TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 93

Grant: Welcome back to the Beatrice Institute podcast. It's been quite a while since we've recorded an episode, but we're back starting to record episodes again. I'm excited to welcome back Jacob Imam. I believe that Jacob is the first-ever repeat guest on the podcast!

Jacob is an economic scholar and last time he came onto the podcast, we talked a lot about 401ks and stocks. But this time we're going to be talking about Jacob's new venture. So currently Jacob is the editor of the New Polity journal, but also is the founder and VP of finance at the College of St. Joseph here in Steubenville, Ohio. We're recording this episode from the offices of the College of St. Joseph, the Worker here in Steubenville. 

St. Joseph, the Worker is a very unique college, students receive both training in a construction trade, as well as a bachelor's degree in Catholic Studies.One of the best aspects of the college is that students emerge debt-free, if they do it right.

Jacob: If they do what we tell them to do.

Grant: Exactly, if they do what you tell them to do, they will emerge debt-free, as they get income from apprenticing in a trade so that they can pay their tuition and also living expenses.

We’ll talk about the college today, and then some of the questions around higher education issues relating to the working class, America, and the trades. So welcome back, Jacob.

Jacob: Thanks, brother. I appreciate it a lot.

Grant: So, first question: if forced to choose, what is the single biggest threat to the flourishing of working-class America? Think, particularly, working-class men.

Jacob: Yeah. Great question. I think that it's an inability to have a creative capacity in your role. I think this is one of the big reasons why you found a disdain for blue-collar trades arises over the last several decades. 

It began with the Taylorism thesis. Frederick Winslow Taylor, the once great golfer and tennis player, ended up writing his great thesis on process engineering, in which you look at how a singular tradesman approached his task and broke down every aspect into various parts.So, a chair maker, goes down, cuts the tree, mills the wood, fine tunely puts the spindles together, in order to create the chair to sell it to Mrs. Smith. What are all the various elements involved in the creation of that chair? Well, Taylor went through and said, well, let's break down everything into a granular, automatized part and then give that part to just one person to accomplish.

So obviously this was a wild success in the American economy. When Harvard founded the very first MBA program, they dedicated the entire first year of the curriculum to Taylor's thesis; to studying that. Now, obviously, Ford's assembly line is the most famous example, or maybe McDonald's kitchen is the other famous example of this coming into the American economy.

But what does that do? I mean, what did it do? I mean, it reduced people's ability to have a creative role in the process. They don't even know the whole, they just are given their part. And at first, this was wildly unpopular for Americans. I think it was something like when Ford had to hire a hundred new people, he'd actually have to hire 963. You know these numbers?

Grant:  I do, yeah. I wrote about these numbers in a piece actually, for the Post Gazette, where I was talking about the fact that I hated being a specialist in the academy. So, I used these numbers. 

So many ways Taylorism, to your point, is actually making its way through the trades, but through the trades and now making its way into higher education, right?

Jacob: Yeah. Well, I certainly think it's in higher education. I’d even say it's more so in higher education than in the trades right now because it is so hard to specialize in these things.

I think the trades actually, I mean this is where I was going, is that the trades have been unfairly tossed into that basket of blue-collar work that has been replaced because everybody wanted to be a white-collar guy: creating the process, being the engineer, not the dude on the assembly line, right?

So there's a lot of truth in that disdain and there's a lot of sadness in that disdain too. Some elements of the traits have really held on. I mean, I think that maybe drywalling is not the most excited thing, but if you're piping in a new bathroom, that's going to be different every time.You know, there's a capacity that of creativity that you have to include. We're doing timber framing here as well, and that's something that's actually kind of amazing because whilethere are power tools that you can utilize for that trade that not for everything.I mean, we're doing some curved braces for a project right now. And you can't do that with power tools. I mean, you have to go back and do that purely with hand tools. 

And so I think that the trades actually have a capacity to retain one's more human features. Yet, I do think overall in working-class America that is the biggest problem. It is to humanize.

Grant: It's an important thing to differentiate manufacturing from the trades. Is that a distinction that you're making right now? It seems to be. 

Jacob: It is.

Grant: So tell me how you just distinguish between those two. Because I think in many ways we lump those together as working-class jobs. But they're not the same thing. So, how do you differentiate the trades for manufacturing? How do you think about them from a policy or an educational perspective?

Jacob: Yeah, it's a great question. I wish I did have a brief definition for either. Maybe you can help me with that. But the way that I think about it in terms of your quotidian activity, is that in the trades you are specializing in the creation of something different every day. Whereas in the manufacturing industry, there is a cookie-cutter product that someone is attempting to incorporate into their life. Rather, as a tradesman, you're attempting to create something specially unique that fits into someone's life already. Is that helpful? Help me out with that. Grant: I actually don't know because I've been trying to think about this myself. Because in many ways a lot of the trades have been routinized and made into an assembly line, like making a chair, as you said. You're exactly right. There is something about the nature of plumbing.

Jacob: Oh, I would say that's like taking away parts of the trades. Making a chair is no longer a trade activity, unless you go into Amish country, which we sent some of our students over to do and learn how they still make chairs. But actually, that's gone from the trades to an assembly line. I think there are more and more aspects of a craftsman's life that's being taken from him and made mechanical.

Grant: So one thing, and this might be just my own idiosyncratic impression, but it seems to me that the College of St. Joseph, the Worker is part of an emerging movement of establishing these hybrid trades, liberal arts colleges across the United States. How do you explain this emerging trend? Or is it a trend at all? Or does it just happen to be the communities that I run in? How do you explain this emerging trend, especially in Christian contexts?

Jacob: So, there are a number of Catholic trade schools and even just larger Christian or Judeo-Christian schools. I would say that they're not all emerging from the same stimulus, per se. I think that you find some of that revealed in the marketing or even the conversations that those other institutions are having. 

One thing that is common to all of us is, “Hey, we hate debt! We do not like the financial enslavement that comes with getting a degree from an institute of higher education.” That is true. That's definitely a major pressure that we feel in trying to escape the anxiety that emerges from that financial shackling that it's almost like a rite of passage today. 

But there's also within that, a movement away from higher education that you often find, so they become purely industrial techniques.You might get a BES, I'm thinking about one school, you could get a BES so you're still getting a degree, but it's in the building trades. For the others, you really are just removing yourself from the context of higher education and into a trade school context, which anybody who has been following it has seen that they're trying to be more and more like a college as the years go on, precisely because America, and the West as a whole, is obsessed with getting degreed.Trade school is kind of like a degree. It's something you do every day after high school to have some sort of an accolade. 

But I don't like that. I don't think that that is a healthy movement, for two reasons. 

Grant: The trade school movement.

Jacob: Not the movement as a whole necessarily, but you find Catholics creating trade schools in reaction against the financially crippling state of higher education. The reason why is because we shouldn't get rid of colleges and universities. Colleges and universities were founded by the Catholic Church for a very particular reason that we can get into. But that means that they are fundamentally ours. I'm here speaking as the happy Catholic that I am. They ought not to be dismissed or forgotten, but rather reclaimed. That's so important to understanding the higher points of our heritage. 

Now, there are some good criticisms to what I just said, and that is namely, not everyone's built for college. I really do believe that. I think that there is a false dichotomy that you find between people meant for college and those meant for the trades. I think that's rubbish. I think the very person of Jesus Christ reveals that that is rubbish. The smartest guy that's ever lived was also a tradesman, and there is something purely intellectual about the life of a craftsman.

That's why I would say that the more and more that's being mechanized in the trades is actually just being taken away from the trades, rather than reforming the trades. But to get back to their distinction, just because you can be intellectual and still be a tradesman doesn't necessarily mean that you should be a professional academic or go on to higher education.

It is higher for a reason, right? So in that regard they are right to have some sort of an alternative for students. In so long as that's the sales pitch, namely, not everybody's meant to go to college. That's great. If it's a reaction saying the whole thing's buggered, I don't like that. That's quite dangerous. It starts to actually forego the principal life of the rational mind.

Grant: So, you did mention one thing about recovering higher education. Is it recoverable or is it time to build new institutions? Are the current institutions just so far gone that it's time to start new ones, which seems to be part of the thinking within new politics? At least, I get a little flavor of that, not specifically the higher education, but more generally building new institutions as opposed to trying to breathe life into the current institutions.

Jacob: Maybe some of that is that I feel like I'm in a rush - I just want the new thing to be here.

There’s a lot of politicking that's going on, and for me, I'll just claim it as a dispositional thing.  I would rather just start with a blank slate and build something new and see if it can be a lodestar for other people to shoot for.

Of course we're not going to hit the exemplar, but maybe we can inspire other good ideas that are going on. So that's a little bit of what's happening.

I do think that other institutions are convertible, but it's going to take that kind of entrepreneurial higher-risk mentality to be able to do it. I'm not just saying that - I really think it's possible. I mean, when you have so much money and so many assets at your disposal, you can reform almost anything.

You just have to be willing to go through the very difficult process of coming up with new models, especially when the ones that you're utilizing right now, in some regards, seem to be working. They're stable. People are coming, people are getting paid. That's stuff that isn't always fun to mess up. But I think it's kind of that in-for-profit mentality: keep changing, keep evolving or die. We should have a better motivation than money. What's your doubt to that though?

Grant: What's my doubt about reforming institutions?  I think being on the inside… I just think about large R01 institution, I'm not talking about Catholic institutions here…There's a tremendous amount of momentum. I think that there's a little bit of philosophical chaos in the sense that it's not quite clear what they're for.

I think folks who on the inside are real good critics of the institutions are weak against the sort of we need a structure. I just don't know how you would get a critical mass within a huge institution in order to right the ship. Now, with that being said, I do think that there are in many ways, opportunities to create shadow institutions within the institution that you can at least help a couple of kids be pulled out and educate them. I think about the Beatrice Institute that I'm a part of, and other things that we're doing. We’re working on something right now called the headwaters project, which is trying to put human flourishing at the center of the applied sciences. I think that those will bear fruit, but in terms of reforming the institution, we're a very small community.

Jacob: So you have some questions about whether or not you want to spend your life throwing sand into the gears or making new gears.

Grant: That's, I mean, that's exactly it. Or being at a place where the gears are already sort of functioning in a way that makes sense and is moving towards something.

Jacob: I know. People have to have the right end in mind. I just don't really believe that a university can truly be a university, be a place in which the heart and wisdom of the past is being handed to the next generation, without being Christian.

That means having to be docile and receptive to a tradition that's outside of ourselves. It's quite uncomfortable, right? But that means constantly converting and changing. With that caveat, I think they can do it.

Grant: Well, we'll see. So, talking a little bit more about the college, what's your ideal class size and acceptance rate at the college?

Jacob: You know, I don't know if I could say something about an acceptance rate. Currently what we did have was one hundred and thirty applicants for thirty spots this first year. So, an acceptance rate of twenty-three percent. It feels good because we get the best, we get to be selective.

But it really does depend more on whether the right people are applying as a whole rather than just having the numbers. I mean, the number games help, but the thing that I was so happy and grateful for in finding our first class is that it was a number of exceedingly bright kids.

I mean, the average standardized test score - which has some serious problems, and it would be great to get into that if you wanted to - was 90th percentile. But these aren't kids that are just coming from private schools that have all the tutors in the world. Some of them were coming from working-class backgrounds and just knocked it out of the park.

So in the first year, and I wonder how it's going to go in the future, we're pulling contrarians. I think as this idea kind of becomes more and more mainstream, as more institutions like ours come onto the scene, it's not going to be as contrarian of kids. So they're not going to be as high performing or as critical or as creative as this first class is seeing.

Now, in terms of the perfect number of students. There are, I think, more in terms of the external limiting capabilities. How much money are we going to have to raise every year? How many jobs can we get for our students every year? How much work is there to be done?

But maybe that's a disappointing lens of evaluation and it shows my financial patterns of thinking. I think more in terms of how many people can you know well? This would probably be the better way of evaluating a cohort. Of course, you have the magic number of 150 or 200, and so maybe an ideal cohort is something around 30 to 50, right? Because you have a capacity outside of just the cohort that you need and want as well. So, I'd say that's probably true. We're trying to hit a hundred for several other external reasons, but that's where we are.

Grant: In terms of mission and vision, would you say you're it is part of the mission to help revive working-class America? Or is it to revive the trades? Because those are potentially different things.

Jacob: Yeah, they are. I would say that our mission is much broader than that. In one sense, it is trying to teach students that the kingdom of God is not just some airy-fairy sentimental idea, but something that we need to help found, actually in reality here and now. The trades are in very wonderful terms a conduit for doing just that for a number of reasons.

We do see that there is a degradation that’s happening in the life of work. We've chatted about and we can continue to chat about the trades are between having a creative capacity in your work to having financial stability in your work, to have a real rootedness in your work, where you're not just moving around, to actually see the tangible difference in the world as a result of your labor. These are all things that few of us get to enjoy today and that it's just low-hanging fruit. And I don't actually think its a mistake that when God became flesh he chose the life of a tradesman for some of these reasons.

Grant: You mentioned this a little bit, but what's the typical profile of the students in the incoming class? Maybe you can make some archetypes.

Jacob: So within our first applicant pool, we had about ninety-three percent men who are applying. Within our acceptance, it is also 93 percent. These were students that came really from all over The United States. We missed an applicant from Alaska, which I was very disappointed by, but Hawaii came through. Our students did end up, quite accidentally, coming from Ohio and Pennsylvania primarily, which was quite nice for us to see in the end.

These are people that came from a varying degree of backgrounds and it's hard to name one just archetype. I'm thinking here that you have people whose parents were welders and then also in finance. You have people whose parents are in tech, but, also doctors and in healthcare.

So you really did span the gambit of professional backgrounds. I would say that  what you do find is exceedingly intelligent students. These are people when in founding the college, I had in mind: my colleagues in my classics and philosophy cohorts from undergraduate who ended up coming to senior year and saying: “I have no idea what I'm going to do. Maybe I'll just go off and become a teacher.” It seemed like the next step and the way that you get professionalized in America. I thought that there should be something better for them. I think we are saving quite a number of these students from really wanting to study the liberal arts without having a practical way of self-giving in the economy in mind.

 I think that is two thirds of the students, and the other third, they were just going to run off and join the trades anyways, maybe a little bit disappointed with that path because they did it very well in school and also just truly loved learning. Not kind of like a platitudinal sense, but really would have missed it in the formal sense. I'd say very active, hands on bookish men is primarily what we found.

Grant: Do you think more of your graduates from the college will end up owning their own construction businesses or getting PhDs?

Jacob: I do think that most of them will end up in the trades actually, but we'll have a, a solid handful going on another path.

I tell everybody that comes through, look, these are skills. Also, a certificate, your journeyman's card that you're never going to regret having. If you finish your undergraduate debt-free and then also have these skills, then you can fix up your house one day.

You're not going to regret that. The average call to a plumber is $350-$500. That's going to save you money every single time. It's not just that you're saving on undergraduate now, it's saving on things in the future. But more importantly, I'd say even that there are skills that you get to offer friends and utilize for building up those relationships with others.

I'm pretty much useless to my neighbors, but my buddy, Dave, he makes so many friends because he's just so blasted skilled at everything.  Those are going to be our students. I tell them not to necessarily monetize these skills that you're acquiring. These skills are always going to be an asset. They're never going to be a liability. Whether or not they're monetary is a different matter.

Grant: Other than education, do you offer any other services to your students? Housing, or cafeteria?

Jacob: We are providing housing.  It's a very different model. I'll mention that in a second. We're not providing food - we do not have a luxurious campus. It's quite a Spartan model. It's a series of buildings all scattered through downtown Stuebenville.

There are some elements of being able to utilize some of Franciscan universities offerings up on the Hill. In the early years, their library, which we're really grateful for, that's a wonderful partnership and generous of them. We are talking to them about their gym and how much our students can be involved in the social aspect of their life.

But in trying to keep our tuition point low, we had to have a series of things that we're sacrificing.  Administrative bloat is one of those. A marvelous campus is one of those. But it also enables us to really focus on the prime mission that we have set off to achieve and that we're not trying to extend our students’ adolescence. We're trying to make them grow up.

The housing model has that in mind. Usually for colleges and universities, housing is another revenue stream. What we're doing is forgoing our right as a landlord to charge rent, in lieu of demanding our students to keep up the house – to maintain it and to renovate it.

Of course these are very habitable, but like any house there's maintenance that you have to do. We want to make sure our students know what it takes to own a home. What are the utilities that you usually have to pay? What are the taxes that you usually have to pay? What about insurance? We have to pay that too. What about the regular maintenance? What's about just having dignity, not just taking care of something when it’s broken, but making sure it looks nice. Having a standard of living, not just for yourself but for your family.

Beause that's what a home principally is, a gift for your family. We're trying to make them grow up and that's one of ways we're trying to do that.

Grant: Is there any sort of residential life? It's like people living with the students to do any sort of that, that sort of offering of residential life or is the residential life their life?

Jacob: No, the residential life is their life. They're coming to learn and we're providing phenomenal professors to teach them, and phenomenal trade instructors to teach them. We do see that trying to create the social life of a student is actually taking away an opportunity for them to cultivate skill.

I want them to be able to begin to come up with ways of building community. We'll help them along, but we want them to be incorporated into our town, be incorporated into our parish. That means being incorporated into the revitalization effort of Steubenville. That means being incorporated into the prayer life of Steubenville, so that you're not just walking around in a domain in which you're meeting pretty much everybody that's your same age and your same class, but rather taking care of those younger than you, taking care of those much older than you, but also having the benefit of being taken care of by those just a little bit older than you and actually being a citizen.

Grant: So why is auto repair not one of your offered trades at this point?

Jacob: Capital expenses are really high for auto repairs next to others. Think about the amount of space that you need, the equipment that you need - it's really high. So that’s on the one hand. On the other is that its median earnings is actually lower than the other trades that we have on offer. Again, we just want to make sure that numbers didn't just work on our end and making fundraising a little easier on our end, but we primarily wanted to make sure that the numbers work on their end. However, we'd be interested in expanding to that one day.

Grant: So those are the two primary considerations when you're thinking about expanding into a particular trade? Whether the cap requirements that we need when they leave and the cap requirements that you need to establish it? What's the heuristic that you go through when you decide on a new trade to adopt?

Jacob: Yeah, great question. We're not at the point of adding new trades, so I won't be able to answer that well. I can only answer on how we decided on these two trades. These were the ones that we saw as having the highest capital gains. We’re putting an amount into it, and getting the highest returns for our students in their own lives.

But I would say that, looking forward, masonry is the next one rather than mechanics. There's a training that is relatively simple. You just need an open room. There's no equipment. It's not like carpentry where you need tons and tons of equipment. The other reason is that it is, it spans the gamut between contemporary and traditional building methods.

Most carpenters today may go quite a long while before they touch wood, but Mason's touch brick fairly often. They might be doing something by just putting up a façade, nothing structural. That's kind of disappointing, but at least they're working with that trade. The movement from going from facade to mass masonry is actually a transition that's eminently possible. As that demand shifts and changes, it's really quite intriguing and exciting as well. I'm particularly excited about preparing to add on this track in the future. We're coming up with ways in which we can engage in mass masonry builds in a way that's not going to break the bank with heating.

That's concern up here in Ohio. If your inside brick and your outside brick is the same wall, it's all connected. Then you're dealing with heat transfer during the winter. It's going to be expensive if you're not just chopping wood and having either a masonry heater or a wood stove – something like that.

Also some people are concerned about the comforts; the transition from the amenities of a modern stick build versus a traditional build. Now, of course, with the major benefit of a traditional build being that they're going to last longer than 80 years.

So it's cheaper, it's just not necessarily as comfortable. It's fun to get some extremely skilled and experienced masons all in one room debating what our own techniques are going to be. That's been a pretty surreal thing.

Usually it's me debating about metaphysics in a room or something like that. But now they're talking about heat exchange. It's brilliant.

Grant: How do you maintain the integration between the trades in the liberal arts tradition? I guess the risks would be small liberal arts college with hobbyist trades, right? Where you come and the trades become a hobby, right? And then the other concern is it's a trade school with the Catholic gloss. How do you maintain the integration?

Jacob: I would just say that, on the first front, that's a lot of what high school   trade shop programs are. Because in part there’s a legal limitation of how much can a high schooler do legally? How much is it safe to do and probably more than they think.

Grant:

Jacob: Yeah, easily more than they think. Also if this is just three hours a week, how far can you actually get if you're not giving serious time to it? Did mom and dad teach you some things? If you're being co-parented between school and home, that's hard to bridge that gap sometimes.

There's plenty of things to consider there. You really just need to rush into both to get rid of this false dichotomy and false anthropology that we've been holding onto. You can really do one or the other. Well, you know, in our system here  we have professors that are obviously concentrating in their fields, but are pretty active builders just for their own home, not professionally.

Our academic Dean, Andrew Willard Jones, was an HVAC apprentice, and worked as a carpenter for a while. He doesn't do that now, but he does everything on his house. (I'm working up to that.) Mike Sullivan, our president, took the other side of the emphasis by being a professional tradesman. He also, still has a very, very active intellectual life. He has a graduate degree in theology as well. Part of ensuring that our students grow up to be fully both, is actually having people that have cultivated on both sides for themselves. You can only give what you have, and thank God we've been able to hire the people that have it.

Grant: So how do you find folks that are the right fit to be a professor at the college?

Jacob: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that it would be interesting for you to have Andrew back and he can talk about the methodology that he's preparing.

There is such an overwhelming number of academics looking for academic jobs today. It's almost on the side of comical, right? We have a ton of people reaching out even before formal searches. What we've been doing instead is just very quietly tap somebody on the whose work we highly admire and ask them if they'd consider moving to the Rust Belt.

Without trying to make it sound like it's been a grand chess game and I don't mean to get out of an answer, but St. Joseph really has brought the right people here. That's been quite staggering. It feels like we're not the ones building this, he really is doing it.

 I'm not sure if I have a very profound or interesting answer to that, but it's quite an amazing thing that our head electrician has a graduate degree in history and, that this new carpenters we're hoping that this snag reads Dostoevsky for fun. To me, that kind of thing gives you hope for humanity - that these people have shown up.

I also think that just because we're really the only trade college in the world right now, people who kind of have bridged both sides are contacting us. If there was more competition in the field, they'd be contacting others rather than us.

Grant: You've just mentioned the protection of St. Joseph. Maybe you can't answer this question, but what is the biggest threat to the sustainability of your college?

Jacob: Yeah. The terror of demons – we really depend on him. The fears that are in my mind are not on the terms of trying to get trade instructors. We can do that. It's not on the side of getting great professors. We can do that. My concern is on having the jobs that we need. This might be one of the things that keeps us smaller than we want to become.

So it’s finding the balance to build the construction company that we want to build. Meaning, how do we obtain the jobs that we really want our students to do, so that they're not just going in three days a week doing drywall? You have to have those skills and also have to pay your dues as you move up,

But they actually just circulate through higher skilled occupations and projects that. It's going to give you a better launching pad. You know, those are things that are kind of on my mind administratively. And I think that that wouldn't   kill the program, but it would be something that would   make it less glamorous than, than it's set out to be right now with kind of the timber framing masonry projects that we have lined up.

Grant: So when you say jobs, you mean while they're in school, not when they emerge? I'm sure that your students aren't going to have trouble finding work after they emerge from school.

Jacob: No, there's not going to be problem at ever finding work. It's the quality of work that I find there's such a quantity problem in the trades today.

But there's also such a lame desire emerging from contemporary America where we just want box tomes. And I mean, even the rich, I mean, it's crazy. You go through these exclusive high-end neighborhoods and they're still just stick framed, and then they'll put a beautiful stone on the outside.

It's just embarrassing actually, but most people don't know to want anything better than that. We actually haven't informed our desires any more than that. I think our students who are so intellectual and high achieving are going to want to do more complicated builds and they'll certainly have that.

It's just right now at the stage of building lining it up. That's what's on my mind.    I don't really think that the numbers work really well, as inflation continues to go up and things get more expensive, raising tuition will inevitably  happen.

I hope it's years down the road, and we're taking some major steps to avoid.      avoid that, but that's something that I don't want to have to do. It feels like a threat or at least a very easy answer which I hope I can have the stamina to not be lazy and come up with something new.

Another one that's in my mind is that it’s a huge temptation for colleges to just rely on fundraising to be able to come up with a difference in numbers. I don't like that. I think that's lazy too, but it's also dangerous. It gets you away from being able to create something better. I feel like if you are putting a price tag on the product that you're creating, then you should be able to balance your books. That's a problem if you're not able to do that. So making sure that we don't fall into the trap of saying, “we could be raising millions of dollars every year, let's just do that instead.”

I think that we need to keep ourselves accountable. There’s good projects out there that don't have the ability of sustaining themselves. I think about aim women's center, which is a crisis pregnancy center across the street from us. They don't charge and it will literally just demand the alms of the Catholics and Christians in this town to be able to keep that going. Right.  we do like the almost should stay over there, shouldn't come for us just cause we're flashy or something like that, you know? We will have capital expenses down the road, how can we set up the system so that we're able to save up and pay for those?

That's something that I'm working really hard on, especially since as you know given our last conversation on this podcast, we're not going to be trading in the secondary market to make that happen. We have to rethink everything from the top to the bottom.

Grant: That's right. You can't do the million or the billion dollar endowment that is invested in the stock market.

Jacob: No, no way. I'm so excited to be working on an alternative. It's just a thrill, because Christ said that he came to make everything new and I think   trying to be docile to that very demanding charge is terrifying and exhilarating all at once.

Grant: Well, Jacob, I'm so grateful that you took some time to do this. This was really fun. I can't think of a better person to have as my first ever repeat guest.

I'm really excited about this. I have my son with me here in the studio and I can't think of a better place for him to go to college. So, I'm grateful that you're doing this both for my son and for our broader community. Maybe we'll bring you on for number three for whatever your next project is!

Jacob: Thanks for that. I appreciate it a lot. Take care.