and talked and stuff. And I give her a workout.

She goes to the gym. She trains. She follows her diet. She checks in with me every single week. She stays steadfast to what it is that she wants to do and puts her goals. We really sit down and focus on what do you want and why is it important to you? What's the why behind the reason?

And so she's been able to do that. And that's a wonderful gift of life that I can give to her. Another client of mine right now, he's down about 30 pounds and he's a very heavy guy. He's very tall, but he weighs a lot. I'm not gonna say how much he weighs, but we could have at least a good 200 to 300 pounds to lose

on his frame alone. And so again, it's just like retraining him how to approach food. He lives in the South, all this good Southern food. It's like, oh honey, listen, we got to get that together. We got to get you, you may not be able to work out, but can you walk a thousand steps a day? You know, now you're doing 3,000 steps. Fantastic. How can we add little things to change your life?

Not just here's a diet and starve yourself. That's easy. How do we change your life and give you the tools to be able to keep it off forever? And that's kind of my approach to this whole fitness thing. Just being in Guatemala, we spent a few weeks in Antigua and we realized that we were probably walking about two hours a day. Even my wife with all of her health issues, she was doing much better there because it's a very walk friendly town and we would just walk everywhere. We didn't have a day. Even my wife with all of her health issues, she was doing much better there because it's a very walk friendly town and we would just walk everywhere. We didn't have a car.

And it made me think of how little I often walk here. I walk to my car, I drive to work, I walk up the road to get a coffee, I walk back to my car, I drive home. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's the little things like that as a New Yorker or as it almost as a New Yorker, as a New Yorker, or as it almost, as a New Yorker, okay, as a New Yorker. We walk everywhere. Like I didn't even get a license until I was moving to LA. I got it like a month before I moved to LA, about that. Grace of God, because I almost failed that test

with the excessive maneuvers in my parallel parking. But when I moved to LA, it wasn't until this global, the pandemic did have some fruits, because I did realize I use my car so much. It's such a car driven city. I would go to the grocery store, which is like five minutes from my house in my car, when I could just take a cart and walk there. Right?

But you've got to feel like an idiot. The way the city is set up, and I don't know LA that well, but there's sometimes where it's like, it seems very dangerous to walk on these sidewalks. Well, there was a- People are a surprise why you would even use it. Yeah. Well, there's a song from the eighties. It's very popular. It's called Nobody Walks in LA. Okay. That's the name of the song. And it's a very catchy tune, but it's the truth. It's like, people look at you like, why are you walking? Like, whoa. But I find that like, I just, I just, I love to walk. So little things, little changing little things like where can you instead of taking the car, can you walk to the grocery store? Can

you walk to get your coffee? Can you walk to do this, that and the third, right? So it's, it's, it's the little things that count at the end. And here's an interesting study that came out sometime last year that just walking 8,000 steps a day or even closer to, if you can get up to 11,000, helps people who are obese to lose weight consistently and keep it off. Like just that little walking, right? Didn't say to run, didn't say to do hours at the gym, walking eight to 11,000 steps a day.

And that doesn't actually take too long. That's maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes, if you're a little slower of walking, less than like two miles, you know? And when you just make these things consistent, even if you're not doing it for exercise in and of itself, if you're just timing and all of our phones and our devices now have pedometers on it,

and if you look at the end of the day and say, oh, I only got 3,000 steps in, how can I get 3,500 instead? How can I get 4,000 in the next two weeks or so? Little things like that can make incredible changes in the body. That's really helpful. I was watching some fella talking about how much he works out every day, how much he meditates every day.

Maybe you've seen this dude. He was a black guy with no hair. That's all I know. Is it David Goggins? Yeah, that sounds like him. Yeah. I'm not in any way criticizing this man, but I think I might end up criticizing. Maybe I will end up criticizing him. Seems like an amazing dude. Seems like a very, um, why don't we look him up? Cause I want to make sure. David Goggins is actually has a

really inspiring story. Yeah. David G. Oh, Gigi. Iis. Let's see. Yeah, I think this this is definitely. So I'm not about to criticize him, but I just had this thought the other day. And listen, I watched like a three minute video on him. So I'm not pretending I understand all that he has to say. But the little I heard was that he meditates for two hours a day. The first thing he does, he gets up and he runs and he hits the gym. And then and all that sounds great. If you don't have a wife and children. Like how do you, how, I'm afraid that we're setting that up as this is what you ought to be doing if you're a

serious person, be serious about their health. But I'm also like, well, what if I wanted to have kids? How inconvenient would that be? I'm sorry, dad's got an hour and a half more to meditate and then I got to hit the gym because I want to be super committed. Um, feel free to push back and I don't know much about this fella. I think here's the thing with this. This is where the social media stuff goes into impact if effect because it's like the people who are the motivators are of course going to be the more extreme ends of things because you have to be at least The person that inspires someone to be like like if this is the pinnacle of what you could be doing fair enough

That's but I find it more important to say okay. Listen guys This is what I do all day. I edit videos. I sit and talk on YouTube. I write diets for people This is what I do This is how I've cultivated my life. And so my whole life is really based around what time do I wanna get up in the morning and actually do this stuff, right? And no, the majority of people don't have that luxury.

So I try to make it at least my responsibility to break down, okay, this is the extreme of it, but if you just have five minutes to sit down and meditate and pray That's five minutes that you didn't allocate to before and once you get that five minutes down If you can't ten minutes, maybe you can 15 minutes Maybe what you need to do is sit down and look at your schedule and I tell this to my clients block it off Like I I get a little extreme sometimes when I need to for myself because there will be times where I'm super disciplined

There'll be times where I'm like sitting in my bed staring at the wall, like, oh my God, what is my life? Right, so I need to get up and write. AM, five o'clock AM, I wake up. Now, this is the extreme here. I have a two hour time block where I meditate and pray. Two hours, five to seven, right? Then seven o'clock in the morning,

sometimes depends on the day I'll go to morning mass. I'd like to go to morning mass maybe like three or four times a seven, right? That's beautiful. Then seven o'clock in the morning, sometimes depends on the day I'll go to morning mass. I'd like to go to morning mass maybe like three or four times a week, right? So I'll say, if I go to the eight o'clock mass, then I make time to go ahead and get that in. But then I also have my workout, like literally like work, eat, pray, walk in the park, whatever.

I have to put it down just to get it done. And sometimes I feel like telling people, Hey, sometimes you have to get that discipline. You've got to write it out. You've got to make it a standing appointment to make it fit for your lifestyle. If you don't have two hours, you got five minutes, right? Do what you can in that time. And to be fair, that's what this fellow would say for sure. I'm sure. I'm pretty sure. I got eight kids and I got a job. He'd be like, well, what can you do? Yeah. I keep repeating this line from Jordan Peterson because I think it's excellent. He says, what's something you could do that you would do that would make your life better?

And it's that would do that I think is so critical because there's all sorts of things you could do, but you won't because you're a big fat lazy slob who's never committed to anything for longer than five days. So why don't you be realistic about what's something you could actually do and that you would do and then do that. Right, right, right. And that comes down to, again, the things that the industry doesn't talk about. That's changing behavior, that's changing patterns, that's changing habits, that's changing

mindset, right? And if you can really realize that that's half the battle, because a lot of people, you can give them a diet and they'll follow it, sure, you know? Or you can get them on a training program, they'll do it for like a week or two, but then the discipline to continue isn't there. The accountability is the other thing

for a lot of people that's missing. So a lot of people when they're first starting out, you may not need a trainer forever, but the first few months or so that you're starting out on a program where you're trying to solidify this new habit, 30, 60, 90 days or whatever, maybe for some people a little bit more, you need someone that you have to report to, and if you can't afford that,

is there a friend, is there a spouse, or someone in your circle that you can say, hey, do you mind if I send you my weight every Friday or every other Friday, or if I report into you, like using your resources in that way is so helpful, but a lot of people need a community. The greatest exercise, I don't know what you think about this, but I had a great community in North Atlanta where I used to live. It was a CrossFit gym and it was the best. And it was the best

because the people were the best. Dawson CrossFit, if anyone is interested. Absolutely just amazing. It's like, CrossFit gyms and coffee shops are similar in that they are either run by devout evangelical Christians or raging leftists. You notice that about coffee shops? It's rarely, you know, I just loved it so much because you would get there, it was this communal, you would do this thing together. But yeah, I think that we must have the raging leftists in the one now. So, but just just a little child. But yeah, I think that CrossFit is good. I mean, there's, I think that CrossFit is not necessarily for everyone, because you have to have a certain level of technique and know how to perform these really...

Olympic lifts. Olympic lifts, yeah. Unless you've got a coach that's really good about working with you and helping you not do things that you don't know how to do yet. Right, and you're moving through with functional speed and all this other stuff, so it really good about working with you and helping you not do things that you don't know how to do yet. Right. And you're moving through with like functional speed and all this other stuff. So it's really can be very tricky if you have injuries and stuff like that.

But for those who are used to working out that need that extra, I used to go to a box that was like over by me and it was a lot of fun. It was great, you know? But I think that, you know, it's, it's, there was a point where like CrossFit was like the rage and I was like, oh yeah, you CrossFit. Like, and I'm not really one to say that like one form of exercise is the end all be all. It's like whatever gravitates to you,

like with the exception of yoga people don't do yoga anymore. Okay, stop it. But anyway, that was a hard one for me. It's like giving up the yoga. Tell me, tell me about that. Well, you know, that's what happens when you get into these Catholic circles

and you start questioning things, right? Then you start hearing, wait, the Catholic church says, what about like new age spirituality and stuff? And then you're realizing like all this yoga, which is fantastic for the body, right? It's great, feels great. But for me, it came down to realizing that it's like an appropriation

of somebody else's religion and culture, right? It's like your your your the positions and some of the things that you're doing are Literally calling upon their their gods. I interviewed a yoga teacher I was gonna bring that up Could you put that in the description for people who want to watch it cuz I like a three-hour conversation with this fella Who actually yeah lived in Buddhist temples. Yeah, he made a really great point. And it was what you just said. It's not the positions, it's when you name the positions that you call on the spirits.

So then what would your advice be, or what did you do to do something similar? I mean, if people are finding a lot of help through yoga, what are they to do? Nothing? Right, well, that's- And then I think people who are ignorant about yoga and how much it helps people would just say, well, why not just go for a walk?

You're like, that guy's never been helped by yoga, clearly. Well, I mean, it's a double fold thing because as someone who is a facilitator of exercise, I can literally create anything, right? So this is where, for me, this step away from yoga has been something within the last, almost year now, I guess. I don't know, the last time I went to a yoga class. And that was hard because I really love yoga with this one particular good friend and teacher of mine in LA.

But I said to myself, well, let me start stretching. I know how to stretch. I know flexibility. I know how to do this stuff without necessarily looking at a specific position and saying that, oh, this is like, you know, when we're calling upon the God Shiva or whatever, you know, it's like, can we stretch without doing that? Sure.

Okay, let's do that. It's like they don't own the NASA's, the, the, the motion, the movement of the body. Right. And it's like, I talk about this with modesty enough that maybe this is like a, a, another conversation we get into. Whereas like we are so like, especially in Christian culture, we are so taken with whatever is of God's giving it right over to the devil, right? It's like, oh, it's yoga.

That's a position in yoga and you can't do it anymore because it's owned by the Hindus. It's like, no, it's not. Even if in your cupboard you are reaching for a can of beans and you accidentally, you will be possessed by Satan. It's like, yeah, it's like, no, that's not how it works. accidentally, you will be possessed by Satan. Yeah, it's like, no, that's not how it works. You're giving the body over to Satan and that's

not how it works, right? That's theology of the body right there, giving you everything over to God, the wrinkling of the, he talks about the paper, like Christopher West, you know, taking sin and crumbling it up, right? Or cumbers the nature. But anyhow, like, so for me, it's like, okay, so I know how to stretch. I know how to instruct with stretching without necessarily turning it over to, to yoga in itself. So on my end, I'm trying to create content now that will go into that. That would be so helpful for people. I don't know this. What's the difference between Pilates and yoga? What is Pilates? I hear people say this.

So yoga in itself is a, is a, well, I'm going to name it what it is. It's a Hindu practice of stretching. But Pilates was a, is a technique which was created by Joseph Pilates, which I mean he was more into body conditioning, gymnastics and stuff. And that became very popular with dancers. And it's all about more core strength and conditioning. It has nothing to do with spirituality. It has nothing to do with anybody's religion or co-opting that. It's all about strengthening the body through, through motion and through core strength more specifically. And then I mean, of course there's like different parts of Pilates that starts on the floorwork that it goes on different apparatus and stuff like that. So it's, it's actually, I like

Pilates a lot. If not necessarily for stretching, but definitely for strengthening. That would be so helpful if you came up with something like that for Catholics who are like, all right, well, I've been really helped by this. What's the alternative? See now here's, this is the funny part. Are you ready for this? So what did I tell you guys? I did in the beginning of all this, I just got on the floor and I just prayed to God, you know, John 15 Lord live in me. I'm living in you. I need you to speak to me. Whatever you want me to tell your people, just give it to me. Right. Catholic channel starts taking off and I'm living in you, I need you to speak to me. Whatever it is you want me to tell your people, just give it to me, right? Catholic channel starts taking off and I'm like,

I was talking about this though, God, what are we gonna? But here we are now where I start to realize, you're a funny man. You punk my life like crazy because now here's the idea, who out there is creating cardio rosaries, right? For Catholics to do, right? So for calisthenics to do right. So, and then here's the opportunity. I started to think to myself recently, like, okay,

how can I facilitate doing more fitness based things that are exercise based stretching? That's for people who want to release themselves of yoga and all that other stuff. Oh, here's a great alternative and let's go ahead and get down and get it. What's gonna be interesting is to see whether or not these two channels merge

or where do you put a video like that? Like does that go in your exercise channel? Well listen, they already know we're on the exercise channel. I was like, look guys, I can't ever get rid of that other channel because there's so much history of my entire life because I started it when I moved to Los Angeles and I, right before I started doing competing, I have videos of me,

if you go back and watch my earliest videos, it's like skinny little Roxy when she was still on the precipice of quitting ballet and going more into fitness. I was like super tiny, I had a big head. And so I watched these videos, I'm like whoa, mind blowing. So I can't get rid of it, because so much of my history is there,

and there's so many people that have been following me all these years. It's like, we're going back about 10, 11, 12 years now, right? So I'm just honest on my channel. I'm like, hey guys, look, you guys have seen me through all phases of my life and Roxy 3.0, 4.0, this is like five now, listen.

Crisis in my life in a major way, I never talked about this ever. I never talked about religion. For me, religion was always over here, and everything else was over here, but I cannot hold in anymore that all of these worlds are colliding, and I'm bringing this here.

You don't have to believe what I believe. I'm not trying to evangelize to you, but if this changes your life, fantastic. But we're bringing God into this, we're bringing spirituality into this, and this is what it is. So they already know, they already know. Some of them are probably watching it right now, this right now, because I shared this on that channel, this interview.

So yeah. That's awesome. So how did you get into bodybuilding? When did that cross your mind that, hey, I want to do that? First of all, what is bodybuilding? And how did you decide to get into it? Yeah, see, I'm redefining bodybuilding in a way, but bodybuilding would be the spectator sport of conditioning the body and trying to get your body to like this absolute apex of perfection when it comes to the balance of muscularity, symmetry and leanness. And then to step on a stage and to ask a panel of judges to judge you against everyone else to see who would be the clear winner.

It's great vanity. I love it, right? It's so ego driven, but it doesn't have to be that way. I remember a seminarian telling me that he was watching this bodybuilding contest and he was just judging. This is in his own words. I was just sitting there just slinging judgments at these people. And then the guy who once said, I want to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, you know, and then the seminary was like, shame

on me. So yeah, it doesn't have to be that. There's a lot of bodybuilders who are actually very much spiritually connected. A lot of conservatives as well, you know, like, so it's a very surprising world in many ways. And it doesn't have to be wrapped up in lust. I think that like just the way our culture is and the way that fitness has been going has been getting hypersexual, of course, with social media. And there can be the outward appearance because of the fact that you're stepping on a stage,

you have very little clothes on, you're showing off your body, that can be seen as lustfulness. And that's what a lot of people who have found my channel by way of the Catholic, you know, streams, they're like, they come to my other channel and the first video they see is me in a bikini like posing on bodies like, Oh, you're so modest. Oh Lord, what is going on? Excuse me. But, um, I'm just kind of like, well,

that's not what it is at all, right? It's not, it's not, it's not hooked up in that. And I don't see the human body. So when you talk about bodybuilding to me, with all of the studying that I've done of the body, I just see it as like I hate the word perfecting but just like taking this creation and how can we like bring it to the absolute apex of what it can be for us individually and genetically right. And so I don't wrap it all up in sin and lust. It's just show we were born naked, right? So how can you, how can you really take this creation and just make it amazingly healthy, fast, strong, you know?

But I mean, at the condition you were in, should any woman ever be in that condition? I mean, I've heard that women can exercise and get into such a shape that they stop menstruating. That doesn't sound healthy. Yeah, no, it absolutely should. So then is that the peak of female? Yeah, it's not. And that's why, that's why me rebranding my channel as redefining bodybuilding has been important because the stage is a fleeting thing. No one can hold that condition, men or women.

When you're on that stage, it's only for a short amount of time that you can actually hold that peak conditioning before it just goes all downhill from there, right? You train for weeks and months and years to reach this one 10-second, 10-minute block of time in your life where you'll look like that and then it's over. So for women, it's not healthy, it's not natural at all

because once our body fat starts to go down to a certain level, you stop menstruating, your hormones get thrown off, like all things, really bad things can happen and have happened to plenty of women in the sport. So it's not something that should be done all the time. I mean, if you decide to compete, you really have to think about the ramifications of what you're doing to your body, how you're doing it, whether

you have the genetic capacity. Because just like there are basketball players, football players, musicians, great minds who are gifted to be able to do those things. Not everyone can sit at a piano and be like, you know, Beethoven, right? But it's the same thing with with bodybuilding. Not everyone can just because you go to a gym and work out, doesn't mean that you will ever be able to step on an Olympia stage or a pro level stage. That's genetics at work. Now, of course we know there's some steroids in there for some people, but a lot of people- Mason Hickman Does testing catch all of that? Tess Witt Testing what? Ain't no testing.

Mason Hickman There's no testing in bodybuilding. Tess Witt Not, okay. There's testing in the natural organizations, right? But the truth of the matter is the biggest. There's testing in the natural organizations, right? But the truth of the matter is the biggest organization in the world is the IFBB, which is my federation, and their amateur level is the NPC. And the reason why they're so big is because back in the day when bodybuilding started to become a thing, okay, Eugene Sandow is the father of modern bodybuilding. And the International Federation of Bodybuilding was, he, like, one of his first shows was like,

that was like the federation that they created, right? And so that federation grew and became popular because it was like the only thing that was out there. And then when the media started coming in with, you had the Wheaters with all the magazines, Muscle and Fitness, Muscle and Fitness, Her Shape, all of these, you know, Flex. The only way back in the magazines, Muscle and Fitness, Muscle and Fitness, Her Shape, all of these, you know, Flex. The only way back in the day, this is before social media,

that you can get into the media was through the IFBB. The only way to get to the Olympia stage is through the IFBB, and all of the greats came from the IFBB. So this is not a tested organization, though. They tried to do it at some point when they wanted to go through the Olympics. That obviously failed miserably. And that's why bodybuilding has never made it to the Olympic level.

They tried to get it in, but it couldn't get it with all the, yeah. The test. This is all news to me. This is probably like secondhand. You know this stuff in and out, but I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. Totally. So in that respect, there is no testing because if they tried to test people in that

specific organization everybody would fail that's not what winning shows so my dichotomy as a professional is like okay I don't want to do all that stuff I don't I didn't get into bodybuilding for the drugs how did I get into this sport so you asked that question so I used to watch television as it's gonna date me so when I used to watch TV and back in the day Okay Around like the Saturday morning cartoons would go off They would show bodybuilding on TV like I was like maybe I don't know maybe five or so four or five

Maybe younger and then I'm seeing like I'm watching I don't know loony tunes and all of a sudden you start seeing these people with these muscles and I was just like wow it's so crazy and then they were women and I was like they all look like the cartoon characters of the day He-Man, She-Ra, you know the Thundercats and of course you know I was watching that you know Wonder Woman like I was like wow they look like superheroes I want to look like that so as I started getting older, I started to watch, I found out that there were different divisions. So they had the fitness division,

so the girls were all doing the tumbling and the routines and me and Dancer, I'm like, I could do that. I could so do that. And that's how I kinda got into it, just always stuck. I would stay up really late at night and work up super early in the morning and watch these fitness shows on ESPN. They were working out on the beach,

I was like, I wanna do that. So fitness has always been that undercurrent in my life. So when I got into it, it was just natural. It was just something that I felt like I was called to do, quote unquote. And so that's how I got into it. And so I never got into it because I wanted to be a mass monster on all these drugs

and doing all these steroids and all these things. And when I was faced with, okay, you made it to the Olympia, all right, and it's probably your lucky shot because of the fact that your division was new and they were looking for a softer look. They wanted the girls to look more natural. So that's great. You had a great shot. But now this is the direction it's going. Mass monsters, more size, more dryness, more conditioning. You got to take this drug, this drug, this drug. And I was like, yeah, okay, I'm out. So that's why I stepped away. But like, what kind of studies have been done on the consequences of these drugs? Not very many. I think I recently saw something that I had saved to bookmark that was kind of in line with this, like the effects of steroids on professional bodybuilders.

But we are seeing again, just like we talked about how society is reaping, you know, you reap what you sow. Well, honey, it's reaping right now because the number of bodybuilders that have died in the last year, we just lost two major bodybuilders, particularly Mr. Olympia himself. Why is his name, Sean Rodin, that's crazy. Sean Rodin, he's one of my favorites, died recently. Had a heart attack, massive heart attack, dead.

40 something years old. Wow. Okay, another body, body builder died. Cedric McMillan, that one brought a tear to my eye because Cedric has always been a really fantastic person. These are people I cross paths with as a professional. Man, he's jacked. Yeah. Yeah. That's nuts. You know, so we ha there's so many more. There's so many more. And the reason given heart attacks, a lot of them heart attacks. Some do you think is because of

steroids? Well, when you think about a guy who carries around 300 pounds on a daily basis, like that's not normal for anyone. When you see the guys that are out there right now, three, three fifty, like huge, that's

not normal for the heart. You know, and the I find it very unattractive. Yeah. I'm not very unattractive. Yeah. I'm not saying I'm right to. It's just personally, subjectively, I find it just very off putting. Like I'm seeing somebody with a body deformity.

Yeah. And it's terrible. It's getting worse. You know, it's ruining the sport. Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about this a lot. There's a new division called Classic Bodybuilding, which hearkens back to Arnold's day and what the classic bodybuilders of that time look like. And that's doing a lot better

than the mass monsters are right now. I mean, Mr. Olympia will always be there. People come to see that, but it's not healthy. When you've got these bodybuilders over the last couple of years, every time you look around, somebody, 40 something year old bodybuilder dropping dead, that's not normal. And so I don't know what's happening with the industry or if anyone's really doing or

saying anything about it. It's just one of those things. It's just, I don't know if there's ever going to be a solution. What was your thoughts on, is it the liver king when that all broke? I never followed him before, but in looking at his pictures, I'm like, yeah, he looks like he's like takes like trend for breakfast. Are you kidding me? Like he's up there popping himself every day with some kind of hard like drugs.

I mean, he looked fantastic. Jacked up. Yeah. When I look at him, that's not natural. Come on. He looks better to me than that Mr. Olympia. Like that looks. See that's funny.

That's somebody who's never done steroids, has never really been into even exercise alone. Bodybuilding, I guess, for people like me, it's hard to look at someone and go, OK, that guy's on steroids. But you can you can do that. Derek from more plates, more dates, the guy who broke that story was so adamant about breaking the liver king story because he was like really upset. He was like that. Mm hmm.

It really bugs him that people pretend people get an audience and then pretend they're natural because he thinks it's unhealthy for society to think that certain physics are natural when they're clearly not. And this fella claims not to use steroids, right? Whoever King did. No, not him. More more plates, more dates. He used to look at the size of him. Yeah, that picture is probably from when he was on gear. Yeah, he doesn't use your shoulders.

That's that's definitely like. And at some point, did he decide he doesn't use gear anymore? I think he's on TRT and that's it. What is that like a hormone replacement therapy, which is not that it's different when you're using these exogenous hormones to balance yourself out, to get yourself to like where peak conditioning would be at your peak. You know, when you're like a virile, like 25 year old guy

and your hormones are all great and fantastic, then you're like 40 something, and it's like all of a sudden you have like this stomach that won't go away, a lot of that's the increase of estrogen in the body for men, the decrease of testosterone. And so balancing that out is really important. Same thing for women, you know, I'm terrified to take testosterone.

Correct me if I'm wrong. Let me just really quickly say why, cause that's a weird thing just to throw out there and not, I know men take testosterone, right? Yeah. Am I right in thinking that to take testosterone would likely result in a stronger libido? It does. I do not want that. Oh, okay.

I want the opposite of that. Well, your testosterone levels are probably normal, but for some guys who struggle, you know. That's why it's considered natural, right? Because you're only allowed to take as much test as would bring you up to what is considered like a healthy level. Right, exactly. Okay, yeah, that's what I thought.

So you can take tests, you can be on TRT and it be considered natural because you're not like, you're not pinning test up to above a natural level. Right, exactly. So that's really what one of the biggest differences are. And I think that if you're doing it for optimal health, then I mean, I think that you'd have to ask yourself ethically if that's something that you want that you would want to do. You know, I think for a lot of people, it alleviates the the the natural process of aging because that's nothing but the body slowing down and you know, decaying into what

we're all going to be, which is dead at some point, you know? But whether you're Mr. Olympia or right. Absolutely. Mr. Potato Cat, Couch Potato. Absolutely. It's coming for all of us. Yeah. Would you mind if we hit up some questions here?

I haven't read these questions ahead of time, so I can't vouch for them, but they just came through here. Let's see. This comes from our local supporter. Mitchell Molls says, my sister competes professionally in bikinis. My family is super worried about her soul because it's perceived as immodest. Can you glorify God through bikini slash fitness competitions? I mean, we've been talking about that. But is there anything else you want to say?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so bikini has always been kind of the bane of the existence of all of us in the bodybuilding world. Cause we just be like, what are they even looking for? Like it's all about the butt. Like it really is, you turn around, that's the show. Like turn around. Like just turn around. Yeah, it's like turn around, girls, walk to the back, let's go. You know, so that's the moral dilemma

that I was talking about, right? That's the division. I was like, okay, if I'm gonna be natural, that's where I probably fall, but I don't really feel like that's what I want to do. Because opposing is very suggestive. It's very, you know, it's very much about playing the carnality of the woman's body in her sensuality. So will it, will it damn her soul? That's a whole different thing.

But I mean, it is. What about in danger? What about that? It could be because it could. Because to be a bikini pro means that you have to put yourself out there. Now, this is the difference between back in the day and today's time. because to be a bikini pro means that you have to put yourself out there. Now this is the difference between back in the day and today's time. You don't have to worry about being in anybody's federation. You don't have to compete to be a fitness model,

fitness star or whatever. You can just go on your social media and garner a following and an audience and boom, now you have sponsors and all that stuff, right? But in order to do that, you have to have the popularity. What works, particularly for women, being half naked, putting your butt in the camera, doing all this kind of thing, too much cleavage,

that's what gets the eyeballs. That's what gains the following. So you go into this pattern of, if I wanna be successful, I gotta do what everybody else is doing, this is what everybody else is doing. So now it becomes that cycle, right? So it's really hard to separate the two.

And it doesn't matter what division you're in. You can be a bodybuilder, like of the biggest proportions. You know, I have some friends who are top level female bodybuilders. I'm talking about the big, big girls. And I love them to death, but some of their stuff is very sexual, you know, what they put out there because that's the expectation.

So unless she sees it like that is she's not going to pull out of it. She has to have that awakening for herself. Unfortunately, Heidi says being black Catholic and a female and being active on social media with great content, there has to be a lot of people pressuring you to completely represent each of those categories. Spiritually, how do you maintain your sense of self? And that's a great question. And authenticity when different camps are fighting over you. Amen.

That's a great question, actually. And I've always been the type of person to beat to my own drum. And I think that is the one thing that like is my saving grace. I never want to do what everybody else is doing. I never wanted to be about trends. I was going to be about being against the grain and standing for what I believe in what my thought process is. So I think that helps a lot because for me, you can tell me, well, you need to talk about this. And I've had people say that to me. Remember, I said that earlier, is like people say, yo, you have to stand up for black people and do this. And then I'm like, no, I don't because that's not me.

And so I just, I pray a lot. And at the end of the day, I just decide, I decide what's going to be on my channel. And that's it. Yeah, I can't come on. Yeah, I can't come on my channel. Tell me what to talk about. Okay. That's what we not going to do today.

So that's it. All right. That's good. Suzuki says, hi, Matt, don't know if she's talked about this, but in her experience with evangelization to youth, has she undertaken different methods of evangelization to people of different communities, race, racial, ethnic, cultural? No, honestly, because this has this was not my plan or idea. This was God's idea. I just put the videos out and then next thing you know, I'm on points with a client is in Ohio, okay. So I haven't really gotten to that point yet.

But I think that I'm at that point in my own life where things surrounding like marriage, family, relationships, dating, children, like society, like that's what really inspires me. So I speak to that and I feel like within, I just like to connect other Catholics that are looking for that community as well. And I think that's what works well with my young adult ministry or what I do within my church. So I haven't really thought beyond that because it just really has been coming to me as of recent. So this is probably slightly different, but I think sometimes we

Catholics find a particular devotion that really strikes us. That means a lot to us or a particular way of praying that's really helped us. And then we kind of make that unintentionally, the litmus test of what it means to look like a good Catholic. And so we come up with this like mold that worked for us. And then we just try to put that on people as opposed to giving them the freedom to assess these different devotions and gravitating to what form of prayer that they'd like to. I obviously clearly recognize that there are boundaries to that, but I think that's something that Catholics sometimes fall into. Like your prayer life, your life has to look like this if you want to be a good Catholic. Right, and I mean, I think that's what makes my, and this is what I've been told

and what's been shared with me, that's what makes my presence very refreshing is that, and I will say for myself, it's like when I was coming back into, okay, I need to have more Catholic influence in my life and people to follow and look for. Yeah, I'm not going to sit here and say that I didn't say, look up, okay, black Catholics and see what would come up.

And I didn't see anything or anyone that necessarily looked like me. I found some really great women. But to me, it was always like these two camps. I feel like there's like the young, like ingenue, like fresh face, like, oh my gosh, I love life and I'm so young and life is, and that's like that one. And then there's like, oh, I'm married, I got like my five to 10 Catholic kids and my wonderful husband.

And I'm like, I'm looking at both these camps like, yo, I missed that boat, you know, what am I gonna do here, ladies? So I think that me, and then just this presentation, let me, who comes on your show with a loud shirt like this? You know, like, all this energy. And I like to say I'm the prodigal daughter in so many ways, and I'm that in between

that it's like, okay, I'm the one that you're, these are the people that like may come into their faith that everybody's looking at, like, you don't fit in here, are you even Catholic? Like, you don't wanna question your like, you don't fit in here. Are you even Catholic? Like, you don't want to question your devotion because you don't fit that box. Yeah. So I think that's what my appeal is, is because I don't fit the box quite there yet. And I think that's like to go back to YouTube advice, to be yourself is so key just to actually be yourself, to not try to cater to a particular audience.

And it ends up being helpful because it turns out to actually be a lot of people who do fit that mold. So you might think, well, this is just me being kind of unique and weird and shenanigan-y. But then there's people who are like, I feel exactly like that and I couldn't, you know. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a place for everyone and everyone deserves a voice.

And I mean, the word representation is a big thing in our culture today. And you know, just feeling like, wow, there's somebody that I can relate to. Now let's not excuse these other, the other two types that I talked about are not important because they are, right? And everyone might move through some kind of phase.

I mean, there was a point where I was there, where I was like the young, like, oh my gosh, I feel so great, I think I'm discerning being a nun or a wife, like that was really a thing. Or I'm discerning between being a nun or a ballerina. That was me, right? So you have that. That's pretty good.

And then you have, later on, I aspire to be the woman who has the wonderful Catholic husband, beautiful Catholic children who are living this life, but I'm not there yet. And so it's like, all right, guys, here's how I'm figuring this out. And I'm past there yet, you know? And so it's like, all right guys, here's how I'm figuring this out. And I'm past 20 something, so like, this is really real. You know, let's get down and figure this out together.

So, yeah. Do me a favor, tell me if any more questions come in on the live chat. So I think we have one more question here. I'm just pulling it up on locals on my phone because my computer did something weird. No, not really. There's a couple of questions, but they're just re-asking things we already talked about. So go back and watch the whole episode. That's the answer to your question.

All right. Where was that? We just had one more and I wanted to get at it. Get at it. Get at it. But now I can't. Oh, there it is. All right. Let's see. Um, this comes from Gabriel. He says, are there any saints that you feel a special devotion to? How do you incorporate the saints into your prayer? Interesting. That's a great question to tell you the truth. Like I just, I've asked myself this question a number of times and I, I, I have alluded

to this over and over about the blessed mother and he's not necessarily a saint she's like the greatest woman. It's right exactly but I have this particular draw to Our Lady of Guadalupe actually I don't know what it is about her specifically but I just like this the medal that I have here was given to me for Christmas and this is Our Lady of Guadalupe yeah right and so I just have this given to me for Christmas, and this is Our Lady of Guadalupe. And so I just have this draw to her. The Blessed Mother to me is just the most amazing form, I mean, just example of femininity and surrender. And so when I think about who would I want to emulate most and who do I trust most, it just always comes back to her. And I've looked at other saints, there are really great saints out there,

but it's just like, you know, even my own saint, my confirmation saint is Saint Cecilia, right? Because she's just a patron saint of musicians. And to me, that was like an artist and a dancer. So that was it, but my draw is still to our lady of Guadalupe. And I have not, I live on the West Coast and I have not been to Mexico City yet. Maybe I can go there for my honeymoon.

Hi hubby, Where are you? Reach out, let us know. So anyway. Yeah. Yeah, I love our lady, Guadalupe. There's something very beautiful about that image. Yeah. Just you want to keep looking at it. It doesn't feel like it gets old. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, we've we've got your link to your YouTube channel in the description. And I said we need to hit at least 10,000 subscribers on your channel by the end of the week. So if you're watching right now, click that link, subscribe to Rocky's channel, check out the good

stuff that she's she's she's got up there. And what's what's next? I mean, you've got these fitness things. Is that the next thing you're working on? Well, you know what? I'm this rosaries. I have such a calling on my heart and what it is, but I really would love to get into like motivational speaking keynotes Oh my gosh, you'd be terrific at that. Yeah, like I really want to be able to Just touch the lives of people beyond just the YouTube channels, you know and I love the stage and that's the thing about life right is that When I was five years old, I knew that my calling, my calling,

is to inspire others to greatness. Now I said that at five. I don't know how that came to be, but I just knew that was what I was supposed to be doing. So all the things that I've been doing has been chasing that, like, okay, this is why I did it. Dancing, oh, that inspires people. Acting, that inspires people.

But now that I'm here all these years later even about how I ended up being a Catholic right because that's a whole story in of itself, but like It all is leading to this this thing in me. That's like, okay, that was preparation You got the stage presence. You got the personality you have the inspires story. You have the talent now Let's put this together for God and push this forward. So for me, I feel like I really have this calling to do retreats, really to be on stage and talk to people across the country. That's what I'd love to do.

You absolutely have that calling. But what it's worth, you definitely do. You're amazing at it. So if people are watching right now and maybe they want to book you to speak at a retreat, do you have a website that they can go want to book you to speak at a retreat, do you have a website that they can go to to contact you? Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

My website, which I'm still working on, I had to rebrand it because I wasn't using my named website, roxybeckles.com. However, the best way to contact me is roxy, R-O-X-I-E, at roxybeckles.com, R-O-X-I-E, B-E-C-K-L-E-S.com. Are you afraid of getting an avalanche of emails? No, send them all in. Can we put that in the description then? Obviously, well, I should, whoever is seeing this,

wait, well, hold on. Okay, don't put it. No, no, no, you can do this. Wait, wait, I just gotta say this real quick. So whoever is seeing this video right now, you're like, I emailed you and you didn't email me back in the last like week or so. I've been so busy, but you can do it now, I'm good.

Cause I had to just prep my mind for this moment I was just so so anyway people probably like side-eye and like she don't answer her email I'll get back to you today actually but Roxy Beckel's at rocks Roxy at rocks Yeah, we'll put it in the description if you do that because that way we'll get the spelling Why people can check it out? Yeah, so I would say that nothing oh Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I got you. Because I'm sure there's so many people who would benefit. Cool. Yeah, so I would love that. Nothing. Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah. Right, well, thank you so much for coming all this way from Los Angeles. Amen. So LA, huh? Sticking with that? No, no, no. We're not sticking with LA.

We're just there because it's warm. I don't have a husband yet. And if he said we're leaving, I'm gone. Let's warm. I, you know, I don't have a husband yet. And if he said we're leaving, I'm gone. Let's go. So that's I'm not married to LA. My family's back East LA is just, it's just a holding point for right now. Are they still in Brooklyn? Yeah. Do you, do they like it? Yeah. I mean, my family is like born and raised. Has it changed much after the lockdowns? Cause I'm afraid to go there. Cause I just, I have a feeling that everyone's probably still in masks. I mean, yeah, people still wear masks.

Masks don't bother me as much as people who insist on still wearing the mask outside with it under their nose. That really bothers me. Cause I'm like, either commit or take it off. Yeah, no, I mean, as more as- I saw somebody still wearing a mask alone in their car the other day. Yeah. And I thought about running them off the road. No, it's not very charitable. Come on, they're saying to hell.

No, I mean, I can imagine people are still masking because they still mask in L.A. You know, New York is New York is not the same New York that I grew up with. And that's because New York is an immigrant city. It was built on the backs of immigrants, right? And you had people coming all through Ellis Island. You had all these people from like the old country, you know, the mother countries. And they brought their customs.

They brought their cultures with them. And these are the things that everyone loves about New York. You go to this section. It's, you know, Caribbean, West Indian. You go to this section. It's all like Chinatown, you know, little Italy. You go to this section, it's all like, Chinatown, Little Italy, you got the Poles over here, you got the people over here. So you have this cultural experience.

I mean, for me growing up in New York, it was such a melting pot. Like I experienced everything. Like, honey, I could get down on some Irish soda bread and some corned beef and cabbage and as much as I could get down on the cannolis and everything else, you know? So it's like, and the roti,

I'm messing with the roti from the Caribbean. So it's like, I've had all these things, that's like these memories of the city that was so mixed. And you go there today and it's gone. Why, how? These people, the older generation, they die. The children, they move out, they sell their homes, their apartments and all that stuff, they move.

You have all of these corporations coming in and buying buildings and property. You have all the wealthy coming in, pushing out all of the poor people. So now you have the city. You push out the cultures. You push out the culture. What you came there for, you got rid of. And now you want to sit around and complain about everything being so expensive. You did that, you know. So.

Old Thursday is a critic of capitalism, aren't you? So this is where you step in. Yeah, good. All right. Well, God bless. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thank, good. All right, well, God bless. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.