00:14:01.880But he is involved largely in productive real estate and real property.
00:14:06.800And then, you know, we have guys like Tim Six that we interviewed that were more on that side as well.
00:14:10.820And you can find examples of Christian families living out productivity and bringing productivity back into the household so that it's not a train station anymore where people just happen to go before they get on the train to the next activity.
00:14:24.900You can find homes like this across the spectrum of economic activity from digital entrepreneurs who are working in an online economy all the way back, certainly to a more agrarian world.
00:14:39.080But even in those the people I know that are involved in those agrarian things, they're very much knowledgeable and savvy when it comes to the Internet and selling things on the Internet and leveraging those technologies.
00:14:51.880So frankly, it just shows me that people, they're not aware of who's involved in these things and their imagination is really stunted where they can only think of fixing the problem by traveling back to the little house on the prairie time when really that's, you simply can't do that.
00:15:08.580But what we can do is we can look back and start questioning the presuppositions that we've inherited and think like a household must be ordered this way.0.95
00:15:20.860He must have this kind of thing that they must use, you know, daycare, wife works, kids go to school like this, kids do that, you know, instead of just receiving those things uncritically, many of which are very novel in terms of human history, certainly, and say, how can I look back at the principles that marked those earlier ways of being and adapt those principles and land them in the modern day?0.96
00:15:45.780And that's certainly possible. You can do that in a lot of creative ways that begins to press back against this atomization and anti-family, anti-human economic world we find ourselves in.
00:16:15.780chose to support them. They've grown enough to make it their full-time livelihood. This is what
00:16:19.220happens when Christians support Christians. Our communities are strengthened and faithful
00:16:23.140businesses thrive. So if you're a Christian business owner who wants to reach thousands
00:16:26.820of like-minded people and grow your company, we'd love to partner with you. Email us at
00:16:31.380advertising at newchristendompress.com. Well, I think that's a good point too,
00:16:40.360is that it's going to take some creative energy. Yeah. As we've done this series on building wealth
00:16:45.700among Christians. We've done Bitcoin. You mentioned real estate. We've done gold. We've0.83
00:16:50.860done traditional finance. We're moving now into one that I just thought as we were talking through
00:16:55.660this, this would be really helpful. There's this idea embedded in all of this that you cannot
00:17:01.280fully recover the biblical household until you've done something about the economic productivity.
00:17:08.560Now, it's interesting to me, if you read older reform guys, if you read Bob Inc. or Gouge,
00:17:13.360they would have talked about this standard as a requirement for the home. But I want to ask you,
00:17:19.280particularly with Christendom, we're about this bigger project of Christendom. Wealth becomes a
00:17:24.200part of this and economics. But why then economics in the household being so pivotal for the
00:17:31.320rebuilding of Christendom together? Yeah. So one of the reasons that economics is so important
00:17:38.240that conversation is that one of the vectors of attack on the Christian church and the Christian
00:17:45.320family is economic. One of the ways that they've sought to undermine the power of the family,
00:17:50.620because statism, like one of our biggest enemies is statism, is this like secular humanist deified
00:17:56.980state attempting to swallow up everything. One of the ways they do that is by taking the power
00:18:02.900from the family and forcing you to live on somebody else's reservation when it comes0.80
00:18:09.640to all of your economic productivity.1.00
00:18:11.140Like you now must work for this global homo corporation.1.00
00:18:14.280They're going to make you put your pronouns in your bio and get vaxxed or you're fired,1.00
00:18:19.340And you start to see how powerless they've made the household where it can't fight back
00:18:24.360because it doesn't have the economic weight.
00:18:27.000But if you imagine on the other side of things, not just families, but tribes and communities,
00:18:31.940what we call Christian Burroughs at New Christendom Press, beginning to reclaim that economic center
00:18:37.760and forming businesses and entrepreneurial exercises and bringing back that economic
00:18:45.400engine into the household, the tribe, and the community. All of a sudden, you have real
00:18:51.600cultural power. You have real political power. You have real power all over the place because
00:18:59.100you've rejected, you haven't let them plunder and take away an engine of culture and power,
00:19:06.080which is economics. Well, I think that's a very real thing. Cause we've talked about this in our
00:19:10.460community. Like if you want men to be free, um, yeah, you can deal with the spiritual. Obviously
00:19:15.440you want to be free from the wages of death, you know, sin. Um, you, you want to take care of these
00:19:20.280things, but if you don't fix things like, okay, what do we do about education? Yeah. You know,
00:19:24.720If we have public education, we're probably still going to lose a lot of our kids.0.83
00:19:29.520But then you get, especially with men, into this issue of economics.
00:19:33.100If you don't find vocations that are meaningful and economically freeing, if they're still beholden to the corporations, which, by the way, during COVID, it was really the corporations acting as the strongman of the state.
00:19:47.740And so you've got to free men from that.
00:19:49.580I want to ask you, in the episode, Adam talks about three models of household, which we'll get into with him.
00:19:57.720One is the fragmented home, and I think this is the one that is so problematic.
00:20:03.300But in the fragmented home, you have mom and dad going to work.
00:20:13.540But then he kind of talks about a middle one.
00:20:15.020And he said, I think there's a lot of people here.
00:20:16.440And this is the 1950s model, which he describes as it's more of a domestic focus, right?
00:20:22.300Mom stays at home, does some domestic duties, but dad goes off to work and you're still generally kids are going to public school.
00:20:29.380This is kind of the leave it to beaver.
00:20:31.320They're not doing a lot of things together.
00:20:34.940And then the third one would be kind of the historic norm, which is a highly integrated family culture, people working together in business.
00:20:42.220my question for you is why would that fragmentation be so destructive and i think about it like
00:20:49.820even in the overlapping spheres we tend to have here with new christian press the church
00:20:54.580and the school i mean we've got so much overlap where it's like our kids are right upstairs we're
00:21:01.100interfacing with our spouses regularly throughout the day we probably experience a lot of freedom
00:21:06.900that a lot of people don't yeah so why is that so destructive to have this fragmentation
00:21:11.640Yeah, if you think about it, like what you spend your time and strength doing together, that's how you form relationships. And the world is all about relationships, the world that God made.
00:21:23.860If you, again, like sum up the law, it's to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. And then your neighbor, as you seek biblical definitions, works itself out in concentric circles vocationally.
00:21:37.280my most immediate neighbor is that i must rule my own spirit basically treat myself like someone
00:21:43.800i'm in charge of yeah you know then my wife then my children then my brothers and sisters my you
00:21:49.300know family members of my own household extended family church business relationships when you
00:21:54.720fragment everybody all out in a million different directions they're never pushing the plot the
00:22:00.140same plow in the same direction and so they're basically developing off in all these different
00:22:04.900directions naturally. And that's where their strength and focus and affection goes. And that's
00:22:10.160how you end up with like this phenomenon that's common where a husband and wife, they get married,
00:22:15.740they love each other. They're very relationally close. They start having children and then they
00:22:20.680get sucked into all the things. And then when their children leave the home, fast forward 25
00:22:24.860years and the last kids leaving, they find that they have nothing in common because they haven't
00:22:30.920actually done anything together. They've been sort of pursuing these isolated roles, that 1950s
00:22:38.640model, but they're not all linking arms together on the same project. And it leads us even to ask
00:22:44.440questions that like the question itself shows how far we've come gone from the, I think the ideal0.58
00:22:50.460questions like, can a woman work? And what people mean by that is like in a patriarchal home,1.00
00:22:56.660should a woman have a job and our answer like is nine nine times out of ten well no because what1.00
00:23:02.280you mean by a job is should she go out and get a career and be gone 40 hours a week and now the1.00
00:23:08.700kids need to be in daycare and she's taken out of the home and titus two isn't happening she's not1.00
00:23:13.800doing those duties so the word of god is being reviled just like serving another man not her
00:23:17.900husband she's doing all these things but if you go back further you find that that's almost an
00:23:23.200incoherent question for most of history because she would have been deeply involved in the
00:23:28.580economic productivity of the household that the man was certainly the breadwinner in and it was
00:23:35.600his trade or his business or his farm, but she was deeply involved. And so when you start to
00:23:41.600move back to this, it's like John Moody's really good on this too. He does a lot of explanations
00:23:46.360of how when you bring the economic productivity back home, your wife is deeply involved in the
00:23:51.880economic productivity as well, which isn't just measured in dollars in, but it's also in dollars
00:23:57.360not burned doing something meaningless. Like when my wife is home canning food and preparing us,
00:24:05.300we have like huge store of shelf stable food that my wife has canned and she's gone out and
00:24:09.480she's taking dollars that I've made and economic productivity in many ways that we work together
00:24:15.380on as well. And she's now made every dollar I make more efficient and effective because we
00:24:21.600don't need to go let's say something comes up in the day we don't need to go to a fast food0.99
00:24:25.580restaurant to eat our dinner because she's economically productive we've got food stores
00:24:30.900we've got beef stew and on the shelf that's better than anything you'll get a can in the store0.99
00:24:34.820so this is just one example of a way that working together economically my wife is very much0.99
00:24:42.140contributing to the economic picture of our household and not just by opening an etsy store0.99
00:24:47.080which is fine, but I mean, it's much deeper than that.
00:24:53.260The Proverbs say the soul of the lazy one craves and gets nothing,
00:24:57.180but the soul of the diligent is made prosperous.
00:24:59.940With the aim of diligence, I realized I needed help
00:25:02.740navigating the world of tax efficiency and investment strategy.
00:25:06.560Time and knowledge were barriers to these issues.
00:25:09.220I could either be lazy and merely crave knowledge of these things
00:25:12.060or utilize someone specializing in tax and investment
00:35:48.500However, how am I supposed to tell that young man to give in his marriage everything that's due to a wife, which is children, her being home and productive at home, all of those things, if he's not even capable?
00:36:02.500Because I've taught him that the pathway to mature manhood is something that basically begins after you're done getting a college degree when you're 22, and now you can start your vocational training.
00:39:02.020This is how we're trying to train our people in Ogden to think, especially as we have many, many children under the age of 12.
00:39:08.140Right now we have a school and we're looking, as we did at the founding of St. Brendan's, where we said we don't need to pursue the model of school that requires you to charge $8,000 per student per year of tuition or more, which, again, think of the economic impact of that kind of model on what a father can give to his son when he is 18.
00:39:30.580then. He's given him a great thing in the education, but are there other ways? And when
00:39:36.460we looked back at the way education had been handled in ages that were producing brilliantly
00:39:41.980competent men and women, men who were going to Harvard at 14, right? Who knew Latin and Greek.
00:39:48.380And we looked at it, we said, I'm pretty sure that if we just do what they did, we can have
00:39:53.980students who are classically educated, know their Latin and Greek and know their classics and know
00:39:58.000their logic know their rhetoric know how to think um who are 14 15 and 16 rather than 24 rather than
00:40:05.42024 yeah and some of them certainly are going to go on and become experts in latin or law or
00:40:12.500mathematics or something else or engineering well you know fill in the blank but most of them
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00:43:15.700So the other thing that's interesting that you mentioned is this idea of setting your kids up for the future.
00:43:21.380And it kind of stands contra to a lot of the, I guess, kind of the boomer financial advice that has been around for a long time,
00:43:31.040which was, you know, you have a 401k, you put all your money there.
00:43:35.000And then when you're 65, you get to tap into that, which means like you get to take vacations.
00:43:40.180One of the things that we've done, and you and I were talking about this this morning, you drive, let's be realistic, a quite opulent vehicle.
00:43:50.560Yeah, it's kind of embarrassing, like how I have to hide it from the parishioners because elders can't be lovers of money.
00:43:58.100And when I look at your car, I think there's a real temptation here.
00:44:02.160Yeah, it has probably upwards of 80 horsepower.
00:44:05.560Can you imagine 80 horses, how expensive that would be?
00:46:02.280But I said, son, would you rather dad drive a Tesla or a Tacoma or whatever it is now, or in seven years, oldest son, when you're hitting 18 and you're looking to start a business or get established in a home or get married, would you rather me be able to help you significantly with that?
00:49:43.840So if we can get more 20s and 30-year-old guys and women, men and women, thinking this direction now, the fruit that it could bear in 20 years from now is unbelievable.
00:49:57.380And one of the greatest compliments I think any father could receive, like you can look at Adam's family and his children love him and his wife loves him.
00:50:45.460But Benjamin also works really hard in researching and writing for our shows and is getting training from, like, Ben right now, who writes for Haunted Cosmos.
00:59:12.600And so we would see faithfulness and church planting in Utah being, you know, multi-generational instead of, you know, often they're short-lived, people move in and out.
00:59:23.720And so, you know, that's a different story.
00:59:26.480But along those lines, yeah, kids are getting older, looking at responsibilities towards them, looking at what we want to do with the church plant, where we'd like to see that go, putting down roots, all that has to do for us with entrepreneurial thinking then.
00:59:42.600Yeah, I think that's so huge. And kind of I want to unpack this idea of the productive household. You and I were talking about kind of three different potentials for what a household could look like. Before we get into that, though, was it like what sparked some of this thinking? Was it stuff you were reading? Were there books you were delving into that got you there?
01:00:05.100And part of the reason I asked that is because I remember like in Kentucky when I was in seminary, Wendell Berry is from pretty close to where we were going to school.
01:00:15.320And I remember reading some of his stuff, and I'd never heard this in Christian circles, but he was talking about, yeah, the most basic economic unit in society is a marriage.
01:02:29.080It's like an airplane, building it on the run.
01:02:32.040Thankfully, I have a wife that's just always been 1,000% on board, and I just cannot tell you how helpful that's been.
01:02:40.640But, you know, little things like the introduction of a tool like family worship began to change my mentality about, okay, I'm the leader of my household.0.88
01:02:52.800And then it's, you know, everybody should have a man crush on the Puritans and start reading these guys.0.66
01:02:59.740And, boy, just compelled to be a better man and realizing, okay, Scripture's sufficient.
01:03:07.180I've been doing what's right in my own eyes, doing what I've seen in the past, which oftentimes was unfortunate.
01:03:15.440And so, you know, trying to get back to the word convictionally.
01:03:20.100So, which you made the point about, there's kind of three ways or three paradigms for viewing a household.
01:03:28.220And so over time, that's helped me think about how do I want to approach my family structure?
01:03:36.020So I would call like the pretty normal today, Eric, I think is like a highly segregated or fragmented family structure.
01:03:46.440the husband wakes up he goes off to his career and the wife wakes up and she goes off to
01:03:51.280to her career and you know the kids get dropped off at whatever you know uncle sam has footed
01:03:57.820the bill for daycare or public school or whatnot and so at the end of the day these folks typically
01:04:03.320wake up and uh well at the end of the day they've they they go to bed i should say um and they've
01:04:10.260they rarely have seen each other yeah after all the extracurricular activities and so forth so
01:04:15.080That's the normal family, I would say.
01:04:19.440The next one down, I would just say, is kind of that 1950s, 1960s traditional family where
01:04:26.120dad wakes up, he goes off to his career, mom is more domestically focused.
01:04:32.100She's homeschooling kids or taking them to private school and participating in that sort
01:04:38.900Many, I think, in our camp have moved towards that, which to me is for the better.
01:04:45.080And for the past couple hundred years, you know, since the Industrial Revolution, you have had kind of those two options as a household paradigm.
01:04:54.380But what over the years we have kind of woke up to is the idea that I think, Eric, we've all been riding the yellow school bus so long that we either don't know that there's another option, another paradigm, or we've sort of never seen it in action, at least.
01:05:21.040So it's foreign to us. But, you know, prior to a couple hundred years ago, the norm, the historical norm was a pretty highly integrated family culture, meaning dad is around, you know, a lot.
01:05:37.640And all of that's tied into also a productive property, whether that I mean, usually that was the farm, right, or agriculture of some type or some sort of business.
01:05:47.980But what that provided, what that productive property provided was a lot of overlap through a day or a week for mom and dad and kids.
01:05:59.460And so no matter, I think, where your family structure currently falls, I think it is important to wrestle with a couple of questions like, how did we get here?
01:06:12.440What ideology potentially has led us here?
01:06:16.640Why has there been an integrated family paradigm as the norm for the bulk of civilization?
01:06:23.100and just now we've sort of rounded a corner and boy the norm again is that highly segregated
01:06:29.400structure and then practically speaking um is family life healthier today are things getting
01:06:37.080better as a result of this and so uh you and i've talked about you know guys like richard
01:06:43.000baxter would say you're not likely to procure family or general reformation until you procure
01:06:50.120family reformation. Right. And I think this is one of the top things that men should be thinking
01:06:57.340about. What is the current paradigm of my household? How did I get here? And is this
01:07:04.180where I want to keep going? Yeah, I think it's so interesting because, like you said, a lot of
01:07:11.020these, I had never thought through until people like yourself, Rory Groves, other guys started
01:07:17.880mentioning what households used to be like. And sometimes it's hard to get out of our current
01:07:22.280framework to see something different. It seems so foreign and weird. Sort of like Joel Salatin
01:07:26.680would talk about, before the mid to late 1950s, there really weren't grocery stores like we know
01:07:32.280them today. I'm like, wait, I can't even envision a world without Walmart. I mean, because we grew
01:07:37.900up with it, right? But it is interesting to me, some of the effects of these things. So if you
01:07:44.000have a highly segregated and fragmented family structure, mom goes to her thing, dad goes to his
01:07:51.100thing, daycare, all that, public school, whatever. One of the things that you start to realize is
01:07:56.860you're like, okay, I have these biblical commands to raise my children in the fear and admonition
01:08:01.120of the Lord, Ephesians 6, 4, Deuteronomy 6, especially though, where I'm like, wait a minute,
01:08:06.640how am I going to do this if I'm not physically with them for at least a good percentage of the
01:08:12.660day, right? If I see my kids for like an hour a day, you know, like they wake up, you drop them
01:08:17.800off at the school bus or wherever you take them to school. You don't see them for eight or nine
01:08:22.060hours. Cause realistically it's like, you know, you know, they're going to go to school and then,
01:08:26.720you know, they're going to have like practice for an hour and a half or two hours after school.
01:08:30.440So time together is very minimal. And then it seems like, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems
01:08:35.600like it just gets hard to actually say, how do I fulfill all these duties? Yeah. You know, even
01:08:40.160And inevitably, like in the church, we've talked to families about, okay, one of the
01:08:45.880things that we require for church membership, this is an old Puritan thing, but you have
01:08:50.380to be fathers leading in family worship.
01:08:53.680In fact, the Puritans would put you under church discipline.
01:08:56.060You'd be under censure if you weren't regularly doing this.
01:08:58.980But the first question for a lot of moms and dads is, well, shoot, given my structure of
01:09:20.300And again, to your point, it's such a different concept.
01:09:23.800I think practically I could give an illustration of just how much this fragmented household has crept into even the larger evangelicalism today.
01:09:34.320So we've been doing something as simple for the last couple decades as beating the drum to say, hey, churches, you might consider bringing your children into worship with you.
01:09:59.820And, you know, people would often either think or say out loud, right, that what are you some sort of, you know, wide eyed radical fundamentalist and usually the words legalist, you know, but but yeah.
01:10:14.660So I think the current ideology has done so well at saying this is how things ought to be, highly segregated homes are the natural, the norm that we don't even know.
01:10:30.100So we have all fell to Kant's theology that we're an end in and of ourselves, which plays into all kinds of things.
01:10:40.040But I would say that that is the essence of fragmentation.
01:10:44.660Yeah. Is that that individualism run amok?
01:10:48.300Well, it's interesting, too, because if you look at data from like current generations, let's take the millennials, they're remaining unmarried at like astronomical rates.
01:10:58.960Obviously, the birth rates are well below replacement levels now.
01:11:03.100there's not really a desire for the household. And in a way, I kind of understand it because
01:11:09.140when the household is nothing more than a hotel room that you come to in the evening
01:11:12.960to watch Netflix, it really, it loses the productive value. And this is something that
01:11:20.160guys like Rory Groves have been really good about hitting upon, which is that when you remove
01:11:24.520productivity from the household, you're taking away some of the core values and virtues of the
01:11:30.960home that just in the end, you're like, well, if, if it really is just a hangout place for Netflix,
01:11:36.360I could go to Buffalo Wild Wings. Yeah. Why do I need a marriage to make that happen? Yeah.
01:11:42.540And then I think that the other model, which is really interesting to me as Proverbs 31,0.97
01:11:47.440because particularly the woman of the home, I mean, she is just hyperproductive in her home0.80
01:11:54.500for her husband, like for her people, she's not working for another household or another boss
01:12:00.720out there, but it's a very different picture of what home life would look like.
01:12:05.940I mean, you've got real estate involved, you've got land, as you mentioned, productive property.
01:12:30.720So, you know, he lamented the destruction of the family farm and the family economy in Scotland.
01:12:37.420And he said this, he said, the loss to the nation as a whole was vital, if not irreparable.
01:12:44.420And it was simply just because men like this could see what was coming down the tracks when you started taking the family in different directions.
01:12:53.700And so, you know, these were normal things guys were wrestling with back in the day.
01:13:00.720Well, it's interesting too, because one of the critiques, I was sharing this with Rory
01:13:04.600Groves, we had a podcast recently for the Hard Men podcast, but one of the critiques0.52
01:13:09.660I hear from within the R camp is, well, this is just some like fixation with the past time
01:15:04.720And then we just want to try to walk that out as best we can
01:15:08.180and look at all the things that are trying to push us in this direction,
01:15:12.120in that direction, you know, worldviews and ideologies.
01:15:14.440And so for us, you know, you come to 1 Timothy 3, 4,
01:15:18.920A man's supposed to manage his household well.
01:15:23.200That word well attached there, it's not a subjective well.
01:15:27.280It's not do what's right in your own eyes well.
01:15:30.180It's an objective of well, and it's laden, I think, with responsibilities.
01:15:34.800I think in the 66 books, God has, you know, when I think of the duties and responsibilities he has given me as a head of a household, I'm humbled and I'm just overwhelmed, frankly.
01:15:45.440And so it's actually the sufficiency of Scripture that drives us to think about these household paradigms and how we're going to fulfill, you know, God's commands and principles.
01:15:58.040And so I don't know if that's a good segue into that, but you had mentioned, you know, concepts like family worship and so forth.
01:16:40.980Fathers ought to be like the psalm singers.
01:16:42.760We're establishing an environment where there's a meditation on the word, catechism, scripture memory, that sort of a vibe, right?
01:16:50.620And so additionally, I think men ought to be leading their families to be fairly fluent in how to actually read and study and apply the word.
01:16:59.920There ought to be theological studies.
01:17:01.520We ought to be introducing our households to spiritual forefathers.
01:17:05.500There ought to be a lot of understanding regarding delighting in the law and delighting in the gospel.
01:17:10.460I think there's a ton of confusion there today that our kids, we need to work them through.
01:17:15.540Proverbs, I think, should be in front of our families, wise and foolish living.
01:17:21.420And then, you know, to think we ought to immerse our children in a biblical worldview, which is likened to that first point, but it's broader, meaning we want our children to see things the way God sees things.
01:17:35.400We want them to see his world, you know, through his word, every detail, and that neutrality is not an option, right?
01:21:48.280I think I'm reminded of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said,
01:21:53.080and he wasn't always right, but when he was,
01:21:55.640he said things like, the righteous man lives for the next generation,
01:22:00.040meaning like it's an all-consuming endeavor.
01:22:04.520And so when I think about paradigms, household paradigms, when I think about responsibilities just toward the next generation, I think the million dollar question for Paige and I has been, what do all of these responsibilities given to a family leader assume?
01:22:24.200like what is the presupposition behind this huge overwhelming list of duties and what am i going
01:22:31.640to have to leverage as a husband and a father to accomplish these these kinds of things and so
01:22:38.720and and how the the only reasonable answer i can come up with eric is is i have to leverage time
01:22:47.020i have to leverage an incredible amount of time to be able to accomplish these things
01:22:53.560And I think you alluded to Deuteronomy 6.
01:22:58.360When I say time, I mean I have all of this content and I think context plays a portion in this because we were just talking about paradigms, right?
01:23:12.060And here's the content and the context.
01:23:14.780And so when you look at Deuteronomy 6, dads teach your children to give their allegiance to the one true God, love Him with everything they've got, and you've got to pass this on to the next generation.
01:23:28.860Well, when they sit down, when they walk by the way, when they lie down, when they rise up.
01:23:33.480And to me, when I think of all the commands and responsibilities that God has given us, that begins to sound—I used to think that was hyperbole.
01:23:41.680Like, that was sort of an over-exaggeration.
01:23:43.820But when I when I take all of these things into my mind, I can't help but think this is probably not an over exaggeration.
01:23:51.380I have a lot of responsibilities here.
01:23:53.800And so I'm going to have to think about I'm going to have to get my butt out of bed pretty early in the morning.
01:23:58.900And I'm going to have to work till dark 30 from my children's birth through maturity while they're under my roof to see that these things are accomplished.
01:24:07.820accomplished. And so, um, so content and context, I think are super important for men to be thinking
01:24:14.320about in just regard to their household in general. What, what have I been called to put into it and
01:24:20.520what, how much time am I going to have to leverage to do that? And, you know, and I talked to dads
01:24:26.180and it's like, yeah, I could pretty well get this done. And, you know, twice a week during family
01:24:31.500worship no we're reading different bibles i think no it is such a good point because i had this same
01:24:39.620kind of revelation personal revelation when i was uh making this switch from complementarianism
01:24:45.720to patriarchy and then reading like say masculine christianity yeah i didn't walk away from that
01:24:51.960book like pounding my chest being like i am king hear me roar i walked away like i have not even
01:24:58.720begun to fathom how weighty my responsibilities are. And I have to take this so much more
01:25:04.480seriously. Yeah. Because as you said, this isn't, you can't do this. You can't even do this in 30
01:25:10.500minutes a day. Yeah. If you really take the commandment and you can tie it even, I think,
01:25:14.860to the great commission, you know, a phrase like teaching them all that I have commanded,
01:25:18.820teaching them everything that I said. You know, I had a pastor say one time, he's like,
01:25:22.960that's going to take a long time. Yeah. To be able to teach them all that Jesus said. And not
01:25:28.260only just to teach it to them, but to live it, to embody it, um, in, in every walk of
01:32:57.700Which is the, you know, the cool thing about, you know, buying an intact business, right?
01:33:03.680And so, and the other beautiful thing, instead of starting from scratch, is literally month one, we were, we was paying our bills.
01:33:11.980And at the end of year three, like, we have max, you know, by the grace of God, we've, you know, we tweaked some things, made a few improvements here and there.
01:34:03.700You know, I almost always have one, two, three kids with me.
01:34:07.620And they're always just in the room next door where it's visible.
01:34:11.380They're doing schoolwork or they're saying hi to their customers.
01:34:14.840And everybody loves the idea of a family business.
01:34:17.780anyway. And so it just sort of feeds that in a real healthy way. Um, so what a great thing
01:34:24.480from a local church perspective, what a great thing for our kids getting rooted in the community
01:34:29.100that we're really not part of, even though we've been out here for 15 years, it takes a while to
01:34:32.700be Utahns. Right. And, um, so man, uh, in the course of that, I, again, I think if you're
01:34:40.960being productive and looking for those kinds of things, your kids are getting older,
01:34:44.780you have some more margin and range, then other things come along. And if that's the way you're
01:34:53.300looking, if that's your bent, like this trout farm came along, we'd have never dreamed that
01:34:57.360something like that would have came along. It's so interesting because we were talking to some
01:35:03.440guys who do venture capital work and they were talking about one of the biggest opportunities
01:35:07.700in America right now is you have this transition generationally from small businesses, from a lot
01:35:14.120of boomer guys and gals and they're getting out of the business and a lot of their kids don't want
01:35:19.400either to be a part of it or they're just not going to pass it on to anybody. And so you have
01:35:24.460this great measure of wealth that's going to go somewhere. And I think the potential for a lot of
01:35:30.840Christian families is let's not have it go to BlackRock. Let's not go that route, but you can
01:35:37.520buy some of these. And one of the things, one of the guys who was doing this, purchasing businesses
01:35:41.960told me was, he said, it's really interesting because if you take a business that's been
01:35:46.380around for 30 years, he said, and you look at the finances and, you know, we go through
01:35:50.980all that and see if it's, you know, profitable business.
01:35:53.900Usually if it's been around that long, it is.
01:35:56.720But he said, what's interesting is they're, they're usually, you know, in that space where
01:36:02.300they're making money, but maybe it could be run a little bit better.
01:36:05.500And so you, like you said, you're taking on a book of business.
01:36:09.780you're not starting from zero. You're actually getting out of the blocks pretty good. And then
01:36:15.160if you can, a lot of them, he said, you know, it's like just implement some better calendar
01:36:18.660scheduling type stuff and some stuff that maybe the boomers when they started the business in
01:36:22.9401980 didn't do. And you can implement a lot of that stuff, make them pretty efficient.
01:36:27.060If you get good customer service, whatever. He said, you know, we're, we're very profitable
01:36:31.620on those businesses. Absolutely. So, and there's a lot of them. I think this is the other thing
01:36:36.040that um a lot of people think that we're saying oh you got to go homestead or you know grow all
01:36:41.580your own food or something like that but it's not that no no not at all not not at least from our
01:36:46.220perspective so um i i think there's a ton of opportunities out there like that and um and
01:36:52.860where the kids can be involved too i think that's pivotal yeah i mean like right now we're we're
01:36:57.380wanting to open a second boarding facility i mean we you know we're we're doing fine like if just
01:37:03.280We're doing great. You know, we're fine. I'm not looking for more work to do per se.
01:37:08.700But we're also thinking about, I guess, some kids that, you know, are getting close to being able to get married and they want to be around.
01:37:16.920They want to build. And as far as an inheritance goes, I would like to be able to pass them something, like to be able to pass something along,
01:37:25.480not just cash, but productive property that actually lends itself to a pretty healthy family
01:37:32.460paradigm, that integrated structure, right? And so if I could do both those things, both help them
01:37:37.680financially, and it's not only good financially, but man, this is a pretty nice way to raise a
01:37:44.400family. You can be together as much as you want. That's a win to me.
01:37:50.020When you think about the generational impact of that too, like the difference of handing somebody
01:37:54.920a stack of cash and saying, here's 40 grand, here's 50 grand, whatever it is. But if you know
01:37:59.740that what you're passing on is, we just think about the annual incomes from one of these
01:38:05.940businesses for your kids and their families long-term. Okay. There's that. There's the
01:38:10.600financial. It's not just a one-time blessing, but then also all the work, as you said, being able to
01:38:18.060pass on the idea and the legacy of productive household. Because that was one of the things,
01:38:23.920Adam honestly terrified me. I spent 15 years in corporate America and Brian is phrased it this
01:38:30.380way. He said, you know, I would do everything as I could as a dad to keep my kids off the corporate
01:38:35.800plantation because I know what it was like to work there. Uh, for the most part, it was soul
01:38:41.280destroying. Uh, the people who own your business is just a nameless faceless group of, you know,
01:38:46.980hedge fund managers who their only interest was like buying, gutting, flipping, running skeleton
01:38:52.960Cruise, you would look, I remember one of the businesses I worked for for two years,
01:38:57.980we got to the end of the two years and they had reported the CEO salary is like $620,000
01:39:03.620that year. And that's not including like stock options or whatever else. And then I'm looking
01:39:10.160and like all the production is coming from the magazine staff that I was working on. It's like
01:39:14.180five people and nobody made more than like 45 grand a year. And I'm thinking these people hate
01:39:19.700us, to them, we are like disposable cell phones, like use, abuse, throw away, get another one.0.99
01:39:27.200We'll get another kid out of college who's young and dumb and doesn't know any better.0.95
01:39:30.100So for me, I was like, A, I want to get out of that. Have no desire to be in it. But then if0.98
01:39:35.780you escape from Egypt, like you got out from under Pharaoh, you're not to your next generation of
01:39:41.380kids going to be like, Hey, you know, who'd be really good to work for is Pharaoh. No. And that
01:39:46.260means you've got to have other options on the table. So I love some of this. The other one I
01:39:51.600think that is so important though, is the idea that generationally, like, let's say you pass
01:39:58.700a business onto one of your kids. It's not like, and this is something I think just that mindset
01:40:04.800from the world that you got to jettison. It is not you're 18, see you bye, hope your life's good.
01:40:39.780I mean, for as my kids get, you know, as my daughters have, you know, as I have son-in-laws or I've got three boys left in the home still, one is at that age, right, where, I mean, he's been helping me, you know, he helped me start this business essentially three years ago.
01:41:02.560That's been his high school, so to speak, experience.
01:41:05.380Um, and so like he, he, he can just naturally just keep going, keep, keep running with that.
01:41:13.500Um, and so it's, uh, and, and he's excited about, I mean, you know, it's a, uh, they're, uh, part of this is this relational aspect in households too.
01:41:24.720Like our kids aren't looking, you know, they're not, we have great relationships.
01:43:52.160Yeah, I think when young people get a piece of a biblical worldview, you know, they have the Lord and all of, and it's, this is a joyful thing for us.
01:44:05.220I mean, you know, not that there aren't hard days and we get calluses and sweat.
01:44:09.000It was a hot summer, you know, so we sweat a lot.
01:44:11.340It's not that because things are easy, but there's just a lot of joy and a lot of life.
01:44:15.780And when your family can kind of see where all this is going, right?
01:45:31.340So, you know, one of the things I did this summer, I was reading a book on family life.
01:45:39.120And it said, hey, if you're not sort of evaluating your household economy, you are definitely going to be more fragmented year to year, but generation to generation.
01:45:54.160And so the kind of the charge was, well, I want you to look at the day in one day in the life of your family.
01:54:20.700At dinner, we sit down and talk about the day, things we've learned, business, books we've read.
01:54:28.100One of the younger sons had, hey, he loves C.S. Lewis, and so he was reading something on Narnia in his spare time.
01:54:35.060And then one of my sons was reading Mere Christianity for some formal schoolwork.
01:54:40.180And so that night, particular night, was a C.S. Lewis discussion, and there you go.
01:54:44.520So after a big meal, a lot of people, a lot of cleanup, you know, a lot of dishes, all of that's done while some of the families doing that.
01:54:53.640We had an issue at the farm that I went and took care of with a couple of the other kids.
01:56:33.420That's where over the years we've decided that this is the best way that we can figure out how to fulfill those duties and responsibilities God has given us.
01:56:43.600And so when you add that up over, you know, a week and a year and, you know, that's how that begins to flesh out.
01:56:53.580Yeah, it's amazing because it really is, it becomes such a glory for not only you, but for your whole family.
01:57:03.360I can remember so many experiences like this, but let's say we've been over to your house, we've had dinner, and it's sometimes hard to describe what it's like, but you go there and you see the kids and our kids are playing with your kids.
01:57:18.180We're enjoying the hospitality and then you drive home and I've talked about Brian about
01:57:26.520this, but it's like when there's good hospitality like that in a healthy family, you walk away
01:57:32.000and you're like, I don't know what that was, but I want that.
01:57:36.280And there's something that actually pulls you in.
01:57:38.460So then you think about, okay, for your kids, just knowing that they're growing up having
01:57:45.020in all of those ways, whether it's, you know, early morning at the dog kennel, learning to
01:57:50.080wake up on time, learning to do your schoolwork, learning to interact with the other kids. They're
01:57:54.940doing all these things. But really what's happening is the affections of their heart
01:57:58.920are being trained and they're being oriented. And it's all being oriented in the grain of,
01:58:04.740we love each other as a family. We're doing this together. And that is just so, again, it's,
01:58:10.480I think hearing that is really helpful because it's more than you could just describe.
01:58:59.660We want to grow in giving and that happens between one another, you know, in our household.
01:59:04.880And if it's not happening there, doubtful, right, that it's pouring over into love for neighbor, love for the church family.
01:59:14.040And so I just think if you don't begin with the household, right, and that generosity, that spirit, hard to think it's going to move much farther.
01:59:26.060Yeah, so you're talking about generosity, obviously interpersonal, the way that you give your time, energy to one another.
01:59:33.500but it's interesting too because the productive household there's also this overflow
01:59:37.600right so it's like okay not just it's not just a blessing to you and your family but also to
01:59:44.080your church and to people who are uh welcomed into it but there's also it seems like a generational
01:59:50.360aspect to generosity yeah right yeah yeah absolutely uh i i uh i think um i think this is
02:00:02.560And this can go back to, it reminds me, since I've been mentioning Wiley there, he says for people to start having children again in the old-fashioned way, which I don't know if there's another way to do it, but he says we need to get children back in the asset column of the household books.
02:00:20.620And I think when that begins to happen, and I mean, that, it just builds on itself.
02:00:28.480So, and you're transferring all kinds of things, right?
02:00:31.740You're transferring love, knowledge, productive property, and these things continue to spiral by God's grace, I think, just hopefully out of control in really good ways.
02:00:45.720So I just think you're just passing on so much more than you could dream or imagine, right?
02:05:38.440Yeah, that's, that's our two main hubs and come, you know, again, you have to build up
02:05:44.220your product and these fish take time to grow.
02:05:47.300And so, but yeah, we'll be able to, you know, get to a point probably mid-year.
02:05:53.140And so, within a year, year and a half, we ought to be able to get to a point where I think just the trout business might be able to sustain a household.
02:06:16.600So that's awesome. Yeah. I, but Erica, you know, none of, I would not be able to do these things. Uh, you know, I've got an army, small army of, of people, um, that are going in the same direction with me. I just would not be able to do, nor am I, nor Paige and I doing that for ourselves or to build a bank account or whatever. Like I, I mean, we'll, uh, this, we're just going to pass this on.
02:06:44.600Yeah, I mean, it'll just continue to be passed on.
02:06:47.260And that's the beauty of it, you know, I think, of all.
02:07:22.860I think a critical piece for any household is to know when you sit down at the dinner table tonight, everybody knows why you're doing what you're doing, you know.
02:07:31.980And if God's word is driving that, I think you're continuing just to dump into them.
02:08:25.300Let's create more opportunities for more guys that are saying, yeah, look, I want to leave the corporate job or I'm out of my house 60, 70 hours a week.
02:12:08.460And I think the other thing that's really stuck with me is that a woman and a godly wife, a helper, she is designed to put her full energy and weight into her husband's mission.
02:12:20.620And a lot of times what we do, we take her and we go put her in like a corporate mission for a man who doesn't love her.
02:12:28.440But it is so cool to see like these ladies just when they are just tapped into like, you know, who they, who God made them to be, who they are.
02:12:36.900man, what they can accomplish, their love for their children. I mean, the other one too is
02:12:42.960funny. It's like, oh, you know, like you just want her to be like homeschooled and dumb. And0.99
02:12:47.400then I'm like having a conversation with like a 14 year old girl and I'm like, they're like
02:12:51.760brilliant. They're reading like Dostoevsky and, you know, Jane Austen and Virgil and the Aeneid.
02:12:59.840And I'm like, yeah, you have no idea what's actually happening in these circles.
02:13:03.580That's so true. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of wives, that reminded me of Spurgeon, his famous letter to his wife. And he just basically says, you know, none has been lost in anything that I've done, only gain.
02:13:19.980And for us, all of this is, I think when I talk to a lot of guys about this, and building and business and economics, one of the things that they usually say is, you know what I noticed, you don't say I a lot, but you say we a lot.
02:13:37.780Meaning as, yeah, because we, the family, is how this is going on, so we're doing this together, which is the beauty.
02:13:50.620I mean, that is the critical piece of all of that.