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Dr. Johann D'Souza has a one-sentence solution to the biggest problem facing young people, and he will tell you upfront that almost nobody listening will actually do it. Never give your child a smartphone. He spent years assuming the answer had to be more complicated than that, researching apps, filters, and monitoring software, before realizing the complication isn't the technology. It is the word "yet." A door left open invites a negotiation that parents lose, because children have more time, more energy, and nothing else to think about. And if you have already said yes, he has a way back that starts with an apology.
But the smartphone is not really what this conversation is about. D'Souza is a clinical psychologist who switched from math and physics to theology mid-college, and a numerary of Opus Dei, which means he gave up marriage so he could spend his life forming other people. That background shows up in his diagnosis, which isn't about screens at all. He says the problem was never ignorance. Virtue is an ability, and without it we can't do the good we already know we should do. He says that, in a family, that looks like anxious moms and weak dads. Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein spend the hour trying to read a man whose face, by his own admission, has never once corresponded to what was happening around him. Find him at neversmartphone.com. He is back Friday for the conversion story.
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Ben Budia is back in the studio, and this time the Knights of Columbus policies stay in the drawer while he tells the guys how a kid from Alicante ended up in Texas with eight children. He grew up watching his father start jeans brands, a construction company, a pavement company, and a toothpick company, and at 14 he got handed a beat-up notebook and a promise: four thousand dollars for every building he found that needed refurbishing. He found six or seven. He still hasn't gotten the money, and he still brings it up when his dad shows up with another bottle of Blue Label. By 19, he had built and sold his own company and was convinced he was a failure. He had the apartment downtown, the car, the business, and a hollow place in the middle of it all, so he sold everything and left for Asia, starting in Thailand because it was the cheapest place to land. Eighteen years later, after China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, he says the thing he can only say now: he traveled that far to find God, and God had been sitting next to him the whole time.
Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein bring him back to the Tiny Table for the part of the story that turns. Ben was in a Catholic church in Bangkok asking God to send him someone who would give his life meaning, and the answer came by way of a job in South Korea and a lunch table at an American Chamber of Commerce event in Seoul, where a woman from San Jose either did or did not tell him nobody was sitting there. She says she did not. He does a very good impression of her saying it. Eight children later, two born in Japan, one in Pennsylvania, some in Colorado, the oldest at UCLA in Santa Monica, and none, to the hosts' visible disappointment, born in Texas. Along the way, the BeatiDudes get into the Fourth Degree and the Catholic men nobody teaches you about in the American founding story, the 5 p.m. alarm that calls Ben to an examination of conscience, whether a halfway examination of conscience counts, and a karate-style fraternal correction.
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Eight seasons in, and Ben Budia is the first guest to arrive at the Tiny Table by motorcycle, in a tie and a jacket, in 110-degree Texas heat, on the theory that if it is 120 out you simply must go 120 or faster. That is roughly the energy of the whole conversation. Ben is the General Agent for the Knights of Columbus in Texas, which means 24 agents and about 30,000 families under his care, but the path to that chair is not the one you would guess. He was born in Spain, left at 19, started a telecom company, sold his share, and spent the next 18 years in Asia. He went to Japan chasing martial arts and ended up training with the national fighting team, which he cheerfully describes as the cherry on top rather than the main point: his conversion. He tells Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein about watching the same handful of Japanese Catholics show up to daily Mass at the cathedral in a country where the faith is a rounding error, and how once a Japanese person becomes Catholic, they simply do not stop. Ben was inspired, and it clearly rewired him.
The other thread is Father Michael McGivney. In 1882, the risky jobs went to Catholics, leaving widows in New Haven to prove to a judge they could support their children or watch those children get placed in what amounted to a sweatshop. A young priest gathered the men he trusted in a church basement and built a promise. McGivney gave away every winter coat he was given to the first homeless man he passed, caught tuberculosis, and died young with around 6,000 members on the books. Today, Knights of Columbus has over two million members and $129 billion of insurance in force.
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Comedian Nazareth is back with the BeatiDudes, and the Friday half of this visit turns from punchlines to providence. It opens with a round of Blessed Are the Joke Makers at the Tiny Table, where a conspiracy theorist prompt produces Honda sponsoring the early church because the apostles were all in one Accord, plus a Sonic ice callback that should probably be reported to someone. Then Nazareth tells the story he has never stopped being amazed by. As a new believer in Hollywood, he made God a very specific and very honest promise, and then asked for a beautiful wife with a rich father who had memorized the entire Bible. Year by year, as his hairline receded and his waistline did not, he kept negotiating the request down until he was willing to accept John 3:16 and a witnessing opportunity. Years later, his dying father asked him to fly to Gaza and put the family home in his mother's name. He went. Five days after landing, he was engaged.
The second story is about the 2008 crash, when nobody was hiring comedians and Bank of America was stacking late fees on late fees until the number hit around $75,000. Nazareth describes waking at three in the morning with the same question on repeat, and then a friend calling to say God told him to send a FedEx. What arrived was not the fifteen hundred dollars he expected. Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein sit with what that kind of rescue does to a man's imagination, and Nazareth is careful to draw the line clearly: this is not name it and claim it. His own image is better anyway. He is still the same old car that keeps breaking down, but now he is married to a mechanic and he has AAA.
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Comedian Nazareth grew up Greek Orthodox in Kuwait, came to America, and built a career that was about to break wide open. Vegas rooms, management, an NBC sitcom in development. Then a friend invited him to church, where he met Christ personally, and then called his manager to quit. About 250 expletives later, he was released. What brought him back to the stage was a deacon telling him that God created humor and Satan perverted it, and that Christians of all people should be the ones laughing. Thirty-five years later, he is Dry Bar's 2026 Comedian of the Year; he still writes for an hour every day, and he closes his shows by giving up the standing ovation to tell people about Jesus instead.
Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein get into the marathon he had no business running, the nine drunks at the LA Cabaret who heard his first real set, and the woman in Vidalia, Georgia, who came to a show the night before she had to sit in court and hear how her daughter was murdered. She told him she needed the laugh. He tells the guys what he heard from backstage when she left. Along the way, the BeatiDudes cover rejection nine times out of ten, why men should let their kids see them laugh, and a wolf in Alaska licking a blade buried in bloody ice, which is the most memorable picture of sin you will hear this year.
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Sean Corcoran is back with the BeatiDudes, and he brought news that landed on his phone 42 times in a single day. A group called Men for Choice, which public records show had zero dollars to its name last year, is suddenly funded on college campuses and training young men to be pro-abortion. Sean's take is worth contemplation. The side that spent decades insisting men's voices do not belong in this conversation always knew exactly how much power those voices carry, and now they are spending real money to harness it. His response was to write college chapters into the Men for Life ten-year vision on the spot, because unexpected pregnancies happen on those campuses, and if the side of truth is not there when the conversation comes up, someone else will be.
Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein push Sean on what men can do about it, and the ask turns out to be smaller than you would think. Write a check or give two talks this year. Not on a stage necessarily, just in your parish, your Bible study, your golf group, your high school buddies, the two conversations you have been avoiding. Sean walks through the real numbers too, including the $200,000 to finish the fatherhood program video modules headed to pregnancy centers, the $25,000 that funds two campus fellowships, and the $80 million Warren Buffett poured into the Turnaway Study that started with 7,000 women and quietly ended with 500.
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At 19, Sean Corcoran fought to save his first child and lost. When he went to the same campus counselor who was helping the mother of his child navigate her abortion, she told Sean this situation did not affect him because he was a man. He believed her, kept it inside, failed out of college three times, and eight years later was homeless and overdosing in a hotel room at the end of a seven-year meth addiction.
The truck he drove to treatment broke down in the parking lot, and he had to push it into a spot, which is about as good a picture of grace as you will find. It was in treatment that a counselor finally connected the abortion to everything that came after, and Sean began to heal. He named his son Michael and wrote the letters of forgiveness he never knew he was allowed to write. Years later, on an ACTS retreat, he told the whole thing out loud for the first time. Three men came up to him afterward and quietly said they had been carrying the same secret for twenty and thirty years. That is when he understood the silence was the problem.
Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein bring Sean to the Tiny Table to talk about what he is building now as the leader of Men for Life. He walks through the history most people have never heard, from the first-century Didache to St. Callistus leading his congregation to the infanticide walls to rescue abandoned babies and adopt them into Christian homes, to fourth-century Christians tearing those walls down brick by brick until the first Roman laws against infanticide were passed in 374 AD. The pro-life movement was started by men, and Sean makes the case that it stalled when men went quiet. He points to a Gallup poll showing 54% of men identify as pro-life against 32% of women and asks the obvious question: where are they?
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Fr. Ken Geraci of the Fathers of Mercy joins the BeatiDudes for one of the most moving conversations from the early days of the show. Fr. Ken explains the deep connection between forgiveness and healing, describing unforgiveness as something corrosive that can eventually damage the person carrying it. He reminds us that forgiveness is not pretending an offense was acceptable or waiting until the pain disappears. It is a deliberate choice to surrender the offense to God and allow His grace to enter the places where anger, resentment, and woundedness have taken hold.
The conversation becomes intensely personal as Fr. Ken shares the story of a grieving mother who struggled to forgive the man who murdered her daughter, then leads Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein through a powerful exercise in forgiveness modeled on Christ’s words from the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” What begins as a conversation about healing becomes an invitation for every listener to consider the people they still need to forgive, including themselves. It is a beautiful reminder that God’s mercy is greater than our sins, greater than our wounds, and greater than anything that has happened to us.
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Devin Schadt joins The BeatiDudes for a powerful conversation about conversion, marriage, fatherhood, and seeing life's trials through the eyes of faith. Devin shares the remarkable story of his conversion at age 24, when a life marked by selfishness, theft, broken relationships, and despair finally brought him to his knees in a Catholic church. That surrender eventually transformed not only Devin, but also the woman who would become his wife. Now an author of 25 books and founder of the Fathers of St. Joseph, Devin explains why the renewal of the Church and society begins in the home, with men learning to embrace the spirituality of St. Joseph and becoming the husbands and fathers their families need.
The conversation becomes deeply personal as Devin tells Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein about his daughter Anna Marie, whose permanent brain injury became an unexpected turning point in his understanding of fatherhood. Devin describes moving from anger and resentment toward forgiveness, discovering that a father does not merely accept his children but actively chooses them: "I choose you. I want to be with you." He also shares the insight that changed the way he sees suffering: Anna Marie was not "in the way," but "a way to the Way." From his new book The Marriage Gap to the daily work of loving a spouse, choosing your children, and embracing hardship instead of fleeing from it, Devin offers a compelling reminder that authentic Catholic manhood is ultimately lived not on a stage or at a conference, but by going home and faithfully loving the people God has entrusted to you.
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Kyle Whittington is back with The BeatiDudes to share what happened when his commitment to the Catholic Creator Conference moved from an exciting side project to a genuine leap of faith. Kyle explains why he walked away from a secure, well-paying career and entered a season where providing for his wife and children requires a level of trust in God he had never experienced before. Rather than wrapping the story in a neat success narrative, Kyle admits that he is still living in the uncertainty, learning that perseverance sometimes means simply receiving enough grace to keep going.
The conversation with Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein moves between serious reflections on vocation, suffering, marriage, and getting your family to heaven, and the kind of ridiculous humor that can only emerge from a 1998 truck with a missing oil cap. Kyle ultimately points back to the crucifix as the model of Christian manhood, reminding us that following God does not guarantee comfort or control, but it does give meaning to sacrifice.
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