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

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Why Doing Dangerous Things Is Good for the Soul"

Pints With Aquinas Episode 555 | Host: Matt Fradd | Guest: John Henry Spann
Date: December 3, 2025

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Overview

In this engaging episode of Pints With Aquinas, Matt Fradd welcomes back John Henry Spann for a lively, honest, and frequently hilarious conversation about the value of men doing "dangerous things" for their souls, the importance of authentic male community, and why modern retreats often miss the mark. Together, they explore Catholic masculinity, the formative power of adventure, and the story behind the newly launched Fraternity of St. Hubert: a spiritual brotherhood combining hunting, fraternity, and faith.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Launching the Fraternity of St. Hubert

• What it is:

  • Not just a hunting club, but a brotherhood with real retreats involving adventure, hunting, and daily Mass ([04:11]–[06:38]).

• The spark:

  • The idea blossomed after Matt encouraged John Henry during an African safari to "just do it" and not be afraid of logistical work.
  • "But you were the one who just said, no, this is really good and you need to do this." – John Henry Spann ([04:28])

• Retreat format:

  • No endless talks or themed workshops; just Mass, confession, and "doing real things with good men."
  • "It's primarily like a brotherhood where we have some retreats that involve killing animals." – John Henry Spann ([05:14])

• Website:

  • fraternityofsthubert.com where men can join, see upcoming hunts, and sign up for updates ([06:37], [11:39], [106:44]).

2. Why Dangerous Things Matter for Men

• Disenchantment & Modern Life:

  • Modern comfort and removal from the natural world dull men's souls.
  • "We're so distracted, and we're so not dependent on the natural world like we ought to be." – John Henry Spann ([09:45])

• Masculinity’s Lost Outlets:

  • Boys grow up slaying imaginary dragons but lose healthy outlets as adults.
  • "A man slays dragons and protects princesses...and then we get older…we don’t have outlets for that." ([13:49])

• The Role of Risk:

  • Doing things that are “dangerous” (adventure, hunting, real risks) can awaken men to virtue and meaning.
  • "Probably every single man listening just about has that desire to do something that is dangerous." ([14:59])

• Masculinity & Virtue:

  • Men should strive not just to be "nice," but dangerous in a good way.
  • "If you had the option of someone saying Matt Fradd is a really nice guy or Matt Fradd is dangerous in a good way, you go with that." – John Henry Spann ([15:02])

3. Spiritual & Philosophical Themes

• Disenchantment & Supernatural Reality:

  • Modern society forgets spiritual realities because of our sanitized, manufactured environment.
  • "We're so removed from real things that it's harder to realize how enchanted...the world is with the supernatural." ([09:45])

• Brotherhood as Spiritual Formation:

  • The retreats naturally filter for men serious about their faith (because they're willing to pay extra for a priest, Mass, etc).
  • "It was just real. I feel like we've been really disenchanted with the world because we're so removed from it." – John Henry Spann ([09:44])

• Saint Hubert’s Story:

  • His legend as a hunter converted by a vision of Christ (the stag with a crucifix) becomes a symbol for men seeking meaning through adventure that leads to Christ, not away from Him. ([32:54])

4. Addressing Concerns over Hunting

• Defense of Ethical Hunting:

  • Spann addresses critics directly, unapologetically saying:
    "First of all, I want to say it is fun. It's super fun. I love it. I like sneaking through the grass...and then shooting it and it dying. That is fun." ([16:54])

• Conservation in Africa:

  • Explains how paid hunts fund conservation and give value to animals in the ecosystem, countering emotional objections.
    "It's really good for the wildebeest population for you to go over to Africa and shoot a wildebeest; it's not good for that particular one, but it's good in general." ([17:59]–[21:53])

• North American Conservation Model:

  • The Pittman Robertson Act and ethical hunting in the USA: making animals "worth preserving" through hunting regulation and investment ([20:31]–[21:53])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On community:

  • "We've got a WhatsApp group, and we are back and forth all the time. People are posting baby announcements in there and all of that stuff because that's what we want, right? That's what we want, is community." – John Henry Spann ([22:19])

• On the hunger for real retreats:

  • "It was sold out with a wait list... There's a real hunger for it." – Matt Fradd ([07:00])

• The masculinity challenge:

  • "Nice guys are nice. But if you had the option of someone saying Matt Fradd is a really nice guy or Matt Fradd is dangerous in a good way, you go with that whenever." – John Henry Spann ([15:02])

• On fatherhood and legacy:

  • "My primary vocation is not marriage. My primary vocation is salvation, followed immediately by my wife's salvation." – John Henry Spann ([37:33])

• On confronting "nice guy" Christianity:

  • "Our church feminizes people. So be nice. Just be nice and be friendly and that's great... But if you had the option... dangerous in a good way. You go with that whenever." ([15:02])

• Legendary banter:

  • On hunting mishaps and lessons, the pair laugh about hunts gone sideways, moments of humility, and initiation into traditions, including a son's “apple-sized” bite from a fresh deer heart ([59:41]).

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Important Timestamps and Segments

• [04:11] — What is the Fraternity of St. Hubert?
• [06:37] — Where to join/learn more
• [09:45] — Disenchantment with the modern world; supernatural realities
• [13:49] — Outlets for masculinity
• [16:54] — Hunting and Ethics
• [20:31] — Conservation: Africa & America
• [32:54] — Story of St. Hubert
• [35:20] — Namibia Hunt Giveaway announcement
• [42:02] — Living off-grid, raising kids with real-world tasks
• [53:03] — Male intimacy and rejecting “bootstrap” myths
• [83:31] — Blessing children and instilling identity
• [106:44] — How to sign up for the Fraternity and what you get

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Q&A and Advice Highlights

• On moving off-grid with a family ([42:02]):

  • Start small: “Chickens are gateway animals. Do the chickens and you'll see it's not that hard.”
  • Get children involved in real responsibilities.

• On fatherhood vs. hobbies ([48:16]):

  • “Almost all of your hobbies are way more fun if your kids are involved... now I just desperately want him to be there.”

• Tips for beginning hunters ([50:42]):

  • Just do it—even if you’re bad at first.
  • Go with someone who knows what they're doing and be open to learning.

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Tone & Style

The episode is warm, honest, unfiltered, and full of the camaraderie you’d expect from two old friends sharing not just faith, but the whole adventure of fatherhood and manhood. There’s irreverent humor alongside spiritual depth, and a recurring emphasis on authenticity, brotherhood, humility, and “real things.” Banter about lions, baboons, cigar mornings, and the struggles of rural fatherhood make it vivid, with the tone remaining approachable and relatable throughout.

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Closing Thoughts

The main takeaway:
Modern men are desperate for authentic challenge, brotherhood, and spiritual nourishment—much of which is found not in classrooms or Zoom calls, but in the wild, facing risks, working together, and grounding prayer in lived experience. The Fraternity of St. Hubert is offered as a path for men to rediscover these goods by “doing dangerous things with good men” and finding Christ amid the adventure.

"As the hunter seeketh the stag, so I seek You O Lord—and yet You sought me first." – (Fraternity slogan, [107:12])

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For more: fraternityofsthubert.com
Sign up for updates, upcoming hunts, or join the community.

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Transcript

[Matt Fradd]

Pints with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help, you know, live and defend the Catholic faith. Start your 7 day free trial today when you download Truthly on the App Store.

[John Henry Spann]

But then last summer, for the first time, not our first time in Africa, but our first time doing it this way, we said we're going to go to Africa, we're going to have a safari, we're going to upcharge everybody so we can bring a priest, we're going to have holy mass every morning, opportunities for confession throughout it. And that's it. Every single man listening just about has that desire to do something that is dangerous. We've taken sort of the American ideal, which I think is an offshoot of Protestantism, right? This pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, right? And we've tried that in this modern world and there's a time and a place for that, right? I think it's really great to be self sufficient in lots of ways, but pure self sufficiency is disordered. It's not natural. You're not, you're not supposed to exist by yourself. The whole stoic by your own pull yourself up by your own bootstrap thing, I think it's lame.

[Matt Fradd]

So you're scheduling hunts not just in Africa, but around the country different times of the year. So if people go to. What's the website again?

[John Henry Spann]

Fraternityofsthubert.com.

[Matt Fradd]

Hey everybody. Before we get into today's interview, I want to tell you about my brand new book. It's called Jesus Our Refuge. If you, like many people and like all of us to one degree or another, have been seeking refuge in things other than Jesus Christ and have just found yourself increasingly weary, then this book is for you. This book is about taking Jesus seriously when he says, come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. It's getting great reviews and I know it will be a healing balm to your soul. Check it out. Jesus Our Refuge. You can get it right now on Amazon. Thanks, sir. John Henry Spann, the guest that everybody loves or does not love.

[John Henry Spann]

So I told you this before we came on the air. On the car ride over here, I'm nervous for the first time because I'm actually doing a thing. I'm here to talk about a real thing and I haven't done that historically and we were talking about some of the best comments ever and there's two that stick out to me and you let me know if you've got any others, but the first one is one guy wrote. I don't remember if this is the last one or the one before, but. But I listened. This is the quote. I listened for about half an hour, and these guys just kept bantering back and forth, telling inside jokes that I didn't understand. And I was driving, so I couldn't select another podcast. So I just turned off my radio and sat in silence.

It's pretty good.

[Matt Fradd]

Yep. And then the second.

[John Henry Spann]

This was the original. This was five, six years ago. I was on the Raising Kids in Sodom, which I thought was good episode. Yeah. Isn't that a great name?

[Matt Fradd]

Great name.

[John Henry Spann]

And a guy said, I love. I love pints with Aquinus. Matt will have these really smart theologians on and then these dip shits like John Henry on.

[Matt Fradd]

Really?

[John Henry Spann]

No, no. It seemed like a legitimate, like, compliment. I think he compared it to Joe Rogan. He was like, you know, a lot of these fighters don't know anything about anything on. And these smart guys who know stuff. So I took it that way. I took it as a compliment.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, what was the. The classic comment was, this guy looks like he's one hand sandwiched away from a heart attack.

[John Henry Spann]

All right, so big, big shout out to one of my students. I might have said this last time I was on the air, but if I did, I'll tell the story again. Victor Escorpio, right? Great kid. He's out of Benedictine now. Killing it. Awesome. He used to make that joke to me all the time in the hallways at graduation. He comes across the stage, he gives me a hug, and he hands me a ham sandwich. On the stage? Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. So he wasn't the one who commented it originally? No, he just knew of it and.

[John Henry Spann]

He just thought it was funny and kept bringing it up to me in the hallways and stuff at school, so.

[Matt Fradd]

Good stuff. Well, I'm really. I always love having you on, So.

[John Henry Spann]

I just had the best time. We had a cold plunge this morning and the sauna, and my wife made us omelettes and delivered them outside. Yeah, she's a good woman.

[Matt Fradd]

Had a cigar?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

It's a great way to start the day. You had some allergy medication.

[John Henry Spann]

I don't know what it is. A little scratchy throat last night. But I like the kind of baritone. Gary. Or not Gary, Marvin Gaye kind of deep voice. And I have Barry White.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Press into it. Before we go any further, one of the reasons I invited you on is that I'm really excited about an apostolate you started And I don't want this to get buried deep into the show. So I'd love to hit it right up front. You've started a hunting society. Just sum it up for us, where people can go.

[John Henry Spann]

And you're very humble about this and I appreciate it. But this all started. We were on safari in Africa this past summer and you said about the fourth night, oh, yeah, I don't think I'm going to be able to commit to, like every year. I don't think I'm an every year guy. Why don't you just do it? And then you said, you know, we'll talk about on the show. We'll do whatever. And I kind of took that away and I thought that might be a cool thing one day. But I'm really bad at having a great idea and then deciding it's too much work. Like I'm lazy inherently. I think that's lame, but it's true. And just sort of letting it go by the wayside. But you were the one who just said, no, this is really good and you need to do this.

[Matt Fradd]

It is really good. And you're not lazy at all. I think you might just be frightened by websites and technology.

[John Henry Spann]

All the tech stuff freaks me.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, you're not lazy.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. So, okay, what is The Fraternity of St. Hubert?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, so, Fraternity of St. Hubert. Check out my super awesome first ever T shirt that just came in the mail three days ago. It's a wildebeest in a crucifix. It's. I don't want to. I don't even like using the word hunting, which. Right. It's not primarily a hunting thing. It's primarily like a brotherhood where we have some retreats that involve killing animals. Right. That's the whole idea. And it was the brainchild. I've been talking about this forever with a college buddy of mine, Jonathan De Thomas. Great guy. We played poker with him one time at your house. I think about how retreats usually aren't great. Right? Typically. And I've been to some good retreats with some great speakers. But typically what happens is you go on a retreat and. And you do a lot of praying and a lot of talks and even Good, good, good talks. Right. And then you leave and you go home. And it was nice. It was nice. It's a retreat that reminds me to be virtuous. All these very good things in and of themselves. But then last summer, for the first time, not our first time in Africa, but our first time doing it this way, we said, we're Gonna go to Africa, gonna have a safari. We're gonna upcharge everybody so we can bring a priest. We're gonna have holy mass every morning, opportunities for confession throughout it. And that's it. There's no big talks, there's no big, let's gather around, have a prayer circle. Right. It's just you're hunting with the kind of men who will pay extra to go hunt with a priest and have mass. And it seems like the easiest thing in the world. But I was kind of hoping I was gonna find somebody else that was doing it and it wasn't out there. And so we built out a website and did all that cool stuff and we're, I guess, launching when this airs.

[Matt Fradd]

What's the website?

[John Henry Spann]

Fraternityofsthubert.com.

[Matt Fradd]

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

[John Henry Spann]

Yes, it was sold out. Two hours. It was sold out with a wait list. And it was. I think there's a real hunger for it.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

And I think it's the simplicity of it that I think is really, really good. Right. What's happening is we're not going to create sort of a retreat with 100 different talks. And there's not going to be a theme of the retreat. And I'm not knocking that. That's great that some people, but the idea is just come out and be in the wilderness. Just go in the wild and do dangerous things with good men. Because I'd been on a ton of outfitted hunts and stuff in the past. And I love the hunt. I love hunting. I've done that for most of my life. But you would go on these outfitted hunts with the most crass people, these people who would come out and you'd be in camp with. I mean, I'm not saying that I'm not trying to pearl clutch or anything. When I say I don't like hearing f bombs dropping left and right. I don't want to hear sexual jokes, but I don't, I don't want that around me. Once again, I'm weak and I'll lower myself down sometimes when that's going on around me. And so the idea of the natural filter is priest is coming, he's being paid for. You're going to be charged more. You go hunt a little bit cheaper if you went by yourself. But those are the kind of guys who are going to be here, the kind of guys who are going to be willing to pay more for holy mass every day. And it was amazing. I wish, I don't know if I have access to some of the emails I got, but I shared some of them with you. The emails that we got back from these guys. Big, big, big shout out to all those guys who went with us to Namibia last year.

[Matt Fradd]

No, they really were legitimately amaz, amazing fellows. And I brought my son with me. It was his senior year graduation present and it was really great to have him around. Such good men, normal men, you know, men who are having a beer, men who are laughing, but men who are serious during the holy mass.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, so I like that word too. Normal, right? Yeah, they're not. I mean there were great discussions, one that I almost wish I could send you the clip to put in here. But we were sitting, we'd gone on a zebra hunt, right. Mountain zebras, not plain zebras where you walk out and shoot the zebra when it walks in front of you. Mountain zebras, their hooves are almost circular because they're so worn from running around on the rocks and all of that. And so we do maybe a two mile trek in. The guy gets his zebra and we're preparing to pack out. But before we pack out, they're breaking down the zebra. You've got your skinners and your trackers and everybody's working real hard. And I sat down on a rock and talked to these two other guys about what a Reverend Norvis Ordo looks like. Come on, come on. It was the best. It was the great. It wasn't pretentious. There was none of that. It was just real. I think I mentioned this in the car right over here. I feel like we've been really disenchanted with the world because we're so removed from it. So right now we're in a climate controlled building. If it's night outside, that's okay. We can turn on lights. If we're hot, we can make it cold, vice versa. And we spend our whole lives doing non real things. And as a result I think it makes us harder to realize how.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

Enchanted on fire the world is with the supernatural. I think, I don't think that it's. I don't think that it's just the scientific revolution and the enlightenment that made us stop recognizing supernatural reality. Right. I think it's the fact that we've built this world. It's not just the ideas, but it's physically the world that we're in that has done that. Right. I mean, if you ask some guy in Central Europe in the year 1600 about demons, demonic presences, vampires, whatever, he's gonna be like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's all. That's all there. That's all there. And those demons are still there, right? They're still around us right now all the time. Demons, angels, all of this stuff. But we're so distracted, and we're so not dependent on the natural world like we ought to be, that it sort of gives us permission to not think about it.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I love that. And now if you want that truth, as you say, you got to go talk to a Filipino grandma.

[John Henry Spann]

So that's a. That was a big. A big thing the other day. I said basically that all the old, like, 170-year-old Filipino ladies in the back of the church who said everything was demonic when you were a kid. They were right. It really all is. It's just all demonic. Everything. And so the idea of The Fraternity of St. Hubert is now go out into the wild, do real things with good men, with virtuous men who are gonna build you up. We had guys, at least two, maybe three guys on this last trip who'd never shot a gun before, right? We had guys who had never hunted before, but they'd done some sport shooting or whatever at a range. And it was just this welcoming, good, awesome environment. I had a guy who. Who texted me afterwards, and he said, I'm having a hard time readjusting to the real world after being in Namibia. Right. He said, maybe this isn't the great tagline, but he said, I felt like the guy in Shawshank who couldn't adapt to the real world after leaving prison because Namibia seems more real than real life. And that's the coolest thing. I don't know. It's just cool. It's been on my heart for a long time, and now I'm super excited about it.

[Matt Fradd]

So you're scheduling hunts not just in Africa, but around the country, different times of the year.

[John Henry Spann]

So.

[Matt Fradd]

So if people go to. What's the website again?

[John Henry Spann]

Fraternityofsthubert.com.

[Matt Fradd]

Fraternityofsthubert.Com, we'll put a link in the description. They can presumably see what hunts you're leading and how many spots are available, they can pay to have them. Maybe them and their son come along with you. And they don't have to be worried. Hey, I don't know if I'm great at hunting or anything like that.

[John Henry Spann]

No. So it's all handled, right? That's the idea. And once again, I told you I was a little nervous about this because it feels like a pitch. It feels like a kind of a pitch, right?

[Matt Fradd]

And it's something worth pitching.

[John Henry Spann]

But if you go to fraternityofsthubert.com, you can sign up for free, Right. To get updates. We also have a membership where essentially, I think it's $6 a month, super cheap. Right. There's a whole chat room feature. We'll send you a merch package, all of that fun stuff. But what happens if you sign up for the email is you're gonna get email updates saying, hey, we got this hunt going on in Kansas. We're hunting pheasants in Kansas, or we're doing. I'm talking to a turkey guy tomorrow, actually, out in Nebraska. I want the Africa thing to be sort of the crown jewel. But we've got a main bear hunt coming up. We've got Namibia 2027. Namibia, this coming summer, booked immediately in about two hours without even pushing the thing. Praise be to God. Right. And today is the feast of Saint Hubert, which is super cool.

[Matt Fradd]

That's amazing.

[John Henry Spann]

I know. I had no idea when you gave me the dates. I know. That's cool.

[Matt Fradd]

I really would like your tagline to be a retreat where you get to kill stuff.

[John Henry Spann]

I love that.

[Matt Fradd]

Something like. Something simple like that. It reminds me of Ron. Is it Ron from Parks and Recreation? He says that fishing is relaxing, like yoga, but you get to kill something in the end.

[John Henry Spann]

Ye.

[Matt Fradd]

No.

[John Henry Spann]

And I don't mean to get all philosophical about it, but I was just rereading Wild at Heart. Right. John Eldredge, who you had on the show, who's amazing, and he needs to convert and become Catholic. He's an amazing, amazing guy. And he gets so into sort of what masculinity is. And I want to make it really clear that The Fraternity of St. Hubert is not primarily about going out and shooting things. Right. That's super cool. I love to go out and hunt. I hunt. I trophy hunt. I shoot big animals. I eat them. Right. The reason we hunt in Namibia is because everything's above board there. The animals are respected. But. But I go out there to hunt. Cause I wanna hunt. But that's not why it's good. Primarily. It's primarily good because it's an outlet for men to really embrace the dangerous, I don't know, liability ridden.

I don't know, stuff that we ought to do, that we want to do. I've said this and I've probably said everything I'm about to say on the show, but I talk to a lot of young men, I talk to a lot of young college guys, a lot of guys who are newly married out of college. And so many of them struggle with that question of what is masculinity. And masculinity, I want to make it really clear, is not going to Africa and shooting big animals. That's super cool. We have that desire to do that. Right. But if you want to know what masculinity is, I think you ought to look at, I don't know, your four year old son at home who knows he's not a man, but knows what a man does, right? And a man is virtuous and a man is good and a man slays dragons and protects princesses and he plays cops and robbers with his buddies and I don't know, does all these things that are really, really good. And then we get older, we get in the malaise of being an adult and we don't have outlets for that. And The Fraternity of St. Hubert, I want to exist to give an outlet for that. Go out and do the thing you can do. You don't have to know anything about it. You don't have to know how to shoot a gun. You don't have to know how to, I don't know, stalk gems, buck in Africa or sit in a tree, stand to hunt bear in Maine. But you, probably every single man listening just about has that desire to do something that is dangerous.

I think this is another John Eldredge quote.

We have a society that says you need to be a nice guy, right? Our church feminizes people. So be nice. Just be nice and be friendly and that's great. I like nice guys. Nice guys are nice. But if you had the option of someone saying Matt Fradd, he's a really nice guy, or Matt Fradd is dangerous in a good way. You go with that whenever.

[Matt Fradd]

Someone 100% would rather that.

[John Henry Spann]

And also to the ladies, I mean, they would. They want to marry that man. They want their husband to be married or to be. They do want him to be married, but they want him to be dangerous in a good way.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I love it so much. I'm so glad that you're doing this. Give me a sense of how much it costs just real quick.

[John Henry Spann]

It's all over the place, right? Yeah. Yeah. So obviously Africa is this coming year is $5,500 a pop. It's six days of hunting, two days of travel. We don't cover the flight. So you're looking at 1500-2500 maybe depending on when you book your flight to get over there. But once you land in Venthook, everything's taken care of. Everything from transportation to food, lodging, every single detail is covered. And I made up a transparency sheet, that's what I've been calling it for this last one, so that people could compare, they could look at it and say, all right, here's how much it would cost for me to do this. Here's how much you're charging me so I can justify. Because it's not like a big money making thing for me. And yeah, realistically speaking, it's super cool that I get to go on some hunts that I wouldn't do otherwise.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I hope you'll make money.

[John Henry Spann]

I'll make some.

[Matt Fradd]

I hope you'll make a lot.

[John Henry Spann]

But just for my time. Right. Is sort of my idea because it is a ministry and I don't think early on we're going to make much at all because that's not the primary idea. We've got servers that we have to, you know, we have to pay for all the whatever and the chat room and all of the hosting stuff. But I don't know, I just love it. It's just been on my heart.

[Matt Fradd]

Do us a favor, articulate the position of the person horrified that anyone would go to Africa to shoot big animals.

[John Henry Spann]

Oh, awesome.

[Matt Fradd]

All right, so try to articulate that well so that they feel like you get what they're saying and then how would you respond?

[John Henry Spann]

So I'm sure there will be lots and lots of people saying this is horrible, that we have two Catholic men sitting around talking about killing animals and how that's fun. First of all, I want to say it is fun. It's super fun. I love it. I like doing it. I like sneaking through the grass. I like pulling a gun up and putting it on sticks while this innocent animal doesn't know that I'm there. And then shooting it and it dying, that is fun. I enjoy that. I don't think we need to be ashamed of saying that. Right. I like to be aggressive. Right. I like to hunt things, I like to kill things. I like to eat those things. I think that's good. So no apologies at all. And. And I'm gonna shoot the biggest one right on purpose. You know why?

[Matt Fradd]

So it looks cool.

[John Henry Spann]

When you look cool, it looks super cool and I feel cool.

[Matt Fradd]

Look at that thing.

[John Henry Spann]

Look at it. He was amazing. I was there, shot that off the truck. So I just want to say that.

[Matt Fradd]

400 yards away, over 400 yards. As soon as I said off a truck, I wanted to be clear. It wasn't like it wasn't chained to the earth.

[John Henry Spann]

It was still in a cage. We drove up beside the cage. No, that was awesome. That was a great hunt. But I just wanna, I'm not pulling any punches on that. I refuse to give the mushy gushy. But that being said, once again, the reason why we're hunting Namibia and not some of these other places, there's a few reasons, but the big one is.

It'S free range, right. We're not hunting the high fence spot and I'm not knocking guys who hunt high fence. Right, I understand. I know. I've got great buddies who I love to death who do high fence hunts on 20, 30, 40,000 acres in Texas, in South Africa or whatever. That's awesome. I just don't particularly want to do it. Right. But it's also Namibia, from a corruption standpoint, the amount of money that you're paying that is actually making it to conservation is enormous. Right? I talk about this with deer and I'll talk about the North American model in a second. Right? But the African model is you got all these guys hanging out in Africa, Spoiler alert. They're not terribly wealthy guys, right? They're mostly homesteaders, fairly self sufficient subsistence farmers, all of that, right? And there's animals everywhere, right? There's wildebeest, there's gems, buck. There's spring buck. There's water, buck. All this stuff. And what are those animals doing? They're eating, right? They're grazing on the same land that these guys goats are. They're trampling through their gardens. They're a pain in the butt, right? Some of the big predators are eating their livestock, all of that, right? And so there's zero incentive, right, if that's the entirety, right. If nobody's coming over to shoot them, there's zero incentive to keep these animals around. They're frustrating, right? They're irritating. It's like I trap coyotes all the time. I want to kill all the coyotes that are around my house because they're killing my chickens and I don't like them. Right? But what the African model of conservation does is they take that and they say, okay, don't shoot the spring buck. I know you want to. I know that. It's a financial liability. You know, it's out there. Don't. Don't shoot it. In exchange, some guy's gonna come over from the United States, he's gonna shoot that animal, you're gonna get the meat from that animal, and you're gonna get paid. And so that's how they fund conservation entirely. Right. Botswana. I think it was Botswana that outlawed hunting. Elephant hunting. Yeah. And when they outlawed elephant hunting, guess what happened? The population nosedived. Right. They recently reintroduced hunting. Right. And now the population's growing again. And it's because the animals don't have a value. They don't have a dollar value for the locals. They have a negative value. Right. They're made out of meat, and they're a pain in the butt. So I can shoot it, get protein, and not have to worry about the impact that they're having on my agriculture and all that stuff. So, yeah, you can feel good about it. And I'm not here to say I wouldn't go shoot pandas even if I could. Right. Not because I have. Not because they're cute, right? They are. They're charismatic. Megafauna, for sure. But I wouldn't shoot them because I realized that would be bad for the population. But as I don't know, backwards as it sounds, it's really good. It's really good for the wildebeest population. For you to go over to Africa and shoot a wildebeest, it's not good for that particular. Right. But it's good in general.

[Matt Fradd]

Trust me. Just stand still. This is good for you.

[John Henry Spann]

If I can nerd out a little bit on sort of, like, hunting history in the United states in the 1930s, I live in Georgia. There were almost no deer in Georgia. There were almost no deer. You had some pockets way up in the mountains, and you had some way down the Okefenokee Swamp. But seeing a deer track was a huge deal back then, for decades. And the reason was they'd all been shot out. People were shooting them, they were selling the meat. There were no laws that regulated hunting. Right now in Georgia, I can shoot 10 does 2 bucks every single year because they've rebounded so much. And the reason they have is the Pittman Robertson Act. Everybody should look up. If you're a conservation guy, that's the difference between the African model of conservation and the North American model of conservation all hinges on the Pittman Robertson act in the US Right? Which basically says we're Gonna charge everyone extra for hunting gear. Bullets, guns, all of that. That's gonna go towards conservation. Also, we're going to give anyone who wants to right. Who's legally allowed to right. Tags for certain animals to make those animals worth something. It outlawed market hunting, so you couldn't shoot deer and sell them. I can't sell the deer that we shoot in the. I don't know, in like a standout in front of my house or anything like that. And it made the animals valuable. It made them trophies. Right. It made them something worth preserving. And now we have more deer than we know what to do with. Maybe a decade ago, they doubled the number of bear tags that they gave out because they wanted people to shoot more bears because they're overpopulated. It's a cool problem.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Wow, that's really great.

I'd love to just talk about. I just like to talk about our time in Africa and how fun it was. I mean, having my son show up, who showed up a couple of days after us with father Jason, 45 minutes.

[John Henry Spann]

Out of the car, he shot a springbok. That was the coolest thing.

[Matt Fradd]

I didn't realize what a miracle that was until I missed 800 shots every single spring.

[John Henry Spann]

There were so many, too.

[Matt Fradd]

There were so many. And they were right in front of me. And they were chained to trees, and I couldn't get them.

[John Henry Spann]

They were not chained to trees. No, they weren't, but no, it was. I have made. What's been super cool for me is the community, like, for anonymity reasons. Obviously, your telephone number wasn't shared with these guys, but mine was. And We've got a WhatsApp group, and we are back and forth all the time. People are posting baby announcements in there and all of that stuff because that's what we want, right? That's what we want, is community. And it's cheesy, right, when we talk about our time in Africa to say this, but it's true. My favorite times in Africa were the times when I was sitting around a campfire. Do you remember Philip?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

I won't give you. Oh, he's terrific.

[Matt Fradd]

He was one.

[John Henry Spann]

Never hunted before. I don't know if he'd ever shot a gun before. He and I just did a little ride around in the back of a. We didn't see anything, and it was the best. And we talked about real stuff because he's the kind of guy, once again, that natural filter that. That is willing to come to Africa and hunt things out of his element and pay more so that he can do it with good men, good Catholic men.

[Matt Fradd]

It was funny that they kept feeding us really late at night.

[John Henry Spann]

Didn't appreciate that, like ridiculously well. Because the sun goes down there at about 5:30.

[Matt Fradd]

We're like, hey, I'm old and can't eat. Super late. Like, well, it's 9:30 and it'll. That's a terrible accent.

[John Henry Spann]

Sometime in the movie. Just like that.

[Matt Fradd]

A little bit about it. 9:30 and 9:30, 10 o'. Clock.

[John Henry Spann]

I loved. We did multiple zebra hunts, right? One guy did a thermal zebra hunt. He really wanted to get a zebra. He hadn't gotten one. He went out. Her buddy Christopher went out and hunted zebras with thermals. Thermal vision at night. And once again, when we were in the Kalahari Desert, we saw the plains zebras. They just stand and run around out there, right? You just can walk up and shoot one. But the mountain zebras, the Hartman zebras, they look slightly different. They live up in the mountain. So it's hard. It's a hard hunt. He got one all these guys, we had these really intense. You remember this really intense zebra hunts.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

And then I went out to get my zebra and one ran across the road. I shot it at about 70 yards. It then ran downhill to die in the road. And we just like drove up, threw it in the back, took some pictures. So it's all over the place now.

[Matt Fradd]

We won't say the fella's name. I think it was the fella from Denver we were talking about this morning. What was the black. What was the animal he got with the giant sable? Yeah, sable. My goodness, that was beautiful.

[John Henry Spann]

It was amazing. My favorite thing. And I can do first names, right? Yeah, I can do first names. Scott, right? Our friend Scott who was there, he came and the first thing he said was, I'm not gonna shoot a baboon. I would never shoot a baboon. They're too much like people. That weirds me out. So he knocks everything that was sort of already on the list. Because when you go, right, there's sort of a menu. It's like, here are the animals that you have tags for. You can hunt these animals. Anything else, we gotta pay extra. We gotta figure all that stuff out. And one of the animals was a baboon. And he shot the other animals that he had tags for within. I think both of them the first day. And then he was like, well, I might as go look for baboons. And by day five, his bloodlust for a baboon. It was awesome.

[Matt Fradd]

That was funny.

[John Henry Spann]

He didn't get a baboon. We didn't get any baboons.

[Matt Fradd]

Now tell them what cj, our professional hunter PH had to say about people who went up to shoot lions and how.

[John Henry Spann]

I don't think.

[Matt Fradd]

Can we talk about that?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, it's gonna be hard to filter CJ in real time. I'm gonna do my best.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

I think I learned curse words from cj.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, my goodness. That man.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

But what was funny is the thing that we kept saying. Cause we just. Earlier you just said, you know, when people are making sexual jokes or whatever. Our only defense against this Namibian awesome fella was we would go, okay, calm down, Sergeant.

[John Henry Spann]

And then he would lean into it a little bit and then back off. He's a great guy. He was terrific. Heart of gold.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, he was great.

[John Henry Spann]

So he was. He does everything. He's a. He's a sniper for the Namibian military. Does all this amazing, super cool stuff. And he also guides lion hunts, right? And once again, that might get the hair on some people's necks up, right? But to hunt a lion in Namibia, you're hunting an individual lion. You don't just drive out and shoot whatever lion you see, right? It has to be that lion. That was a problem. Livestock predation, whatever. So if you wanted to chalk up, whatever it is, 50 grand to go lion hunting right now, you could. You'd call them up and you'd have to wait around for a long time until there became a problem lion. Then they'd call you and say, hey, you got, I don't know, a week to arrive in Windhoek and we're going to go on a lion hunt. And the way he described it is, you know, we're shooting 300 win mag freaking pringle can suppressors. It's great. You can hear it hit the animal and you can tell by the sound if it's a good shot or not. But it takes, especially if you're not used to bolt action rifles, right? It takes a minute. So they would go and pull up on a lion. He would stand in front of the guy with his semi auto shotgun full of slugs and the guy would line up to shoot the lion. And he said, if you didn't get the lion right away, it immediately, right, it's coming at you. It is coming at you right away. And my favorite story, right, was he gets in front of the guy. He's like, are you ready? Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

In front of you, behind the guy. CJ's behind the guy. Backing him up.

[John Henry Spann]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

CJ's got his hand on his shoulder.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

The guy's up there with his.300 win mag. He goes, all right, shoot. And so he shoots. He misses. C.J. realizes he's not shooting again. The line's coming at them. There's only about 80 yards to start, right? So covers 40 yards like that. And CJ looks and the guy's gone. The guy's running in the opposite direction, and CJ with the shotgun with slugs, just kills the lion. The guy came back. He had evacuated his bowels all over himself. Not great.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, but that's the thing that I want to make fun of. But no, that's probably what I would do.

[John Henry Spann]

I think I'd poop my pants. I don't think I'd run away. I think my pride would be weaponized. I would weaponize my own sinful, prideful nature to be like, no, I will stand here and I will fill my boots up with excrement and I will not leave.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm gonna nail my boots to the floor. Yeah. I mean, his point was that we have this fight or flight response. And when you get into a situation like that, when a lion is running at you.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

You find out there's no masquerading, there's no you. Just something happens.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, but. And that takes me back, too, to what, What I was saying earlier, though, about masculinity in general. Right. And you think that guy shoots lions. That guy's a man. Every single awesome man I know, who I really aspire to be, like, has not shot a lion. The vast majority of them don't hunt. Right. My whole thing is not be a man. If you want to be a man, you have to. This is not some, like, I don't know, five day alpha male. Whatever. That's not what it is at all. You talk about genuine male tenderness. You talk about guys who can actually have, like, good intimacy between men. The best place to do it is around the campfire in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, surrounded by wild animals that want to eat you.

[Matt Fradd]

He speaks to himself.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

That's good. I'm really glad you emphasized that. That's a great point.

[John Henry Spann]

Well, I get accused of that all the time because I wear a lot of flannel. I carry a gun with me. I drive a pickup truck. I like to hunt. I butchered a whole bunch of chickens yesterday before we came up here. I do lots of farming.

[Matt Fradd]

Tell me how you hurt your knees again.

[John Henry Spann]

I wiped out trying to tackle a pregnant Goat. So my goats, I've got Nigerian dwarfs, and they're out on, like, three acres. It's giant. They got plenty of space. It's cold now. We're in the North Georgia mountains. It gets below freezing at night. Got this big, fat, pregnant nanny goat who's about to pop any day now. And I've got a stall in the barn. There's nice hay in there. I've got a bowl that you plug in, and it keeps the water nice and warm. It doesn't freeze her own food. And it's like pouring down rain. And I'm worried she's gonna have the baby at night and die. And so me and my son, who's a champion, and my daughter, who's at your house right now, we go out there to wrestle this thing. And I wiped out so hard. I got ahold of a hoof. She, like, shoves off my face, and I fall on the ground, and it's killing. I feel like I'm feeling my age for the first time in my life in a big way. The knee makes my back, makes my neck, makes my shoulders hurt. It's awful. But anyway, so I get accused of that all the time, right? Some rah, rah, machismo, manosphere bs, which is I could not be further from the truth, right? But I think the reason why I like doing these things is when I was a little kid and had no idea what a man was like, I just tried to emulate things that look masculine, right? Clint Eastwood is manly. William Wallace is manly. I'm gonna take this amalgamation of all these different caricatures of masculinity, put them together, and then that's me. And then I got older. I started to become, I think, a little more spiritually mature. And I removed all the lies, right? The womanizing or the heavy drinking or the whatever. And what was left is, it turned out I really did like a lot of these manly things. Yeah, but it doesn't make you manly. So I don't want it to seem like I'm saying, yeah, I'm selling you a ticket. You want to be a man? Come with me to Africa. No, no, no. The whole idea is go on a retreat. Go on a retreat with good men.

[Matt Fradd]

I want to tell you about Hallow, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hallow.com mattfrad Sign up over there right now, and you will get the first three months for free. That's, like, a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not. Whether it's helpful, if you don't like it, you can always quit. Hallow.com Matt Fradd I use it. My family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music including my Lo Fi hello has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily routine and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it to get through it all just go check it out. Hallow.com mattfrad the link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent you can play little bible stories to them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic.

[John Henry Spann]

Hello.com mattfrad and the way it works just before we get off in the weeds. Right. We do have that membership that you're able to do. It's nothing. It's like six bucks a month. You get a little merch package, all that fun stuff and you get first dibs on all the hunts.

[Matt Fradd]

Will they be able to talk to.

[John Henry Spann]

You if they approach 100%? Yeah, we'll have. I'm working on building up the whole chat capabilities and all of that is going great. Yeah. If you pull up the website, it's not quite done yet but you're still welcome to go play around on it. But.

What I want it to be is primarily a community where we do have a half dozen, ten times, whatever a year we go on these different hunts. Some of them are in Africa. I really want to do musk ox in Greenland really bad. I don't know why that's been on my heart for a long time. But a cast and blast for a three day weekend in Louisiana or a pheasant shoot or turkeys or white tailed deer down in Middle Georgia or something. My idea is just give guys permission to get together with guys without like a oh, I'm not good at this. I don't have to prove myself. Right. Because we all have those wounds, right. Where we have to prove to ourselves almost that we're masculine. Which is a lie, right.

[Matt Fradd]

For the enemy. I 100% agree with that because that is what I was nervous about. Like I don't know the first thing about X, Y or Z. And there are other fellows who felt that way and no one was no, there's no weird, no one was posturing. Everyone was happy to help each other.

[John Henry Spann]

Right.

[Matt Fradd]

You know, I Want to know who St. Hubert was? Tell me about him.

[John Henry Spann]

Oh, awesome. That's good. That's good for talking about, like, masculinity wounds too.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

So Saint Hubert of Liege, right? Was over there in sort of Brussels, or not, I guess the Netherlands area, right? I want to say 1300s, not sure. And he was a. He was a good guy. He's regular wealthy dude and his wife and child die or his wife dies and his child is shipped off, essentially. And he does exactly what I would do in that situation. I hate doing. I hope I wouldn't, but I feel like I would, right? He just retreats. He just retreats to the wilderness. He goes out in the woods. He spends all of his time with his dogs hunting, right? Trying to find animals, trying to kill animals, bigger animals, cooler animals to fill this hole that will never be filled by anything but Christ, right? He's trying to fill it with dead animals, which I get. I'm guilty of that sometimes, right? Of like, you almost make an idol of it. And he's out there, it's Good Friday. He's told by the bishop, he's reminded by the bishop on his way out that he needs to go to Mass. He's like, cool. Anyway, and he goes out and I really want to, like, double down on how bizarre this is, right? He sees this giant stag. It would have been a red stag. We usually see it as a white tailed deer depicted. And he's sneaking up on it, right, with his hounds, and they're about to run this deer and kill this deer. And all of a sudden the deer turns and looks at him and it has a crucifix between his antlers. It's the Jagermeister. This is Jagermeister, master hunter, right? That's where the image comes from. And he tells him to repent and he needs to go back to church, right? And he does. And he turns his life around and he becomes a good man. And that's why I keep tripling down on. It's not about a hunt. The hunt's really great. You're gonna have so much fun. You're gonna have a great time hunting, fishing, shooting ducks, whatever we're doing, right? But it's really about finding Jesus through community with these other men and something that you actually want to do. There's not that many guys out there, and I mean, people can throw shade at me if they want to, but there's not that many guys out there, I don't think, who get super duper pumped about going to some Retreat, especially when they're married, especially when they have kids, they go because they recognize it's good for them and it is. That's great, go on retreats. But there's a whole lot of guys out there who really want to go flex their masculinity in a real way. There's a reason why there's a big fight. Fat liability release form you have to fill out before you come on this. It's dangerous and it's good. It's dangerous and it's scary and you might die. You probably won't. But it's. I don't know that it speaks to me. And I feel like it speaks to a lot of other guys too.

[Matt Fradd]

It does. I'm so glad you're doing it. We're going to take some questions and at any point, if you want to go off on a tangent or something, you can.

[John Henry Spann]

I want to throw one thing out, one last thing about the Fraternity of St. Hubert. We are giving away a hunt in Namibia.

[Matt Fradd]

What?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, this coming summer.

[Matt Fradd]

What does that mean, giving away a hunt?

[John Henry Spann]

You can have it. So essentially, we've had a lot of guys who are really like, wanted this to do well and there's a lot of. We've got some money and once again, this is me coming back to it. I could dip into it, but I think it'd be really cool and a good membership driver too. If we said, hey, you sign up, I don't know, we'll say like two weeks after this show drops. I think that's what we had talked about. But within two weeks, you sign up, you do like the year long membership. Once again, six bucks a month, super easy. And we'll give it away, I think like Christmas maybe. Epiphany. Maybe we'll do Epiphany giveaway. I'll call you on the phone and say, come on. And then you just got to get a plane ride to Namibia and everything else is handled as 100% free.

[Matt Fradd]

That's fantastic.

[John Henry Spann]

So.

[Matt Fradd]

All right, you ready?

[John Henry Spann]

Got questions? Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Philip Z. Says, what's something you wish you had done 10 to 15 years ago instead of now?

[John Henry Spann]

Well, that's good. 10 to 15 years ago. I'll go 15 years ago. That's right before I got married.

[Matt Fradd]

All right.

[John Henry Spann]

I wish I had, I wish, I wish I had really delved into. And I'm not just saying this because it's what we're talking about, right? What it means to be a man and what it means to be a prince of heaven and a son of God, I wish I had thought about it more like. Because even right now I can intellectually assent to that, right? Yes. I am a prince of heaven. I'm a son of God. Go team. Right. But getting married to my bride, I had. And I know we all say this, right, 10 years ago I thought I loved my wife, but now I really love her. And 10 years from now I'll say the same thing. That's good. That's true. But less my relationship with her and more like my own relationship and my own understanding of who I am. I didn't delve into that at all. I became Catholic or I started caring about my faith because this really, really pretty girl thought it was probably a good idea, right? And then I liked it and I liked the guys who were doing those kinds of things, right? And so I. It was a much more performative faith and I wish that I had taken a step back. It wasn't bad. In fact, it was really, really good. But it was a. I think, yeah, it was much more performative. I didn't have a sense of like.

My. Sorry, I know I am rambling.

[Matt Fradd]

No, it's great.

[John Henry Spann]

My primary vocation, I didn't understand what that was. My primary vocation is not marriage, Right. My primary vocation is salvation, followed immediately by my wife's salvation.

[Matt Fradd]

And.

[John Henry Spann]

And I didn't understand that first part. I still struggle with that.

[Matt Fradd]

Do you think you would have known that 10 years ago?

[John Henry Spann]

I couldn't have understood that.

[Matt Fradd]

It's hard, isn't it? Eh. Because, you know, it's easy to look back 10 years ago and wish X, Y or Z had happened. But I don't know because you also arrived at this probably through stupid mistakes that you may have made. I don't know.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, I don't. I don't know how I feel about the whole Rascal Flats, God bless a broken road thing, though. Like the redemption story piece. I did a retreat for or a confirmation retreat for a bunch of high schoolers a few months ago. And I did this big piece about how, like, I've got a cool redemption story. I just told it to you and I hate it. I don't like it. I wish I didn't have it. I wish that I could be like so many of these guys I know, who are just good. They were always virtuous. Like, that's a man. That's cool, right? These guys, like, I can tell you a lot of stories about fist fights and drugs and girls and whatever, and it's like neat bar talk, but it doesn't make me a better father. It doesn't make me a better husband. And I really admire those guys who probably a lot of them think that they're. They're boring because they don't have a conversion story, they don't have a redemption story. But I think there's an innate lie in a lot of redemption stories that says you gotta sow your wild oats a little bit to come back. You gotta go. You're the prodigal son. You gotta go out and do the stuff and the prostitutes and the whatever before you come back home. And then you can really appreciate. And that's a lie. That is a lie. If you have not fallen into all these temptations and all this sin, that's the best.

[Matt Fradd]

You know, you're kind of sounding like Therese of Lisieux right now.

[John Henry Spann]

You may not have realized like a year.

[Matt Fradd]

Because, you know, Christ says, she's loved much because she's been forgiven much, right? Therese says, ah, but, but what about the one who hasn't been forgiven much? That's because she's been preserved from so much filth, therefore I'm even more loved. You see, she applies that to herself, which I just think is beautiful.

[John Henry Spann]

I just looked.

[Matt Fradd]

She knows there's no merit of hers, that she hasn't fallen into depravity.

[John Henry Spann]

I look back at stages of depravity in my life and I'm just like. I'm embarrassed. I'm grossed out. It's just. And yeah, you're right, there's some element too. If all these things hadn't happened, I wouldn't be the guy I am today. Probably, I guess, right? But, man, I'd give a million dollars to go back and to have stood at the altar and married my bride and not brought all this baggage, right? That whole God forgives us, nature doesn't. All those mindsets and habits and everything that I brought into this marriage, it was life. And good dudes, like good guys came in and just grabbed me by the collar and drug me forward, which was the best thing that ever happened to me. I've talked about this before, but it's all good. John Power. I'm not bored. John Power. You know John Power.

[Matt Fradd]

I love John Power.

[John Henry Spann]

Last name. He's a great guy. Cam, your bride was his youth minister forever ago. Yeah, I was at a party at a lake house or a beach river house in North Georgia, having a great time, drinking, flirting with these girls, just making an idiot out of myself. And he was this John Powers, this good looking, athletic Just big, built like a brick guy. Women wanted to marry him, guys wanted to be like him. And he kicked all the girls out at like 11 o'. Clock. And I was furious. And he put his giant hand on my shoulder and said, now we're gonna go talk about it. We're go talk about it, and drags me over to the hot tub. We sit in the hot tub, continue to drink and smoke. And he basically says, like, we gotta kick the girls out, otherwise somebody's gonna do something they shouldn't be doing. Right. We're gonna make some bad decisions, and God bless us, we're just gonna sit here and talk. And then we talked. And he, liked, just ripped into my heart over and over and over again with all the uncomfortable questions, the, hey, when's the last time you looked at porn? Why do you do that? When's the last time you. Why do you drink so much all the time? Why are you constantly trying to get with these different girls? Like, what's going on with that? And because I respected him because he was this big, cool guy, I let him do it and I answered his questions. And that began, like, the introspection of my own life.

[Matt Fradd]

Let me tell you another cool story about John Powers. So he came and visited us while we were living in Ireland. And he had been so inspired by, I think I'm remembering this correctly, he had been so inspired by a university professor that he had started to pray multiple rosaries a day so that he could eventually make up for all the days he hadn't prayed a rosary. Yeah, like that kind of thing.

[John Henry Spann]

That's great.

[Matt Fradd]

Really good, dude. All right, Patrick. Lord says, are you happy with your move to off the grid? And what would you say to those who are considering it, but concerned with uprooting their family?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah. So I always, just for the sake of honesty, there is one electrical wire that runs to my house, so my power does come. Now we have a generator. Right. We could be off the grid. Off the grid if we wanted to. Right. But our water's provided and all of our animals and we grow some food and all of that stuff. Yeah. I 100% recommend it. Once again, going back to real things. Right. Real things in the real world make you, I don't know, more in touch with reality. So when it's cold outside, if it's frozen, I have to wake my son up a little earlier to go out and do stuff that's gonna take us more time. Right. We have to do certain chores every day. Right. Or else the animals die or Else the raccoon will get into the hen house or else, you know, whatever will happen. And I like the order and the structure that it forces you to do. Because you're opting in, right? You're opting in. You're saying, I choose to take on all these inconveniences and all these chores and all these requirements. And then you have to do it. And it's the best. I think it's good for us spiritually. I think we've lost post agrarian society, post industrial revolution. I think we've just lost a lot of our sense of what makes us human. And we forget that, right. Not to go down another rabbit hole, but we forget as a. Yeah. As a sort of. As Christendom, right. That this little time period of a couple hundred years we're in right now is radically different and unique to the vast majority of human history ever. If you take a guy from 700 BC in Greece and then you take a guy from 1500 AD in France, different cultures, different everything, like, they get it, they understand one another, right. If they could speak the same language, there would be some technical or some technological advances and all that. Cool. That's neat. But then you take that same guy, right, from France and you put him in 2025. We're alien. This is an alien world. Everything's bizarre and different and backwards, right? Yeah. And so I think going back, like purposefully going back to that more agrarian lifestyle is great. I understand everybody can't do that, but I highly recommend, right, whatever tiny piece of that you can do, do it. Get some chickens. Who cares about your hoa? They suck, right? Grow tomatoes. If you live in an apartment, grow. Raise a couple of quail in a cage on your balcony. Like just do just a little thing that makes it more real. Yeah. And the stuff with kids is awesome. Like, we've got. We currently have 32 chicken meat chickens. We had 57 a week ago. But now, like a daily activity. I take the chickens, I kill the chickens, I put them on the tailgate of the truck, I cut the legs off, cut the heads off, cut the wing tips, bleed them out, skin them out and hand them to Henry, who takes them inside. And he takes all the guts out and all of that. And then he hands them to Mary Margaret, right? My 11 year old, she takes them to the sink, she cleans them off, she wraps them up, she writes the date on it and moves them to the freezer. And it's just, we have to do that. There's no way I can do this by myself. And I definitely wouldn't do that if I had the option of not. So I bought the chickens. Gotta do something with these chickens. They're costing me a lot of money. Right. And so I think my biggest piece of advice, if you're considering doing that, is whatever small piece you can do, do it. Chickens are gateway animals. Do the chickens and you'll see it's not that hard. And you'll see that what is hard is really good and you're really glad you did it afterwards.

[Matt Fradd]

I like that. I like the micro approach to something as opposed to blowing up your life, having this dream that is nothing at all like you hoped it would be and then regretting it and going back.

[John Henry Spann]

Well, that's how we started. I married my beautiful bride in 2011 and we moved. She moved from her father's palatial mansion estate in the Southern Maryland suburbs and I moved from my parents house in small town south Georgia. And we bought a cul de sac, or a house on a cul de sac. Right. $150,000, nice little starter home, three bedroom, two bath. Back when the housing prices made sense and it had an hoa. And I grew tobacco and corn and had chickens and meat rabbits in the backyard. And I went stir crazy about it. I mean, I really remember saying to my wife before we even got married that I just couldn't, I wasn't going to leave Georgia. I've been here, my people have been here forever, since white people were in Georgia. Right? We are the people. Right? We've been here. And I was getting stir crazy with this because I wanted to do more. It was fun what I was doing. We had gardens and pull up carrots and grow potatoes and peanuts and fun stuff in the ground like that. But then she came home one day, or I came home from work one day and she had all these real estate listings printed out. And we went and we took the next step. We bought a trailer. It was a double wide trailer. We built it, we set it out there. You've been there. Yeah. You were there a lot.

[Matt Fradd]

I helped you move into it, I think, didn't I? Well, today, remember we went and got all. Not that this matters to anybody watching, but just for that guy who can't turn his podcast off, didn't we take all of your furniture and put it into a garage up the road or something? Me, you and Thomas?

[John Henry Spann]

I think maybe, yeah, big pot or whatever. I burned. I've always burned my couches every time I've moved. Not like that's nothing symbolic. It's just inconvenient to move a big couch and I buy secondhand stuff anyway. No, but then we moved into that and we built that out and then we got to a. A point where, you know, praise be to God, 2008 was the best thing that ever happened to us. Right. Because of that financial collapse. And we actually had some money because we lived at home, which was the best thing ever. We moved. We both moved from our parents house in with one another. Right. Nothing in between. And yeah. Then we started to do more and more and then we moved out here and now I've got the big spot and the pasture and everything. But you start super small because you might hate it and that's okay. It's okay if you hate it and don't want to do that. We need cosmopolitans and there's always been cities and.

[Matt Fradd]

And I'm looking forward to asking you this question. Matt asks, what should we think of George Washington?

[John Henry Spann]

What do you think of George Washington? I feel like I'm supposed to have some countercultural answer to that. I really like George Washington. He's awesome. I like the whole crossing the Delaware and killing the British in their sleep on Christmas thing. I think he's great. And I can be super critical, like don't ask. I'm not. I will not talk about Abraham Lincoln on the show.

[Matt Fradd]

I wonder if that's what he meant.

[John Henry Spann]

I'm not a fan of Abraham Lincoln.

[Matt Fradd]

You don't want to talk about.

[John Henry Spann]

Mostly because of the war crimes. Yeah. But I really like George Washington.

[Matt Fradd]

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

[John Henry Spann]

So I want to start by saying for some reason I've always. I don't know why this is true, but people have always asked me questions like this, as if I have any sort of a like, good answer. I'll tell you what I think, but none of this is like the right answer necessarily. I remember I was riding up to the Right to Life march on a big bus with a bunch of high school kids. And I was talking to one of them and I finished and I turned around and I said, hey, how you doing? Just to this other kid who I knew and his response, I assumed it was gonna be, I'm great, thanks. It was. Well, actually, there's really some things that are weighing on me. I was like, okay, great. Here we go. So I appreciate it. I appreciate people asking me these questions, as if I have any idea. But I'll spitball on that one. Almost all of your hobbies are way more fun if your kids are involved, whatever level they can be. Right? And so I spent a good amount of money and more importantly, I spent a good amount of time on my hobbies. I don't buy fancy hunting gear. I buy a lot of secondhand stuff. I've been using the same bow for a decade. I've bought my son a couple of rifles since he was born that are sort of multi use me and him. But I mean, realistically, I do it as cheaply as I can, and I do it with him. And I think we were talking about this earlier, but I remember when I started hunting with Henry and he was maybe three or four years old, and he would sit there and he made everything so much harder. And I did not really like the hunting aspect, but I was trying to be a good dad. And now he's 13, and I get really upset if he has something that he's got going on. So he can't go hunting with me because I just desperately want him to be there.

[Matt Fradd]

That's really nice.

[John Henry Spann]

I used to really relish in, oh, finally I've got a day. I've got an evening. I can go to an evening, sit and be by myself for a moment. I love being by myself. I'm secretly pretty darn introverted. But now I just really want him to be there hanging out. So just involve your kids. Is a big. And I wish. I wish my wife liked it. I wish my wife and I shared any hobbies. We do not.

[Matt Fradd]

Can you tell the story about the time she. I don't know. I don't want to get her into trouble. Something died.

[John Henry Spann]

You gotta be way more specific. Well.

[Matt Fradd]

Something died because of her and a gun. But I don't know if it's. It was. She came.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah. No, I don't think I can tell that story. Okay, good.

[Matt Fradd]

See how. But it wasn't that good how I did that.

[John Henry Spann]

Appreciate that. Yeah, I don't need to.

[Matt Fradd]

But let's just let the myth roll around out there.

[John Henry Spann]

Pandas. Who knows?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. That one time a panda came to your backyard in North Geor. Zachary May says, tips for beginning hunters.

[John Henry Spann]

Do it seriously. And I'm not trying to be reductive. Just do it. And you're bad at it, and that's okay. Watch a couple you look.

[Matt Fradd]

I'd say I Think I might actually be in a better place to give advice than you are because I'm a beginner and that is go with people who know what they're doing and let them initiate you into that. And don't be afraid to look stupid.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah. And it's okay. Nobody can. It's like so many different.

Outdoor related hobbies. And I'm sure there's other hobbies too, but it's outdoor stuff in particular that I think of because I used to be new at all of this, Stu. This summer I took my two oldest and I paid 300 bucks and we did a trout fishing class up in the North Georgia mountains. I didn't know how to trout fish, so we did it. The guy's so excited. Of course I was paying him money. But to answer all the questions and go through all of that stuff, I have never. Right. I'm a director with the Georgia Trappers Association. I'm an active member of the First Hunt Foundation. I'm a CSI member. All this stuff, right? I have never once had a situation where some guy came up and said, hey, can you teach me about this? And anyone has been like, can you teach me about it? No. No, I can't teach you about that. Shame on you. Like, not one time ever. People are so excited. Please come in.

[Matt Fradd]

Turns out men like to be the ones who initiate people in things.

[John Henry Spann]

I have a friend who told me, he said, I think guys feel good when you ask them for advice. And so I like to ask guys that I like for advice. It's a good way to become their friend. And it's true. I mean, it's pretty utilitarian, but it is, it's true. I love.

[Matt Fradd]

I mean, so long as you're actually asking for their advice. No, I completely agree. Yeah, you think about that. Like, we live, as you say, in an alien world, and there are men who know how to do things. And if you ask them, they feel honored by that because maybe they don't feel like they know how to navigate the alien world.

[John Henry Spann]

But talking about the alien world, right? What's super interesting is we've taken sort of the American ideal, which I think is an offshoot of Protestantism, right? This. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, right? And we've tried that in this modern world. And there's a time and a place for that, right. I think it's really great to be self sufficient in lots of ways, but pure self sufficiency is disordered. It's not natural. You're not an island Right. You're not supposed to exist by yourself. And I feel like that has become so pervasive in a modern world where not only are you not supposed to be doing things by yourself, but you're also living in this alien world where everything's different.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[John Henry Spann]

And everything's not conducive to, I don't know, sort of your natural flourishing. And now we're isolated in a weird place and confused and scared. Going back to intimacy, though, right? Male intimacy.

That is something I've grown in a lot. Talking about in the past 10 or 15 years is the ability to say, like, hey, I kind of want to talk about something.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[John Henry Spann]

And not have you be like, nope, that makes you effeminate. That makes you a homosexual or whatever.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[John Henry Spann]

And I only have a handful of guys that I'll do that with. That I'll kind of open up. You said to me one time that friendship is like being able to bear your heart to someone. And saying this right here, this is how you could really hurt me.

[Matt Fradd]

This is how you could take me out if you want to. I need you to. This is how you do it.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah. Oh, that's so hard. Especially hard as a young man.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

Which I don't think is wrong. Like, I appreciate that the young men. But the whole stoic by your own pull yourself up by your own bootstrap thing, I think it's lame. I don't think it's good.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Megan wants to know what your favorite hymn is.

[John Henry Spann]

My favorite hymn?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

Okay. This is a low, low hanging fruit, and it's going to seem like a cheap one, but I'm going to go for it.

At benediction every Friday. At the school where I work, St. John Bosco Academy, by the way, we just opened a new north campus because we were turning away so many awesome families because we didn't have the space. So check us out up in North Georgia. But every Friday we have benediction. Right. We have adoration all day on Friday and the whole school. You don't have to go. It's after the bell rings. 95% of the kids go to benediction and they sing the Salve Regina. And I've decided that counts as a hymn for this question. Oh, yes.

[Matt Fradd]

Beautiful.

[John Henry Spann]

And they harmonize and it is the tiniest taste of heaven. It really is. It is amazing. I go there just to just, like, almost sightsee. I just can't believe that I get to be with these kids. It's awesome. So that is my favorite thing to hear.

[Matt Fradd]

Song is specifically, you know, How I learned San Francisco.

I've told this story before, but the heads of Ignatius Press were visiting Covenant Eyes because they were doing some kind of business deal. And at the end of the night it was me, Father Fessio, who's the founder of Ignatius Press and a few others were at this like dingy pub, right, Karaoke, light stuff going on and sticky tables. And we were just, just had a drink. That's your heaven. That sounds gross to me.

[John Henry Spann]

It was like earlier today, we were in the coffee shop.

[Matt Fradd]

We were at a hipster coffee shop. Like, isn't this great? Like I hate everything about.

[John Henry Spann]

Everything about it was awful. Yeah, give me sawdust on the floor and sticky tables all day long.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, no, I'm good with that. I don't need that. I don't want that at all.

[John Henry Spann]

Okay, sorry.

[Matt Fradd]

Anyway, so at the end of the night we only had like a drink each. It wasn't. We weren't doing karaoke with Father Fessio. But at the end he said, well, how about we finish the night with a salve with his. An Australian accent. He's not Australian. I don't know why I did an Australian accent. And so I was embarrassed cause I didn't know the salve. But it was cool. Cause we sat there in a sticky, gross pub singing the salve. And the next day I just listened to it on repeat 800 times on YouTube until I finally learned it.

[John Henry Spann]

So this is a humble brag. Yesterday on the right in, my daughter came down with me, right? I just took her. I do a lot of stuff with Henry, especially this time of year with my son. And so I took my 11 year old daughter down and I try to purposefully, right, have one on one time with him and do dates and all that stuff. I have five daughters now, right. I just had a baby four weeks ago. And so I'm trying, I try to purposely spend one on one time with them as much as I can. And we pray the rosary together on the way down. And she, without my prompting, did all of her Hail Marys in Latin. It was the coolest thing in the world. Super cool, Very cool. And I learned the Hail Mary, I learned the Ave Maria in Latin while I was on a road trip with Angie and she just like kind of gave me a couple pokes about how I didn't know it. And she was like, oh come on, you're always talking about you like Latin mass. You don't even know the Ave Maria. I mean I was probably 20, it was before we were married. And I spent, I don't know, a couple hours of this road trip with her, like walking me through, like teaching a child to read. That's beautiful, Maria. Okay, Grazia Planet, like. And we went through the whole thing and then it was super fun.

[Matt Fradd]

That's nice.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Chad says which bear is best?

[John Henry Spann]

Which bear is best?

[Matt Fradd]

That's all he said.

[John Henry Spann]

That's a great question.

The, the one that's in front of you is the best. I talking about this main bear hunt that we got coming up. You know, Maine black bears aren't gigantic. I think our Georgia bears are about the same size, right? I mean you can get some 600 pounders maybe if you're lucky, but for the most part you're talking about two 300 pound bears. And I was reading through some like comments about this one outfitter and all these guys were complaining about wish there were bigger bears. Dude, it's a bear. You just shot a bear, you went out in the woods. This thing that could rip you apart for fun, right?

[Matt Fradd]

And you wouldn't be saying it's too small then.

[John Henry Spann]

And you, you got the bear. I think, I think it's so amazing. So I've never shot a bear. I've never both been hunting bears and seen bears in the woods at the same time. I've done both plenty, but never at the same time.

[Matt Fradd]

What's your dream hunt right now?

[John Henry Spann]

Probably money.

[Matt Fradd]

Money isn't an issue. And someone says, come with me to X so we can hunt X.

[John Henry Spann]

Probably musk ox because it's so alien, right? You have to go to Greenland. You have to go sort of, I.

[Matt Fradd]

Don'T even know, what are they called?

[John Henry Spann]

Muskox. They look like buffaloes with sort of downward sloping horns and lots of fur. Oh, they look beautiful. They're the buffalo equivalent. They are to buffaloes as woolly mammoths are to elephants. They're big and brutish and I see why. And a lot of them are float hunt. I just like weird stuff. So like one of the hunts we've got hopefully, right, we get some traction, we get some guys. And the only reason why, you know, we do the membership stuff is because you gotta put or like the money up front is you gotta put deposits down on a lot of this stuff and it's difficult. But I really wanna do python cowboy not far away in Florida.

[Matt Fradd]

What is that?

[John Henry Spann]

Python cowboy. He does iguana, python and hog hunts in Florida. It looks awesome, but it's just weird and different and neat and that sounds fun to me.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh my goodness.

[John Henry Spann]

Are you on the python, Cowboy.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

Don't look amazing. I want to eat one. That's one of the weird things I haven't eaten. I've eaten most weird things, but I haven't eaten.

[Matt Fradd]

That scares me.

[John Henry Spann]

The python.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, yeah. And it looks like they're in the water and catching iguanas. Is that an iguana?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, they're shooting iguanas. They basically just hunt all invasive species in Florida.

[Matt Fradd]

Huh.

[John Henry Spann]

I really want to do it. I've eaten snake. I've never eaten python. Right. And I've never eaten iguana. Here's like, frog legs. I'd like to try it. We were talking about that the other day. You know, I've got a real strict rule at my house for my son who just passed his hunter safety course. Meaning, like, I bought him a lifetime license when he was 2, but he's just passed his hunter safety course, so now he can hunt by himself. I don't have to be there anymore. And we were talking about sort of like the rules, which we've been talking about his whole life. Right. But my rule is you can kill anything you want in season, but you gotta eat the thing. You have to eat it. There's some exceptions, like furbearers who do a lot of trapping. Did I send you that picture of the bobcat my daughter caught that was as big as she was? So cool. I won't eat male bobcats because they taste like cat pee.

[Matt Fradd]

But can we also point out how great it was when my son, Peter, thanks to you. Thank you for that. You took him hunting and I was with you, of course, but he shot the buck and we gutted it, and we pulled out the heart and said, you want to take a bite? And I said it serious just in case he would.

[John Henry Spann]

Right.

[Matt Fradd]

And he did immediately, which was amazing. He took a big bite, sounded like an apple, and then chewed it and spat it out. And you remember, then I bought him a. What do you call them in America? Candy apples?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, yeah. Candy apples. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

We call them toffee apples, which looked.

[John Henry Spann]

Eerily similar to the heart. That's still the biggest buck we've ever shot on that property. Really? Yeah. Was Peter.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, the Euro amount is on his wall. I wanted to ask you. This is kind of off topic, but you just had a daughter, and I don't know if you want to talk about this or not, but the idea of.

She could be an assassin, secret assassin.

[John Henry Spann]

So it's just.

[Matt Fradd]

Can we explore that or.

[John Henry Spann]

So my wife has children at home, which is great. And scares me to death. I am not like the whole off grid thing and whatever, that's super cool. I like that a lot. But the idea of my wife, right, potentially having a medical emergency, the house scares me to death, right? I'd be alone with all these kids. But I realized, right, she didn't need any help. We have a midwife there who I paid a ridiculous amount of money to come out and we had some birth pool that eight dozen other women have given birth in that was in my living room or my bedroom and all of that stuff. So the baby's born and it's great. She loves it. Has a baby, delivers the placenta, cut the cord after a few minutes and she just climbs. She stayed at the house for two weeks. She didn't leave. She didn't go further than my front porch for two weeks with this baby. It's awesome. She's so happy. I love it.

[Matt Fradd]

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[John Henry Spann]

But here's what I realized. If you have your baby at home, you could just not tell anybody. And we just got a Social Security card, so that's out of the realm of possibilities for little miss Josephine. But Anne Ray's a super assassin, a la the Hitman. Games.

Wouldn'T be virtuous, but it'd be neat.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And what did Cameron, my wife, say to you last night? It seems like that would be what.

[John Henry Spann]

She treated it like it was a very serious proposition. I had. Like, I was considering this.

[Matt Fradd]

Like, I think that would raise A whole lot of issues and you and opportunities.

[John Henry Spann]

No, I mean big, big shout out to my beautiful bride who, you know is. She's currently at home with five of my six kids and all girls except for the oldest. And yeah, she's just the best. She's just the best. And the children, babies always. I think about this a lot when we talk about having like multiple children. Right. Lots of kids. Babies are sort of the one, I don't know, thing in our life that really brings all the little kids together. I say little. My oldest is 13 now. But there really is this sort of like truce of like calling each other bad names and tripping each other and fighting over things and whatever around the baby and it's really cool. It's really beautiful. I think a lot of people don't realize that kids get older. I think a lot of people who will give you a hard time for having a bunch of kids, it's some version of like they think they're just.

[Matt Fradd]

Throwing 10, 3 year olds.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah. And it's like, yeah, I've got a two year old right now. She's a huge pain in the butt. She learned how to open doors. Like she's reached velociraptor level. Right. And that's such a pain in the butt. I hate it so much that she can do that. But in a few years she's going to be this, I don't know, this person with her own thoughts. You can have discussions with and all of these things and they're going to grow up and hopefully stay in the faith and come back and.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, yeah, you're a really good dad. I don't know if I've told you this either but I'm really just going through this phase in my life where I just love being at home with my kids.

[John Henry Spann]

That's awesome.

[Matt Fradd]

But that's a new phase for me. I would say that's in the last three years. Maybe that's developed before that. I just wanted to, you know, do my duty, like not abandon my wife or anything. But I'd rather go like hang out with someone or go on a date with my wife. But now that the kids have got getting older, I actually find them really interesting, really funny and you know when they bicker like kids will bicker, it's very annoying.

[John Henry Spann]

It was very heartening last night seeing your children fighting in school. One of them had a knife up in the air and while trying to look at something.

[Matt Fradd]

Not trying. Yeah. Just so you followed that too quickly to the kids were fighting. She Wasn't trying to stab anybody, but it was like, please put that giant knife down.

[John Henry Spann]

But it made me feel better about my own. I feel like there's so much of a push now in a really good way, for people to just sort of, I don't know, talk about how, like, it's hard. I feel like a lot of people do. I feel like that's great.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

But I was having this conversation with a buddy the other day. I think we listened to something that was talking about how difficult marriage and children were. And, like, yeah, it is hard, but I almost feel like we overemphasize that. Like, it's the best. It's the best thing in the world. These kids are the best thing in the world. My wife is the best thing in the world. And, yeah, I get irritated. Like, I'm an imperfect man, and I fail as a father and a husband all the time. I don't know. I think it's like a boomer seepage of family life is bad, and it's really great.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. I think it's that you have to be honest, but you have to be prudent in how you express what you're feeling. If you find your child to be very difficult, it's not helping you. It's disrespectful to them, your wife, and it's not helpful to anybody else to air your grievances. You know, find a friend, find a spiritual mentor, find a therapist, a child there. I don't know, depending on the issues you're having, and you can express that it's difficult. But what I don't like is when you see people online complaining about their children. Right. So I think. Don't pretend it's great if it's difficult, because that's actually. That would. That would make someone feel really alone right now. Like, suppose they've got kids with, you know, all these sorts of intellectual issues, say, or disabilities, or just they're having a rough time of it because the money's not coming in, and they don't know how they're gonna make ends meet. And they hear me, someone saying. And you saying, that's terrific. Well, I don't want them to feel alone. Like, I want them to acknowledge what's difficult because it's difficult. But I. But I agree with you. Like, I.

It's the best. I mean, I don't know what I'd be doing without them.

[John Henry Spann]

This has been an interesting dynamic in my house. We've reached the age where my son is significantly larger than my wife.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[John Henry Spann]

And that's been a really interesting dynamic to just watch and sort of help them both work through a little bit. Because you almost see on his face, he's 13 years old. He's probably 5 foot 9. He's just a bigger guy. Tall, tall guy. And all of a sudden, this woman who used to be scary, this woman used to be much larger than him. His mother. He respected her and he loved her. But also, if she wanted to, she could pick him up and throttle him. She's never done that, but she could. And all of a sudden, he's looking down, literally looking down at her while she's upset about something with a deep.

[Matt Fradd]

Voice or a deepening voice.

[John Henry Spann]

With a deepening voice. And he's just physically imposing and he's not, like, threatening. But that's a fun, NSA fun.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, did I tell you the story about my eldest, Liam?

[John Henry Spann]

What?

[Matt Fradd]

Who I love, who's so terrific, and he's now at Franciscan. Such a good guy. And anyway, so he said something a couple of months before he left, right. For college. He said something kind of disrespectful to Cameron. It wasn't too bad. It was just like an off the cuff. Hey. And so I walked past him and I kind of gave him a little shove in the shoulder, went, hey. I was gonna say something like, don't speak to my wife like that, but when I shoved him, he didn't move back. Oh, not because he was trying, because he. He's a bigger guy. And in my head, I thought, you need to leave. You need to go to find your own cave, your own woman and start your own life now. Like, this is not gonna work anymore.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, but that's a natural progression of things, isn't it? And it's frustrating with, you know, I only have one boy, so all my boy advice or whatever is all based on this one boy and this one temperament. Right. My daughters have got all these different temperaments. And so I can sort of, I don't know, give, I guess, better tuned advice about different things, like girls collectively than I can my son. But I so just enjoy his desire to be a man, to do man things. I've let him start driving my pickup truck by himself. Right. Not off property, but we have miles of dirt roads in this little property. And so I'll tell him to go drop the garbage in the dumpster. The dumpster's a mile down the dirt road, and we throw it in the back of the truck every day. It's the coolest thing in the world. He's just after that, he wants to do that. He wants to demonstrate his masculinity. And I've been thinking a lot about rites of passage and those sorts of things, right? How do you do that? How do you have a transition to, oh, now you're a man? Cause we don't. We don't have any of those. I was talking to a college somewhere not too long ago, and I promised I would do this big shout out to the University of Georgia Catholic center because I am here and not there. And I was supposed to be giving a talk there to just boys because last time I did boys and girls, and it didn't go over great with girls. Went over great with boys, but not with the girls.

[Matt Fradd]

They were unhappy with you.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah. So. Okay, So I struggle every time we get one of these talks, right, where the girls talks. And this is actually. I think there's a disorder. I don't think I should do this, but I just can't help it, right? I've got this big. I've got all these little daughters and my bride, who I love to die, right? And so with the ladies, it's ladies, you're princesses of heaven and daughters of God, I'm so sorry. This world has just ruined you, right? God creates an order of perfection. And here you are, the Eve. Daughters of Eve at the time, right? And I shouldn't. I shouldn't do that because it's not true. Girls have agency, and they're not agency.

[Matt Fradd]

They're evil. They're not. Yeah, yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

I feel girls.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, they do. I think so.

[John Henry Spann]

That's a myth.

[Matt Fradd]

I'll ask my wife.

[John Henry Spann]

But with my daughters, I feel like my primary job is to, like, love them. Just love the snot out of them and affirm them in their dignity and just remind them how good they are. But with my son, I have this, like, I have to make you a man, right? And so when I'm talking to a group of college guys, right.

I think they really like the just kind of punch in the gut over and over and over again, right? Like, lord, why did you give me your hardest battles? And God's saying, I'm not giving you a hard battle. I'm just asking you not to masturbate to Japanese cartoons. Like, what are you talking about? Like, guys want to hear that. They want the gut punch of, like, get your stuff together. I want that. I know that's not all guys, but that's me. And I needed that. And I wanted that, especially growing up and coming into the faith and all of that. But I think right now, this is what I was going to say in the talk. I think that if you took 98% of unmarried men, right, and you said you can have two options, right? You can live this life where you are right now. You can have video games and you can have free access to pornography, and you can have whatever and a big house and a stipend or whatever. So you can just do the normal thing, right? Or I can take you out to 1880s Wyoming. I'm gonna leave you there in a cabin, and you're gonna be standing out in front of that cabin, and all these painted Indians are gonna come riding and shrieking over a hill, and you're gonna die or kill them. I think almost every boy would do that. But then we have all this BS sort of piled on top of everything, so we forget that that's what we want to do. That's what I want to do.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

I'm married. I would like my wife and children in the cabin behind me while I'm staying out there with a shotgun, right? But I'd still like to do it.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

Painted Indians, man. That's what we're after.

[Matt Fradd]

I love that. Yeah. Sons and daughters.

[John Henry Spann]

But it's fun watching. Watching my son, like, want that so badly. Like, want the danger and want the.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I actually also like what you said earlier, where you said, I got one son, right, and then you've got a bunch of daughters, and they're all different. And I say that because I think we can give general. I think advice can be unhelpful. A lot of the time you think of anything in particular, think of a particular Catholic devotion or something that works well in your marriage, or something that worked well in your exercise routine, whatever it be. When people find something that works for them, they tend to then push that on everybody else as if this is the secret source. But they're different. Their experiences are different, their desires are different, their bodies are different, Their temperaments are different. And so I think we have to be really careful with the kinds of advice that we go seek. Seeking for online, like, how do I raise my kid? Like, how do I run my household? Or how, you know, if you. I think you can give good general advice on here's how an ordered home looks, say, or how to raise a child. But I think if we go just desperate, we'll try to apply, you know, a circle. What is it? A square peg and a round hole sometimes. And we have to be willing to receive that feedback and then adjust and not say, well, it's this or bust.

[John Henry Spann]

I've got this talk that I've done at a bunch of men's groups. Dads, Right. Older guys groups. And it's called the. I forget the number, but things your kids wish you knew, right? And I was asked to give a talk to all these men one time, and I had prepared all this stuff, and I realized, I don't know, like, you all have grown kids. You all have kids who are teenagers. And at the time, my oldest was maybe nine. And I realized I don't have anything to tell these people. And so what I realized I did have was about a decade and a half of having conversations with high school and college kids, right? And what they're saying about their parents. And so I prepare it. It was a pretty good talk. It went over well. And then it was almost like a. Maybe it was a holy spirit thing. I stumbled across about a decade and a half. Old Onion newscast, YouTube video.

It's this woman who's being invited on as a parenting expert. And the guy says, all right. Hello, and welcome to Good Morning America. Today. We're going to have Renee whoever, and she's going to answer some questions for us. The first question we have is, who the hell do you think you are telling me how to raise my kids? And I thought, that's so, like, yeah, that's a great point.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Oh, man, the Old Onion. Wasn't that the best? Whatever happened to that level of talent and brilliance?

[John Henry Spann]

I think it's coming back. I think all comedy's coming back. I think everything's getting better.

[Matt Fradd]

Is it?

[John Henry Spann]

I talked about this the last time I was on. I really don't want to talk about politics, but I just feel like the world is moving in such a good direction. I was telling you this earlier today. My church, Arlie of the Mountains in Jasper, Georgia, RCA or OCIA now, not rcia, is packed to the brim now with, like, good old boy mountain people. That's the coolest thing in the world. It's no longer just so and so's trying to marry somebody or they're from new. It's like all these people who I just saw, all these guys who were like my kind of people, wearing, like, dirty blue jeans and stuff, standing outside holding catechisms. I was like, hey, guys, what are y' all doing? Waiting for OCIA to start. Like, it's amazing.

[Matt Fradd]

All right. Yeah, go on.

[John Henry Spann]

I was gonna say my well guy. I told you this earlier. My well guy who looks exactly like sort of a blue Collar Royal Americana. Well, guy, he was over at my house helping me with a problem on my pump. It was right before Easter. And, you know, he's got real thick Southern accent and big old thing, a grizzly wintergreen long cut tucked under his lip. And he looks up at me and he says, when are y' all going to Mass? And what he meant was, we got Easter coming up. And I was like, that's a strange question, right? Are you being combative right now? Immediately I got defensive, as if I was going to have to defend the faith from an Indian, the well guy. And I said, I think we're doing the vigilante. And he goes, yes, do. And then we saw him at the vigil map. Apparently he and his wife and his daughter had all converted and come across.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, how did he know you were Catholic?

[John Henry Spann]

I think he had known he'd recognize us from Mass, but I didn't recognize him because he was covered in. Well, nice stuff.

[Matt Fradd]

All right, honest question. What's your assessment of this? Because, you know, Paul talks about in season and out of season, and we. I'm sure, you as well. I've been doing this podcast. Before this, I did missionary work in Ireland and Canada. I think it's fair to say I was doing this out of season. And now the Daily Wire is like, we'd really like your show. And that's clearly because they know how to milk it. They make money. Yeah. Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

Oh, neat.

[Matt Fradd]

Did you not see them Twitter the other day?

[John Henry Spann]

No, never heard of it.

[Matt Fradd]

And so it's in season. And it's in season for the reasons like we're just giving, like people. It's. OCIA is exploding. What is happening? Where is this coming from?

[John Henry Spann]

I mean, from a. From a cultural standpoint, once again, I don't want to wade into politics, but from a cultural standpoint, I think, and I've been saying this a lot lately, the pendulum just swung so far. They won. The countercultural revolution of the 60s and 70s won. The sexual revolution won. They destroyed society. They rotted it from the inside out. We're a shell of our former selves, right? We as the west as Christendom. No fault divorce, all this stuff, right? All these fatherless children, they won. They destroyed everything that is true, good and beautiful, except for the tiny. Right. The tiniest thread that Christ is always going to leave in the culture, right? Because he wins in the end. And I think they just overplayed their hands so hard. And I'm so glad that all of this stuff came to light over the last five years from, I don't know, everything. The drag queen stuff and all the BLM stuff and all the. Just sort of radical.

They. Whoever they is. Left wing, right? No, not saying that. You told me. I wasn't allowed to say.

[Matt Fradd]

That's stubborn. Netanyahu's listening.

[John Henry Spann]

But yeah, they just overplayed their hand really hard. It was amazing. It was awesome. And so all these people, they want to rebel, young people in particular want to rebel. And they don't have the option to rebel by going further left, because you can't go further left.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[John Henry Spann]

And so they're instead rebelling by doing what's true, good and beautiful. I think about this a lot with my own.

Sort of conversion story, redemption story, whatever. My parents, who I love, they're so good. I've got great parents, they're great humans. Right. But they were pretty politically liberal. And so I think I rebelled by becoming more conservative. Right. Where a lot of kids were.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, then are you afraid for your grandkids?

[John Henry Spann]

I was buying guns.

[Matt Fradd]

Right. I don't like. Yeah, like, this is the thing, you know, who was it? Is it Hegel? Right. Talking about the dialectic. As humanity progresses, you have the antithesis. I forget it. Right. But it's the back and forth of ideas that come into conflict with each other. And then you have a sort of synthesis between the antithesis and the thesis.

And, you know, I don't think we're progressing necessarily, but I think there's something to that pendulum swing idea. Yeah. Like, I grew up watching my friends. Parents were like, don't call me Mrs. Or mister. I mean, you may have grown up in a different place, but, you know, and the priests were like, call me John and gross family. My friend's mom was buying us pornography. I mean, I'm not saying this is mainstream. I'm just saying, like, we lived in this question authority, no. 1, you know, now we're desperate for tradition because. But how long does that last until the next pendulum swinging?

[John Henry Spann]

I don't know. But I know that once again, 200 years ago, we were fairly consistent with where we were 2,000 years ago. I'm talking about societal structures and culture. Right? And then we got off course, really weird in the 60s and 70s. I think it's going to be. I think it's swinging back. I don't think it's going to swing all the way back. But I feel like the norm is some standard of truth and good and goodness and beauty.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[John Henry Spann]

That has always existed throughout humanity. And so I'm still sort of optimistic, I don't think. It just swings back and forth every other generation forever and ever. Right now.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. I mean, I'm a Christian, so I believe in God's providence. But if I weren't, I guess I would say that all of human history is merely the swing of pendulums and the advancement of technology.

[John Henry Spann]

Right.

[Matt Fradd]

So, like, what does this part of our cultural story look like with AI and whatever the hat will look like in one year, five years, the.

[John Henry Spann]

The sort of, I don't know, wild card is the whole technology piece. I have no idea. I don't know what that's going to look like. I mean, it's great. I don't want to be a Luddite, but I kind of am, like, just naturally. Right. I'm sort of naturally contrarian and all of this. So I don't know. It scares the heck out of me. And I feel like I just want there to be an answer. Besides, don't ever let your kids look at the screen ever. Right. I want that to, like, that's what I'm doing right now. That's great, right? It's working. And they're in a culture where that's talked about, right? Our school, the vast majority of the parents are on board with all of that. And so my kid doesn't feel weird, but I feel like that's not a forever answer. Right. Eventually, obviously, my kids are gonna have a smartphone eventually, right? Maybe when they're off on their own or whatever, they're gonna do it. And there's gotta be. There's a deeper answer in there. In there somewhere. I mean, it's sad and I don't want to sound defeatist, but with, say, pornography exposure or something, it's just a matter of when informing your children well enough, because it's going to happen. It's not a matter of if anymore. It's going to happen. And I just want my kids to be formed well enough to where they say, that's evil. I am disgusted by it.

[Matt Fradd]

What you know what's really neat is my kids. The way they'll talk. They'll say things like, let's say we just came out of the grocery store. You're like, that lady was so nice. She must be a Christian. Hey, dad. Cause she was happy.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

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

[John Henry Spann]

I think even in secular society that's happening. I feel like there's more of a sort of societal pressure to not do that. And maybe it's just the circles I run in, but it seems like more and more people are saying, I'm not gonna raise an iPad kid. I'm not gonna do that to my kid. Look how it screwed me up. And we're all like that, right? We all get screwed up somehow. And then.

[Matt Fradd]

And that's the litmus test we implement in our own brains as to how the lone star to guide our children or to raise. That was for me, but I missed a lot of things looking at the don't let my kid watch porn. I mean, that's a very good goal.

[John Henry Spann]

But I think you missed a lot of times.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, what I mean is, I think there's something to that. Right. Let's say your parents failed. Maybe they didn't. It wasn't their fault, but they failed in some area. Maybe they couldn't provide for you financially. And so you go, my kids are gonna. I'm only gonna have a couple of kids and I'm not gonna let them go without. Well, for me, I was looking at porn by the age of eight and that really messed me up. And that's a big part of my story. So for me, when I had kids, my kids will not see pornography. Like, I will not tolerate that. So I just mean, I think there are other things like, to consider when raising your children. You shouldn't look at porn. And. But in our minds, I think we sometimes fall into the trap of thinking, so long as I can make up for this poverty I experienced as a child, moral poverty, intellectual poverty, poverty, financial poverty, then I'm. Then I'm. That's. That's how I'm gonna.

[John Henry Spann]

Right.

[Matt Fradd]

Be the perfect.

[John Henry Spann]

And then all the other stuff goes. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Then you kind of forget about other things, you know, like. Does that make sense?

[John Henry Spann]

No, it makes a lot of sense.

[Matt Fradd]

Did. Do you have something like that that you think I mean?

[John Henry Spann]

Mine's just the screen stuff in general that I'm so terrified of all the time, and I hyper focus on that.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah. I just one thing. I know I've talked about it before, but nobody takes anything else away from this episode. The thing that has been so just on my heart all the time, and I bring it up every time I talk anywhere or anything is this idea of our kids identity, like them knowing who they are and how important that is. Right. I think that was a big part of my story. I was struggling with. I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what my identity was. I didn't know that it was based in. That it was based in anything.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[John Henry Spann]

I struggled with what culture I was a part of. I felt torn in all these different directions. And so I ended up jumping with both feet into a lot of things that I shouldn't have jumped into. And some of it, once again, I came out on the other side. I was like, oh, I like that, but I need to calm down. Right? But the whole idea of blessing your children, I know I say it all the time. Every time I'm on the show, I think I say it, but it's so important. Taking a moment every single night before they go to bed and you bless them on their forehead and you say, you're a prince of heaven, you're a son of God, your true home is in heaven. You're good, you're my son. I'm proud of you. All of that stuff. And dad has to do it and it's gonna be super awkward the first 10 times and then they're gonna love it and they're gonna want it. And what that does, I hope, once again, I hope my oldest is 13, right. Is instill some sense of here's who I am no matter what I do. A lot of, like, if we get in a fight or, you know, I discipline my son or something that day, I'll say, sometimes you do bad things, but you're so good. You are so good. And I hope he believes it because I still struggle with believing that. Right. I still struggle with believing that I am good and I'm worthy of respect and I'm worthy of love and I'm not pitching it back to St. Hubert, but I think it's super important to say that out loud as mental, that we do ultimately we just want what is actually really good. We want to be virtuous and we want to be good, but we don't believe that we can be. And so when I surround myself with people like you, people like my boss at work, like my good close friends who will say, no, you're really great, I say, well, Matt thinks I'm awesome. I think Matt's awesome. So maybe there is something to that. That stinks, right? The whole identity crisis is so hard.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. No, it is true. I feel like if you've been Married for more than years. Five. Five minutes. And your wife can stand to be around you. You may not be as bad as you think you are.

[John Henry Spann]

Oh, that's beautiful.

[Matt Fradd]

How's that for a low bar?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

I remember thinking that one day I was on the bed and my wife and little children were sitting on me and they were scratching my back and massaging me before I was going to work. And I don't know how it happened, but I thought there was a. There was a hope that maybe I'm not as awful as I think I am.

[John Henry Spann]

That's beautiful.

[Matt Fradd]

And I suppose in one sense you're worse than you think you are. And also far better than you think you are. I mean, that's also probably the case.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah. But. Yeah, I don't know if that's the case.

[Matt Fradd]

Which one?

[John Henry Spann]

I had a priest. The worst part, I had a priest one time who was talking about, like how God sees us, right? And he was saying, strip away everything, all your successes, all of your failures, all of your sin, all of your virtue, and what do you look like? You look like a baby. How do you not love a baby? Right? That's what you really are. That's how God looks at you. And I think sometimes one of my younger daughters, when she was a few years younger, called me a butt crack one time. And I like to think and the way I reacted was sort of this bemused, like, well, I have to do something about this. You can't call me a butt crack. What a hilarious thing to call me. And I like to think, I hope that's how God looks at us when we sin. He thinks, oh, you idiot, you beautiful precious thing that I love so much. You can't do that. It's gonna negatively impact your life. Let's get you to confession. Let's get that handled. Yeah, I hope so. And our young ladies too, right? I don't want to just talk rah rah masculinity. I think that there is so much there that these girls need to understand about themselves, even if it's only an intellectual assent, right? Yeah. It's better to feel God comes to convert our hearts, not our minds. Converting your mind is really, really great. You can win YouTube flame wars, you can do whatever, right? But he comes to convert our hearts. And the fact that when I look at my daughters, and primarily, and this is for everybody, every woman in the world from 2 to 120, right?

Realizing, even if it's only an intellectual assent, that your identity, first and foremost, is a princess of Heaven who's good and lovable and forgivable and God created. He's been thinking about you from eternity so that he can spend forever with you. We just have to remember that. Say that out loud. Occasionally I have to, and I don't always believe it. I don't feel that most of the time. I struggle with all that, with all the feeling stuff. We've talked about this, but I had an intellectual conversion to the church because it made sense and I felt smart and I had spiritual pride and I thought I was better than other people because I was smart and I had found the truth. Go me. Jesus is so lucky to have John Henry Spann, who can figure this stuff out. Now let me tell other people why they're wrong. Right? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's great. It's nice. It's really neat that you can have a gotcha moment with the church and then realize it's some monk from 1200 years ago like, talked about how that was ridiculous. Right. But what really matters is us realizing what we're actually rooted in. Right? We're shoots off the stalk of Christ. You know, we're good. We're so good. I don't feel good. Got a headache right now.

[Matt Fradd]

That's beautiful. Really well put. I was with Sister Miriam recently, and she reminded me of a quote from Julian of Norwich, who said, God sees sin as pain in us. Don't just. Do you agree?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

I don't know if you. Too quickly, without thinking about it.

[John Henry Spann]

No, I did, but by the time you said, do you agree? I thought about it.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like you see that in your kids. Hey, like, when they're. When they're making bad decisions, it's all for me. It's very often I feel like they're out of communion with me, and now they're hiding something from me, and now they're trying to make life work independently from me. I'm not talking about old kids. I'm talking about, like, you know when little kids do that, and you're like, oh, no. What you need? This happened to me with a particular child when they were very young. They were stealing from me, and I could tell something was up and laid in bed. What's going on? Nothing. Nothing. Like, all right. But I kept pressing, kept pressing, kept pressing gently, but, like, what's going on? And this child broke and wept and confessed everything. And I got to hold this child and say, I love you so much. There's nothing you could do that would make me love you less, you know, Said all that and then said, don't ever steal from me again. Like that was said. But it was like, you're so beautiful. I love you. Right? Here's the point, though. It's like that child was beginning to live a life out of communion with his father, which was leading to hiding like Adam and Eve in the garden. And it was leading to shame. It was leading to get along without dad. But here are my fig leaves now. Here's how I'm going to get by. And the father me, in this instance, came in and I was able to bring about communion. And then the pain goes away and the child can live in freedom. And that's so much of our story, I think.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, I like the terminology, fig leaf, right? How we like what we're trying to hide from God. I have. I was talking to my spiritual director about this not too long ago. I have imposter syndrome all the time, right? This fear that if you really knew, even you, like you, my friend, if you really knew who I was, we wouldn't. I need to put up some barriers because I don't need you to really know who I am. And I think we deal with that so much more now. I was a. I don't remember what this was, a talk or retreat or what, but I was talking about, if we're being honest with ourselves, how many of us have been wearing masks on top of masks on top of masks our entire lives from the time we were old enough to care what other people think about us. And it's really hard to. Like, right now. I feel like I'm kind of. This is kind of a cope, right? I'm kind of cheesy saying all of this, right? But how do I get down to what is really me? How do I really understand who I am? Right. Primarily a prince of heaven. It's hard. It's hard. It's a lot of. I don't have, like, a practical answer.

[Matt Fradd]

It is hard. And I agree with you. Like, sometimes I'm wondering, as I'm saying things that I hope are true, how much of that is just posturing, you know? But I. But I think you can tell from the effects, you know, if you start living in a way where you're. Where everything gets better, like really better, and your wife says to you, like, you're actually more patient and kind and loving, and the kids like being around you. Like there's litmus tests, I think, like that. That shows that you're going in the right direction. Because if you were going in the wrong direction, like, if I was hiding from my wife, drinking in secret, looking at pornography, these things, my life would get worse and everyone around me would enjoy me less.

[John Henry Spann]

Right.

[Matt Fradd]

And I think so. Even though I don't know if I can tell in the moment am I being authentic or not, because what the hell do I know? But I think you can tell from. There's this, like, expanse and this hopefulness and this confidence in Christ. Yeah. So I think you can tell when you're on the right path.

[John Henry Spann]

Well. And I don't think faking it till you make it is necessarily a bad thing.

[Matt Fradd]

No, I agree.

[John Henry Spann]

A lot of times I do what I feel like a virtuous man ought to do in this situation.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, that's good.

[John Henry Spann]

Just because I feel like I should do that. I want to be a virtuous man. I'm going to fake being a virtuous man, even though I might still believe at some level that lie that I'm not. That I'm not really a good man, but I'm not really much of a man at all. I'll have that little lie from the devil in there. But if I were, here's what I would do. And the idea is, eventually you build that up. Just. You were talking about Dostoevsky, Right. I'm going to read Dostoevsky because I want to be the kind of guy who reads Dostoevsky. And then after a while, you're like, I actually really enjoy.

[Matt Fradd]

Who would have thought that happened?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm really. An excellent short story of his called the Double. It's about a man who is very awkward. Oh, I'd love to read some part of it to you. He's so good. What? I doesn't have to be at Dostoevsky. It should be about fiction. What I love about Dostoevsky and I think why people love certain authors. Dostoevsky reflects my interior life back to me through his assessment of the human psyche. And it makes me feel less alone. I've had all these thoughts and ways of interacting with other people. That is awkward. And then I hate myself for being awkward. And then I overcompensate all these sorts of things. And he, like, in his characters, shows me myself. And I go, oh, thank God. Does that make sense?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

I've been. I need to read. Read again. Like, I listen all the time.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, but listening, I think, might be more natural than really, really. It's more human.

[John Henry Spann]

Oh, but I like the Idea. I like the idea. Next to my wife, my beautiful bride.

[Matt Fradd]

I agree that it's cooler, but I think the spoken word around the campfire preceded the written word on pages. Right. So maybe it's more human to listen. So maybe audible is more based than reading. I don't know.

[John Henry Spann]

I. I don't remember where I heard this the other day.

[Matt Fradd]

It'd be more based actually to have it read to you from someone you love, perhaps.

[John Henry Spann]

Oh, that sounds great.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

To convince Angie to read the Theodore, Rosemary, Matt, Sedge.

[Matt Fradd]

Just pick it up.

[John Henry Spann]

No, I just. I want to do more of that. My audible account is ridiculous. I love. I love audible. Mary Margaret and I are. We just read the Giver together.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I just remember. Yeah, it was really good. The apple. I remember the apple. Is it the color?

[John Henry Spann]

There's an apple color. Red. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And he was explaining what color looks like if you'd never heard of color.

[John Henry Spann]

Here's what I want to talk about briefly. So ever since this baby has been born, the baby sleeps in the bed with my wife. That scares me to death. I'm worried I'm gonna roll over on the baby or something. Or I'm just scared of that.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[John Henry Spann]

So I don't sleep in the bed with my wife. We don't have a guest bedroom, so my options are the couch or my son's room. So Henry and I have become roommates for the past four weeks or so, and we've been doing boy movie nights. And it's the best. It's the best thing in the world.

[Matt Fradd]

What movies have you been watching?

[John Henry Spann]

A bunch of them. We watched Alien.

[Matt Fradd]

Does he like that?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Would Peter like that or is it too much?

[John Henry Spann]

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

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

Well, I think. We don't say that.

[Matt Fradd]

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

[John Henry Spann]

But it's the sexuality piece that I just want to. I won't put in front of my kids. But Alien Predator. And I'm supposed to be saying, like, man for all seasons. No, we've not watched a man for all seasons. Alien, Predator, Cat of Monte Cristo, the one with.

Jim Caviezel. Which is.

[Matt Fradd]

Is it good?

[John Henry Spann]

It's excellent.

[Matt Fradd]

Now, is that a Peter age movie? Could I watch that with you?

[John Henry Spann]

You should watch that tonight. It's so good. The Patriot Gladiator, Braveheart.

[Matt Fradd]

You need to come up with a list for us.

[John Henry Spann]

I'll put them out.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, maybe you could put it on your website and we could link to it.

[John Henry Spann]

Yes, 100%.

[Matt Fradd]

Because I watched Braveheart recently and I forgot how good that movie is.

[John Henry Spann]

Okay, here's why I like Braveheart so much. Because William Wallace, who's a really virtuous good man, is not the modern idea of what a virtuous, like what a church guy looks like with like a short sleeve button up and his tie and whatever. He's not just like a nice guy because once again, nice guys are lame. Nobody wants to be a nice guy. Right. Being nice is a. A good thing to do occasionally. Right. But he's a fighter. He's like. He's like, Christ, right? He's like, I'm gonna go tick off the English guys who are here. Even though you guys are having this nice little. What, I'm go over there and like, get up in their face and then I'm gonna go sack York. I say I'm gonna go sack York on a pretty regular basis. Yeah, it's really good. It's really, really good.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I mean, it's beautiful. When his. When his father and brother die and that little girl gives him that flower. You watch that and you don't cry. I'm not sure if you're a man. Is that. You gave me five reasons I'm allowed to cry.

[John Henry Spann]

There were seven, and that wasn't one of them.

[Matt Fradd]

No, but can I add that one? I can't add that one.

[John Henry Spann]

I got so much negative. I got random emails from that they didn't realize. I thought it was the most obvious tongue in cheek thing in the entire world.

[Matt Fradd]

Isn't that funny?

[John Henry Spann]

I think one of them was, if you're riding alone in a pickup truck with the windows down, listening to country music written between 1982 and 1994, you're allowed to cry one tear. And people are like, that's ridiculous. This is toxic masculinity.

[Matt Fradd]

And at that point you should have just doubled down. Yeah. All right, well, now it's from 1986. You keep complaining. I'm going to keep closing that window.

[John Henry Spann]

I am the arbiter.

No, I have.

[Matt Fradd]

That movie was so beautiful. I would encourage people to go watch that again. I mean, there's the nice classy breast scene. So for that point, I was like, I just cover our eyes for that, just in case. But I think, by the way, I think that can sound funny, actually. Nate Bogazzi has a whole point on this. A whole joke about this.

[John Henry Spann]

Classy breast themes.

[Matt Fradd]

No, but about how he grew up in a super Christian family and how. Oh, no, no, it was John Crist. I beg your pardon? And he was saying the bit where the guard is like, kissing that girl's face and trying to rape her. Shut your eyes, but open your eyes as they slit her throat and whatever. And you think, well, does he have a point? And I don't think he does. Like, I think superficially I get the point and it's funny. But it's easier to watch an act of violence without committing an internal sin than it is to watch an act of sexuality without committing internal sin. Do you see? Also, acts of violence can be justified, whereas fornication or what have you that is often depicted in movies is not justified.

[John Henry Spann]

You ever watch Saving Private Ryan?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, a long time ago.

[John Henry Spann]

I've got that rolling around in my head. I need to do the like, common sense media deep dive on that and see if that's good for. Because once again, it's violent.

[Matt Fradd]

Violent.

[John Henry Spann]

I don't think there's any.

[Matt Fradd]

What about.

What was on the Mel Gibson did recently?

[John Henry Spann]

Apocalypto?

[Matt Fradd]

No, the. The guy who's a non combatant.

[John Henry Spann]

Oh, a Hacksaw Ridge. I haven't seen that one, actually.

[Matt Fradd]

Fantastic. Yeah, there is a lot of good movies out there. I always talk about three billboards outside of Ebbing, Missouri.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, please watch that. I don't know if I've ever seen it.

[Matt Fradd]

Promise. It's worth it. I remember it restored my faith in movies. I shot the laptop lid next to my wife. I was like, that's why people like movies.

[John Henry Spann]

All right. But you know what's better than a good movie, man?

[Matt Fradd]

What?

[John Henry Spann]

Going out and trying to shoot a squirrel but not doing it. I'm serious. Yeah. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

All right.

[John Henry Spann]

Same with video games. Same with anything that you're like, once again, real things. Real things are good. Real things are better.

[Matt Fradd]

But three billboards outside of Ebbing, Missouri.

[John Henry Spann]

My daughter caught a 30 pound bobcat and a trap, shot it and skinned it and we ate it.

[Matt Fradd]

She skinned it?

[John Henry Spann]

No, I skinned it. She stood. She stood around while I Skinned it.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I'm gonna send that thing to Nashville soon.

[John Henry Spann]

I've got a 12 foot long alligator in my freezer right now. Like the skin and the head and all the meat. I really want to do something. I'm sorry.

[Matt Fradd]

No. Yeah, sorry. I got a question for you. What do I do there? Do I ask Nashville to ship it? Do I ask Daily Wire to ship that? I can.

[John Henry Spann]

I think you have to. Right?

[Matt Fradd]

Or do I drive it?

[John Henry Spann]

I would drive it.

[Matt Fradd]

I think I might drive it. But it. It's a big drive and no one can come with me.

[John Henry Spann]

Like, you could stick it out in the side.

[Matt Fradd]

It's way bigger than it looks.

[John Henry Spann]

It's. It's enormous.

[Matt Fradd]

It's so beautiful, isn't it?

[John Henry Spann]

I was lined up on one on our last trip.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm excited for the. What did we get? Gim's buck.

[John Henry Spann]

Did you do a gimbal mount?

[Matt Fradd]

Shoulder mount?

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, I've got a. Got a blease buck, a zebra rug, another spring buck and a blease buck. I really wanted to. Were you there when I shot the police bug?

[Matt Fradd]

I didn't think it was the one where C.J.

[John Henry Spann]

Kept telling me, you want to shoot a female. Like, I don't want to shoot a female. They have bigger horns. Like, I feel bad. I want to shoot one of the guys. And finally he just like, exasperated, like, fine, that's the guy. Good luck. And I shot him.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, you didn't. You do like a mammoth shot.

[John Henry Spann]

It was a really good shot.

[Matt Fradd]

Six or seven. How fast?

[John Henry Spann]

Oh, you're building up. I don't know. I don't remember the yardage on that one. I did take my longest successful shot ever on this trip, though, and it was a 400. It was 403 yards. Standing shot on a springbok. And I cannot overemphasize how great it is to be wandering through the savannah with a gun and like, it's amazing.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, see, we need to do this again. But I'd like to. I liked all those fellows, but I would like to do it with just the two of us. We gotta do something like that before we die. Because there's something about getting up in the morning, having our coffee and just.

[John Henry Spann]

Going out all morning.

[Matt Fradd]

Like, cold plunge, cold plunging.

[John Henry Spann]

Cause it's winter down there, right? Everything's freezing cold. And it was. Yeah, you said it was the first time we went. We've probably talked about this before, but I was really worried about you not enjoying it at all.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, me too. Not really worried, but I was worried.

[John Henry Spann]

I thought you were gonna go, like, actually, I just want to sit back in a canvas tent and, like, read Brothers K. All right. That's what I'd rather do. You have fun. Like, I think it's really great that you're doing it. I thought that, too, but then you shot the first animal you shot last time, and you said, I don't want to do anything else.

[Matt Fradd]

Do you remember I said how good life would be if, like, this was our life? You and I just go hunting all day, we come back to our wives in the evening, and we just do it all over again.

[John Henry Spann]

That's great.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, how do we make that life happen?

[John Henry Spann]

I don't think my wife would. I was. I was looking at prices in Namibia. Yeah, I would love. You know, land's free over there. It's.

[Matt Fradd]

I beg your pardon.

[John Henry Spann]

Land's basically free, but it's free land.

[Matt Fradd]

I think you said a lion. I thought. I don't think that's true.

[John Henry Spann]

No, no, they're very.

[Matt Fradd]

Land is.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, no, that's my, like, internal. When I'm thinking of what this is, probably disordered, but on a regular basis, I'll think of things like, what would I do if all of a sudden, everyone I love disappeared? They all died in some horrible accident?

[Matt Fradd]

What would you do?

[John Henry Spann]

This is disorder, but this is what I think I would do.

[Matt Fradd]

It's fun.

[John Henry Spann]

I would disappear somewhere and just hunt. I would. Saint Hubert. I would go be Saint Hubert for a while, and then hopefully, some holy man would hit me upside my head and change that.

It'd be fun for a few. And Jeff would be there. Jeff? My dog.

[Matt Fradd]

Do people go hunting? What other countries are popular to hunt in?

[John Henry Spann]

In Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Rhodesia.

[Matt Fradd]

Wasn't a while to see the.

[John Henry Spann]

I was correcting myself.

[Matt Fradd]

Level of racism towards white people in Namibia and South Africa.

[John Henry Spann]

Did you talk to anybody, like, any of the, like.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, I talked to CJ about it.

[John Henry Spann]

I talked on the airplane to this girl who was trying desperately to move to Namibia from South Africa.

[Matt Fradd]

And Namibia is not much better because South Africa is about to implode.

[John Henry Spann]

From every.

[Matt Fradd]

Everything I was hearing, I think Namibia.

[John Henry Spann]

Is just so rural that you can just sort of be out and away from everything and never have to go into the city. But really, really horrifying stuff. The whole.

[Matt Fradd]

He was saying, you're seventh in line as a white man for a job, for a government job. It's like, handicapped black woman, black woman, handicapped black man, black man.

[John Henry Spann]

Well, he was. He was talking a lot about how, you know, the British Came and the Boer wars, where the British fought the Boers. Right. Who were the Dutch inhabitants who had been there for hundreds of years.

[Matt Fradd]

I love how much he hated the British.

[John Henry Spann]

And he said, I promise, if you were British right now, I'd say the same thing. And then just like a whole estimation. Oh, my.

[Matt Fradd]

Creative expletive.

[John Henry Spann]

And no, it was. They were these really tough people who built civilization out of nothing. Out of nothing. I know that's politically incorrect to say, but there was nothing there. There were people there. There were Stone Age people there.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[John Henry Spann]

And then the Dutch came down, built a civilization, the British took it over, and then they ruined it. Yeah. I'm not attacking all the British, but the ones in South Africa in particular.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Well, now the natives are ruining it.

[John Henry Spann]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[John Henry Spann]

I don't think. I think a lot of them aren't even natives. I think the Zulu right up. Or the Bantu migration that went down in there. Yeah, that's right.

[Matt Fradd]

Thanks for that correction. Yeah. Now they're just ruining it and the government's ruining it. It's very sad.

Anyway, so we should get on a few extra hunts in.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, exactly.

[Matt Fradd]

The world implodes.

[John Henry Spann]

No, there's a. There's a bunch of those, like, sub Saharan African countries. But I want to. I would like to hit stuff on different contexts.

[Matt Fradd]

Can we hunt in Japan? What could we hunt?

[John Henry Spann]

Yes, there's a great hunting culture in Japan.

[Matt Fradd]

Is there? What can we go. I'd love to go to.

[John Henry Spann]

BO are a big one in Japan.

[Matt Fradd]

Wild hog.

[John Henry Spann]

I've killed a lot of, like, wild hogs in the US And I really want to kill them over there because these are. They're all technically feral hogs.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[John Henry Spann]

There were no. There were no pigs in America. The closest thing were the javelinas. Right. When the Spanish got here. But then they let all their pigs go. And then we've had wild hogs since the Spanish showed up. But I really want to hunt, like, over there, where they're from.

[Matt Fradd]

What about Australia? You want to go just shoot kangaroos out of a helicopter?

[John Henry Spann]

That's my. My biggest complaint about Australia.

[Matt Fradd]

Australians can shoot them.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah, but I could never. I don't think I'm.

[Matt Fradd]

You want to come watch me?

[John Henry Spann]

No, you can't shoot the crocs either. Like, you can go on a crocodile hunt.

[Matt Fradd]

You carry my bags.

[John Henry Spann]

But I would. I would love to hit an Asian hunt. I would love a European hunt. I really want to do South America. I want to do the Red Stag and the Black Buck down in Argentina. Those are introduced too.

[Matt Fradd]

But what I want for you is for you to have a room where each room depicts a different continent. And those are. That's where you put the.

[John Henry Spann]

Did you talk to my wife about that? That sounds great.

[Matt Fradd]

She'll love that.

[John Henry Spann]

No, we've come to an agreement right now with shoulder mounts that we can't have more than we can have no new shoulder mounts of the same species in public viewing areas in the house. So no more. She likes. Except for birds. She likes ducks.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

We got a woodcock this year. That's fun.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[John Henry Spann]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Good. Thank you for coming on the show, everyone. Please go check out your website again.

[John Henry Spann]

It's fraternityofsthubert.com. check us out. Sign up for membership. You'll get newsletter, merch package, all kinds of good stuff.

[Matt Fradd]

Now if they go there today too, they'll see upcoming hunts. How many spots are left, whether they can. How much it is, sign up.

[John Henry Spann]

And if you don't want to give $6 a month, that's okay. We'd love for you to, but just sign up for the email to stay updated. I think it's good. I think it's really. It's a great opportunity for like minded Catholics to go be men together.

[Matt Fradd]

And I really want you to think of a phrase, a retreat where you get to kill something. Something like that.

[John Henry Spann]

Now we got kind of a cool flowery tagline of what is it? Yeah. As the hunter sequel, the stag. So I seek you, O Lord, and yet you sought me first. Come on. That's good.

[Matt Fradd]

That's pretty good.

[John Henry Spann]

It's not as pity.

[Matt Fradd]

You probably shouldn't change it to what?

[John Henry Spann]

I retreat where you kill stuff. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. And is that a quote from someone? No, no. Really.

[John Henry Spann]

Can you chew on it a while?

[Matt Fradd]

That's really nice.

[John Henry Spann]

Thanks.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I'd like you to change it to mine and attribute it so that my name is on your website. Just.

All right. God bless you.