The King's Hall - Interview with Rory Groves

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Brian here with a big announcement from New Christendom Press.

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00:00:13.400 And in it, Eric and I take you through the dark history of feminism,

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00:00:21.220 and what to do about it.

00:00:23.040 Pre-order it today at newchristendompress.com slash longhouse.

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00:00:30.900 We'll also be signing the first 1,000 copies, so pick yours up today.

00:00:36.900 Well, welcome everybody to another episode of the Kings Hall Podcast.

00:00:41.520 My name is Brian Sauve, joined by some Chad Kings.

00:00:44.860 Go ahead and introduce yourselves, gentlemen.

00:00:46.800 I am Leroy Jenkins slash Genghis Khan.

00:00:49.580 That's actually both a lie.

00:00:51.260 Wow.

00:00:52.660 Genghis Khan.

00:00:53.960 I think it's pronounced Genghis. 0.96

00:00:55.240 It's Genghis. 1.00

00:00:55.760 It's definitely Genghis. 0.95

00:00:56.440 Yeah, definitely Genghis.

00:00:57.340 Well, he's my people.

00:00:58.540 So here is my question for you, Dan.

00:00:59.660 He's everybody's people, actually. 0.92

00:01:01.000 He fathered like most of Siberia.

00:01:03.340 I actually have a direct bloodline to Genghis Khan. 0.55

00:01:07.180 This explains so much.

00:01:08.560 Genghis Khan. 0.60

00:01:09.160 And to Maverick from Top Gun.

00:01:11.100 So the other interesting thing.

00:01:12.740 Wow.

00:01:13.560 That's really interesting.

00:01:14.800 I didn't know that.

00:01:15.540 A fictional character.

00:01:16.480 Wow.

00:01:16.640 Do you think my basically father, Genghis Khan, do you think he would have defeated your

00:01:22.780 people in open war?

00:01:24.920 Genghis Khan would not have defeated my people.

00:01:27.440 He could not have traversed the ice flows with his horses.

00:01:31.500 Oh, he would have destroyed them, I think, my father.

00:01:33.980 Wow, this episode off to a great start so far.

00:01:37.440 What about you?

00:01:38.240 Who else do we have here?

00:01:40.080 I'm Dan Burkholder.

00:01:41.060 Dan Burkholder.

00:01:41.720 I'm not related to anyone of distinction.

00:01:44.080 You know what I found out yesterday is that, according to my family lore,

00:01:47.580 I'm related to some Mayflower passengers.

00:01:50.380 But I feel like every family makes this kind of stuff up,

00:01:52.960 so I'm going to do my own research.

00:01:53.980 My wife's family, they joke that they were stowaways on the Mayflower.

00:01:57.920 Oh, okay.

00:01:58.700 Yeah.

00:01:59.020 All right.

00:01:59.440 Right.

00:01:59.700 Sure.

00:02:00.200 Sure.

00:02:00.640 Yeah. 1.00

00:02:01.000 Those Polacks, let me tell you what. 1.00

00:02:02.500 Yeah, man. 1.00

00:02:02.780 Well, we did the Ancestry thing, and apparently the one we did was a Mormon company.

00:02:08.900 So in the Mormons, everybody's related to Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

00:02:12.540 What?

00:02:13.120 Yeah.

00:02:13.860 And Jerry was like, okay, this is fake.

00:02:15.900 You're like, we've made a mistake.

00:02:17.100 I want my $79.99 back.

00:02:19.120 Well, everybody, welcome to this episode of the King's Hall podcast.

00:02:22.360 we have a great interview that we're going to roll for you here in a minute with Rory Groves.

00:02:27.220 Eric, why don't you tell us a little bit more about Rory? Some of you have probably heard of

00:02:30.960 his book. And if you haven't read it already, you should definitely pick it up. But go ahead and

00:02:34.860 give us a quick intro there, Eric. Yeah, definitely. So I first found Rory through

00:02:39.660 his book, Durable Trades. Since that time, that's been a couple of years. I did an episode on the

00:02:44.740 Hardman podcast, really enjoyed this concept of really productive property being brought back

00:02:50.500 into the household finding trades that have lasted across the centuries particularly the book came

00:02:57.380 out really helpful timing it came out right in 2020 with covid and so the economy shutting down

00:03:02.660 and that was a great time to be thinking about hey is my trade durable and or as the government

00:03:08.160 called it essential well and what you found out a lot of the things that are on rory's list in the

00:03:13.060 book were things that didn't go away during the pandemic, the great shamdemic of 2020.

00:03:20.700 So anyway, yeah, I talked to Rory, kind of got into this idea of how do you actually build 0.70

00:03:26.280 productive property in the real world? I think that's something we'll talk about too in After

00:03:30.660 Hours. Yeah, we're going to take some time in our patron show After Hours to talk about our

00:03:34.440 own approach here in Ogden with our business endeavors, really why we even structure our

00:03:38.980 whole intellectual work through the new christian press and other endeavors as well the way we do

00:03:44.740 uh i like i actually didn't know this until today but wendell berry actually endorsed

00:03:49.160 durable trades interesting he said not every book is necessary not by a long shot but durable

00:03:55.480 trades is necessary and and i think that he's on to something there with that you know the language

00:04:01.600 of necessary because we have so many books in the marketing world in the self-help world in the

00:04:06.960 Here's how to start a business. Here's how to make money, manage money, invest in stuff, whatever it is. But what Rory is trying to do in this book is uncover family-centered professions that are uniquely suited, I think, to a lot of the things that we've talked about in the Kings Hall in the first season and in this season.

00:04:26.000 professions that have endured through some of the hardest periods of history and made it.

00:04:32.460 And I think a lot of us sense that impending like the hammer could be falling on our generation

00:04:40.380 in a lot of economic and in other ways, culturally and financially and in all these different ways

00:04:48.840 in the family, the church. And so it's going to be important that people figure out how to be

00:04:53.200 fathers who set their children up for success in their professions to last through trial and for

00:04:58.980 they themselves to do that i think it's also important because sometimes when i talked about

00:05:02.600 it before durable trades people think like okay so this is like arts and crafts at home that you

00:05:06.960 can sell at a fair etsy and while that could be we're actually talking about um a lot of things

00:05:13.160 make the list like a pastor uh because those are things that are hard to replace with technology

00:05:17.880 yeah um you know counselors stuff like that chat gpt does a lot of our counseling

00:05:22.700 right um not mine oh no no oh okay i'm sorry never mind well i think that i think the book

00:05:29.360 is particularly helpful because a majority of men nowadays i believe are in knowledge work

00:05:34.960 of some sort that just when you hear knowledge work just think cubicle work like wherever you

00:05:40.180 are in a cubicle plantation yeah and the way that rory has structured the book through a ranking

00:05:46.040 system with all of these different trades. Even a doctor is on there. It's like being a trade,

00:05:51.020 as well as a shepherd, a butcher, carpenter. You'll have to read the book, but he ranks them

00:05:57.100 based on their durability, their profitability, how long they've been around, things like that.

00:06:02.660 So it's very, very helpful to be structured that way. So as your typical knowledge worker

00:06:07.660 in the modernized factory work,

00:06:11.080 which is data entry type middleman jobs.

00:06:14.840 It's a really helpful book to explore to think,

00:06:17.600 what can I be doing to make myself more durable

00:06:21.020 as a family and as a man?

00:06:24.400 So I think it's really helpful

00:06:26.240 as far as structuring your life

00:06:28.100 with giving you more optionality.

00:06:30.140 Yeah, and I think the final thing, Dan,

00:06:32.480 just to piggyback on what you're saying,

00:06:34.700 how does it tie into fatherhood?

00:06:36.020 Well, I think as fathers, part of our role is passing on a trade

00:06:41.080 that used to be part of fatherhood, and I think it still should be,

00:06:44.040 but used to be visibly part of fatherhood

00:06:46.200 that you would pass a trade off to your sons especially.

00:06:49.120 Because when you think, okay, I want to help my son find a godly wife

00:06:52.320 and build a household and a family, well, he's going to need a trade.

00:06:55.640 He's going to need to be able to provide for his family.

00:06:58.780 So I want to get him off thinking on the right kinds of durable work

00:07:02.860 that he can do.

00:07:03.420 Are there any themes that you can tease for us in this interview, Eric, that you're the one who sat down with them that people can expect to hear in this interview, things to be paying attention for?

00:07:13.960 Yeah, I think one of the things is we talk a lot about in the interview not having a perfectionistic mindset about this.

00:07:23.020 Rory is kind of like first generation figuring this out.

00:07:25.480 That's where a lot of us are.

00:07:26.700 But at the same time, you don't have to lose hope.

00:07:29.900 There's a lot of practical things that we'll talk about in the episode that you can be doing

00:07:33.160 to gear yourself and your children up. And so Rory's going to talk about a lot of those things.

00:07:38.380 I think it'll be very practically helpful. Excellent. Well, with that said, Ray, why don't

00:07:42.620 you go ahead and roll that interview for everybody? We hope it's helpful to you guys,

00:07:45.440 and we'll see you on the other side. Well, welcome to the King's Hall podcast. I am playing

00:07:53.000 your host today. I'm Eric Kahn, and I'm joined today by Mr. Rory Groves. Rory, thanks for

00:07:58.720 joining me today. Thanks for having me back, Eric. It's good to be here. Absolutely. Well,

00:08:02.380 Rory, I understand you guys have some snow up in Minnesota. We just had some snow. It's that

00:08:07.360 time of year. You got the wood fireplace going on in the background. That's right. The time of year

00:08:13.420 for snow seems to be pretty much every time of year up here in Minnesota. It feels like that

00:08:19.060 about this time of year. Yeah, that's exactly right. Rory, in this episode, we're going to

00:08:23.160 be talking about kind of continuing this theme that we've been talking about in the Kings Hall

00:08:27.460 podcast, which is the importance of fathers. I think in particular, because we've talked about

00:08:34.240 it before on the Hard Men podcast, but talking about your book, Durable Trades, maybe we can

00:08:38.740 start there. It seems like when you get into things like vocations, it really is a father-son

00:08:44.980 endeavor and also something that's passed on as inheritance. I just want to ask you,

00:08:50.880 when did you start realizing with what you're doing that it was going to be an important thing

00:08:56.540 to include your children as a father in that work? Yeah, that's a good question. And that actually

00:09:02.320 does strike at the heart of why I wrote that book, which started as a personal quest for me

00:09:10.340 and my family. It wasn't actually a book project when I started out. I didn't say, hey, I think

00:09:14.460 this topic hasn't been addressed yet, and I'm going to be the one to do it. I was just coming

00:09:19.560 off of about 20 years in high tech and realizing that, do I want to spend the next 20 years of my

00:09:26.500 life in this direction, in this vocation, and still be boxing my family out of that most

00:09:31.880 time-intensive part of my life. You know, in other words, I couldn't really bring my kids

00:09:37.980 and my wife or my family along with me to the computer screen, you know, to really understand

00:09:43.840 what I was doing, what I was creating. And I started to crave something as I became a father,

00:09:52.160 of course i started to crave something that we could be doing together started to wonder you know

00:09:57.820 is it possible in 20 you know say 2020 is it possible for families to still work together i

00:10:05.260 mean i hear examples like that from time to time of a family business and every once in a while it

00:10:10.560 seems like you know of course there's farmers out there that do that but what else is out there for

00:10:14.300 guys if they are feeling drawn in this direction because i basically had reached a point in my

00:10:18.780 career where I knew money wasn't going to bring me fulfillment in life. And, you know, there was

00:10:25.020 diminishing returns on the number of coding languages I was learning, um, or the things

00:10:30.540 that I was putting out there and watch, watching go obsolete three days later. So I was, I was

00:10:36.100 really craving that. Like I knew family was so rewarding, you know, to be able to bring them into

00:10:42.940 another task was so rewarding. So that was where I began to first think about and question some of

00:10:48.400 these things. And it led me to just basically started, you know, was putting together a

00:10:53.400 spreadsheet. I was looking at historical businesses and I was saying, you know, seeing in the research

00:10:59.200 where there would be fathers passing on their, you know, carefully learned and skilled trades

00:11:06.980 that they had spent a lifetime learning. They're passing those on to their kids and they're

00:11:10.380 apprenticing them and they're mentoring them and discipling them along the way. And then there's

00:11:13.620 their children are passing it on to their own children so you have these third and fourth and

00:11:18.740 fifth generations that are accumulating knowledge and it's it's a it's a different kind of

00:11:24.740 inheritance than I was used to where most of our jobs will last a couple of years there's no chance

00:11:31.240 to even become a master craftsman in most of the careers that we have today so that that was really

00:11:36.940 at the heart of it and I and I the more I dug into it the more I thought yeah there's there's

00:11:41.700 definitely got to be a better way than how we've been going about this the last several decades.

00:11:47.560 Yeah, I think that that's a great point. It also makes me think of, okay, so a household

00:11:51.760 economy, the stuff that you're trying to encourage people to build. Obviously, wives and daughters

00:11:58.140 are included in this as well. I guess just talk about why it's so important as a father to be,

00:12:03.300 you know, setting that tone in your home for them as well. And what sorts of things are you

00:12:07.140 trying to teach them as a part of that process? Yeah, I would answer that by saying, I think one

00:12:13.000 of the fundamental shifts that we took on in society is to begin to think of families as a

00:12:18.440 collection of individuals who all have their own separate individual pursuits. And a lot of this

00:12:26.240 comes out from some of the philosophical thinkers centuries ago, but we're walking that out today

00:12:31.860 where everyone is trying to find their fulfillment in life through personal achievement.

00:12:39.960 So you have, you know, the husband and wife oftentimes are working two separate careers outside the home

00:12:45.760 because they're outside the home trying to find their own personal achievement.

00:12:49.560 Then the children have to go somewhere.

00:12:51.860 And so you have the children in public daycare, also known as public school,

00:12:56.540 and even the brothers and the sisters are separated from each other in those schools, okay,

00:13:01.160 because it's all age segregated. So you have the entire system, the machinery of modern society is

00:13:06.300 geared around individualism. And if you go back to scripture and you read, what was family? You know,

00:13:13.940 what is mankind? How did God create us to function in the beginning? You find that God took woman out

00:13:18.880 of man, that we are united as one flesh. And so, and the children issue from that one flesh. And so

00:13:25.060 this whole concept of a family as a single unit, as a single work unit, used to be how most

00:13:31.080 of history regarded the family, that they were meant to work together, to provide together,

00:13:37.560 to share a common vision.

00:13:39.380 And so I think when you break apart that notion of the family as one flesh, and then you set

00:13:45.520 it free to kind of do all of its own personal ambition, then you actually end up tearing

00:13:52.260 down the original design for family and tearing down any possibility of finding true fulfillment

00:13:59.140 through that.

00:13:59.660 Now, there's a spiritual significance to it too, which I'm not touching on, but that's absolutely essential and biblical.

00:14:06.860 But I would just say that even the fulfillment, the personal fulfillment, will not be achieved by personal ambition.

00:14:14.280 And so when you're talking about, let's go back now to your question on wives and daughters.

00:14:18.860 So why do we have wives and daughters?

00:14:21.960 What is the purpose that God instituted for the family?

00:14:24.440 And if this concept of the family is meant to work together to be part of a larger whole, right, where the sum of the parts is greater, or the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, then the goal is not to break that family apart.

00:14:40.640 But the wife has a role, the children have roles, the sons have roles that are different than your daughters.

00:14:47.560 And historically, you're looking at things like the sons are going to need to be leaders in their own homes when the day comes.

00:14:53.800 So as a father, you're looking at your sons and you're saying, what can I do to prepare them to have successful, intact families and fulfilling lives and provide and protect and all these things for their families?

00:15:06.580 And you're looking at your daughters and you're saying, how has God created them and gifted them to be part of a family, part of a larger whole?

00:15:14.900 Not just you can be president someday or you can achieve whatever you want to, whatever you dream of.

00:15:19.740 that's not actually going to satisfy the human creation as God designed us.

00:15:25.700 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:15:26.960 It also brings me to another question just at a personal level.

00:15:31.180 So you've kind of had these two modes of existence, right?

00:15:33.500 And you talk about this in your book, Durable Trades, where you're working in technology,

00:15:38.420 you're doing that, and then you guys make this shift.

00:15:40.480 But I'm curious on a day-to-day level, if you look at like today versus back then,

00:15:45.640 can you gauge just what the difference in family life is overall maybe on a scale of like happiness

00:15:52.140 or fulfillment do you sense that there's been a huge difference for you and your family oh if

00:15:59.240 you're just talking about us personally yeah yes yeah no doubt about it i mean we were we were

00:16:04.900 always very happy we were very blessed i i consider myself blessed we had i had a good

00:16:09.500 career. It paid well. I was able to even work from home for, you know, I still had to be separated

00:16:15.860 when I was doing my work, but for many years I was able to work from home. We had things like,

00:16:21.100 in terms of a modern construct, we were very blessed and had things very well, but there was

00:16:27.520 there was still this void of purpose and fulfillment of like, why are my children here?

00:16:34.680 why are they part of this family? What is there that we're supposed to do together

00:16:39.900 that only our family can do together? Because that's the other thing, too, is God's given you,

00:16:45.480 just as he's ordained your marriage, and he's brought together certain gifts and abilities

00:16:52.560 and personalities to create something that didn't exist before, he's also given you those children,

00:16:58.920 and those children come along with certain gifts and aptitudes and creative energies.

00:17:03.720 all of that together, you don't really tap into, like, I guess what I'm trying to say is there is

00:17:09.980 no modern specialized career that will replace the significance and the meaning that you find

00:17:16.000 when your family pulls together. And that especially, and I'll say I've walked away from

00:17:22.160 a larger paycheck in order to pursue this direction. And I initially, I really wondered

00:17:28.480 if I was doing a disservice by leaving behind, you know, a bird in the hand, so to speak. But

00:17:35.160 there's no question in my mind, absolutely none. The kind of generational inheritance that you

00:17:42.140 build up just by focusing on developing that rich relationship with your own children,

00:17:46.780 it by definition, it means that they will be more bonded to their children and they will pour that

00:17:51.700 forward into the next generation. If you withhold, if you're absent from your children,

00:17:56.520 if you pursue you know if you if you prioritize time in the office over time and time with the

00:18:03.560 family even if it's for a large retirement fund at the end of your life or whatever reason you

00:18:07.960 might have for it your children are not going to be as bonded to you they're not going to be as

00:18:12.720 bonded with their own children and they that that kind of research is out there if you care to look

00:18:17.600 it up but it's a it's a problem when God says he visits the sins of the fathers of the third and

00:18:22.460 fourth generation. That's what he's talking about. It takes a while for those curses to work out.

00:18:26.960 And so anyway, prioritizing family has never yielded any regrets in our lives.

00:18:32.840 Yeah, that's a great point. The other question I have is, I'm assuming at some point your view

00:18:37.540 of inheritance changed. I know mine did. I was actually reading Joel Salatin, of all people,

00:18:43.520 because it wasn't really something I heard talked about in the Christian church very much,

00:18:47.140 but Joel was talking about leaving a living inheritance and stuff like that. So as you

00:18:51.220 had time to think on these issues. I'm curious, was there a shift for you? What caused you to

00:18:56.740 start rethinking, if you did, kind of these different ideals of, you know, what a retirement

00:19:01.800 should look like and what an inheritance for your children should look like? Yeah. So for me,

00:19:06.500 the biggest shift came with considering what kind of skills I had to pass on to my kids.

00:19:12.020 And I think when we moved out to the country, so we live in a farm in Southern Minnesota,

00:19:15.520 we moved out here 10 years ago. And initially, I just kind of liked the idea of having more room

00:19:22.080 to play and spread out and maybe get some chickens or something. So we've done that,

00:19:27.060 but now we have tractor and we have a baler and we're tending goats if we can keep them

00:19:34.320 in the fences at all. They say a fence that will not hold water will not hold a goat. And I think

00:19:40.460 that's just about true. So we do all kinds of stuff out here. And I think the first dose of

00:19:47.120 reality coming at this as a computer science programmer background is just how ignorant I

00:19:54.840 actually am about the basic things that you need to live. And I'm fascinated by the fact that for

00:20:01.560 every generation since Adam, up to, let's say, maybe the late 40s, right? Every human generation

00:20:09.880 prior to that could live off the land if they had to. They all knew how. They maybe didn't want to,

00:20:15.060 but they knew how. And we're at a point now where we literally don't know how. Like, there would be

00:20:20.740 mass starvation and death if some crisis, like the Great Depression, were to come along again,

00:20:26.800 right? At the Great Depression, 50% of the families were still rural, still lived on farms.

00:20:32.080 Actually, 80% were rural, 50% were still farming.

00:20:36.060 Wow.

00:20:36.380 And today we have 98% are not farming, or 2% are farming, and well over 80% live in cities.

00:20:44.700 And we just don't have the knowledge of how to actually provide for ourselves.

00:20:50.020 Now, we have specialized knowledge, and that's what was dawning on me in my profession, in my career,

00:20:57.200 is I could try to teach my eight-year-old

00:21:00.820 how to program a certain language

00:21:03.320 that was in vogue that day,

00:21:05.000 but what's that gonna do for him?

00:21:06.880 When he's 18, 19, or 20 entering the world,

00:21:09.100 it's gonna be completely useless.

00:21:11.280 But maybe I could teach him how to grow food,

00:21:15.360 or maybe I could teach him how to build,

00:21:17.320 or how to raise animals, or work with animals.

00:21:20.060 And those are all skills that I think every human being

00:21:23.480 in every society should have.

00:21:25.500 I mean, we should know how to live off the land.

00:21:28.700 And then if you want to specialize beyond that, great.

00:21:31.420 But so for me, it just started out by what do we need to have as a basic semblance of civilization?

00:21:38.300 And let me pass those skills on to my kids because I certainly don't have them.

00:21:42.580 But hopefully my kids will learn them and they can pass them on to their kids.

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00:22:13.700 to reach thousands of like-minded people and grow your company, we'd love to partner with you.

00:22:18.280 Email us at advertising at newchristendompress.com.

00:22:26.560 Yeah, I think that's great. One of the other things that it makes me think about is, you know,

00:22:30.820 as you're thinking about the day-to-day practical vocational training, obviously you wrote the book

00:22:36.140 Durable Trades. It's made me think a lot about, okay, how do I start, you know, looking at my

00:22:41.280 sons and finding opportunities for them to, you know, maybe go work with a painter or a butcher

00:22:46.000 or whatever to figure out what they're good at, what they like, where their, you know, giftings

00:22:50.020 are aligned. I'm curious in your family specifically and practically, how have you

00:22:55.740 started to work through for your boys some of those issues? Yeah, great question. And this is

00:23:01.960 a challenging one because by virtue of my background, I don't have a lot of these skills

00:23:06.360 myself. And so I've done what I can with what I have. I guess that's the first part. Malachi says

00:23:14.060 that in the last days, God will come and turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the

00:23:20.220 hearts of the children to their fathers. So the first step is turn your heart to your children.

00:23:24.080 Start to think generationally as a father, not think about your retirement account or what's

00:23:28.940 going to happen this weekend or who's on the roster for what sports team. Start thinking

00:23:35.580 generationally, you know, your grandchildren. Think about setting your kids up for successful

00:23:40.900 careers for themselves. And then you're going to have to rely on the Lord in terms of filling

00:23:45.440 in the gaps for you. So I'll give you some specific examples. So with my son, my oldest son

00:23:51.400 is 12. He does most of the livestock operations now, which, you know, pertain to feeding the

00:23:58.780 animals and watering them and halter breaking. And he comes along with me to the livestock auction,

00:24:05.100 and if we're going to sell some sheep, and those kinds of things.

00:24:07.760 So he's getting a well-rounded education in basic animal husbandry,

00:24:13.040 and I think that's great.

00:24:14.740 But he needs a viable career,

00:24:18.000 and I think one of the things that I have felt that he would be naturally gifted at

00:24:22.380 is woodworking, which is one of the trades I talk about in my book.

00:24:25.940 This would be like furniture making.

00:24:28.000 They call it finished carpentry or cabinetry.

00:24:31.640 It's a very durable trade.

00:24:33.060 it commands, if you're skilled at it, and that's the key, you have to be good at it, but it can

00:24:37.120 command a very good living. You can work from home. You can bring your family into the work.

00:24:43.000 It does not require inordinately expensive tools. In fact, a lot of the best woodworking out there

00:24:49.240 is done with hand tools. And so this is something that I've thought would be a really good fit for

00:24:53.940 him. But the dilemma that I have is I don't know how to do it. And I'm not going to take five years

00:24:57.800 to figure it out because he'll be just about ready to leave. So I'm in the process at the

00:25:02.240 moment of trying to find mentors for my community, for my churches, from different surrounding areas.

00:25:07.900 We're doing what we can on, you know, YouTube or some different places like that. But I really want

00:25:12.160 to find in-person mentorship for him so that he can begin. And he's 12 now, as I said. Ideally,

00:25:20.420 I think the best thing you can do as a father is to get your kids starting down the track to career

00:25:24.840 as early and young as possible. Do not wait until your kids are 16, 17, 18 years old before you try

00:25:32.060 to teach them a work ethic. You've got to get them alongside you, working with you. That's why

00:25:36.620 farming is so great because there's so many ways to bring children into that work. And it's

00:25:41.380 meaningful work. It's not, you know, clean your room, you know, pick up the bathroom kind of

00:25:46.140 stuff. It's very meaningful work that needs to be done, but it teaches a work ethic. So you want

00:25:50.820 your kids at eight years old, you know, breaking a sweat and just getting used to the idea that

00:25:56.120 this is what we do. We're created to work. This isn't something that we fill in around the edges

00:26:01.560 or we look forward to quitting at the end of the week, this is what we're designed to do.

00:26:06.440 And then with that, if you can find something that fits their aptitudes, their gifting,

00:26:10.580 something that they are naturally drawn to, then it's actually, you know, by the time Ivers said,

00:26:16.360 let's say he gets started woodworking now when he's 12. By the time he's 16 or 17,

00:26:20.680 he could be very accomplished at what he's doing. And he could be doing all of this while he's still

00:26:24.960 at home with us. We homeschool. So he would have a lot of time in the day to be able to go out to

00:26:29.680 his wood shop and work on things and improve his craft. And I could see very likely that he would

00:26:35.020 have a strong career option right in front of him by the time he leaves our house, without having

00:26:40.780 to go to college. So anyway, so that's just one example that I had in each of our kids. We have

00:26:46.100 six kids. Each of our kids, it's my responsibility as a father to try to single out what do I think

00:26:52.420 God has gifted this child with, and then use this time that we have together to try to get him

00:26:57.400 trained up in that yeah it ties in to the next thing i wanted to ask you because i think this is

00:27:02.060 this is great a lot of the era that that i and men older than myself yourself maybe too

00:27:08.360 grew up with it was kind of this idea like you were on your own like you'd visit a guidance

00:27:13.120 counselor uh on your way out the door uh to college probably because that was just kind of

00:27:18.620 the de facto like well go to college then you'll figure it out uh i realized going through that

00:27:23.620 process though a lot of people got to like the fourth year of college and were like yeah i still

00:27:26.800 don't know what I want to do. I'm graduating. I don't, I'd never really had a career track

00:27:31.680 from this point, but it does get to this fundamental issue of fathers are required to

00:27:37.340 provide a vocation and a calling to set their kids up for success. So I want to ask you this

00:27:44.140 now for on the side for the girls and you think about your wife and her job, like vocationally,

00:27:49.580 what are you doing for them that is preparing them for motherhood and for life outside of your

00:27:56.680 home? The best thing that I can think of to do, and this is still something that I'm developing

00:28:01.740 as I understand it, as I study the scriptures and as I come to understand the family economy,

00:28:07.520 I feel the best thing that I could do for my daughters is to help train them up to be effective

00:28:12.900 wives, to support, and to be one flesh with their husbands, to partner with their husbands

00:28:18.440 in the call that God has for their families. If you can break away from the argument, you know,

00:28:23.760 the basic feminism and even for masculinism arguments, it's not a him versus her. They are 0.88

00:28:32.120 meant to be one flesh. It's really, it's an individualist argument is what you're fighting

00:28:38.440 against. And if you can understand the family as a whole, as a whole unit, uh, uh, wives and

00:28:45.800 daughters, uh, are absolutely essential to complete. Like the, the husbands cannot do

00:28:51.540 what they are called by God to do without a wife who is on board.

00:28:56.200 And likewise, a husband who shirks his responsibility as a father, as a protector, as a provider, 0.71

00:29:02.440 you cannot have a functioning family if the hearts of the fathers are not turned to their children.

00:29:07.720 They have to be putting family first.

00:29:09.580 They can't be putting golf first.

00:29:11.320 They can't be putting hobbies or time with buddies first.

00:29:15.320 The family has to be first if they're going to have a functioning whole.

00:29:19.040 And in those families, the wives, the daughters are going to be richly provided for, well-protected, and they're going to be set up for fulfillment in life and success.

00:29:28.740 I'm totally convinced of that.

00:29:30.140 If people find their place within the family economy that they're going to do well, they're going to have a well-lived life, and they're going to be richly rewarded for it.

00:29:38.320 I don't know if that answers the question or not.

00:29:41.200 Absolutely.

00:29:41.620 I think that's really helpful.

00:29:42.520 i was talking to i think rich lusk about this but he was saying kind of teaching his kids like if

00:29:48.500 okay if mom does well that means dad does well if dad does well that means mom and we're this unit

00:29:53.480 and we do well or we don't together right yeah you're absolutely right that goes against the

00:29:58.100 individualism of our day for sure i want to ask you now rory about gather and grow um you guys

00:30:04.680 have been doing a lot i think to uh incorporate in what you're doing but also incorporate other

00:30:09.360 people in training and stuff like that. So maybe if you would talk about that and some of the

00:30:14.480 training, get together, people coming to your farm, doing stuff, what are you guys up to there?

00:30:20.800 Yeah. So ever since we moved out here, we just love learning all this stuff about

00:30:25.500 living off the land, self-sufficiency. It's just been a big part of the drive that

00:30:29.960 has been motivating us since we've moved to the country. And we've invited people along

00:30:34.740 the way with us to just come out you know tap maple trees and make maple syrup and here's

00:30:39.520 here's how to do it and um here's how to butcher chickens we've done internships over the summer

00:30:44.240 we do different kinds of gardening techniques and we are i guess one of the things that we say

00:30:49.260 is our expertise is that we're not experts that we're we're a bunch of city kids that had no idea

00:30:54.220 what we're doing and most certainly if we can do these kinds of things you can do them too we can

00:31:00.200 demystify a lot of that stuff. And so I feel that there's something more, something deeper than

00:31:05.320 just the skills themselves. What we started to do is to focus in on the whole family working

00:31:11.340 together, not just picking up the individual skills, but using work as a context for bringing

00:31:16.400 the family together, I think is the opportune or the ideal context for discipleship. So,

00:31:23.680 you know, when, you know, while we're farming here, while we're doing the different things,

00:31:28.000 we get to bring the family along when they're gardening and pulling weeds, or we're corralling

00:31:34.240 sheep and moving them from one pen to the next, or like I said, you know, mending fences. There's

00:31:38.760 always these opportunities. It's amazing, Eric, the kind of conversations that I have. I'll be

00:31:44.000 out in the garden with my son, and we'll have a conversation about what makes for a wife,

00:31:51.400 qualities in a wife that you want to look for. And the things come up like that all the time.

00:31:57.620 super huge, life-impacting kind of conversations, but it's not like this. We're sitting down with

00:32:04.660 the Bibles open, and we just read the verse about it, now let me expound upon, you know,

00:32:09.180 the virtuous wife. I mean, that happens too from time to time, but there's a receptivity there

00:32:14.420 when you're actually outside, and you're working, and you're, you know, you're digging fence posts,

00:32:19.020 or digging fence posts, and then you're weeding the garden, or you're pulling potatoes,

00:32:23.240 and you're out there together, and you're talking, and you know what that is. There's something that's

00:32:26.860 so natural about that context of working together, that discipleship goes hand in hand. Actually,

00:32:32.620 I have a chapter in the book called The Discipleship of Work, and it's about this

00:32:35.860 exact thing. So that's why I am, it's more to me than about the homesteading skills.

00:32:40.800 It's really about how can we bring the family together, because that's where it all starts to

00:32:46.160 click into place, theologically, and also with the land, and with the Creator, and all these things.

00:32:51.660 So we started this ministry called Gather and Grow.

00:32:55.300 It was an outcropping of these events that we were hosting on our farm.

00:32:59.080 And really what we wanted to do is we decided, like I said,

00:33:02.280 we didn't want to just teach the skills.

00:33:04.560 We really wanted to put some kind of inspiration to take this further.

00:33:08.760 It's more than just the raising chickens or raising goats or things like that.

00:33:14.280 It's a lot more about what is God calling your family on this earth to do?

00:33:19.660 And then how can we help you?

00:33:21.880 And so we decided to do this as a ministry rather than as like a for-profit business.

00:33:27.340 We just, we had some different reasons for doing it that way, but we just felt ultimately

00:33:31.240 we wanted to reach a certain category of people who may not be able to afford expensive events.

00:33:37.320 And so this is one of the things that we do now.

00:33:39.560 So you can go to our website, gatherandgrow.us, and we have events throughout the year.

00:33:45.140 We publish a newsletter.

00:33:46.760 If you don't live nearby, you can kind of follow along with things that we are encouraging other families in.

00:33:53.440 We talk about the family economy.

00:33:55.600 We give examples of other families who are doing it.

00:33:58.560 And mainly it's just to try to encourage folks.

00:34:00.780 And we were just at a conference this past weekend doing exactly that up in North Dakota,

00:34:07.080 sharing more about this, connecting families to each other in their local areas who are walking this way.

00:34:13.300 One of the things that I've noticed that a lot of people will say,

00:34:16.940 we thought we were the only ones, or we thought we were the black sheep in the family.

00:34:20.800 We're the only ones in our church that think this way.

00:34:23.520 You know, why doesn't anyone else see this?

00:34:24.980 And so folks, when they come to our events or they get our newsletter,

00:34:28.260 they're like, ah, we're not alone.

00:34:30.220 And that's exactly why we're doing it.

00:34:32.920 Yeah, I think that's really great.

00:34:34.120 And it seems like, too, you know, I think about when your book came out,

00:34:37.720 2020, COVID, all that stuff happening.

00:34:39.580 it seems like there's been a shift and what people are realizing is well maybe my corporate job wasn't

00:34:45.320 as stable as i thought it was maybe the work you know the durability issue so timing seems like

00:34:50.500 couldn't have been more perfect for that message do you get the sense that more people are coming

00:34:56.320 awake to the reality of like you know even yesterday i was reading an article and it said

00:35:01.460 you know social security is going to be no more they're not going to be able to afford it well i

00:35:06.660 just wonder how many more people are going to start thinking then, well, maybe I have to take

00:35:11.240 care of my parents, maybe I should have treated my kids a little better. Do you see people coming

00:35:18.120 more and more awake to some of those realities? I think, yeah, I think the timing of the book's

00:35:23.300 release certainly didn't hurt. Things were coming off at the wheels when I was talking about things

00:35:31.880 like brittle systems in the book. The historian Joseph Tainer talks about the collapse of complex

00:35:38.580 societies. Yeah. And I think it's very hard to refute his argument. He basically says that all

00:35:44.580 societies reach a certain level of complexity, whereby it's no longer possible to sustain the

00:35:50.180 level of complexity that they have. And the only way that they can deal with future problems

00:35:55.720 is by reverting to a simpler model, which is what we basically call collapse. I mean,

00:36:00.100 the roman empire went through that all the aztec and the mayan civilizations went through that

00:36:04.540 really every civilization known to man to this point eventually reaches a reaches a stage where

00:36:11.340 they cannot increase in complexity it's just too costly for the society to do that so i think

00:36:16.500 people looking around and they're saying you know where's the toilet paper or why are eggs 10 bucks

00:36:23.760 a dozen uh they're starting to it's starting to dawn on folks with increasing frequency that

00:36:29.260 hey, our way of life, this may not be normal. And Tanger actually would say that we are the

00:36:36.920 anomaly of history. This is not a normal way. This vast complexity, this being rich with fossil

00:36:42.460 fuels in this kind of upwardly mobile, prosperous life is very unusual in world history. And so

00:36:50.380 folks are starting to look around, and I think they're definitely more open to the possibility

00:36:54.940 of doing things for themselves in a way that they weren't used to doing before. The stores may not

00:37:00.000 always have what you need. You may not hear, so I live an hour south of Minneapolis. We actually

00:37:04.520 lived in Minneapolis 10 years ago, and, you know, they're defunding the police, and they're, I mean,

00:37:09.280 there's riots, and there's all kinds of crime escalating, and, you know, you get to a point

00:37:16.940 where, whereby you got to ask yourself, do I need, should I be completely dependent on a system that

00:37:23.100 may not actually be there for me. Should I start taking steps now while I have the opportunity

00:37:28.020 to be more self-sufficient, to rally around with other families, you know, in small community,

00:37:34.700 to be more self-sufficient together and that can rely on each other when the megastructures and

00:37:39.920 the states and the governments and the mandates and everything else that's coming down the pike

00:37:44.060 might not be in our best interests. Yeah, I totally agree. And it's really interesting,

00:37:50.320 too even at a kind of like the outside of christendom even secular level you see stuff

00:37:56.800 like raw egg nationalist uh wren stuff like that taking off and you're like i start reading the

00:38:02.960 book and it's you know he's basically talking about like why you should have some like homesteading

00:38:07.340 and you should raise your own chickens and the way that we you know defeat the globalist elite

00:38:11.740 is you chickens who knew rory that that was the uh that was the answer but i think more and more

00:38:17.400 people are realizing okay first of all you know some of the world health organization stuff

00:38:24.200 that seemed hokey 10 years ago and now they're like yeah but the food plants are actually burning

00:38:29.300 down um i don't know what's going on with that uh but it does definitely seem like man if i had a

00:38:35.860 little bit more control at least over some of the food that i was putting into my body um and i know

00:38:41.480 uh on the hard men podcast we talked about things like testosterone and and people's hormone health

00:38:47.020 men and women and you start to look at the data and you're like there are real problems going on

00:38:52.540 here so i i guess my question for you is you start to look at some of those things you see what's

00:38:57.600 going on at a societal level um are you to the point where you're saying yeah i think that there's

00:39:03.760 more going on here with eggs and food production um just curious your thoughts on that side of

00:39:09.260 things? Yeah, we're at the last gasp of a dying civilization, is the way I'd put it. The kinds

00:39:17.020 of things that we see going on, the devaluing of currency, the kind of moral debasement,

00:39:22.700 the complete breakdown of intergenerational faith and culture. You know, we used to inherit

00:39:30.600 culture and faith primarily through families for the last 2,000 years, and that's not even

00:39:34.840 happening now. You have anywhere from 60% to 90% of children are abandoning the faith of their

00:39:40.500 parents. All of these things happen at the end of empires. And so I think you need to wake up and

00:39:48.700 smell the napalm, I guess one commentator puts it. Your flesh is burning. Right. And you need to

00:39:56.200 become less dependent on the massive structures, the massive structures. And you need to do what

00:40:02.720 you can to become more independent. You need to have a healthy independence and self-sufficiency.

00:40:07.180 You know, the Apostle Paul, 1 Thessalonians 4.11, he says, he exhorts us to live quietly,

00:40:13.860 mind our own business, work with our hands so that you will not be dependent on outsiders or on

00:40:19.740 anyone. And so there's a call even in scriptures for us to maintain a level of independence from

00:40:27.680 worldly systems. I think that's good. I think that's healthy at all times, even if civilization

00:40:32.480 was very prosperous. But especially now, when you see some of these warning signs,

00:40:38.880 yeah, you know, the wise man sees danger coming and takes refuge. You need to start doing some

00:40:44.420 of these things. And what I would also say is you're not losing out. You're not missing out

00:40:49.440 by, say, taking the time that you would have spent in a movie theater and, you know, picking apples

00:40:56.440 off of your own orchard apple trees you're not missing out by not joining in with the modern

00:41:02.540 amenities that everything you know the bread and circus of modern society you're gaining so much

00:41:07.640 we've been missing out the whole time by all of this nonsense that we've been uh engaged with all

00:41:13.440 the television you know that a father watches on average five hours of television a day and spends

00:41:17.940 23 minutes with household children what is that five hours that is bureau of labor statistics

00:41:24.580 Five hours.

00:41:25.780 Five hours a day, not including working on screens.

00:41:28.520 This is just passive screen time.

00:41:30.940 We're missing out now if this is the kind of life we're living.

00:41:34.340 The true life, the life you're meant to live, is in the earth.

00:41:37.340 You're meant to steward creation.

00:41:38.900 God put Adam in the garden to tend and keep it.

00:41:41.380 You're supposed to be in community with people around you, deep relationships.

00:41:44.940 Facebook doesn't cut it, right?

00:41:46.580 Twitter doesn't cut it.

00:41:47.480 These are not the deep, abiding relationships that God designed for us.

00:41:51.040 He wants us face-to-face with other people, building, exhorting, sharpening iron, sharpening

00:41:55.620 iron, but then he also wants us stewarding his earth, and from that life, you get all

00:42:00.800 kinds of blessings.

00:42:02.180 I mean, I don't know if chickens will save the world, but I know that when people take

00:42:05.120 it upon themselves, you know, one more point to make on this is, John Adams, you've heard

00:42:11.680 him quoted, probably sometimes saying, our Constitution was written for a wholly moral

00:42:17.120 and religious people.

00:42:18.700 It is wholly unsuited for any other audience or something like that. 1.00

00:42:24.440 Totally inadequate for any other.

00:42:26.860 Okay, they were moral and religious people they wrote that constitution for, yes.

00:42:30.720 But you know what else they were?

00:42:31.920 They were agrarians.

00:42:33.200 They were self-sufficient people.

00:42:35.440 And if you have a populace that is entirely dependent on corporations and government and large institutions, you don't have a free people anymore.

00:42:43.680 They're dependent by definition.

00:42:45.640 You have a people who are self-sufficient, who can provide for their own needs. 0.97

00:42:48.920 They can tell the bureaucrats to go lick the hands that feed them.

00:42:53.780 You get the Sam Adams, and you get the John Adams, and you get the founders of this country.

00:42:59.380 Liberty has to come from self-sufficiency.

00:43:01.600 You need to be able to have some basis to say, this is my kingdom, and you don't belong here, and I don't need what you're selling.

00:43:09.220 That has to be part and parcel with what we're doing here.

00:43:11.560 So there is very much a mission forefathers to take back control from all of these areas that we've seeded out to all of the other bureaus and the institutions and the corporations and see what we can produce ourselves, become producers again rather than consumers.

00:43:29.060 Yeah, I think phenomenal points.

00:43:30.980 It brings me to another question.

00:43:32.960 I started reading this book because of Chris Wiley, but it's Matthew Crawford's book, Shop Class as Soul Craft.

00:43:39.780 Have you heard of this?

00:43:40.220 Great one.

00:43:40.700 Yes. I figured this would be up your alley. But one of the things that he says in there that is just really resonated with me and the pastors here, we started reading this book.

00:43:51.240 They talk about the value of work. So Henry Ford introduces the assembly line.

00:43:57.820 And they had to pay people an exorbitant amount of money to get them to stay because no one wanted to do the actual work because they realized through hyper specialization that the work actually was just terrible.

00:44:08.820 But then you fast forward to now.

00:44:10.260 People have gotten used to it.

00:44:11.360 It's the standard to do menial work that everybody hates and is soul-destroying.

00:44:16.200 When you think about passing on vocation, you think about the work you do, why is it so important to do work that is actually valuable, meaningful, and contributes to those around you?

00:44:31.820 Why is that so important?

00:44:33.160 Well, I mean, yeah, I think, again, it strikes at the core of what are we here for?

00:44:37.860 You know, why do we exist? Are we supposed to be cogs in a machine?

00:44:42.220 The great resignation was this, what economists have labeled this period of 2021, kind of after the initial shock of the pandemic.

00:44:52.780 There were 47 million employee quits in one year.

00:44:59.300 One year, 47 million.

00:45:00.660 One third of the entire American workforce quit their jobs.

00:45:05.120 They weren't fired. They weren't laid off.

00:45:07.860 they quit voluntarily and so this was and this was a the called the great resignation and in

00:45:15.820 in all these you know management theorists are trying to figure out you know what's going on

00:45:19.920 here this because it breaks all of the models that they understood up to that point which is

00:45:23.960 where if you're in a recession uh you won't have to worry about hiring because everyone's going to

00:45:28.820 want to hang on to their jobs for you know for dear life well that the opposite happened they

00:45:33.600 could not keep people hired and where you know you have ceos quitting their jobs very high level

00:45:37.960 directors and executives all the way down to hotel housekeepers they were all quitting their jobs and

00:45:43.360 they could and they still i mean you still if you try to travel and you try to stay in a hotel you're

00:45:47.120 still up against these problems where they don't have enough staff in most of these service sector

00:45:51.680 jobs why the bottom line the bottom line question is we're not ultimately driven by economics

00:45:59.420 We're driven by meaning and significance.

00:46:01.820 And people are willing to say, I don't care what happens.

00:46:04.480 I'm not doing that job anymore.

00:46:05.960 I'm not coming back.

00:46:07.240 That was a, like you said, that was a soul-sucking job.

00:46:10.480 It was meaningless.

00:46:11.480 And if I have to work on a farm and eke by at subsistence, I'm going to do it because

00:46:19.080 I need something that's more fulfilling than just bringing home the paycheck.

00:46:23.120 And that's a huge core of what I'm getting at in durable trades anyway, is these are family-centered vocations.

00:46:31.200 The idea here is how can we do something together in this day and age, in the modern age,

00:46:37.020 with a view of history and historical professions that have always provided this kind of meaning and significance in the past.

00:46:43.920 It wasn't until the Industrial Age, right?

00:46:46.000 You're talking after the 18th century, roughly, is when all of these tens of thousands of

00:46:53.240 new jobs came on the scene that were just pushing buttons, or literally, like, I mean,

00:46:58.460 connecting, you know, the telegraph operators, connecting one cord to another cord, and that

00:47:02.620 was their job the whole day.

00:47:04.340 Opening a coal door for a cart, mule cart to come through, 10 hours a day, six days

00:47:09.420 a week.

00:47:09.840 They needed someone to sit there and open the door, and it was 14-year-old kids that

00:47:13.840 were doing it.

00:47:14.340 So these are the breakdowns that happen as we started to specialize.

00:47:19.520 And yeah, so to me, it's not surprising that people, it's not that people don't want to

00:47:25.280 work, it's that they want their work to mean something, right?

00:47:27.960 And they want their, they want to do that work with people who mean something to them.

00:47:32.540 Yeah, absolutely.

00:47:33.760 I totally agree with that.

00:47:35.240 My other question is, because I'm so, I guess, just interested in the conversation, but is

00:47:39.980 As you're, you know, I'm sure reading books like this, if you had like a top five list

00:47:47.560 where you're like, look, these are the books you need to read, what would you put on there?

00:47:52.900 Oh, you put me on the spot there.

00:47:54.500 I know, yes.

00:47:56.920 Well, I read pretty widely at the moment because part of my job is to try to assimilate a lot

00:48:03.240 of different categories of thinking.

00:48:07.520 So I don't really pigeonhole it too much.

00:48:09.260 But I definitely recommend, in terms of authors, I'd recommend C.R. Wiley, as you've already mentioned.

00:48:14.360 I've appreciated his work, especially if you can get out to hear any of his talks.

00:48:19.780 He's been at our farm.

00:48:21.540 He did a gathering with us a couple years ago.

00:48:24.740 Very good stuff to share.

00:48:26.600 And he's an in-the-trenches kind of guy.

00:48:28.460 He knows what he's talking about.

00:48:29.980 I also like Alan Carlson, who wrote the foreword to my book.

00:48:33.700 If you read his stuff, definitely excellent.

00:48:36.060 Wendell Berry would be right up there, too.

00:48:38.820 Yeah, for Alan's stuff, where would you recommend people start?

00:48:43.280 Personally, I really like his book called The Natural Family, Where It Belongs.

00:48:48.440 And it's agrarian essays, but he goes into some of these things that we've been talking about today.

00:48:53.600 In fact, pretty much everything I share is just plagiarizing Alan.

00:48:57.440 We have an arrangement. He understands, and he's okay with it.

00:49:00.800 But no, you'll see.

00:49:02.140 yeah so uh but but i like he really makes the case for you know the family economy in a way

00:49:09.680 that i hadn't come across before i was an avowed capitalist up until i started reading his stuff

00:49:15.240 and he and it's not that he's anything less than free enterprise it's just that he wants the

00:49:23.280 families to not be subjugated by corporate interests and so uh it was very illuminating

00:49:27.840 to kind of start to think through some of the implications of if you focus purely on the economy

00:49:33.700 as the virtue of all things. If efficiency is the only goal of society, then you end up with

00:49:38.560 these meaningless jobs and fragmented families. So yeah, so I appreciate him. I don't know. I mean,

00:49:44.380 other than that, I spent a lot of time in the scriptures and seeing what God has to say about it.

00:49:48.920 Oh, that's awesome. I always do the same thing. It seems like every time I talk to Chris Wiley,

00:49:54.620 it's like i want to know what you're reading and what's really good and he'll usually have like

00:49:58.220 that's how i figured out about uh shop classes soul craft and i was like chris you've been hiding

00:50:03.420 this one this is a absolute gem uh so definitely enjoy reading that stuff uh the other thing i

00:50:09.520 want to ask you about is we kind of wrap things up here i know that uh you guys are planning i

00:50:13.880 think at chris's church in battleground washington uh in may uh there's going to be event there that

00:50:20.400 you guys are going to be at that people can attend, if you have some information about that.

00:50:25.340 Yes, yes, definitely. Thanks for bringing that up. So Chris and I and Nathan Spearing will be

00:50:30.600 at the Traditional Fatherhood Intensive. It's the first annual conference that his church is

00:50:36.440 putting on out there in Battleground, Washington. So if you go to fatherhoodintensive.com,

00:50:43.980 I believe that's the right website. Coming up May 5th and 6th, so it'll be a two-day event.

00:50:48.660 It's for fathers. It'll fill up fast as soon as tickets go on sale.

00:50:53.920 So make sure that you sign up for that.

00:50:56.080 But come on out and spend a day and a half with us.

00:50:59.300 Be encouraged and meet some other like-minded men who are trying to build stronger home economies

00:51:04.440 and trying to provide and protect for their families

00:51:09.620 and really getting a big dose, a big boost, I think, of encouragement

00:51:15.220 and an understanding of what we're up against,

00:51:18.660 but also what we can practically do about it.

00:51:21.480 And I believe you'll be teaching a course

00:51:23.600 on Brazilian jiu-jitsu and firearms tactics courses.

00:51:27.140 That would be Nathan.

00:51:29.580 That's awesome.

00:51:30.800 Just as we wrap up, Rory,

00:51:32.440 what encouragement would you give?

00:51:33.960 Like things can look bleak,

00:51:35.520 but if you're going to say to fathers,

00:51:37.480 you know, don't lose heart, be encouraged,

00:51:39.900 what would you say to them?

00:51:42.920 I've been called a sober-minded optimist.

00:51:45.580 You might have picked up tones from that here today.

00:51:48.340 I'm not idealistic about what's happening out there.

00:51:51.540 But I'm very optimistic because I feel there's so much that believers, true believers, can be doing right now.

00:51:57.780 And there is nothing more important than what fathers can be doing in their homes.

00:52:02.980 First thing I would say, hands down, family worship every day.

00:52:08.200 Wherever you are, every father can do this with their family.

00:52:11.420 If you're not doing it, make time to do it.

00:52:14.060 It's the single most important thing that you can do.

00:52:16.720 So do family worship with your family, and then you will—I've seen this repeated so many times.

00:52:21.660 You will see families completely changing in a short amount of time

00:52:26.340 as the kids start to hear their own fathers reading the Word of God to them

00:52:29.720 and implementing it or applying it to their lives.

00:52:32.180 But secondly is to start focus on building your own home economy.

00:52:36.240 It doesn't mean you have to quit your job, at least not right away.

00:52:39.660 Maybe you'll get there.

00:52:40.460 But start taking steps for a common vision with your family.

00:52:45.100 There's so much that you can do, right?

00:52:47.660 If you just sit and take in the bad news headlines, it's going to be demoralizing.

00:52:51.440 But there is a lot that you can do right with your own family right at home.

00:52:55.200 And I will tell you this, and I say put this to the test.

00:52:58.980 See if God will not bless your efforts to build a family-centered economy,

00:53:03.880 to come together under a common vision that God has for your family,

00:53:07.400 to pull your wife into it, to pull your kids into it, and to partner up in this.

00:53:11.860 And no matter what it is, if it's like cutting flowers and selling it at a farmer's market on the weekends

00:53:17.080 or setting up a lemonade stand, I don't care what it is.

00:53:20.760 Maybe it's building some furniture, doing something like that.

00:53:23.580 No matter how small, you see if God will bless that.

00:53:27.060 And I believe and I have seen that he will bless that.

00:53:29.600 If you're seeking land, if you're seeking a different way of life,

00:53:33.800 take the first step according to what God has put on your heart

00:53:36.760 and then keep praying for one step at a time, and you will see an amazing transformation

00:53:41.900 as you wait patiently for the Lord to do the work for you.

00:53:46.740 That's great. That's so encouraging. Thanks, Roy. I definitely appreciate that.

00:53:50.480 Last thing, where can people follow along with what you are doing? I know you love to be on,

00:53:55.740 I'm sure, TikTok, Facebook, all those. Great.

00:54:00.100 Yeah, sayonara, Facebook, I guess.

00:54:02.300 Yes, goodbye.

00:54:03.060 uh yeah come on out so we like the tangibles and so come on out to um our website gather and grow

00:54:10.140 dot us and sign up for our newsletter we just finished up the latest copy we send that out a

00:54:15.860 couple times a year but we'll put we'll send something to your mailbox it's free just go to

00:54:20.540 the site and sign up for it and we'll we'd love to send you a copy and we want to stay in touch

00:54:24.800 we want you to contact us if if you can tell us how to pray for you and your family and we're

00:54:28.920 going to walk with you and we're going to encourage you and build you up along the way

00:54:31.600 Awesome. Well, I appreciate it, Rory. Thanks so much for joining me in this episode.

00:54:36.200 You're very welcome. I appreciate the opportunity to share, and it's good to see you again.

00:54:40.460 Absolutely.

00:54:45.300 All right. Well, that's been an interview with Rory Groves. We would encourage you to use the

00:54:49.340 link in the description, pick up his book, Durable Trades, if you haven't already,

00:54:53.280 and definitely peruse that. Thanks, Rory, again for coming on and lending us your time

00:54:58.040 and your knowledge and the fruit of your labors.

00:55:01.120 And listeners, we hope that you don't just listen

00:55:04.180 to these episodes of The King's Hall,

00:55:05.580 not just this one,

00:55:06.500 but that you actually take the time to think actionably.

00:55:09.800 What should I do next?

00:55:11.140 What life steps should I take?

00:55:12.860 Make sure that you're chewing your food

00:55:14.680 when you listen to a good podcast

00:55:17.300 or when you read a good book,

00:55:19.020 that you're stopping and taking that time

00:55:21.120 to make sure that the knowledge

00:55:23.100 and the information that you're being given

00:55:24.900 makes contact with your everyday life.

00:55:27.560 And as you do that, like you heard in the interview, don't be a perfectionist, be a realist, be a doer, not just a theoretician.

00:55:34.600 And as you do so, remember that the first work is to make sure that you are conquered by the spirit, that you're a self-ruled man.

00:55:41.680 He conquers who conquers himself.

00:55:43.860 Thanks for listening to this episode of The King's Hall, and we'll catch you next time.

00:55:46.900 We'll see you next time.

00:56:16.900 The King's Hall, if you'd like to support the show and get some extra content.

The King's Hall - March 17, 2023

Interview with Rory Groves

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