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EXIT Podcast Episode 01: Chase the Farmer
689 Plays3 years ago
Chase is the EXIT Group's expert on general contracting and commercial agriculture. He has built successful businesses in construction and landscaping, and is now in his second year as a commercial chicken farmer. We discuss:
- why he left behind a biotechnology major to make his career as a tradesman
- building a home for your great-great-grandkids
- the entrepreneurship master class that we are developing together, and the duty to become self-reliant so that you can say "no".
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Transcript
Introduction to Exit and Guest
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett.
00:00:20
Speaker
I'm joined here by Chase the Farmer, good friend of mine, good friend of Exit.
00:00:25
Speaker
Chase is a general contractor.
00:00:27
Speaker
He's done landscaping.
00:00:29
Speaker
He's currently operating a commercial chicken farm and we're going to have lots and lots of questions about that.
00:00:36
Speaker
Before we get started there, I want to talk about
00:00:39
Speaker
what Exit is, since this is our first podcast.
00:00:43
Speaker
Exit is a group dedicated to getting all members of that group free from any form of corporate coercion.
00:00:53
Speaker
The Constitution means the state can't round you up for things you say, but HR sure can.
00:00:59
Speaker
They can try to take away your kids' health insurance.
00:01:01
Speaker
They can try to take away your ability to feed them.
00:01:05
Speaker
And because that power is sort of unbounded,
00:01:09
Speaker
legally right now, that's where a lot of that abuse happens.
00:01:14
Speaker
What that allows us to do though, is, you know, if you're living in the Soviet Union, you couldn't really get out of that situation without leaving the country.
00:01:22
Speaker
But here, you do not have to participate in that corporate system.
00:01:27
Speaker
There are options.
00:01:29
Speaker
And one of the things that I realized when I got fired was that I knew at least a dozen guys who
00:01:37
Speaker
could show me a way out.
00:01:40
Speaker
And I thought, you know, I could take one of those paths or I could bring all those guys together and try to teach other people and say like, you know, let's, let's get everybody kind of out of this box.
Chase's Journey and Exit's Vision
00:01:52
Speaker
Let's set everybody free.
00:01:53
Speaker
So, so the, the structure of the program,
00:01:57
Speaker
is it's a dues paying fraternal organization.
00:01:59
Speaker
You pay your dues every month.
00:02:02
Speaker
You get access to the brain trust of the group and all the expertise that they have sort of on an informal basis, but you also get early access to the podcast, exclusive seminars and Q and A's, or we bring in an expert to talk to the guys and address some issue, whether it's crypto, whether it's homesteading, getting involved in the trades.
00:02:24
Speaker
And I thought it was a good idea to bring Chase in for this first call since he's an expert in like three of those areas.
00:02:29
Speaker
And so I've been leaning on him to produce some of our earliest content.
00:02:34
Speaker
So Chase, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what interested you about Exit?
00:02:42
Speaker
So I, as Dr. Bennett pointed out,
00:02:45
Speaker
contractor, been involved in the trades for many years.
00:02:49
Speaker
I dropped out of college because didn't find it as appealing as I thought I would and decided to get into construction and I never looked back.
00:02:56
Speaker
So I've enjoyed it quite a bit.
00:02:58
Speaker
And when Dr. Bennett first pointed out to me exit and kind of his vision, his idea, it resonated.
00:03:05
Speaker
I understand the power of networks, the power of
00:03:07
Speaker
Having guys that you can turn to when you need something done.
00:03:11
Speaker
Obviously in the trades, that's very important to me.
00:03:13
Speaker
If I have a job that needs to be done by an electrician, I'm calling that electrician.
00:03:17
Speaker
If I have a question about some goofy plumbing thing that I come across, which happens way too often, I will call the plumbers and say, hey, this is what I'm looking at.
00:03:25
Speaker
What are your thoughts?
00:03:26
Speaker
So I see the power of networks, the power of being able to meet with others, to kind of combine forces, to brainstorm on issues that you may face, and then move forward with a plan.
00:03:37
Speaker
And I've seen that work in my life.
00:03:39
Speaker
And I just wanted to help bring what little bit I know.
00:03:43
Speaker
what little bit of experience, the sweat, the blood, the tears I've earned.
00:03:49
Speaker
I want to share that with others and help them see others succeed because there's a lot of joy in that.
00:03:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:54
Speaker
So from our conversations, there's no doubt in my mind that you have the capacity to do the work in college or anything else.
00:04:02
Speaker
So tell me why you didn't, tell me why you, why you got out of college.
Alternatives to Corporate Life
00:04:06
Speaker
So I was in college for biotechnology, which is
00:04:09
Speaker
I still, still in the back of my mind, I still have a great love for.
00:04:14
Speaker
And I was full of all kinds of dreams and just beautiful visions of biotechnology could fix all the problems we ever faced as humanity.
00:04:22
Speaker
We can bioengineer E. coli viruses to pick up lead and heavy metal contaminants in rivers.
00:04:28
Speaker
And we spray the riverbanks and then we just go through and just pick up the lead afterwards.
00:04:32
Speaker
And
00:04:32
Speaker
We can engineer tomatoes to grow in the desert with absolutely no water.
00:04:37
Speaker
And the list goes on and on.
00:04:39
Speaker
And I just, very, very rose-colored glasses.
00:04:42
Speaker
I thought this was the way forward.
00:04:43
Speaker
As I studied it more and more, I took a few ethics classes and I found out a lot of my religious convictions, a lot of my morals left me in the minority.
00:04:54
Speaker
And that was something I grappled with for a long time because I really work and be surrounded by people that want to play God.
00:05:00
Speaker
I wasn't comfortable with it and I had to take a semester off.
00:05:04
Speaker
When I had that semester off, I got back into construction and I started working for a couple of different contractors.
00:05:08
Speaker
And I was like, you know what?
00:05:09
Speaker
I love working with my hands.
00:05:11
Speaker
I love hanging out with the guys.
00:05:13
Speaker
There's something really rewarding about showing up to a job site with a stack of lumber.
00:05:17
Speaker
And at the end of the day, you're walking away from a framed out house.
00:05:20
Speaker
And there was a lot of reward for that in me.
00:05:22
Speaker
There was some good money in it for me.
00:05:24
Speaker
And slowly over time, things snowballed, started my own company.
00:05:27
Speaker
And to make money kind of an easier route, I decided to pick up landscaping during the summer.
00:05:34
Speaker
During the winter, I'll do remodels.
00:05:35
Speaker
So that's kind of where I started and where I'm going.
00:05:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's a huge black box for people in my situation.
00:05:45
Speaker
I was raised in kind of an upper middle class suburb where we weren't even like the schools actually eliminated shop classes.
00:05:52
Speaker
And the rationale was like, yeah, they were like, you don't need to know this because you're all going to college and you're just you're going to pay the little people to do that for you.
00:06:00
Speaker
You're going to pay some goofball like Chase to go do it for you.
00:06:03
Speaker
So I think a lot of guys would prefer because they go into these, they go into the schools and they have the same experience you're having where it's like, my values are really hard to find, you know, anybody who shares them here and you go into the corporate world and it's exactly the same and it gets worse the higher up you go.
00:06:19
Speaker
And I think a lot of guys have this idea that there's just not enough money to support a family working with your hands and talk.
00:06:28
Speaker
I've met enough guys like,
00:06:30
Speaker
you to know that that's not the case.
00:06:32
Speaker
So part of my goal with this is to like open up and it's, you know, it's not just trades, but it's kind of the whole gamut of software jobs, things you can do remotely, anything that makes you anti-fragile, anything that makes you robust to coercion, able to say no.
00:06:47
Speaker
And exit is not just for Latter-day Saints or even for conservatives or any, like it's not for one group, it's for anybody that wants to get out.
00:06:55
Speaker
But from my perspective as a Latter-day Saint,
00:06:58
Speaker
I'm watching as the fundamentals of what we believe are becoming less and less acceptable in polite society.
00:07:07
Speaker
And there's a book by Orson Scott Card called Stone Tables.
00:07:10
Speaker
And it's about Moses and the Exodus.
00:07:13
Speaker
It's a fictionalized kind of version of that.
00:07:16
Speaker
And in his version of it, the Hebrews sort of start as like the literate upper middle class kind of bureaucrat servants of the Egyptians.
00:07:25
Speaker
And they're very well taken care of and very comfortable.
00:07:28
Speaker
And then a new pharaoh comes in and they're viewed as sort of the allies of the old regime.
00:07:34
Speaker
And so they're all persecuted and enslaved.
00:07:38
Speaker
And there's a lot of things about that book that are kind of goofy, but it was spooky to me.
00:07:42
Speaker
how much it matches the experience of Latter-day Saints right now, because we were so embedded in corporate America and even the intelligence community, law enforcement, you know, the whole Mormon fed meme.
00:07:55
Speaker
And those institutions that we sort of attached ourselves to have either changed so much that they're now hostile to us or
00:08:04
Speaker
the institutions have fallen out of favor and are no longer cool with sort of the powers that be.
00:08:09
Speaker
And so we have to get out.
00:08:11
Speaker
And the purpose of exit for people in that situation is to kind of get out while the getting's good to prepare so that you have a place to land and
00:08:21
Speaker
Eventually the dream is to create for my friends, for my group, enough geographic mobility, where if I help a dozen guys get remote software jobs, not necessarily software, but just any, anything where they can move, then those guys, maybe they decide that they want to move somewhere together and start something together.
00:08:39
Speaker
And then, you know, maybe they need people to start building houses.
00:08:43
Speaker
Maybe they need people to start working these trades.
Entrepreneurship Mindset Shift
00:08:46
Speaker
And so like, obviously I can't, I'm not in control of all of that, but I feel like I can play a role in sort of planting some seeds that somebody else can harvest.
00:08:57
Speaker
So with that in mind, I wanted to talk to you about this landscaping idea because I asked you to run a module for me to build some content with me.
00:09:07
Speaker
And I knew that you had all kinds of things you could potentially teach.
00:09:10
Speaker
And you immediately said to me,
00:09:12
Speaker
Well, if you want the easiest one to get into, it's landscaping bar none.
00:09:17
Speaker
So tell me a little bit about that.
00:09:18
Speaker
What makes landscaping so attractive from like starting from zero perspective?
00:09:25
Speaker
So often when you think kind of grass cutters, your mind's going to go more towards that's what teenagers do.
00:09:31
Speaker
That's what I did when I was 12 years old, et cetera, et cetera.
00:09:33
Speaker
That's why it's easy to get into because even, even a teenager can do it.
00:09:38
Speaker
It's very easy to break into.
00:09:39
Speaker
It's just, it's going to require a little bit of gut work, but the costs are low.
00:09:43
Speaker
It's easy to break into.
00:09:44
Speaker
And you can do it as a side gig, a little side hustle to save some money on the side, slowly transition yourself out of corporate life.
00:09:50
Speaker
If you wanted to spend some time outdoors, breathing the fresh air, smelling the flowers, talking to your customers, hearing the appreciation of their voice.
00:09:58
Speaker
It's very rewarding.
00:10:00
Speaker
It's very easy to break into.
00:10:01
Speaker
And eventually you'll be someone in one of the chats was talking about how they know guys that started and five years later, they're just hanging out with their housewives, cashing checks.
00:10:10
Speaker
If you want that to be the goal, make that the goal because it's very attainable.
00:10:15
Speaker
And the beauty of this module to me is that it's going to hold your hand from weekend side hustle.
00:10:21
Speaker
I can only do this on Saturdays.
00:10:23
Speaker
Right.
00:10:23
Speaker
Because I got a day job to.
00:10:26
Speaker
All right.
00:10:26
Speaker
I have built enough of a client, enough of a book that I have enough to keep me busy.
00:10:32
Speaker
And I've established, you know, some savings from this business because it's very low overhead business.
00:10:38
Speaker
You know, you're just it's almost all profit apart from, you know, the value of your labor, obviously, which it's a lot.
00:10:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:45
Speaker
But you go from I'm working Saturdays and I'm saving the money and I'm building the book until I've got enough saved that I can take maybe two months.
00:10:53
Speaker
I've got two months of my expenses paid for.
00:10:55
Speaker
And then I'm going to spend those two months expanding that client book into a full time.
00:11:02
Speaker
I'm always I'm always mowing lawns.
00:11:04
Speaker
Well, and also the beautiful thing, too, as I say, the beautiful thing, too, about this is.
00:11:09
Speaker
You think it's seasonal, but you can start at any time.
00:11:12
Speaker
So if it's the middle of December and you need, I need a side gig, I need something to do.
00:11:16
Speaker
Guess what?
00:11:17
Speaker
You're gonna go and you're gonna hang flyers on doors, very cheap, very easy to do that you can do yourself in an afternoon to just shovel snow.
00:11:24
Speaker
Okay, and you're gonna start building up a base that way.
00:11:27
Speaker
Or in the fall time, the leaves are falling, we're not cutting grass anymore.
00:11:31
Speaker
Guess what?
00:11:31
Speaker
You're gonna go out and pick up leaves.
00:11:32
Speaker
And what do you need for that?
00:11:34
Speaker
You need a rake, maybe a leaf blower if you can spring it in the budget.
00:11:38
Speaker
and some trash bags.
00:11:39
Speaker
And just, it's going to take a little bit of manual labor, but you can start this at any time.
00:11:42
Speaker
It's not just, okay, I have to wait until next March or April to start.
00:11:46
Speaker
No, you can start today if you want to.
00:11:48
Speaker
And if you're ready to put in the work.
00:11:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:51
Speaker
I actually, I've been thinking about this myself because one of the biggest challenges with like bagging up leaves is you got to have somewhere to put them in like dump runs can be really expensive, but I got 10 acres.
00:12:04
Speaker
So I can just go into back 40 and just
00:12:07
Speaker
dump those leaves you know what I mean yes and and the chickens will love it and the wild criggers will love it and it will break down and augment your soil in future years and you will be much happier and yeah so that's that's definitely something that I'm going to do come come fall when the leaves start to turn but so we the goal of this of this program this module is to
00:12:31
Speaker
tell you exactly what to buy.
00:12:34
Speaker
We're going to tell you exactly what to charge, which is going to vary a little bit by your neighborhood, but you're going to have like a starting point to say, all right, you know, maybe this price is a little high.
00:12:45
Speaker
Maybe I recalibrate, but we're going to give you a price.
00:12:48
Speaker
We're going to tell you how to build your customer base, what neighborhoods to go into when you're starting out, what neighborhoods you can expand into, how to increase your efficiency so that you're, instead of
00:12:59
Speaker
jumping all over town to address sort of client needs.
00:13:02
Speaker
You're like, I'm taking care of every lawn on this street and I'm just going boom, boom, boom, boom.
00:13:07
Speaker
You know, 40 bucks, 40 bucks, 40 bucks, 20 minutes at a time, 25 minutes at a time.
00:13:11
Speaker
We're going to talk about how to take payments, how to deal with getting stiffed, when you need to have a contract, when you need to demand a deposit ahead of time.
00:13:21
Speaker
how to hire your first employee.
00:13:23
Speaker
And so that's how it scales from side hustle to full-time job to you're running a small business.
00:13:29
Speaker
We're going to give you all the forms and marketing materials so that once you've picked your business's name and logo,
00:13:37
Speaker
You're going to have just a blank PDF.
00:13:39
Speaker
You slap your logo on there.
00:13:40
Speaker
That's your form.
00:13:41
Speaker
That's your flyer.
00:13:42
Speaker
And so the overall goal of this is to just have something that you don't really have to think about.
00:13:49
Speaker
You just pick it up and execute it.
00:13:52
Speaker
And you were telling me that it's about a thousand dollar budget up front.
00:13:56
Speaker
And then, you know, guys making seven figures doing this.
00:13:59
Speaker
So we're saying how to take how to turn a thousand dollars into a million dollars with this landscaping business.
00:14:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:06
Speaker
And if you're willing to put in the sweat and the hard work and that kind of sweat equity into this business, you can do it.
00:14:13
Speaker
I'm not in the seven figure range yet.
00:14:15
Speaker
That's a long-term goal of mine.
00:14:17
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:14:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:19
Speaker
And there's guys that, uh, one of my favorite guys, I pointed out to Dr. Bennett, there's a group of brothers that work together and they work six months out of the year, cutting grass, 10 to 12 hour days.
00:14:29
Speaker
That's all they do is just cut grass.
00:14:32
Speaker
And then the other six months of the year, they,
00:14:36
Speaker
move down to Florida, move down to Texas, down to their beach homes and live on the beach and be beach bums for those six months off.
00:14:43
Speaker
And they just enjoy life, raise their kids.
00:14:45
Speaker
I think most of them homeschool, if I remember right.
00:14:48
Speaker
And so they get to be involved in their children's lives, get to spend lots of time with their families.
00:14:53
Speaker
It's just those six months of really hard, dedicated work.
Self-Reliance vs Corporate Life
00:14:56
Speaker
And they do hire guys, they bring guys on and they're working and transitioning towards getting to that point where it's
00:15:03
Speaker
It's a business that's going to operate itself and they can kind of just sit back and enjoy life a little bit, which is a wonderful goal to have.
00:15:10
Speaker
And I, we're all shooting for it.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:15
Speaker
Again, I feel like there's a mentality among sort of white collar wage slaves that like either the job is too physically demanding for them to, to, to gut through or that you have to work yourself physically and
00:15:33
Speaker
until you're in your 60s.
00:15:34
Speaker
And it's just sort of like this subsistence farming thing where you're not saving.
00:15:39
Speaker
You're not, but that's not the case at all.
00:15:41
Speaker
You're building, you're building,
00:15:43
Speaker
you're building this clientele and then you are sort of outsourcing the labor part, the gut part, the hard part.
00:15:51
Speaker
So like, no lie, it's a grind for a while, but it opens up and there's an end to that and there's a payoff to that.
00:15:59
Speaker
Which honestly, like in the corporate world, that is not always the case.
00:16:04
Speaker
Like a lot of times the reward for working really hard in the corporate world is you get to work a lot harder and you get to make,
00:16:10
Speaker
you know, more money, but when, but when are you going to spend it?
00:16:13
Speaker
Like when, when you're, when you're 65, that's when you're going to spend it and you're old and busted.
00:16:18
Speaker
So yeah, I, and, and there's another, there's another component to this that I wanted to address, which is my mindset as I've gone into working for myself has changed just dramatically, just overnight.
00:16:32
Speaker
And it's happened several times in my life.
00:16:34
Speaker
This is not the first time this has happened.
00:16:36
Speaker
So
00:16:38
Speaker
Like I said, grew up, I was always gonna go to college.
00:16:41
Speaker
That was, it didn't even occur to me that there was another possibility.
00:16:44
Speaker
And I was always just unbelievably lazy in school, just always like bare minimum.
00:16:51
Speaker
And I, you know, as a bright guy, I did okay, but it was constantly like, you're not living up to your potential.
00:16:57
Speaker
And so I grew up kind of believing that this was sort of a inherent flaw in my character.
00:17:02
Speaker
But then I go on the mission
00:17:05
Speaker
And I find that it is just the easiest thing in the world for me to knock doors for 14 hours a day, every day, you know, well, six days a week, right?
00:17:14
Speaker
And then I get done with that experience.
00:17:17
Speaker
I go to college.
00:17:19
Speaker
College is the same way.
00:17:21
Speaker
I'm lazy, I'm underperforming, I'm wasting my life on video games.
00:17:27
Speaker
Then I graduate and I don't have a job.
00:17:29
Speaker
I got a baby on the way.
00:17:31
Speaker
And then I go work for a friend of mine
00:17:34
Speaker
making 10 bucks an hour working on his sort of like summer cabin.
00:17:39
Speaker
And that, you know, I have no problem working 12, 14 hour days doing that.
00:17:43
Speaker
So it's like, I'm realizing there's something about myself.
00:17:46
Speaker
Like I, I know that I can work, but something about a desk is just really hard for me.
00:17:53
Speaker
And now, you know, I'm, uh, uh, liberated from, from, uh, from that corporate situation where I was,
00:18:02
Speaker
basically inert professionally for like three years, four years.
00:18:07
Speaker
And now it's easy to work again.
00:18:09
Speaker
I'm, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm banging out 16 hour days, mostly because I can't eat or sleep right now, but it feels good.
00:18:18
Speaker
And I feel like, you know, exactly the freedom.
00:18:22
Speaker
There's a lot of freedom in, in having that liberation, but, and there's, you got to keep the discipline.
00:18:27
Speaker
You got to keep the drive.
00:18:28
Speaker
You got to keep those things going.
00:18:29
Speaker
And sometimes it's a pain, but,
00:18:31
Speaker
There's a lot more freedom in saying, okay, I'm my own boss.
00:18:36
Speaker
This is nice.
00:18:36
Speaker
If I need to take things a little bit slower today, I can do that.
00:18:39
Speaker
If I need to kick it up in high gear, it's the same principles as having to work in the corporate life, but the rewards are just so much more sweet.
00:18:47
Speaker
They're so much sweeter.
00:18:48
Speaker
They're so much more apparent.
Spiritual Growth and Historical Parallels
00:18:50
Speaker
And it materializes in front of you so much quicker because instead of just punching the time clock, filling out the spreadsheet, calling it a day, and then never looking at that spreadsheet ever again, you can slowly see this progression in your own life of
00:19:02
Speaker
You're building this business.
00:19:03
Speaker
You're building whatever it may be, whatever field it's in, you're building it for yourself.
00:19:08
Speaker
There's just such a great reward in that.
00:19:11
Speaker
Exactly.
00:19:11
Speaker
It's yours.
00:19:11
Speaker
You can put your name on it.
00:19:12
Speaker
You can be proud of it.
00:19:14
Speaker
And you can do with it what you want, which is just, it's so liberating and it's so nice.
00:19:20
Speaker
And I've, as far as corporate jobs go, I can say I might've had one.
00:19:25
Speaker
I worked for kind of a large contractor that worked for, that was covered multiple States.
00:19:31
Speaker
And there's some corporate aspects.
00:19:33
Speaker
We had an HR department, but it's all construction.
00:19:35
Speaker
99% of the workforce was male.
00:19:37
Speaker
And so we, it's the construction industry.
00:19:40
Speaker
We have a much different mentality.
00:19:42
Speaker
But even then getting away from that company, for me, it was like, this is so nice to be able to just go out and make something of myself.
00:19:49
Speaker
And it's just so rewarding and it's so exhilarating and it's worth it.
00:19:53
Speaker
It's, you might be terrified to walk away from that desk, walk away from the security of that paycheck,
00:20:00
Speaker
but there's more to life than just that.
00:20:02
Speaker
And I think about it.
00:20:04
Speaker
That's what I'm going to tell the listeners.
00:20:06
Speaker
Think about it.
00:20:07
Speaker
There's really, take some time to really think about that if it's worth it to you or not.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:11
Speaker
So there, and, and, you know, a lot of, a lot of guys, myself included up, up to two weeks ago was like, that sounds awesome.
00:20:22
Speaker
I love that idea.
00:20:23
Speaker
I'm so bought in, but like, I haven't invented a better mousetrap yet.
00:20:29
Speaker
And so I don't like, like, I don't know, like, I don't know how to get in.
00:20:32
Speaker
I don't, I don't know what my, what my big idea is that I'm going to start a business with.
00:20:38
Speaker
And so the beauty of this is like, you don't have to reinvent anything.
00:20:41
Speaker
You can just go work, man.
00:20:45
Speaker
And pick something you're comfortable with and just jump in.
00:20:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:49
Speaker
I, I, I was reading in my scriptures about the flesh pots of Egypt the other day.
00:20:54
Speaker
Because I was thinking about my salary, thinking about the check that I got at the end of every month, which was a pretty okay check.
00:21:06
Speaker
And, you know, the children of Israel are in the desert.
00:21:09
Speaker
They've been...
00:21:12
Speaker
They've kind of burned their boats.
00:21:13
Speaker
Like they're not going to go back to Egypt.
00:21:14
Speaker
There's no going back.
00:21:15
Speaker
They just kill them if they went back to which resonated with me.
00:21:19
Speaker
And they're saying, you know, well, well, we're in the desert now.
00:21:21
Speaker
We don't really have a plan.
00:21:22
Speaker
There's no food.
00:21:24
Speaker
And they're saying like, I wish that we just died in Egypt where we had the, where we had the big flesh pots that we could just get what we wanted.
00:21:30
Speaker
And I think about being in direct contact with providence.
00:21:36
Speaker
And let me explain what I mean by that.
00:21:37
Speaker
So like,
00:21:39
Speaker
If you're a farmer or even like a salesman, you know, on an intimate level that like whether or not you succeed is partly up to your effort.
00:21:51
Speaker
But a lot of it is, you know, a lot of guys say chance, but really it's God.
00:21:56
Speaker
You know, God has to make the rainfall.
00:21:58
Speaker
God has to keep the bugs off.
00:21:59
Speaker
God has to, you know what I'm saying?
00:22:00
Speaker
Like if he's not cooperating with you, it doesn't matter what you do.
00:22:06
Speaker
So if you're a Hebrew slave in Egypt, you're not directly connected to that risk.
00:22:14
Speaker
Like they deliver you the food and you make the bricks.
00:22:22
Speaker
And it's a trickle.
00:22:23
Speaker
It's a tiny piece of like these, because the Egyptians are working the most fertile land in the world at the time, basically.
00:22:32
Speaker
And so they're pulling in tons and they're giving the Hebrews just as much as they can, just as much as they can get away with.
00:22:40
Speaker
Just enough to keep them interested, keep them around.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:43
Speaker
Right.
00:22:43
Speaker
And I think about sort of Satan's plan.
00:22:46
Speaker
Satan, Satan says, uh, I'll take care of everything.
00:22:50
Speaker
I will do it.
00:22:52
Speaker
Not one soul will be lost.
00:22:53
Speaker
Like I'll, I'll parcel out your little trickle of, uh,
00:22:59
Speaker
of reward and I'm going to, and I'm going to get rid of the, of the danger.
00:23:05
Speaker
And I really think that, I really think that one of the reasons why God wants us to be free from, from subjugation, from bondage is so that our ability to understand our dependence on him is very close and very intimate so that we don't feel like our livelihood is dependent on obeying some corporate
00:23:28
Speaker
egregore, some idol.
00:23:30
Speaker
And this is, this is living a kind of a higher on a higher level, really, because having that connection, I think one of the biggest things in my life, a big eyeopening experience I had was planning a garden many years ago and in a, in a suburban backyard with some pretty moderately bad soil, but just putting those seeds in the soil exactly as, as you pointed out and just saying, look,
00:23:55
Speaker
It doesn't matter how much work I put into this.
00:23:57
Speaker
I mean, I could sit there every single day and just tend to these little things.
00:24:00
Speaker
And if God wills it, those dang seeds are not going to pop.
00:24:03
Speaker
They're not going to sprout.
00:24:04
Speaker
They're not going to do a single thing.
00:24:06
Speaker
You have to rely on them.
00:24:07
Speaker
You have to trust in them.
00:24:08
Speaker
And that's a terrifying thing to think about what the Israelites had to go to.
00:24:11
Speaker
And it wasn't easy.
00:24:12
Speaker
It was not a walk in the park because then they misbehave.
00:24:16
Speaker
They do some inappropriate things.
00:24:18
Speaker
They spent 40 years in the desert struggling.
00:24:21
Speaker
And sometimes you walk away from comforts
00:24:24
Speaker
You're going to have to go through this struggle.
00:24:26
Speaker
And it's tough.
00:24:27
Speaker
That's terrifying.
00:24:28
Speaker
You need to be cognizant of those things.
00:24:31
Speaker
You need to be mindful of that.
00:24:32
Speaker
It's going to be tough.
00:24:33
Speaker
It's going to be a struggle.
00:24:34
Speaker
But what's the end goal?
00:24:35
Speaker
This promised land.
00:24:37
Speaker
And in your own personal life, that's a greater connection to
Ethical Farming and Home Practices
00:24:41
Speaker
God.
00:24:41
Speaker
It's a greater relationship with your family.
00:24:43
Speaker
It's more financial independence.
00:24:46
Speaker
It's greater just long-term security where you're not reliant on somebody else's stuff to write the check for you.
00:24:51
Speaker
You know, God's going to provide for you depending on how much work you're willing to put in.
00:24:55
Speaker
And so like on one level, on one level, their, their fear made sense.
00:25:01
Speaker
Yes, it did.
00:25:02
Speaker
Cause it's like, there, there really isn't any food.
00:25:05
Speaker
Like, no, you got sand and sagebrush, man.
00:25:10
Speaker
Good luck.
00:25:10
Speaker
Right.
00:25:11
Speaker
But on, on, on another level, they just watched God burn down the most powerful empire in their, in their world.
00:25:20
Speaker
for them to make this happen.
00:25:22
Speaker
And they'd see miracle after miracle after miracle.
00:25:24
Speaker
So it's, it's, it's like, and, and that's my, you know, I feel like that's my situation.
00:25:29
Speaker
You know, I, I watched, um,
00:25:31
Speaker
I watched JRC get chucked under the bus and doxxed and have his livelihood destroyed.
00:25:41
Speaker
And then there was an 8.2 earthquake outside Anchorage.
00:25:46
Speaker
And I just thought like, I thought like, and you know, nobody was hurt, but I was like, that's a shot across the bow, man.
00:25:54
Speaker
That's, I mean, it was the same day.
00:25:56
Speaker
It was like a couple hours away.
00:25:59
Speaker
And in our situation,
00:26:01
Speaker
um actually the morning i got fired uh my wife went horseback riding with uh with some folks in the ward and they said did you guys feel the earthquake this morning and and i could i no joke i i couldn't find any information about it so like i don't even know if it was real but my wife was crying like because i told her about the earthquake in alaska yeah and uh
00:26:28
Speaker
you know, there's a, there's a verse that says you'll be in league with the stones of the field, like all of, all of creation on your side.
00:26:37
Speaker
I say, I remember a post, a couple of tweet a couple of weeks ago from, from the esteemed Dr. Bennett talking about how he's out with a lawnmower destroying the rocks in the field, but it seems the rocks, it seems the rocks have forgiven him and are now working in favor.
00:26:52
Speaker
It's,
00:26:54
Speaker
God is cognizant of us.
00:26:55
Speaker
Do not forget it.
00:26:57
Speaker
Do not doubt.
00:26:58
Speaker
Yeah, he's on your side.
00:26:59
Speaker
He's rooting for you.
00:27:00
Speaker
He's in your corner.
00:27:02
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:27:02
Speaker
And like, you know, I really, I don't want to make this like a prosperity gospel thing.
00:27:06
Speaker
It's not like, no, it's not like, what am I trying to say?
00:27:10
Speaker
There's not, there's not like a moral imperative to go make a lot of money and people who struggle.
00:27:15
Speaker
It's not because they're, you know, less valiant or less, whatever.
00:27:21
Speaker
We're all called to go through different things.
00:27:23
Speaker
But I do believe very strongly that there's a spiritual component to being self-reliant and reliant on God.
00:27:31
Speaker
And the more freedom you can have from tyranny, the more you can free yourself from tyranny in a peaceful way.
00:27:41
Speaker
Let me put it this way.
00:27:43
Speaker
Sometimes in order to serve God, you have to be able to say no to other people.
00:27:48
Speaker
Exactly.
00:27:48
Speaker
And we are in a stage of the game where
00:27:52
Speaker
The things that they're asking us to do are not acceptable.
00:27:55
Speaker
And we have to be able to say no and walk away.
00:27:57
Speaker
And so that, I think, is a moral imperative.
00:28:01
Speaker
And even if you don't, this is one piece of the puzzle, this thing I'm trying to do.
00:28:06
Speaker
But I do think that it's part of the puzzle.
00:28:08
Speaker
I think it's part of the solution to sort of the modern predicament.
00:28:13
Speaker
It definitely is.
00:28:15
Speaker
So I wanted to talk to you about your chicken farming business because that's a whole other avenue.
00:28:23
Speaker
So we've had several friends.
00:28:26
Speaker
So we raise chickens now.
00:28:27
Speaker
We've got 15 chickens.
00:28:30
Speaker
And it's sort of bafflingly simple at that level.
00:28:34
Speaker
Um, like I, I can't believe more people don't do it.
00:28:37
Speaker
And so many of our friends have asked us like, or have said like, gosh, that sounds cool.
00:28:43
Speaker
I'd love to raise chickens, but I don't have like a farm to raise them on.
00:28:46
Speaker
Or I don't like, I wouldn't know where to start.
00:28:48
Speaker
And for us, it's literally like, well, they gotta have, they gotta have food.
00:28:52
Speaker
They gotta have water.
00:28:53
Speaker
They gotta have like a covered space where the critters can't get to them.
00:28:59
Speaker
And like, it's not real complicated.
00:29:02
Speaker
And yeah, no, it really isn't.
00:29:04
Speaker
So tell me about how you got into that scene.
00:29:07
Speaker
And like, you know, the land that you're working right now, it's not, it's not like deep black, like Ohio river Valley, like, you know, fingers crossed.
00:29:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:20
Speaker
I'd like to be there one day, but we're not there yet.
00:29:22
Speaker
No, that's, and that's so a little, little bit of background.
00:29:25
Speaker
My wife and I, when we were dating, um,
00:29:29
Speaker
this has always been kind of a dream in the back of our minds.
00:29:31
Speaker
We've always said we want to homestead or we want to farm, we want to do something.
00:29:36
Speaker
And we joked when we were dating about moving to Hawaii and opening up a dairy, Aloha dairy or something cute like that.
00:29:42
Speaker
Cause you know, milk is $20 a gallon or whatever it is out in the islands.
00:29:46
Speaker
And Hawaii is a pretty place and it would be fun to, you know, milk cows while you're looking over the ocean, standing on volcanic ash.
00:29:54
Speaker
But
00:29:55
Speaker
not a huge fan of the politics of the state and all the regulations required to drag cattle out there.
00:30:02
Speaker
But so as long as we've been married, we've been looking at land and saying, okay, we want to get out of the city.
00:30:06
Speaker
We want to get out of the suburbs.
00:30:08
Speaker
We want to live on some land.
00:30:09
Speaker
We want to kind of go our own way, raise our own food, know where it came from, be comfortable with it.
00:30:14
Speaker
And the fun thing about chickens, the world would be a lot better place
00:30:19
Speaker
if everyone just had a couple of chickens, the things they'll teach you, it's amazing to just sit and watch these silly little animals, descendants of the dinosaurs, little, little velociraptors run around your yard.
00:30:30
Speaker
It's just fun to watch them and sit there and appreciate them.
00:30:33
Speaker
And obviously they do give you something in return.
00:30:36
Speaker
You take care of them.
00:30:36
Speaker
You're sweet with them.
00:30:38
Speaker
And you get these wonderful little things every morning.
00:30:40
Speaker
There's little eggs that they're just divine.
00:30:42
Speaker
You raise your own eggs.
00:30:44
Speaker
You can't go back to supermarket eggs.
00:30:47
Speaker
It just,
00:30:48
Speaker
it ruins it for you.
00:30:49
Speaker
And if you do any little bit of research into it, you suddenly realize, oh, wow, I don't want to eat those eggs because of what those chickens have to go through.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:31:01
Speaker
And so my wife and I, when we picked up this land about two years ago, and the easiest animal to get into, the easiest thing to start with are chickens.
00:31:11
Speaker
And so we picked up 30 New Hampshire Reds because they're
00:31:15
Speaker
We're in Colorado.
00:31:16
Speaker
New Hampshire Reds are really good in the cold.
00:31:17
Speaker
They're really hardy.
00:31:19
Speaker
They're much more friendly towards children.
00:31:20
Speaker
I've got some younger kids.
00:31:22
Speaker
So we started with these guys, raised them up, got them second day they were born from the post office.
00:31:27
Speaker
We did the whole set up a brooder and got them through the winter.
00:31:31
Speaker
And it's kind of fun too, because then a neighbor up the road was moving.
00:31:36
Speaker
She had to get rid of some of her chickens.
00:31:37
Speaker
So we picked up like six, seven more chickens.
00:31:40
Speaker
Someone had a rooster that lives in the city and they can't have a rooster.
00:31:44
Speaker
So
00:31:44
Speaker
We adopted the rooster.
00:31:47
Speaker
My wife's at the feed store.
00:31:48
Speaker
There's a fresh patch of chicks.
00:31:51
Speaker
Oh, they're so cute.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah, and look at what they grow up to, sweetheart.
00:31:54
Speaker
But she brings home a couple of baby chicks that are her little flock.
00:31:58
Speaker
And it slowly just starts growing.
00:32:00
Speaker
And so all of a sudden we have, we're up to now 60 egg layers.
00:32:04
Speaker
And so what we do is we have an electric net and a mobile coop that we drag around the property.
00:32:12
Speaker
to kind of target different areas.
00:32:14
Speaker
So the chickens will go through, eat the grass, eat the weeds, eat the bugs, drop their fertilizer all over creation, which is a beautiful thing to see because I want that black soil.
00:32:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:25
Speaker
And then we collect the eggs and we sell the eggs and we're kind of operating at cost neutral because we're able to sell these eggs to different people.
00:32:33
Speaker
And there's some rules that we're following, some laws that we are mindful of.
00:32:37
Speaker
And so we have to be careful about how much we sell.
00:32:40
Speaker
We can't go over
00:32:42
Speaker
250 dozen a month, which we're not anywhere near, but there's certain numbers we have to play with and we have to follow the rules.
00:32:48
Speaker
We wash our eggs, we refrigerate them, but we sell them as farm fresh eggs and people in the cities just love it.
00:32:56
Speaker
We've got several chiropractors that are customers of ours and they just, and they'll buy them by the kind of in bulk packs, five dozen at a time and, and go through them and they just love them to death.
00:33:09
Speaker
It's a nice, solid kind of
00:33:12
Speaker
deep orangey yolk.
00:33:14
Speaker
And it's just a, it's a beautiful thing that it's just so much better.
00:33:17
Speaker
Like I was saying about taste.
00:33:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:19
Speaker
It's just a better product.
00:33:20
Speaker
Exactly.
00:33:21
Speaker
And then, and so this transitions into, well, if you can, if you can raise egg laying chickens, you can raise meat chickens.
00:33:29
Speaker
And so the principles are the same.
00:33:31
Speaker
We want them outdoors.
00:33:32
Speaker
I I'm not a huge fan of free range.
00:33:34
Speaker
I want them to be contained in certain areas, which is why we use electric netting to move them around.
00:33:38
Speaker
Why are you not a fan of free range?
00:33:40
Speaker
Because I don't want to step out my front door into chicken squat.
00:33:46
Speaker
There's that aspect, but also there is a bit of a predator problem.
00:33:51
Speaker
And so having them contained within a certain area, they're still on pasture.
00:33:56
Speaker
They still have a sizable area to run around.
00:33:58
Speaker
It gets moved every day.
00:34:00
Speaker
Every other day, if I'm a little bit behind, but they get fresh grass every couple of days.
00:34:06
Speaker
So that they can enjoy they can live their best life, they can have fun, they can be happy chickens.
00:34:12
Speaker
And they can be safe from predators.
00:34:15
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:34:15
Speaker
And so we raise them up and, and we've experiment this year has been our experimentation with the meat and our first set we, we weren't as pleased with how they turned out.
00:34:25
Speaker
I'm a big fan of Joel Salatin and his methods.
00:34:29
Speaker
And I've looked at John Suskovich and I've looked at kind of a lot of other of these guys and the big names in the industry.
00:34:34
Speaker
I don't know anything about that.
00:34:35
Speaker
What are those?
00:34:38
Speaker
So those are a couple of guys that kind of the pioneers of in the field and they've, they've come up with different ways to build coops and different ways to raise chicken farming.
00:34:48
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:49
Speaker
It's, it's a whole obscure science we could, we could delve into and go down, but these, these men have kind of,
00:34:56
Speaker
influenced me and some of my thinking and I figured out what taking their models and saying, okay, this works for them, I'm going to try it.
00:35:04
Speaker
And there's a couple things that don't work.
00:35:06
Speaker
And so I've been able to sit there and modify how we do things.
00:35:10
Speaker
But there's there is a demand and and these chickens, we sell them at a premium.
00:35:16
Speaker
But we've we've had several a couple of our harvest, we've had people come out and watch us do the harvest or we're going to take this live chicken, we're going to go through the process.
00:35:25
Speaker
I've got a fun Twitter thread about it if you want to read about it, but there's a process we have to harvest humanely, kill these animals and prepare them so you can eat them.
00:35:34
Speaker
And the world would be a much better place if we had a better connection with our food.
00:35:39
Speaker
And we've kind of gotten away from that as a society.
00:35:41
Speaker
Unfortunately, you ask people, hey, where does your chicken come from?
00:35:44
Speaker
Well, it comes from McDonald's or it comes from the grocery store.
00:35:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:48
Speaker
Okay.
00:35:48
Speaker
Well, take a step back and where does that come from?
00:35:50
Speaker
And
00:35:51
Speaker
A lot of people don't realize kind of what goes into that and the sacrifice of the animal and not to wax too religious or philosophical, but you do need to respect the animal and ensure that it has the best life possible.
00:36:06
Speaker
not only for a better product, but just because I think God's going to hold us accountable for how we've treated these animals.
Family Involvement and Life Skills
00:36:12
Speaker
So yeah, there's a lot.
00:36:13
Speaker
It's, that's another component.
00:36:16
Speaker
That's another component of exit.
00:36:18
Speaker
It's, it's not just how you make your money, but it's, there's elements of consumption that you don't want to participate in.
00:36:23
Speaker
There's elements of, there's elements of that system that are evil too.
00:36:27
Speaker
And, and, um,
00:36:29
Speaker
And yeah, chickens, like, it's such an easy way to, because, you know, like I was saying, you're on relatively marginal land.
00:36:40
Speaker
You could, like, honestly, so I'm finding that our chickens, like, don't even want to range out that far.
00:36:48
Speaker
Like, they're not particularly interested in exploring.
00:36:51
Speaker
Like, they're pretty...
00:36:54
Speaker
homebody animals.
00:36:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:56
Speaker
Different breeds will have different reactions.
00:36:59
Speaker
We've got kind of in our wild pack of chickens that my wife's collected.
00:37:02
Speaker
There's some that'll try and fly up and sit on the roof and we'll run across the field if we let them.
00:37:08
Speaker
And there's others that they just want to sit in the coop all day and just hang out and take a couple of dust baths.
00:37:13
Speaker
They have different personalities and different things.
00:37:16
Speaker
And what you were mentioning earlier is about, I mean, starting with, with a 15 chickens.
00:37:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:22
Speaker
It's all scalable and people don't understand that is, is raising your own birds in your backyard in the middle of suburbia or raising them out on land.
00:37:31
Speaker
This is something you can do.
00:37:32
Speaker
You can start with a handful of chickens, raise them yourself.
00:37:34
Speaker
Our good friend, Adam, he had a good thought one day on Twitter about these are, these are like 10 or $12, a dozen eggs.
00:37:42
Speaker
Is it really worth it?
00:37:45
Speaker
It's worth it because there's more than just the food that you're getting out of it.
00:37:48
Speaker
There's a, there's a lot of
00:37:50
Speaker
There's a lot of life lessons.
00:37:51
Speaker
There's a lot of.
00:37:52
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:37:53
Speaker
I got my, got my kid.
00:37:54
Speaker
The fertilizer.
00:37:55
Speaker
So yeah.
00:37:57
Speaker
I got my kid, you know, scrubbing out the coop and, and, and sort of shepherding chickens back into the pen.
00:38:03
Speaker
And there's all kinds of jobs that, that a little kid can do.
00:38:08
Speaker
And that's, that's another piece of this is the corporate sort of white collar service industry model of family life.
00:38:16
Speaker
Kids are totally alienated from what their parents do for a living.
00:38:19
Speaker
They're fundamentally in a lot of ways sort of alienated from just productivity period, from doing anything that's useful to anybody else.
00:38:29
Speaker
And, you know, in my opinion, cope about that is like, well, it's their job.
00:38:34
Speaker
It's their job to go to school.
00:38:35
Speaker
It's their job to get an education.
00:38:38
Speaker
But like, you know, I remember public school.
00:38:41
Speaker
That was a place to put us.
00:38:43
Speaker
That was just a holding pen.
00:38:46
Speaker
It was the daycare.
00:38:48
Speaker
Yeah, and the things that I learned, I learned on accident, learned on my own time while I was pretending to listen during class.
00:38:54
Speaker
And so part of the goal of remote work, part of the goal of homesteading, trade work, all of these things, and one thing that they have in common, in addition to making you less vulnerable to cancellation, coercion, is that they're all things that a kid can understand and participate in.
00:39:15
Speaker
if you're, if you're, I know that you're, you're kind of trade specialty is carpentry.
00:39:19
Speaker
And like, there's a lot of that, that your little kids can't do, but they can go get your tools.
00:39:24
Speaker
They can go, you know, bring me that board and watch any, watch you work.
00:39:28
Speaker
And kids are fascinated by that stuff.
00:39:30
Speaker
I mean, Mr. Rogers neighborhood, you know, they, they love watching sort of the process of, of how real jobs are done.
00:39:37
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:39:38
Speaker
Well, and as a, as a father, some of the most rewarding projects I've ever worked on
00:39:44
Speaker
have been something silly and little that my son has asked me to do.
00:39:48
Speaker
So building his lemonade stand, building a little fort out of pallet wood and talking with him.
00:39:56
Speaker
And he's, he's just five years old, but sitting there and talking him through the process.
00:40:00
Speaker
Okay.
00:40:01
Speaker
Well, what do we need next?
00:40:02
Speaker
Well, we need screws or we need nails.
00:40:04
Speaker
Okay.
00:40:04
Speaker
Well, where are they?
00:40:06
Speaker
Well, he knows in dad's tool tank, whereabouts it is.
00:40:09
Speaker
And so he'll go to the door and open it up and ask me to carry it.
00:40:12
Speaker
But
00:40:13
Speaker
handing him a small ball peen hammer and some finishing nails and saying, hey, here's a board, just whack at it.
00:40:21
Speaker
Kids love that, man.
00:40:22
Speaker
Just let him do it.
00:40:24
Speaker
Let him be a kid.
00:40:25
Speaker
Let him experiment a little.
00:40:27
Speaker
And maybe it's just me, but this is how I learn is by having to do and go through the process.
00:40:33
Speaker
And the first time I hit a nail with the hammer, I'm pretty sure I bent the nail in half.
00:40:36
Speaker
I don't remember, but over the years and over the hundreds of thousands of nails, I've had to
00:40:42
Speaker
either drive in with a gun or hammer in, that first one mattered.
00:40:48
Speaker
And so it's let your kids experience those things and let them be involved in your life.
00:40:53
Speaker
Let them see you work.
00:40:55
Speaker
I have fond memories of my dad waking me up Saturday mornings to go and cut grass and how much I hated that.
00:41:00
Speaker
And look at it now.
00:41:02
Speaker
I built a business out of it.
00:41:03
Speaker
And so it's let them experience it.
00:41:06
Speaker
guide them, teach them, hold their hand a little bit and do it with them.
00:41:10
Speaker
And it's a beautiful thing to watch your child learn something that you see as easy and they have to struggle with it.
00:41:17
Speaker
And then you start to realize, I had to struggle with it.
00:41:20
Speaker
And it's a very humbling experience.
00:41:23
Speaker
So much of being a parent is closing the loop and seeing
00:41:27
Speaker
seeing yourself from the outside on both ends because, because you'll find yourself.
00:41:35
Speaker
So, so my, my oldest boy, you can be like James, James, James, James.
00:41:42
Speaker
And you like, you have to yell at him.
00:41:44
Speaker
Like you're mad at him for him to even come online at all.
00:41:50
Speaker
And it never did that when he was a child.
00:41:52
Speaker
No, that was a hundred percent me.
00:41:54
Speaker
That's exactly how I was.
00:41:56
Speaker
And I was, you know, the sort of feelings of, like I was talking about earlier, feelings of kind of laziness, uselessness, you know, you're smart, but you're never going to amount to anything.
00:42:07
Speaker
You know, I look at my son and I go, he's a pretty neat kid.
00:42:11
Speaker
I, I, I, I like him quite a bit, even though we will watch his career with much interest because he's going places.
00:42:21
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:42:23
Speaker
And, and then on the other hand,
00:42:25
Speaker
getting to remember my parents doing that to me and how it felt hostile and how it felt aggressive and me being like, Oh no, I was just, that was just a really challenging thing for them.
00:42:38
Speaker
Like they were, they were like, they were, they were frustrated, but like still from a place of love and sort of, just sort of helping you understand it.
00:42:52
Speaker
And parenthood is so,
00:42:54
Speaker
is so valuable for that.
00:42:56
Speaker
And it's unfortunate that so many people in our culture are going way late in their lives without ever closing those loops.
Building a Home and Community Support
00:43:09
Speaker
Yeah, no, don't wait.
00:43:10
Speaker
Don't delay.
00:43:12
Speaker
And it will work out.
00:43:13
Speaker
That's the interesting thing.
00:43:14
Speaker
And the paradigm shift in life when you're growing up, and I know this is different for everyone, but there comes a point in your life where you suddenly realize,
00:43:24
Speaker
I'm an adult.
00:43:26
Speaker
My parents were adults.
00:43:28
Speaker
I'm an idiot.
00:43:29
Speaker
They're idiots.
00:43:31
Speaker
And that, that it's just such an eyeopening experience to suddenly realize that.
00:43:35
Speaker
And, and hopefully your heart's in the right place and you're forgiving enough to realize parenthood does not come with a manual.
00:43:43
Speaker
You got to struggle through it a bit.
00:43:44
Speaker
And it's some days you're just, you pull your hair out.
00:43:47
Speaker
And I mean, I don't have a whole lot of it left, but you're like, how am I going to figure this out?
00:43:51
Speaker
How am I going to get through this?
00:43:53
Speaker
It's going to work out.
00:43:54
Speaker
We all struggled with it, but yeah, close the loop.
00:43:57
Speaker
So I wanted to talk to you about your situation because you made a decision to move out to the country without a house.
00:44:07
Speaker
I'll root my family, yes.
00:44:09
Speaker
Yeah, you're building your house right now, correct?
00:44:12
Speaker
Yeah, we're working on it.
00:44:14
Speaker
So part of what I see as the challenge of Exit
00:44:19
Speaker
is if you're a patriarch in your home and you have a wife and kids, you have a responsibility to them.
00:44:26
Speaker
And that for a lot of guys in corporate America is sort of the gun to their head.
00:44:32
Speaker
That's how they're kept compliant is I can't put my family through that.
00:44:38
Speaker
And, you know, candidly,
00:44:41
Speaker
putting your family into a trailer while you build a house is like, that's a lot to ask.
00:44:47
Speaker
And so it's insanity, man.
00:44:49
Speaker
I, I question my own judgment about it daily.
00:44:52
Speaker
So, but tell me about how you view that challenge and how you sort of act as a leader in your home and make that workable for everybody.
00:45:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:03
Speaker
So we, so we were in the great booming metropolis of Denver and
00:45:09
Speaker
My wife and I purchased a town home.
00:45:11
Speaker
We brought two of our babies home to it and we had done a bunch of renovations on it, fixed it up and the market was hot a couple of years ago.
00:45:20
Speaker
And we were like, it's time to, it's time to make a move.
00:45:23
Speaker
We, we just felt really strongly about it.
00:45:25
Speaker
We started looking at land.
00:45:27
Speaker
We found, and initially we were looking at just tiny little lots and we were looking at five acre lots, six acre lots, kind of still suburban rural connection, but we just,
00:45:37
Speaker
We kept hunting, we kept looking, we finally found our little diamond in the rough out here.
00:45:41
Speaker
And we had a, there's a well that's very old.
00:45:46
Speaker
I mean, God willing, it lasts for another five, 10 years.
00:45:49
Speaker
We had electrical running to the property and a very old out of date electrical panel that scares me and gives me nightmares.
00:45:57
Speaker
Even to this day, a rundown stable and that was it.
00:46:01
Speaker
And so we were like, okay, the money we can make off the townhome, we can pay for the land.
00:46:07
Speaker
There's not going to be a whole lot left out to the budget.
00:46:10
Speaker
And building a house is not a cheap prospect, especially when you start looking at, like, you can look at material and say, okay, well, it's whatever, $100,000 for material.
00:46:18
Speaker
Okay, well, now think about the labor.
00:46:21
Speaker
And, like, I can do all this stuff.
00:46:23
Speaker
It's not terrifying to me.
00:46:24
Speaker
And I've got connections.
00:46:25
Speaker
I can pull a lot of favors.
00:46:26
Speaker
I can get my electricians out here to do a lot of electrical work for me.
00:46:31
Speaker
I'm going to have to grill them a steak or two and keep them happy.
00:46:34
Speaker
And so they don't complain too much, but, and I know plumbers and I know concrete finishers and I've got some other carpenters I can call up and they can help me frame the whole nine yards.
00:46:43
Speaker
We can do this.
00:46:45
Speaker
But, but it's daunting and it's, it's terrifying.
00:46:48
Speaker
And I think for me, that was, that's one of the motivators is I have this responsibility to now three children because we brought one home to a trailer.
00:46:57
Speaker
How crazy am I?
00:46:59
Speaker
And my sweet wife,
00:47:01
Speaker
who has the patience of a saint, there's a great, I don't know if it's duty, if it's, I think it's love.
00:47:08
Speaker
It's a higher motivation than just duty because I want to provide the best possible for them.
00:47:13
Speaker
So it's like, yes, we're living in a trailer, beautiful 24 foot long camper from the mid nineties, gorgeous interior, very dated.
00:47:23
Speaker
My wife's updated some of it.
00:47:25
Speaker
Very uncomfortable when it's, you know, 10 degrees out and the wind's blowing at 60 miles an hour.
00:47:31
Speaker
but there's also some other lessons that I've had to learn in this situation about the importance of kind of, like, I haven't looked at a TV in two years.
00:47:40
Speaker
I haven't touched a video game in about the same amount of time.
00:47:44
Speaker
I don't have time for it and there's no space for it.
00:47:47
Speaker
So there's a lot of things that I've had to set aside and say, these things aren't important.
00:47:52
Speaker
What is important?
00:47:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:54
Speaker
Making sure they're comfortable, making sure they're safe, taking care of them and making sure everything works right.
00:47:59
Speaker
And it's,
00:48:00
Speaker
Chris Price- Like I said it's there's some days where it's terrifying I question my own sanity frequently and saying is it is it really what I want to do, and this goes back to kind of just in your daily grind.
00:48:13
Speaker
Chris Price- Are you forgetting the big picture, what is your big picture, I want my wife's dream house and we.
00:48:20
Speaker
Chris Price- On it it's not just it's not just her choice or aesthetics.
00:48:23
Speaker
I wouldn't have picked them, but having gone through the plans, having gone through the blueprints, having gone through the design phase, I love it.
00:48:30
Speaker
I've fallen in love with this house and I see this house and I'm like, I want to be in that house and I want to raise my children in this house and I want to see my grandkids in this house.
00:48:39
Speaker
And I want my great, great, great grandkids to run through the hallways and touch the walls and know that I made this for them.
00:48:46
Speaker
And I want to build that kind of intergenerational
00:48:50
Speaker
connection and love and just say, this is everything I do is for you guys.
00:48:55
Speaker
I want this for you.
00:48:57
Speaker
And the fact that you know every every stick in that house.
00:49:02
Speaker
I know where the dang wires are.
00:49:04
Speaker
So if I have to rewire a room, I can find it pretty dang quick.
00:49:07
Speaker
Well, you know, like I think about the way the church, the way the church builds the temples, you know, they're, they're one of the only sort of builders in the world that is building sort of a monumental architecture, architecture designed to last centuries.
00:49:20
Speaker
And in, in cash and done to the highest industry standards.
00:49:24
Speaker
I know a lot of guys that have worked on those temples.
00:49:27
Speaker
they are the finest craftsmen and tradesmen that I will ever meet on, on this, in this mortal plane.
00:49:34
Speaker
Just absolutely phenomenal.
00:49:35
Speaker
The things that they can come up with, the troubleshooting when there's complications, when, when code runs into, because there's lots of code that's just kind of redundant and they'll run into some of those things where it's like, do we sacrifice the aesthetic for the code?
00:49:49
Speaker
No, we'll make them work together.
00:49:51
Speaker
And it's, it's such a beautiful process.
00:49:53
Speaker
And that's,
00:49:54
Speaker
What's your big vision?
00:49:55
Speaker
Keep that in mind.
00:49:57
Speaker
And that's, that's what keeps me going.
00:49:59
Speaker
That's what keeps me motivated.
00:50:00
Speaker
That's what gets me out the door in the morning.
00:50:02
Speaker
That's what keeps me up till one, two, three in the morning, doing invoicing, doing paperwork, trying to figure out the next big step.
00:50:10
Speaker
It's having that big grand vision and it's a, it's a beautiful thing.
00:50:14
Speaker
So, and when you're, I don't mean to keep belaboring this, but when you're alienated from, from the physical craft, you
00:50:22
Speaker
When you're alienated from physical labor, then all you can get is what you can pay for.
00:50:29
Speaker
And the concept of F you money is relative to, first of all, it's relative to what you can give up, what you can sacrifice.
00:50:37
Speaker
It's also relative to what you can do for yourself, right?
00:50:42
Speaker
Because if you're on a sort of middle-class income, right?
00:50:48
Speaker
and it's just white collar work and you don't know anything about trades and you don't know anybody who knows anything about trades, then if you want to do something like this, you're sort of at the mercy of the market as far as like, you know, you're not going to be able to afford the beautiful, the lasting, the permanent.
00:51:07
Speaker
But you're in this situation where, you know, you don't have to be a bazillionaire to build a legacy for yourself.
00:51:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:17
Speaker
And that to me is just so admirable.
00:51:20
Speaker
And that's what I want.
00:51:21
Speaker
I want to be in that world, man.
00:51:23
Speaker
And you know, it's a great place to be.
00:51:26
Speaker
Come on over.
00:51:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:28
Speaker
And, and, and for me, you know, I think I can't quit what I'm doing right now because I, because this, this task is sort of what I'm called to do.
00:51:38
Speaker
I'm not going to go become a general contractor, but part of my goal with this project is
00:51:44
Speaker
is to get to know the people who can point me in the direction and aggregate that skill set so that I know that I'm getting the right people and that I can leverage that.
00:51:55
Speaker
So I think we've covered all the big stuff that I wanted to cover.
00:52:00
Speaker
Yeah, if you want to check us out on Patreon, it's patreon.com slash exit underscore org, exit org.
00:52:09
Speaker
We recently had our first group call
00:52:15
Speaker
And yeah, I'm going to go into this because this was, this is, you need to, because it's a, it's a perfect illustration of what exits about.
00:52:23
Speaker
So it was a phenomenal experience as a participant.
00:52:28
Speaker
And I'm sure as the organizer, it was even better.
00:52:30
Speaker
Oh, I mean, it couldn't have been more rewarding.
00:52:32
Speaker
I mean, so we originally was supposed to be kind of an admin call, like, hey, what do you guys want from this?
00:52:39
Speaker
Here's what I've got planned.
00:52:41
Speaker
Here's the schedule, the agenda, et cetera.
00:52:43
Speaker
But that same day, a friend of ours got wind that they might be in trouble, that they might be doxxed.
00:52:51
Speaker
And someone was sort of gathering intelligence on them.
00:52:54
Speaker
And this was a guy, very decent guy had never said anything really even that problematic, but no absolute, absolute gentleman.
00:53:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:05
Speaker
But we all know that doesn't matter.
00:53:07
Speaker
No, it does not.
00:53:08
Speaker
Unfortunately.
00:53:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:10
Speaker
It was enough for him to be afraid.
00:53:12
Speaker
And we got him in the room.
00:53:14
Speaker
We said, you know, this is kind of an emergency hot seat.
00:53:16
Speaker
We're all going to address this guy's challenge and see what we can do for him.
00:53:19
Speaker
So he told us a little bit about his industry, his location,
00:53:22
Speaker
what he was up against and the quality of insight that came from that group.
00:53:28
Speaker
I was just blown away.
00:53:29
Speaker
I mean, it was, there was a lot of things that would not have occurred to me, even things that like initially I'd told him the other thing I'd sent him in a different direction.
00:53:37
Speaker
And they were like, nah, no, no, no, that's not right.
00:53:39
Speaker
Here's, here's what it is.
00:53:40
Speaker
And here's why.
00:53:41
Speaker
And I don't want to get into too many details, but like, I was just so impressed with their, with their level of insight and their level of compassion.
00:53:48
Speaker
And he, and he told me just up and down for the next couple of days, like,
00:53:52
Speaker
you have no idea how much that just punctured and deflated the panic.
00:53:59
Speaker
And I knew that I had support.
00:54:01
Speaker
We found that guy three direct referral situations where like we knew that down one of those roads was a job for him.
00:54:11
Speaker
And I don't know if he'll take one of those.
00:54:14
Speaker
They were, they were all good.
00:54:15
Speaker
They were in his lane.
00:54:17
Speaker
They were in his salary range in his level of sort of seniority and experience.
00:54:22
Speaker
And it's up to him what he chooses to do.
00:54:26
Speaker
But what we gave him was your income's not gonna be interrupted.
00:54:31
Speaker
Your family's not gonna be disrupted.
00:54:33
Speaker
You're not gonna have to move.
00:54:34
Speaker
Every one of these opportunities was either remote or local to him.
00:54:37
Speaker
So it didn't tell him what he had to do, but it raised the floor for him.
00:54:44
Speaker
It raised his worst case scenario to like, any one of these possibilities would be fine.
00:54:50
Speaker
And I would be fine.
00:54:52
Speaker
And so now he's in a situation where if he wants to, he can talk to his boss and he can say, look, these are the things that I've said.
00:55:01
Speaker
And I'm not going to apologize for it.
00:55:04
Speaker
I'm not going to recant any of it.
00:55:06
Speaker
And I'm not going to stop talking.
00:55:09
Speaker
And they love him.
00:55:10
Speaker
He's a wonderful worker.
00:55:11
Speaker
He's smart, very capable guy.
00:55:16
Speaker
And they don't want to lose it.
00:55:17
Speaker
So he's going to have this conversation and he's going to say like,
00:55:21
Speaker
look, this is me.
00:55:23
Speaker
If you're not okay with that, I'm moving on like yesterday.
00:55:27
Speaker
And now the ball is in his court.
00:55:31
Speaker
He is proactive.
00:55:32
Speaker
He's taking steps forward.
00:55:34
Speaker
He doesn't have to worry about being reactionary, trying to fight back.
00:55:37
Speaker
He can go on the offensive.
00:55:39
Speaker
And that's what it's all about.
00:55:41
Speaker
Just unbelievable power.
00:55:44
Speaker
Unbelievable power.
00:55:45
Speaker
I wish so much, not because I wanted to stay in that job because I didn't,
00:55:52
Speaker
But to have the power that he's going to have to just say, like, I had the sort of nothing to lose power.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:56:04
Speaker
I had the power where I, because I didn't apologize for anything.
00:56:08
Speaker
I didn't recant anything.
00:56:09
Speaker
I said, you know, this is, yeah, yeah, I wrote those things.
00:56:16
Speaker
That's me.
00:56:17
Speaker
It is what it is.
00:56:18
Speaker
You want to have a debate about it?
00:56:20
Speaker
You'll lose.
00:56:22
Speaker
They did not want to have a debate about it.
00:56:23
Speaker
Unfortunately, it would have been epic.
00:56:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:26
Speaker
But to be able to tell them, like, you know, I have this value and you know I have the value and whatever you want, however you want to play it is fine with me.
00:56:36
Speaker
Like, that is just such an enviable position to be in.
00:56:42
Speaker
And that's what I'm all about.
00:56:43
Speaker
That's what I want.
00:56:45
Speaker
for everybody in the tent and for everybody out of the tent.
00:56:48
Speaker
My goal is to have this be a brotherhood where we take care of our own.
00:56:53
Speaker
And we also, once our guys are set, we go kind of range out.
00:57:00
Speaker
We look for other people that we can help.
00:57:02
Speaker
And right now I'm trying to build it into something that can sustain my family so that I can do it full time.
00:57:07
Speaker
But from what I'm seeing, it's rapidly coming to a point where it's not going to be about the money.
00:57:14
Speaker
You know, and it's just going to be about, this is what I love and my basic needs are met so I don't have to do anything else.
00:57:23
Speaker
I can just do this.
00:57:25
Speaker
Yeah, and the little bit I've been able to work with you on this upcoming training for kind of starting your own landscaping company, you've got the passion, you've got the fire.
00:57:36
Speaker
So you get excited over this.
00:57:38
Speaker
I mentioned something in passing.
00:57:40
Speaker
And you get so excited about it.
00:57:42
Speaker
You're like, no, no, no, go back to that.
00:57:43
Speaker
Let's talk about that for five minutes.
00:57:46
Speaker
There's, you've got the passion, you've got the drive, you've got the mission.
00:57:49
Speaker
And that's, that's one reason why going all the way back to the beginning, this exits going places because Bennett's, Bennett's at the wheel and he's excited about it.
00:57:58
Speaker
And that's what I'm just, I'm looking forward to seeing where this is going to be two, three months from now, six months from now, a year from now.
00:58:06
Speaker
seeing all these guys that have joined up, seeing how they can change and transform their lives, where they can be more independent, where they can be in places where they want to be instead of being dictated to.
00:58:17
Speaker
They're no longer the serfs, but they're free men that can enjoy all that God wants to bless them with.
00:58:26
Speaker
Amen, brother.
00:58:26
Speaker
All right.
00:58:27
Speaker
That is a wrap for us.
00:58:30
Speaker
Thanks so much, Chase, for being with us.
00:58:33
Speaker
Thanks for having me.
00:58:35
Speaker
And thanks so much to everybody listening and especially to our members who are going to get this today.
00:58:41
Speaker
It is so humbling to me that you guys have chosen to be part of this and just
00:58:49
Speaker
Couldn't be more pleased to have you around and, and to everyone else.
00:58:52
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:58:53
Speaker
Please, please look into what we're doing.
00:58:55
Speaker
And because I think it's for a lot of you, it's, it's something that could, that could change your life.
00:59:01
Speaker
I really believe that.
00:59:01
Speaker
So that's the exit podcast.
00:59:04
Speaker
Thanks everybody.
00:59:05
Speaker
We'll see you next time.