00:00:00.000Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webin with Right Response Ministries, and you're listening to another
00:00:04.020episode of Theology Applied. This week, we have a special treat for you. What we're doing here
00:00:09.440at the end of the year is we're taking a few of our favorite episodes that we've ever recorded
00:00:13.740with Theology Applied, and we're airing them for all of you who have missed them and for some of
00:00:19.460you who maybe watched this episode in the past but wouldn't mind a refresher. So this episode,
00:00:24.740one of my personal favorites, is with Ben Merkel. Ben Merkel is the president of New St. Andrews
00:00:30.760College in Moscow, Idaho. And the title of this episode is How Public Schools Are Turning Children
00:00:38.320Against Their Parents. How Public Schools Are Turning Children Against Their Parents. If you
00:00:44.160want to be aware of what's going on in public schools and why it is absolutely vital that
00:00:49.620Christians provide for their children a distinctly Christian education. This is the episode for you.
00:00:57.500Real quick, before we get started, if you would prayerfully consider supporting Right Response
00:01:02.360Ministries, we would be incredibly grateful. You can do so by giving a gift of any amount
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00:01:25.300family. We need your help, and we pray that you would consider supporting us in this endeavor.
00:01:32.400Applying God's Word to every aspect of life. This is Theology Applied.
00:01:38.100Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webin with Right Response Ministries.
00:01:46.020This is another episode of Theology Applied, where our whole goal in this podcast is to help Christians not only salute the inerrancy of the Word of God,
00:01:56.080not just recognizing and acknowledging God's authority through His Word, but the sufficiency of God's Word.
00:02:02.660realizing that that all of the scripture needs to be applied to all of life and so it's very
00:02:10.560fitting our guest for today we have Dr. Ben Merkel who is the son-in-law of Doug Wilson and
00:02:17.200the whole saying kind of mission statement that they've had there in Moscow where they live with
00:02:21.060the church and with the school and all these different things is all of Christ for all of
00:02:26.620life we want to take the whole Christ and his authority executed through the agency of the
00:02:32.180Word, so all of Christ, all of the Bible, all of His Word, and apply it to all of life,
00:02:36.980not just, you know, Jesus, Lord of my heart, not just applying the Scripture to church
00:02:41.920and the home and parenting, but politics and media and entertainment and vocation.
00:02:51.760So we're going to be looking at what the Bible says about education, the importance, the
00:02:57.620significance, but then also getting really practical and how to apply a Christian worldview
00:03:04.700and the sufficiency of scripture in the way that we educate. And so we have Dr. Ben Merkel. He is
00:03:12.160the president of New St. Andrews College. And I'm going to let him take a moment right here from the
00:03:17.820outset and introduce anything else, Ben, that you might want to share about yourself.
00:03:22.540No, that's a great introduction. It's a pleasure to be here. Enjoy your ministry and your church and look forward to our conversation here.
00:03:31.720Great. All right. Thanks for coming on. So first thing that I want to ask a little bit personal, but just people getting to know you some for you.
00:03:39.000When and how did you first get interested in being an educator? What got you excited about education?
00:03:45.940Well, you know, it was kind of a multi-step process. So it started during my undergraduate. I was at the University of Idaho, and I was taking a lot of chemistry classes, but I didn't really like chemistry.
00:03:59.840And it was during my time at the U of I that I really felt like I had a heart for going into ministry of some sort. And virtually every pastor I knew was a teacher.
00:04:09.260and so I got a secondary education degree in chemistry thinking that that was the way you've
00:04:16.060got yourself ready to be a pastor. I know I did not really ask for any advisor counsel or anything
00:04:21.240it just seemed like that's what pastors did. I started as soon as I graduated I came on staff
00:04:28.900with the local church here doing evangelistic work to the University of Idaho leading Bible
00:04:33.120studies, going in and speaking to fraternities and doing that sort of thing. Um, but during that
00:04:38.760time, um, new St. Andrews college started and I was doing pastoral training through our church.
00:04:45.000Greyfires hall had just started. I was the very first Greyfire student. And, uh, so I was doing,
00:04:50.860uh, ministerial training and new St. Andrews started and Doug Wilson, my father-in-law asked
00:04:55.520me if I would TA a class for him, which I, I did. And, uh, it's kind of a long series of events,
00:05:02.180But one of the things that I noticed was that the impact that I was having on the students in my classes versus the impact that I was having in my Bible studies on the U of I campus, it was really interesting that it was in the context of education that I was seeing their souls opened up and people were ready to do a deep dive into what they actually thought.
00:05:26.520and I started to see that I was having a more profound impact on um in discipling them and
00:05:34.520mentoring them and whatnot through education than I was just in my normal pastoral work
00:05:39.040and so that just got me intrigued and I threw myself more and more at it and saw
00:05:42.940it blessed more and more as an outlet where there's something about those years from 18 to
00:05:49.08022 23 and that first moment when you've left home and you're out on your own for the first time
00:05:56.540there's something really significant that happens there and it happens in those classes that shapes
00:06:02.380lives in a really profound way and i found that that was just something i wanted to be involved
00:06:05.840in that's cool yeah so just massive amount of influence at a very a very uh pivotal time in
00:06:12.580people's lives and just realizing it really is significant yep okay so let me go ahead and just
00:06:19.320get right into it um our topic for today we've titled it christian education and the myth of
00:06:25.720neutrality christian education and the myth of neutrality so i think a good question for us to
00:06:31.360start with is uh what is the difference and is there a difference between christians in education
00:08:22.140And that's a very deep discipleship that happens.
00:08:26.120And when you're doing that kind of work, you're tending to work on the big picture questions, the sort of, why am I here? What is life about? What is beauty? What is goodness? You're wrestling with questions that have to do with the transcendent standard that we live under.
00:08:44.480So we have a God whose character has shaped this whole world.
00:08:49.000And when you're in that kind of education, you're understanding – you're looking to God's character.
00:08:54.620You're understanding what his character is like.
00:08:56.600And then you're taking that down into this world and you're starting to see this world in light of that transcendent standard.
00:09:03.440And so then that sets you up for arguments where you are trying to deduce the laws of logic that God has revealed to us via his word but also through his law written on our heart, natural revelation.
00:09:21.540It's this law that we see from him that we then interpret the rest of the world in.
00:09:27.040And we can have lots of arguments where, you know, I have this standard.
00:09:31.580How is that consistently applied in all of these different areas?
00:09:35.380That's one way of thinking about education.
00:09:38.720That's not at all what any of our current schools are doing.
00:09:42.820Our current schools are far more oriented towards imparting very basic vocational skills.
00:09:49.880So you're trying to teach people how to use Excel, how to use, how to code, how to write, whatever.
00:09:57.040You're teaching them very specific vocational skills.
00:10:01.920And to the extent that there's anything larger worldview about it, it's a lot of indoctrination in a very God-hating kind of philosophy.
00:10:10.700But it doesn't look to any sort of transcendent standard.
00:10:13.780Um, you'll see things like, um, uh, well, have you noticed that like over the last say two years, how many conversations have you seen between two people who, um, have very different perspectives come from two very different worlds and have two ideologies that are very opposed them.
00:10:36.260And yet they were able to have a very clear and calm and rational conversation where they
00:15:43.340Why – and within the Christian worldview, you're able to put that on the bedrock foundation of who God is and the world that he has made.
00:15:52.760Now, we believe in – because I'm a Christian and because I read my Bible, one of the things the Bible tells me is that God's law is written on the heart of all men and that God's attributes can be perceived even by the unregenerate through natural revelation.
00:16:08.980So I believe that there is a natural law and a law of God written on the heart of those who are outside of Christ, and therefore there are things that I can learn from them that they understand this world in real and true ways.
00:16:23.240But that only makes sense ultimately because the God of the Bible is true.
00:16:28.100And what you find is that everything always leans and moves towards consistency over time.
00:16:41.100There are inconsistencies that you can have in your life that over time will work themselves out and will reconcile themselves into a consistency.
00:16:51.480You know, I'm looking at today's news of Jerry Falwell and what was what's going on there.
00:17:00.620And you have all these crazy things that are coming out.
00:17:03.820And one of the things you find is that you can hold on to things that are contradictions, that are that are hypocrisies for a little bit of time.
00:17:10.780But there is this, you know, my father in law would describe it as like somebody who's trying to sit on a beach ball underneath the surface of the water.
00:17:18.020You know, you can hold it down there for a time, but sooner or later, you know, it shoots up over here.1.00
00:17:23.480And the Christian's job is to poke their arms.1.00
00:17:28.440And so so I think an education, you know, even the public school system, you could go back 50 years and you could go to a public school.
00:17:40.280And somebody with my convictions would say, that's a bad idea.1.00
00:17:43.740You need something that's explicitly Christian.0.96
00:17:45.740But somebody who was at a public school 50 years ago could be excused for saying, you know, you say that, but this seems pretty good.
00:17:53.060And I would say, no, no, it needs to be explicitly on God's word.
00:17:57.980And sooner or later, this inconsistency will come out.
00:18:02.740So over the last 50 years, what we've seen is that public education getting worse and worse.
00:18:07.560And you'll have even parents now, like I see this when I'm talking to parents about sending their kids off to college.
00:18:12.700They'll say, I'll say, look, you know, the secular college is God hating and blah, blah, blah.
00:18:17.880And they'll say, yeah, I hear you say that.
00:18:19.940But I remember when I went to college and it was God hating, but there was also a lot of really good about it.
00:18:25.140And it was actually where I became a Christian and on and on.
00:18:28.060And and and what they don't realize is that that was 20 years ago.
00:18:33.160The college campus of today is so different.
00:18:36.500But the college campus of today was is consistent with that college campus of 20 years ago.
00:18:43.640It's one long trajectory that over time it's going to become more and more consistent with itself.
00:18:49.340And so there are plenty of areas where I don't have a problem dipping my foot in that water because I know it's I know that this book is inconsistent with God's word, but there's some stuff in here that's really useful.
00:19:06.980But I want to be really careful and conscious of the fact that over time that inconsistency is going to come out and it is going to destroy it.
00:19:15.420And I think that we are really, really short sighted when we think that particularly with where the schools are now, that we can hand our children over to that and not have that have a catastrophic effect on their lives.
00:19:31.160I completely agree. I think of music, you know, I think we're just hardwired because we're made in the image of God because of natural law, natural revelation. We can't, human beings cannot sit well with dissonance, right? We want to resolve the note. You got to do one or the other. And because of the doctrine of total depravity, because the heart of man, apart from regeneration, as you referenced, is opposed to God, not just neutral, but Romans 8 says hostile towards God.
00:19:58.000It does not submit to his law, nor can it because of that disposition in the heart of
00:20:03.640man being opposed to God and because of being, so in terms of total depravity, there's an
00:20:27.240We can't live in this inconsistency. We're going to have to pick one or the other.
00:20:30.740But because the heart of man, apart from regeneration, is opposed to the things of God,
00:20:35.040because they're spiritually discerned and because he's hostile towards God, he's at enmity with God.0.71
00:20:40.340Because of all those things, there's just going to be this natural, apart from a Christian education,
00:20:45.620apart from a Christian worldview, and really ultimately apart from regenerate hearts.0.83
00:20:50.320It's really not if, it's just when. It's a matter of time.
00:20:53.140There's going to be this constant downstream towards not order, but chaos. And I think of that, I think of Darwinism. I think Doug said this, but I think of Darwinism being taught for decades in the public school system. And now all of a sudden, it's like, all right, we want revolution. We want to change things and we want to make them better.
00:21:13.980And what's the immediate default strategy among young people coming out of public school systems, taught Darwinism?
00:21:21.380The strategy is, well, let's burn it all down.
00:21:25.360But it does for the Darwinian because if you just do chaos, well, what comes out of chaos?
00:21:31.200According to Darwinism, according to evolution, order.
00:21:34.200Whereas the Christian worldview would say, if you want to fix things, you can't burn it.
00:21:37.820You can't go to chaos because chaos produces nothing.
00:21:41.240We believe in God, who is a God of order. And so even that, it's like, we maybe don't draw the connections. But my point is, I think, you know, the riots and burning down cities and defunding police, you look at that and you think, oh, like, this is, this is silly. But it's actually not. It actually is, I think, the culture trying to resolve the dissonance.
00:22:08.660It's it's picking a lane. It's it's I think that's really true. Consistency.
00:22:12.780I am. So actually, I just did our last on Friday.
00:22:17.340We have a weekly dispute audio and I gave our first dispute audio talk.
00:22:20.560And I based a lot of that quote from Lewis in that hideous strength.
00:22:26.140And he makes this observation that I think is really profound, where he says I think it's his character, Dimble, who says this.
00:22:32.140He says that he's just kind of pontificating to his wife.
00:22:36.480And he says, have you noticed that the world is always sharpening and coming to a point?
00:22:41.860The world is always getting narrower and pointier.
00:22:45.380And there is something about as we grow up, it seems like every day God takes the world that we lived in yesterday and he puts it in front of us today and he divides it in half.
00:22:58.420And he says, pick which one you want, you know, and we need to pick faithfulness.
00:23:03.920And then, and then he does that again tomorrow. And, and it's funny because there are, um, there are friends that you had 10 years ago that you could not fellowship with now because God matured you and he's growing you more and more faithful.
00:23:21.840And for you to grow up is for you to choose the half that God wants you to choose.
00:23:28.260And it's not to say that 20 years ago you were disobedient for being where you were.
00:23:35.680But God keeps wanting you to grow up and he keeps making you right choices.
00:23:39.980And my observation to the students, which is pointing out like how over history, you know, you look at you look at King David, godly, righteous, righteous man.0.63
00:23:49.060And we know he stumbled with Bathsheba and everything. But even if you were to go before that, and we were if I was to take King David and put him on the stage, you know, right now, we would be looking at a man who was a complete barbarian, who has a multitude of wives, one of whom he won by with a necklace of Philistine foreskins.
00:24:10.500um it wouldn't fly now like we need to grow up we need to we need to mature from that and every
00:24:18.400year god is going to ask you to get sharper and and i say this because i think that 20 30 40 years
00:24:26.800ago christian education felt like a principle that certain men were was they were advocating
00:24:34.220this principle because of things you know peculiar convictions that they had whatever
00:24:39.640But it seemed like it was an option and you could go in any number of different directions.
00:24:46.680Where we are now, we see that the peculiar convictions that these guys had were actually not that peculiar but were actually some really, really incisive foresight who saw the way this thing was going, who understood the ground that we needed to seize now and that that option is no longer much of an option.
00:25:07.940And the world is divided in half, and you need to pick which one.
00:25:11.500And whichever one you pick, one's going to endure and preserve.
00:27:01.980Well, it's like Jesus says, to whom much is given, much is required.
00:27:06.360And what happens is every day you get just a little more inheritance from him.
00:27:10.920But that inheritance, it demands more of you.
00:27:14.860But the thing is, if I continue on with that talk, one of the things I noted was if you take that analogy and you run with it a little bit too long, it starts to feel like – well, it feels very negative.
00:27:30.480Cause it feels like, um, are you like sitting on a, uh, a shipwrecked boat and like every
00:27:36.040day half of the boat like breaks off and falls away and sinks, you know?
00:27:39.760And so you've got to keep, so, so by the end of your life, you're going to be just on this
00:27:43.060little one plank that's left or something that sounds negative.
00:27:46.820But what Jesus tells us is that, um, you know, he, he gives us that analogy of, um, the one,
00:27:54.940the disciple who chooses Christ over, um, brother or sister or wife or family or wealth, or so you,
00:28:04.800you choose Christ over each of these things. He says that you will receive a hundred times that
00:28:11.200back and eternal life. And so what's, what you find is, is that, that God is stripping things
00:28:17.860away from you, but as he strips things away from you, you find that something a hundred times
00:28:23.340bigger emerges and that, and with eternal life plunked on top of that. And so it's not you
00:28:29.840getting narrower. It's actually, it's the miracle of the gospel that when you, when you let go of
00:28:36.520something, you find that he gives you that thing back multiplied by a hundred. And that's just the
00:28:42.560way Jesus loves to work, right? Like it's always, you want to go to the front of the line, go to the
00:28:46.460back line. You want to be at the top, go to the bottom. You want to be the master, go be the
00:28:49.720servant you want to have all of these things well then let go of all these things and you get them
00:28:55.480all back multiplied by a hundred and that's just the way the gospel works and so you do get massively
00:29:01.240richer you get so much richer by doing that spiritually possibly physically possibly not but
00:29:08.180you you definitely get so much richer uh spiritually through all of that wow that i i feel kind of
00:29:15.000surprised that edified me i didn't know our conversation would go that direction but that
00:29:19.260was so good for, I hope it's good for our listeners. Maybe it's just me. Maybe that's
00:29:22.880just something God's been doing in my heart recently, but that was really, really encouraging
00:29:26.440for me to hear. Um, let's shift gears now, uh, as we kind of wrap up, maybe if we could just get
00:29:31.800five more minutes, um, of your time, but could you talk a little bit about, um, we've talked
00:29:36.720about Christian education. We've talked about a Christian worldview, but, um, I know that, um,
00:29:41.680you're involved in classical education and, uh, even for myself. So my, my sister is a teacher
00:29:47.700at Cambridge here in San Diego, and I know they've taken some cues from the K-12 school
00:29:55.240that you guys have there in Moscow. But New St. Andrews, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's also
00:29:59.680it's not just a Christian university, a Christian college, but it's classical. What is that? What
00:30:05.040is a classical education, and why is that important? Yeah, so the classical Christian0.95
00:30:11.080education was um it kind of exploded here started in 1981 with logos school and then it kind of
00:30:19.400took off across the whole u.s and now the world um you have a lot of accs schools scl schools and
00:30:25.580then it's uh jumped over into the homeschooling world classical conversations and a number of
00:30:30.400homeschoolers use curriculum in one stripe or another that uses classical so that was originally
00:30:34.920a k-12 movement and then new st andrews college was started as a college that tends to pull
00:30:40.080primarily from kids who come out of that classical education and there is um well there's a whole lot
00:30:46.340to say about what is classical um but let me let me give you my really quick summary um i described
00:30:53.280earlier that um contrast between looking at education as being designed to impart a particular
00:30:59.440vocational skill versus education looking to understand who god is who this world is in light
00:31:05.360him. Classical is basically reflecting back on what is the classical tradition, a long tradition
00:31:12.060that went throughout, really derived from the early church and through the medieval era into
00:31:19.600the 16th, 17th century. There was a process of education that classical education, as it began
00:31:25.740here in 1981, was an attempt to recover some of the elements of that tradition. And the goal is to,
00:31:33.680instead of going straight to vocational skill, but it's instead trying to actually train the mind
00:31:39.980itself at a more fundamental level. So to use an illustration from if you remember,
00:31:47.120like in the 1980s, when you were getting your computer, you would you could get your your your
00:31:53.320tower. But then, you know, as kids, we always wanted like the graphics card or the speaker or
00:31:59.420you know some sort of impressive screen or whatever but you could have all these accessories
00:32:06.540but if your actual processor couldn't support it it was dumb you needed a powerful processor to
00:32:14.060to run everything else think of classical education as aimed at that processor itself
00:32:19.640so it's looking at what now in the workforce is now referred to as the soft skills it's the skills
00:32:25.820that are a little bit closer to the heart, the mind, the soul, and it has to do with
00:32:30.320your ability to do critical thinking, your ability to communicate with clarity, to be
00:32:36.160able to speak and to write, to be able to get up and argue and not be flustered, to
00:32:41.400be able to be given a huge stack of assignments to go home and know how to, on your own, figure
00:32:49.180out how to work through this and logically break it down, work through it all, come away
00:32:55.100with a coherent understanding of it be able to interact with others on that subject it's not
00:33:00.800any one of the professional skills but it's these soft skills that um it's interesting in the
00:33:05.700workforce now you get a lot of kids that come with their vocational skills but they don't have
00:33:09.620common sense they don't know how to write they don't know how to speak they could code but they
00:33:13.500don't know how to make eye contact it's it's um right so it's the stuff that's a little bit closer
00:33:18.620to home in the mind of the person, but then it's connecting that to their understanding
00:33:26.280of who Christ is and who they are in Christ, so that they see the world through the lens
00:33:33.480That's really what classical Christian education is doing, and it has to do with focusing
00:33:37.400on the ancient arts of logic, grammar, rhetoric, and putting the mind together.
00:33:44.260It tends to privilege the great works of the Western tradition because these tend to be the works that bring out that kind, those kinds of intellectual skills and as well as give them a sense of their Christian tradition and the inheritance that they have in Christ.
00:34:04.180that's what the k-12 movement is doing and it's produced i think a really um incredible product
00:34:13.120when held up in juxtaposition against most other educations and i do think it's interesting because
00:34:20.340when i talk to christians and i say okay as a christian for a moment let's speak critically
00:34:25.420about what's going on in the world of education and if i'm speaking the world i'm speaking usually
00:34:29.420in the world of higher education. Most Christians, their sole category for critiquing colleges from0.96
00:34:37.440a Christian perspective has to do with poking holes in the financial system, people going into0.79
00:34:45.120debt, people blowing all kinds of money on a ridiculous, you know, campus experience and0.82
00:34:51.920whatnot. And there is so much to be said to critique colleges on the financial end. It's
00:35:19.360Would it be fair to say it like, because isn't there a piece in classical education that kind of follows the development of a child and when they're, so would it be fair to say that like grammar, it's kind of like the first third in that K through 12, the first third is like grammar and we're just, we're just memorizing and just we're putting all this information in and then logic.
00:35:40.760So now it's not the what, but it's the why and how, and the how, like how to use all this kind of stuff. And then, and then, so it's like grammar, logic, and then rhetoric and how to, and now it's how to persuade, how, how to, how to disagree without needing a safe space, you know, or being triggered.
00:35:59.480So is that fair to say grammar? Is that the right order, I guess? Because you mentioned those three things. But is it grammar, logic, and rhetoric? And does that actually follow the development of a person? I've heard that before. Is that true?
00:36:12.780I think that's a really important part. So I mentioned this started here in 1981. There was a essay written by Dorothy Sayers, I think it was in the in the 1940s, that she called the lost tools of learning. And she she structured what you just described as a kind of experimental thing where she said, look, let's take this medieval system and break it down like this.
00:36:35.660wouldn't this be a really interesting thing to try? My father-in-law being the kind of rare bird
00:36:42.740that would say, well, let's do that. Let's try. He began Logos School and structured it along those
00:36:50.740lines and doing exactly that, taking advantage of the natural proclivities of kids who are,
00:36:56.900you know, eight years old to memorize the precocious nature of your junior hire who wants
00:37:02.160to argue teaching them the actual laws of argument the weird sudden insecurities that afflict your
00:37:09.760high school student that they suddenly become so concerned with how they come across and how other
00:37:15.640people think of them that that actually is what rhetoric is about and that teaching them here the
00:37:21.980here's the art of rhetoric and the art of persuasion and here's how you control how you
00:37:26.760come across that it takes advantage of the natural development of the student. I'm, as a father of
00:37:34.180five kids, I have three that are now here at NSA and two that are at Logos School, that very first
00:37:39.520classical Christian school. And it's just been so fun watching their developmental stages coincide
00:37:46.540with this curriculum, making them just come alive. It's just a blast. That's really cool. Well,
00:37:51.720thanks, Ben, so much. This has been really helpful for me personally. I hope it's helpful
00:37:56.360for our listeners um for those who are listening to this episode or will be listening once we air
00:38:02.160it and they want to find you and follow you keep up with some of the things you're doing learn some
00:38:06.820more from you um how can they find you how can they follow you well definitely check out the
00:38:12.140new st andrew's web page as well as the nsa uh facebook page those are the best places to see
00:38:17.680what we're up to uh i think you were about to segue to our our after hours conversation and
00:38:24.140Those that will be about some things that showed up on our NSA Facebook page.
00:38:31.380So we have some bonus questions just to kind of begin to spark the appetite of our listeners.
00:38:36.700These are for our responders, our club members.
00:38:39.500If you're not a responder yet, please become a responder.
00:38:42.320We're building a bonus reel of a lot of great kind of behind the scenes questions being answered by our guest on this podcast, Theology Applied.
00:38:51.580So here are the two questions I'm going to be asking Ben for our after hours conversation.
00:38:57.760So the first one is that I've heard New St. Andrews has been under fire for a particular video advertisement that they aired recently.
00:39:05.740And so kind of getting a behind the scenes scoop on that and kind of the really just the controversy and the push back and forth between the college there and those and the civil authorities in Moscow.
00:39:19.680And the second question I'm going to ask him in our bonus reel is, what is kind of a behind-the-scenes look at being the son-in-law of Doug Wilson?
00:39:30.880Doug Wilson is an incredibly faithful man, but he's known by many in the evangelical world as being controversial.
00:39:36.660And so I thought it would be really interesting to hear Ben talk about, from a closer-to-home perspective, what it's like to be a part of his family.
00:39:44.480Maybe the Doug, the side of Doug that we common folk don't get to see.
00:39:49.180So tune back in with us, become a responder, check out the bonus reel with those two questions.
00:39:54.760And thanks again so much, Ben, for coming on the show.