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Building A Family Economy with Rory Groves · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Would you say the industrial revolution was a mistake? Like, how would you describe that transition that happened? An unmitigated disaster, I would say. Yes. You got to look at the trend line of a thing. And it is catastrophic. It was a mindset change that said, it's okay to rip apart families as long as it increases profitability. Profitability justifies everything. That is not a historical way for societies to endure.
• 0:25
  And I think the mind shift away from families towards individual pursuits comes across as like, well, this is more liberating that way. Well, it's the liberty that brings you into bondage because all of a sudden we don't have the support networks. We don't have the generational structure. We don't have the option in many cases to live a way that the families used to live, to disciple our children as we sit in a house, as we walk by the way, as we lie down, as we rise. These are not options that many individuals have anymore.
• 0:56
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family. Everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I am excited to be joined today by Rory Groves. Rory, thanks for jumping on here today.
• 1:21
  Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So Rory and I have been like circling each other's works a bit. And man, I've been diving into the family economy. This is a topic that is very interesting to me. One that I think is going to be, I can't imagine a more relevant topic for the next five to 10 years. I think this is going to be our whole world is going to.
• 1:42
  I think become obsessed with this question about like, what is the nature of work, you know, with AI coming? How does that interact with family? Is there a theology behind this? What's the sociology of the theology? And I think that we're going to see people experimenting with lots and lots of different approaches. And speaking of which, I'd love, Rory, for you just to share a little bit about your backstory as you guys kind of, especially economically, how did that kind of walk us through a little bit of what you guys transitioned into?
• 2:12
  Well, economically, I mean, this was the furthest thing from my mind. I love my family and everything like that, but I never really considered ideas around the family economy until much further into my career. But we moved out to a hobby farm about 12 years ago. Then at that point, I was running my own software business and I had been basically in high tech my entire career at this point, probably about 30 years or so. Not quite that many, 25 years.
• 2:38
  I'd been a professional contractor, computer programmer, pretty much you name it. I had worked in it. We had software. I sold retail. I had stuff we did white label branded. So everything high tech was just my world. Over the course of just experimenting with different life decisions, we thought it'd be a lot of fun. I was feeling drawn to do something out in the country and kind of set up like a little remote station and just continue on my work.
• 3:01
  From a remote, you know, a lot of people are telecommuting. It was common for IT guys to telecommute even before it became the post-COVID bonanza that it is today. So we moved out here and got started doing chickens. And my wife and I, we have no background whatsoever in farming. So it was just having fun. That's all it was. It was the hobby farm. Yeah.
• 3:25
  One of the things that the farm did that I didn't really expect is it provided a context for our family to work together.
• 3:34
  And so we, but in very meaningful ways, instead of, you know, a lot of times you get together with your family and you're, you're doing vacations together. Maybe, maybe dad's going off to work, maybe mom's going off to work and then they're storing up some savings so they can take a really fun vacation with their family and they go somewhere exotic and they have an amazing time. And then it's back to life as usual, which is where the mom and dad are working different jobs or the children are in school. And so you just don't see each other until the end of the day.
• 4:02
  Well, what I noticed was with the farming was that we were together all the time. Our work essentially became the opportunity to be together.
• 4:12
  And so when I would leave the farm activities, maybe do some chores in the morning, maybe there was an afternoon where we're harvesting potatoes. I started to see a contrast to my real job, my quote unquote real job of pulling down a salary, running a business, slinging code, all these things. But all of that kind of work I was doing alone. And I definitely couldn't do it with my family, even if it was maybe not alone. Maybe I had some co-workers from time to time or contractors.
• 4:39
  But I definitely wasn't bringing my wife, wasn't working with me in the business. My kids, of course, couldn't do anything in the business. There's nothing really I could teach my kids about code because you know how fast that industry changes. So I was just starting to notice this kind of dual life where on the farm we were working together. I was having some meaningful times with my children. It wasn't recreation, although that's mixed in with it, but it was work. It was doing really purposeful things.
• 5:09
  And so I, it was about this time that I started to get introduced to this concept of the family economy. And I was just hooked, like right out of the gate. I read something from Kevin Swanson, who's a pastor on Colorado. He had a book called Family Life, and he just had a chapter on it, just talked about some of the biblical precedents and the historical precedents for families that used to work together. And man, I was like, this is it. This is, you know,
• 5:36
  If it's possible to work with my family as my vocation, that's what I want to do. And so that's really where about probably seven or eight years ago, we started to pivot and start seeking out that direction. Excellent, man.
• 5:51
  Yeah. And I know that as you guys have made that transition, one of the things I really enjoyed and diving into your book is you kind of took a big step back and you start asking some really big picture questions. So where did this come from? What, like, is this normal? Is the idea that we all just go off and do our own kind of.
• 6:08
  into this macro economy. We all try to, and then we come back together for a few hours every day. Is that, is that kind of the way? And so is there like at this point, and I, you know, one of the quotes that I, that I posted actually got us together. Our mutual friend said, Oh, you, I was like diving into your book and you wrote the industrial revolution demanded above all efficiency. Yeah.
• 6:27
  And nothing is more inefficient than human relationships. So after thousands of years of historical practice, families stopped working together. They left self-sustaining farms for jobs in the city. They exchanged generational land for rented tenements. They traded time together for paychecks apart. And the unbroken cycle of father and son, of mother and daughter, of family and home was put asunder.
• 6:48
  Do you see that there's like, how would you describe this? Like theologically, is there, is there like a normative way that God designed families? Is this, or is this like a lifestyle choice? How would you think about this? Um, you know, that's a good question. I'm not a theologian, but I'll just tell you a layman's interpretation of the Bible. Okay. God puts Adam and Eve in the garden. It's not good that Adam's alone. I mean.
• 7:14
  I think we can draw some doctrines up and perhaps out of that, but it's not good that he's alone. So then he gives the dominion task to Adam and Eve. The initial entrance of work into humankind comes to a family. The purpose comes to a family, not an individual. And I think that if you can look at a lot of instances in the scripture where,
• 7:39
  I mean, I don't think that there's one that says thou shalt not work separately. I mean, I don't think that there's that kind of mandate, but I think that there's a normative, descriptive type of standard. And it's in the Bible because it was in all of human history up until about 200 years ago. Families existed to work together. There were no corporations. There were no unions. There were no co-ops. Families were the work unit of society.
• 8:08
  all the way up until very recently in modern history. And so, yes, you look at examples such as, what was Abraham doing? He was tending his father's sheep. What was Isaac doing? He tended his father's sheep. What was Jacob doing? They were tending their father. And it goes down and down the list where every instance pretty much in scripture
• 8:29
  is an instance of a family economy. It's a family that's working together. There's multiple generations. They're not all leaving each other to go off and find salaries. There are certainly cases of that, and it's not condemned for someone to do that, but it absolutely is the normative flow of history that families used to function as a work unit, as a team. Yeah, so...
• 8:52
  So one way to say that then is if this was what is historically normative, we are in the middle of a experiment, basically. Like, does this work? I mean, given the state of the experiment right now, would you say the industrial revolution was a mistake? Like, how would you describe that transition that happened? An unmitigated disaster, I would say. Yes. Okay. Well, and what I mean by that is I just don't, you got to look at the trend line of a thing and it is catastrophic. Yeah.
• 9:22
  The way that it has essentially put materialistic pursuits ahead of human relationships. That's the real the rub of it. Now, does that mean that every modern invention is wrong? Of course not. There is inventiveness going on all throughout history.
• 9:38
  But the kind of inventiveness that came out, it was a mindset change in the industrial revolution that said it's OK to rip apart families as long as it increases profitability. That kind of mindset, which is today, which is we're used to that. Like, yeah, if you can cheat people out of 10 percent of a product and sell it for the same price at the supermarket, go ahead and do it. Who cares? Profitability justifies everything.
• 10:01
  That is not a historical way for societies to endure. And so we've seen this erosion of a mindset where the family unit is the most important unit of society and its transition to, no, the individual is the most important, the most fundamental unit of society. And I think the mind shift away from families towards individual pursuits is...
• 10:24
  It not only comes across as like, well, it's more liberating that way. Well, it's the liberty that brings you into bondage because all of a sudden we don't have the support networks. We don't have the generational structure. We don't have the option in many cases to live a way that the families used to live, to disciple our children as we sit in a house, as we walk by the way, as we lie down, as we rise. These are not options that many individuals have anymore. Right.
• 10:50
  Those have all been washed away with the tide of industrialism. Yeah, I'm very concerned about the fruit for sure. It has placed these other efficiency, profitability above relationship. I think the thing that's tricky about where to go from here is I think what created the industrial revolution wasn't necessarily...
• 11:10
  The proactive pursuit of those values, it was, I think, you know, humans were pursuing survival for most of history. And it used to be that to maximize survival, maximize everything, efficiency, all these things you described, you'd work together as a family. Like that was what created all these goods. The Industrial Revolution actually gave us a pathway of efficiency through specialization and lots of other trends where you could survive the...
• 11:38
  By pulling the family into its different components, you know, placing them in. And so this is a really strange place to be. Like, it seems like if you're going to resist what is maybe the most efficient pathway or the way to the most material prosperity and say, no, we're going to do something that's less prosperous, but more human, more family centered. That seems like it requires another revolution of some kind. Like you would have to...
• 12:05
  You'd have to be driven to say that there's a proactive vision that is resisting this. How do we recover from the fact that industrial systems are more efficient? They do create so much abundance, such a survival advantage. How do we recover from the benefits if we're going to decide to go a different direction?
• 12:27
  Yeah. What are the stakes? What is the worst situation right now on the ground? Then we, you know, we're pivoting to the question of, well, how do we fight this war? Like, if this is actually something where we recognize, first of all, that this is not the intended way for families to thrive.
• 12:48
  then what do we do about it? And that's a much bigger question. And there's not a one-size-fits-all answer. You don't put the genie back in the bottle, for example. We don't go back to a pre-industrial society unless the post-industrial society collapses under its own weight, which I'm not going to take that card off the table either, but that's another topic. But
• 13:10
  What do we do about it here now? Can we have islands of freedom, so to speak, within the larger industrial system that is always trying? I mean, the nature of it is maximizing efficiency. And so the gravity of the thing is going to be separating people into individualistic labor. And then replacing them with machines because it's more efficient. And we're going to go through one of those revolutions. And we already are. That's already begun. Yep.
• 13:37
  But a lot of times, I think, you know, when you see the advantage, the survival advantage of the material abundance, all of that's true. And it is materialistically better. And I think that...
• 13:49
  I don't think that the people who were beginning to work in factories and the fathers are going into the coal mines and the mothers are going into the textile mills with their daughters and things like that. I don't think anyone could have possibly envisioned the kind of destructive nature that that would have three or four generations later on the family.
• 14:09
  I think if they knew that they were giving up their entire way of life, I think that people would have resisted more. And we know that some people definitely did resist and they have their derogator derogatively named the Luddites today. We actually do some research on the history of the Luddites. They were simply trying to preserve a way of life that they had lived for like 30 generations. Yeah.
• 14:34
  There were some people resisting it, but I don't think that people understood the magnitude of the shift. So we find ourselves here today, you know, two centuries into this experiment of a way of life.
• 14:47
  I think a thinking person can draw the conclusion that humanity is not happier and more socially connected and our families are not better discipled in the way than they were 200 years ago when we had more intact families and communities. Yeah.
• 15:06
  So, suicide, I mean, you take all kinds of antidepressant drugs and depression is a loneliness. I mean, all of these loneliness, all of these things. We could go down that road. I don't think we need to go down that road. But I think what I tell people is we're not going to get out of this overnight.
• 15:24
  Okay. And there are things that we need to start doing. The first thing we need to start doing is thinking generationally again, not thinking about how to maximize the happiness for my life right now, but we need to start thinking about the children and their lives and what are things that we can sacrifice now. So our children can start to carry forward another vision of family and society. Okay.
• 15:50
  And I don't really know what's going to happen with industrial society, but I know that those families that pull together now will be the ones left standing. Here's one of them right now. Hey, what's up, buddy? Left standing when society continues to crumble. It's going to be the strong, driven families who have vision for their children and their children's children. Those are the ones that are going to remain.
• 16:15
  And so if we can be pouring in to all of the things that go on the book, talk about work, worship and wisdom, you know, different elements that we can begin to pour into our families now to build up that base, we're going to improve our chances of, I think, coming through and thriving on the other side of this. And it doesn't mean leaving prosperity in the dust. It just means reprioritizing what's the purpose of my time in my life.
• 16:40
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• 17:06
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• 17:17
  And I think one of the moves you've made that I find unique, that I've made this case, but this is where I don't see this very often, to really fixate on the economic part of this, especially as Christians. Usually it's like the worship part or like, but one of the things that I've noticed is that in a family, you have this massive amount of time.
• 17:37
  that is dedicated to work. If, if everyone's going different directions, that's going to create a certain kind of family. And we have a mandate for Deuteronomy six for the kind of like family that God, like if you just read the entire Bible and ask the question, what are kids doing in the Bible? I did this when we first started having kids. I was like,
• 17:55
  Does the Bible, why doesn't the Bible tell us to put our kids in school or even educate our children? Like, what does it say? And it does directly tell us what kids did with their time. And it's, it's a command. It's not just like a description. It's Deuteronomy six. They were with the parents. And so you have this, but I think one of the things I've been confused by is,
• 18:13
  is like, I really want to follow Jesus. I've been discipled primarily by people in full-time ministry. They're, in some sense, also a part of an industrial economy. They're specialists, right? And so it's been very difficult to find other people who have really thought deeply about the fact that maybe the economic question is one of the earliest questions we need to ask. If you give that one over, if you just say, look, let's just capitulate to the culture
• 18:40
  In terms of like the way we think about careers, the way we think about how do we make money? Let's just hand that over. Like, let's just be normal in that area. And then we'll try to raise strong families. Like I would say, you know, whether it's focused on the family, I don't see other large family ministries like making a case like you're making. And I also make that this is actually, we need to deal with this. Like we have to talk about how we make money.
• 19:05
  economy, the way you make money has a direct impact on the kind of family you end up building. And so when people say, we want to be a family team, we want to be multi-generational, like all the values you described, then usually one of my first questions is, okay, well, let's talk about how you're going to make money and how you're thinking about that area. And so have you seen this tension, particularly within the church? It seems like a very small percentage of us are talking about the economic implications of a family-centered life.
• 19:33
  Yeah, absolutely. I think I can't really think of hardly any churches that understand this concept because most churches are built atop, like you said, they're built atop the industrial model. And they depend actually to a large extent on the industrial model because that's how they fund. It's men in the congregation and women earning salaries, paying the tithes that fund the church building.
• 19:58
  A pastorship or people working in ministry are ancient in terms of the vocational trade. That's still one of the few areas left in society where it's more common to have a family working together. When you see in maybe smaller sizes of churches, you see husbands and wives and often children are involved with the ministry as a family.
• 20:21
  But it is true that most churches, they don't see it. And I think most of the church doesn't see this. I think this is the rock we haven't looked under yet. And I think believers need to turn this rock over. And the church and the theologians need to look at this and examine it and say, have we ceded control?
• 20:38
  to the culture to determine how Christian families should work? Do we just go along to get along with this and try to redeem it from the sidelines? Or do we begin a whole new movement away from what the state, the corporate, whatever the agenda is from whatever the interests are?
• 20:58
  and build our own culture that is a godly culture in this way and we've seen that happen the corollary is the homeschooling movement there's still the vast majority of christians in america do not homeschool but no one can say that it's a fringe movement anymore there's something like six million people involved in homeschooling but back 40 years ago
• 21:21
  It wasn't even legal. I mean, at least it's legal to have a family economy, depending on what you're selling. There were some pretty big headwinds that they had to overcome. Theologically, they had to push for it. They had to push for it legally. Some parents went through a lot of persecution and had to win court cases.
• 21:36
  But here, you know, look at the results 20, 30, 40 years later. There's some real obvious fruit from that. And I was talking to Kevin Swanson just a couple of weeks ago, and he's been big time homeschool advocate for 50 years. He's been the executive director of the Colorado Homeschool Educators Association and very, very involved in this. And he said to me, he said,
• 22:01
  homeschooling is the beginning. Family economy is the goal. That's the goal. The whole thing. Yes. We want the whole thing. You know, Pharaoh wants to keep our children back. He wants to keep our cattle back. If you look at that example, they're trying to leave Egypt. The Israelites are trying to leave Egypt. And he says, you can go and worship your God. Just leave your sheep and cattle with me. Well, what is he talking about there? He's talking about their work. Yes. Go
• 22:31
  But you go worship your God and I know you're going to come back. Or he says, okay, you can go, but I'm going to keep the children. Right? Yeah. And so we see this over and over again where God's people need to be completely free to pursue godly families and culture and build the whole city on the hill. Not just give 80% of our main waking hours to the godless culture and just kind of go for the economic exchange.
• 22:59
  We need to reclaim economy as well. And that's going to take a lot of work, just like it takes in reversing any kind of current. It's going to take a lot of work and it's going to create a lot of interesting responses from a lot of people who are not used to that. Yeah. Great analogy. Yeah. Well, I think it's really great to say, look, this has already happened once with schooling. I think that's really encouraging. Yeah. To say, hey, look.
• 23:21
  It created, there was a lot of conversation. There were laws that we had to fight. There were all kinds of curriculums that had to be written. There's paradigms that had to be shifted. And, you know, this is, and it wasn't to say that like you were, this is not a moral issue, but there's a lot of wisdom and we needed to really understand, okay, if we want to, if we want to like do.
• 23:39
  recover this, we're going to have to do a lot of work. I remember when our kids were really little and they were kind of getting exposed to, you know, all these different kinds of way of doing, doing schooling and doing church. My son said, oh, that family, they go to public church. Right.
• 23:54
  And so there's homeschool and there's public school. There's home church or household-based church. There's public, larger city churches. Then you have also home-based economies and public-based economies. Yeah, that's a good point. This is all...
• 24:13
  these are all very similar. These are kind of overlapping ideas. And so you're, you're kind of making the case that there's a bit of like a all or nothing reality to some of this, that, that there's, you can definitely do it piecemeal, but, but in terms of the design itself,
• 24:28
  Like it's possible to cast a vision that says, look, I want the household to be the primary center. And I think the thing you start to talk about the collision between like what is the basic economic unit? One thing you wrote is the basic economic unit is not an individual.
• 24:45
  It's not a corporation or the government. According to the creation mandate, in 5,900 years of historical practice, the basic economic unit is the family. I don't think people believe that. I think that's a very unusual belief. What happens if somebody buys into that, like that the family is the economic unit as opposed to the individual?
• 25:05
  And that does go to the heart of a lot of philosophical differences, whether the individual is the basic economic unit or whether the family is the economic unit. And I assert and believe that dividing the family is what leads to all of the modern maladies that we have today. I mean, just taking the theology side of it apart. Yeah. I think the case can be made that focusing on the individual actually leads to exploitation.
• 25:33
  stopping at the family level as a work unit if our laws if our society was geared around keeping the families as an intact indivisible unit
• 25:45
  then we would have different outcomes. We have the basic issues that we have with caring for the young and the elderly. I mean, these are all situations that become huge problems in an individualistic society, not to mention the loneliness and all the other epidemics, but just taking care of the young people, the sick people. What happens when mom and dad are gone working all day? Who decides...
• 26:07
  Who should share in the portions of the revenue that mom and dad bring home? Well, how is that decided? How is that apportioned? What about if someone's weak? I mean, sick or disabled? What if they're elderly? Who decides who gets to care for them? Well, right now, we're moving in some pretty heinous directions, but one of them is just we're sequestering people away into institutional care. Right. And they're not getting...
• 26:30
  great care in these institutions and our children are not getting great educations in these public institutions. And so the, by foe, the, that's a big topic. Yeah. Alan Carlson was very influential for me. I highly recommend anything that he's written, but he's been speaking on this topic for a very long time. He has a book called the natural family.
• 26:51
  But that's really a heart of the matter issue is whether you treat a whole family as a unit or whether you bypass, you bypass the jurisdiction of the family and try to plunder, in my words, the assets within that family for private gain and whether it's a corporation or whatnot. Yeah. And it seems like the thing that's most, the element that has most been attacked is
• 27:18
  to break the family into its individual pieces is to deny that the family has like a father dimension to it. And it seems like in any of these other units we're describing, it's clear that there's there's like a structure and a hierarchy and there's leadership. And so I think to some degree, and this is why a lot of times people see this through the lens of politics and they don't understand that.
• 27:43
  what's happening, the level of exploitation that you're describing that happens to the individual because there isn't, we're too afraid to put that responsibility on a father. And that is a really unusual move that we've made. And it's difficult for me to, like, I've tried to trace, like, where did this come from? Because if you go back to Roman times, within Jewish cultures, first century cultures, there was the Patras Familia,
• 28:08
  He was a part of the government. I mean, he had all kinds of responsibility. He literally had the power of life and death over his household. There were so many elements. But then you read the U.S. Constitution, and this was almost 300 years ago, and there's not a mention of the father or even the family in the Constitution. And so this level of individualism goes, at least in our context, goes back pretty far. How do you see that playing into a recovery? If the family is a unit, the most basic unit, how critical is it for us to understand its structure? Does it have a structure?
• 28:38
  Yeah. Oh, I mean, it's everything. It's everything. Uh,
• 28:42
  Chris Wiley speaks on this and he says, in the Greek, you can't say the word family without saying the word father. The father is absolutely the cornerstone of the family. In former times, it was such a tragedy. If the father were to die prematurely, the family essentially would dissolve or be absorbed into other related families because you needed the father to set the trajectory for that family. He was the gatekeeper. He was the protector. He was the provider.
• 29:12
  And it wasn't a thing where his role was reduced down to simply making a salary that others would spend. I mean, he set a vision for that family. Remember, there were no corporations. So a family was a corporation. And the father was responsible for leading his family in a productive and healthy way.
• 29:35
  talent, you know, marshalling the talents together of his individual members. And many times those households, they were multi-generational. Well, not many times. I mean, and they were almost always three or four generations. They many times had extended family members. So the, the Oikos, the Oikonomia, which is where we get our word economy from, that was always a household enterprise. And that's essentially what we traded. It's interesting you say that 300 years ago. So we had
• 30:03
  It makes me think of the, really the beginning of that shift into individualistic mindset happened with the Great Enlightenment. So that doesn't entirely surprise me that the Constitution would make no mention of family, or at least of fathers, because we were beginning in the 1700s to move away from that. And of course, they had, a lot of those thinkers had a lot of influence on those who wrote in our laws initially and formed the Constitution.
• 30:31
  But certainly, if you look at the Puritan writers before that, if you look at examples in New England, such as the pilgrim settlements, and you study up on the formation of those families and those societies, they were father-led families, and they were very united with a common vision. But they were also as communities of families. They were very united and self-sufficient, which I think we've also become entirely different.
• 30:58
  We've lost that as well as the ability to really fend for ourselves. And of course, our liberty is rooted in being able to provide for ourselves first. Yes. How important do you think land is to this equation?
• 31:11
  I don't think it's absolutely essential, but I think it goes a long way to having some kind of material basis for your liberty, for your production. We're different in a society today not being an agrarian, primarily an agrarian society, in that you can have a pretty healthy family economy with a workshop on half an acre next to your house. You can do quite a lot. You can get along with that.
• 31:40
  But the land certainly provides a material basis. And I think it's important for families if they have the opportunity to get some arable land to be able to do some farming or homesteading. Yeah. I think it's a wonderful way and a very natural way that families have worked together and kind of kept a very stable, living off the land is a very stable, tried and true, proven way. Yeah.
• 32:06
  To maintain your own in troubled times, which is what a lot of us have gone through. I mean, what's the price of eggs like for you right now? Because it's pretty nuts out there. Yeah, I also think land can kind of be a storehouse of identity for a multi-generational family. You see that in the past, especially the way the Torah is written.
• 32:23
  Where the laws were really designed to make sure that the reason why land had to be passed down a certain way was because of that name that was going down. I got a practical question because you made your money initially in software. I have a similar background. I made a lot of our money through various internet entrepreneurial endeavors and then transitioned into something that was a little more integrated with my kids. And so I've really wrestled with this question.
• 32:49
  Is it like, is there some kind of way in which we have to consider extracting value from the macro economy in order to create these micro economies? Is there a way to both? And is there an order where we can get some of that and then transition fully into a more micro family economy?
• 33:06
  Or do you think that it's possible to just homestead and just like hunker down and try because of industrialization, because of efficiency, it has bled so much of the value out of a lot of these very home-based enterprises. How have you seen this working? And I just want to practically, people are listening to this and going, okay, I've got my career, you know, can I make a transition somehow and then move in this direction? What have you seen work in terms of that?
• 33:31
  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's the perfectly rational way to begin. I don't think that you should automatically just quit your job and hope for the best. You know, it's incredibly difficult to learn to live like from a homestead to supply your needs from homestead. We've been doing it here. I think we're going on. This is our 13th year.
• 33:53
  And we do source quite a bit of our own food, but it's not just food that you need. I mean, there's a lot of things. So we still have a lot of expenses and we still have a lot of things that we do to cover those expenses. So creating a family economy is not an overnight thing. It is a transitional thing. Yeah.
• 34:13
  And it might take you the rest of your life. I mean, that's the thing you got to think about. It's not just switching a job. You're beginning to lay the groundwork for future generations. And so the most important thing that's going to happen is that paradigm shift, is the shift in the way of thinking. Once your mind bends towards a new possibility, it's pretty interesting what can happen after that. When all kinds of doors start to open up.
• 34:38
  Ideas might come to you. Connections might come to you. And you start to see things happen. And I think that if you're in the mindset of really locked into climbing the corporate ladder or finding your fulfillment through your job, you probably aren't going to see those opportunities when they come. If you're thinking, what can unite my family? What are things that we can work together so I can disciple my children while we're working together? You're going to start to see...
• 35:06
  Ways to do that. And it doesn't have to be income generating and revenue generating activities. I mean, you could just start this summer by planting a garden with your family if you've never done that before. That is family economy. I mean, it's on a very basic sense.
• 35:21
  You can start a little dog breeding business. You can start doing some, I don't know, building sheds or building chicken coops. There's little things that you can do on small scale on the side. And I know we know, we hear from people all the time. That's how they start these things. And then...
• 35:41
  They grow. I mean, if there's something to it, they grow or they get in the right position or a farm opens up for them or a job situation. I can think of many situations where people have been able to change their job and it's just a more family conducive job. They're still working for someone else, but they're home every day over lunch.
• 36:00
  They're doing more agrarian type of work or they're doing something that's a better fit. They can bring their kids into it from time to time. So there's a transition in place there. I wouldn't expect it to happen overnight, but I would say if you can make the heart change that's necessary, there are a lot of things you can start doing right away with your family. I love it.
• 36:20
  Yeah, I want to really emphasize that anyone who's listening is like, wow, I think we're far away from this and you might be discouraged. One of the realities is when your mindset shifts, you start to see opportunities you didn't see before. Don't underestimate that, you know, and so you can start in these small ways, but...
• 36:36
  In the same way that when you buy a car, you see that car everywhere all of a sudden. When you start thinking this way, you start to see opportunities that you didn't see before. There's an old idea that the household is not just a place of consumption, but of production, of contribution. That work and family weren't always separate. At Family Inc., we're trying to recover that.
• 36:53
  We help families build businesses together, not just to generate income, but to create something lasting, something you can pass on. This isn't about pitching get-rich schemes. It's about equipping you with a framework, a strategy, and the support to actually build. Whether you've never started anything before or you already have a side business you want to grow, we'll help you take the next step with clarity. If that's something you've thought about, head to familyteams.com slash familyinc.com.
• 37:22
  And one of the things I wanted to ask you about, Rory, is, man, we are running into a crazy next five years with regards to the explosion of artificial intelligence, humanoid robots. The church did not have a pre-existing theology of family that protected us from the Industrial Revolution. And so we've been spending the last couple hundred years trying to recover that, and we still have not articulated properly across the church a theology of family.
• 37:47
  And so that is part of what we're discussing now. I think that what's coming is if we don't have a theology of work, we are in big trouble. And because if work is just a way for us is sort of a necessary evil, which is really the way most people treat it. It's like if we could just get money from the government, then let's just do that and be creative for the rest of our lives. And that's what's going to be pitched to us in the future as AI develops. So what do you see happening in the next five to 10 years now?
• 38:14
  What's coming and how do families steal themselves properly against the corrupting influence of whatever these technological breakthroughs are going to bring our way?
• 38:25
  It's going to get really ugly, I'd say. And I say that as being a technologist for my entire life, my entire career, is the AI revolution and a lot of the advances that are coming alongside it that are attendant to it are going to put a lot of people out of work. What's unique about this revolution is that it's not the low skilled or the...
• 38:53
  you know, kind of the blue collar, which is up to this point, been experiencing the majority of the displacement through automation. It's going to be the highly skilled white collar, four-year college degreed clerks, you know, people working in any kind of clerical professions and administrators. These kinds of things are, I mean, in, in, in,
• 39:17
  We could have seen this coming a while ago, but now everyone has begun to see what's possible in only a couple of years with the speed, the pace of this automation. I'm speaking of things like just the visual arts, the introduction of film, the incredible abilities of things like chat GPT in terms of linguistic capabilities are just so far beyond what anyone could have imagined even like three or four years ago.
• 39:44
  And so we're going to continue to see that. And it's going to be the white collar professionals who are going to be hit the hardest this time around. Ironically, it's going to be the tradesmen who are not. Right. They have, there was a study that I cited in my book, Durable Trades, about the coming robotic revolution. I think they said that there's something like 800 million job losses worldwide by 2030. So this was probably published in about 2020. Right.
• 40:11
  So you're looking at a very significant. I do remember that they expect about a third of the American workforce to be put out of work. But then at the same time, over the same period, a 30 percent increase in trades related professions because, yeah, the demand for all things building remodeling, you know, I was just telling you before we were carrying.
• 40:32
  47 sheets of drywall up the stairs because we're putting in a new master bedroom at our house. Man, there's just, I literally wrote a book on trades and I still just feel like I don't know the first thing about any of this. It's one of those things that you're not going to have displaced by a robot. I mean, it's just not going to happen. There's just too much custom work. So my advice to people is, well, first of all, that's Durable Trades was a book that was written specifically to counter this question. Yeah.
• 40:58
  And it is what jobs are going to be resilient in the future. Instead of making just bold predictions, I just said, hey, well, what jobs have survived to the present? If you go back thousands of years of human history, if a job has survived the industrial revolution, to me, that makes it a pretty durable choice. And if it's still around today to provide an income. And I thought these are jobs that are family centric by and large, because usually families are the ones working together. Mm hmm.
• 41:27
  And these are options still today for families. So in that book, I go through and cover a lot of these possibilities of how family centered, how much resilience, how impervious they are to things like AI and other things. And what you by and large find is jobs that are catering to the core human needs are the ones that are always in demand. Yeah.
• 41:49
  I was just talking to someone whose son just started working in the logging business and kind of like he's an arborist, I guess you could say. And it's one of those professions that, you know, trees always keep growing back and people need arborists and they will always need arborists. They might make a robot at some point to like limb trees. But while the tooling gets better in a lot of these professions, they still need the people that understand the profession. And these are jobs that go back thousands of years.
• 42:17
  And so I think that a lot of those old working with your hands kind of jobs are ones that families should consider. I essentially left my career in computer programming to...
• 42:29
  learn how to homestead and herd sheep and grow food in the ground. And that's part of our family economy. It's not everything that we do, but I just feel like we need to have some basic skills that are simple, but yet cater to these core human needs. And those are the ones that are going to be ironically sought after in the coming revolution that we're heading into right now. So good. Yeah.
• 42:55
  Yeah, we've definitely seen that transition in our family. All of our sons, sons-in-law are in the trades and you very quickly find you can work together, you can start to spin things up, the amount of money you can possibly make. It takes developing those skills, but I'm much, much more excited about that trajectory for all the reasons you're describing.
• 43:16
  So, which is such a difference. So many of us were not raising children in the same economy that we were raised in. That's right. Like, of course, if you get a, and people famously talk about, like, if you get a four-year degree, you automatically get another 20 or 30 or $50,000 a year. That is not true anymore. And so be really, really careful about those messages that come from the far past. Well, last topic I want to ask you about, Rory, before I let you go is just, so we talked about like work, work.
• 43:44
  and schooling a little bit, but I'd love to hear about like worship or just what have you discovered in this area? Because I think a lot of times, what, what, what is any rhythms that have been really meaningful for your family? I think, I think so much of that also has been outsourced and I'm really curious. Yeah. What you and Becca have found in that area.
• 44:03
  Well, I can just tell you the most important thing we do and the most valuable thing we do is worship together with our family at home. I'm talking about not replacing church. I'm saying in addition to church, we do every single day we do family worship. And there are other books on this and there are other pastors who have encouraged this. And it's the best thing that we've ever done.
• 44:30
  It is really a vital part of our day to sing together, to read the word together, for anyone to bring up anything that they're struggling with or wrestling with to talk through. For me as a father to try to communicate, to remind, you know, the Lord, he designed families, you know, to serve him together as families. And so there's so much blessing just waiting to be poured out if you just put yourself in that posture, in that position.
• 44:58
  I was just thinking last night I was having a conversation and saying, you know, the work of our family right now is to have faith for what God wants to do. And it just kind of occurred to me that when the window of opportunity comes in a season of waiting where it's time for you to move forward, it takes a lot of courage. And if you haven't been working at having faith for what God's going to do, believing that he's going to part the seas,
• 45:24
  You might miss that window because you're afraid in the moment when it comes. This is what happened with Joshua and Caleb and the other 10 spies when they spied out the promised land. There was the window of opportunity to enter in, but they didn't all have the faith for it. Even in a season of waiting, and there are many people I know, we hear from them all the time. One of the things that we do is publish a newsletter together, and I'd invite any of your listeners to.
• 45:48
  If they want to learn a little bit more about this topic, we have a newsletter called The Grovestead. That's our farm. And we just share what we're learning about family economy through that. But one of the things that we hear from a lot of people is they're in this season of waiting. They're looking for a homestead. They feel drawn in that direction or they want to start a family economy and they don't know how.
• 46:08
  And so I'm just remarking in the sense of it takes a lot of faith to do these things. And when you pull together as a family, I get to, as a father, admonish my family, my children, my wife, as I know we're waiting on the next thing that God has for us.
• 46:24
  But this is an opportunity for us to strengthen our faith so that we will be courageous when the time comes and we won't shrink back from what God has for us. We'll know when this window comes. These are kinds of things that like prior to doing worship together, we just didn't have that culture in our family. And we had always gone to church. That was never, never not part of it. But this is so rich and it's such a wonderful opportunity.
• 46:49
  to really deepen that walk with your own family, for your children to hear dad shepherding his family, to hear mom giving encouragement, admonishment as well. It's absolutely priceless. And I really believe, and I say this in the book, a family economy begins on your knees because you gotta have a vision for what you're gonna do with that family. And the vision comes from God. So that's one way, doesn't matter what your job is, doesn't matter where you live, doesn't matter what your kids are involved in,
• 47:17
  One thing that every family can do is begin worshiping together and seeking God for their family and then just wait and see what he does and what he communicates. Love it. Rory, thank you so much for sharing that. I love each of these circles and we have to be comparing notes and also like sharing what these takeaways for families that are in these transitions. So thank you guys so much for pioneering the way. So the groves...
• 47:43
  Where can people get the, what's the name of the newsletter and how can people find that? Newsletter is called the Grovestead. If you go to, we set up a, one of the things that we do here is host events on the family economy, on homesteading. We've opened up our farm to do things like that. And so I'd encourage if anyone's in the area, we're in Southern Minnesota. We'd love to see you. I'd love to meet you. Come on out to our farm sometime. We posted events at our website is gatherandgrow.us. Okay.
• 48:10
  And then you can also sign up for our newsletter. It's actually like a print newsletter. We print it out and send it in the mail. Imagine in the electronic age. But it's just something fun because it's actually, you'll see articles from our children and different things that they're doing. And you'll just see any articles from other families. In this latest issue that we put out, we have a family that shares about how they found a homestead and how they began to build their family economy through that homestead.
• 48:37
  So any kind of encouragements that we can provide, we put it in that newsletter and send it out. But that's a great way to keep in touch and just see different things that we're doing. And if we can help you in any way, this is what my wife and I and our family feel called to do. We want to help families. So please reach out. We'd love to connect you with other families in your area if they're thinking along these lines and help you any way we can. I love it.
• 49:01
  Yeah. So if you go to the growstead.com and then under publications, the growth said newsletter, you can get the print version. I just signed up from, we can sign up for both. These are awesome. I can't wait to like get this stuff from you guys. I love it. Great. Yeah. We'll send one out. Yeah. This is like to get your family anywhere else that people can find this. So events are, go to gather and grow.us is the events website. Yep. Great. Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much for jumping on here today. I appreciate it. Thank you, Jeremy. Look forward to talking more.
• 49:29
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.