Episode 62 Transcript

Grant: My guest today is Jacob Imam. Jacob is the executive director of New Polity, which is, and I quote, “a think tank located in Steubenville, Ohio focused on being a stable center for Postliberal ideas to be proposed, debated, corrected, and developed in environment of academic seriousness, and free from the constraints and ideological pressures of the modern university system.” Jacob's currently writing his doctoral thesis on theology and economics at Oxford as a Prize Scholar. 

Welcome, Jacob. I'm really excited to have this conversation. We're going to be talking primarily about theology and economics, but our conversation will cover a number of other topics as well.

Jacob: Hey, thanks so much. It's good to be with you. 

Grant: So I want to start out with a question that might feel a little off topic, but I actually feel like it might be relevant. What is the moral status of parish bingo night?

Jacob: That's an interesting question. Recently I was asked in a debate about an article in the catechism about the permissibility of gambling. Gambling is a tough one, because it's not just an economic enterprise. I'm sure that the catechism is not saying go carte blanche, here you go Las Vegas. It's something probably that's more in the familial setting, for fun, for friendship, rather than as a way of poaching people. That's something that I think needs to be weighed by a pastor in understanding what's going on with his flock, rather than just giving a general hard line on that issue.

Grant: As a good Catholic, I'm always looking for new things to talk about in confession, so I was really excited to hear your piece on investing, because now I can feel guilty about my 401k. So I really appreciated you giving me that opportunity to find something new to confess; I was sort of running out of things, and here I am now with my 401k. [laughter]

I want to talk a little bit about your work on Christianity and investing, particularly investing in the stock market. I know you question even that term “investing,” so we're going to get into that a little bit. I want to start with some philosophical and theoretical groundwork related to your deconstruction of stock owning as such. So first question: is what is the point, the end, the telos of investing?

Jacob: Pope St. John Paul II gives his definition of investing in Centisiumus annus, the encyclical that he wrote in 1991. He said there that to invest is to offer people a chance to make good use of their labor. In other words, it's a chance to dignify the labor of your neighbor. The idea here is that you are trying to build people up. He actually puts this conversation of investing right next to his conversation of charitable giving, and actually qualifies that term. Because all throughout the patristic era in the early Church, as well as all the way through to the modern era in encyclicals and the 1996 Catechism, there's this understanding within the Catholic tradition that if you have any funds beyond what you need—meaning what you need to use to provide for those under your care—then the remainder must go to the poor, to the indigent. This is based on a larger principle of the universal destination of earthly goods that we can get into or not—I'll let you decide on that—but within that principle, you have to ask the question, what about investing? Precisely because invested funds are, definitionally, superfluous funds. They're not funds that you need to use right now for your needs. They're not things that you're going to use even within an approximate future. So how do you handle that? Do those need to go to the poor as well? 

John Paul II says, well, they don't; but they still need to be utilized in a way that cultivates the kingdom of God, and cultivates a greater unity between peoples. Ultimately it's for the dignity of man that we invest and that has to be our lodestar, our guiding principle, when we do. 

Grant: So how did the point of investing change when institutions of commerce went from societies—societas—to  companies—how did that change the point of investing?

Jacob: What you're alluding to here is what the medievals would call a business partnership or a societas. This word was used generally in medieval Latin to refer to everything between friendships to also marriages—man and woman coming together as man and woman. But it also had a technical meaning as well. That defined a particular type of business relationship where you had a stans, somebody who invested money, and a tractor, in somebody that would a merchant that would go down, say to Portugal to buy wine and to bring it back to the community. Which you know, is the example that often is used in these medieval treatises, wine being not only the default drink—because you need some alcohol in there that kills some bacteria—but also because it is utilized for the liturgy itself.

So that's the model where a tractor was sent somewhere to purchase something, bring it back, and then they would split the profits between the two of them after all the merchant’s costs were covered. 

Raymond de Roover, who's probably one of the greatest economic historians of the last century, said that it would be a mistake to understand the stans—the investor—as just a sleeping partner. In fact, he was someone that would advise the merchant on what to do. And once he got back, he would be in the game, helping him sell whatever he had. He was actually invested in multiple senses. He was invested personally, as well as financially. His work was oriented to cultivating that. 

You can tell right here, the investment was not so much an investment in an entity, but rather in a person. And it was a joint activity. I think that's the best definition that we have for societas.

Now, there's not one way in which this sort of relationship logically came to culminate in the modern company, but we can tell a number of differences. When I purchase a company, I am purchasing a legal entity. I'm not part of an “us” anymore. I'm buying in it in the same way as I would buy a table, a chair, or a coffee. But what does that actually communicate? Well, what am I actually buying? What I’m actually buying is the labor of others; I am actually possessing the fruit of others labors. So in a real sense—and I say this hoping that it's not as provocative as the term may sound—there is a modern form of servility introduced in the ownership of a company that never existed in medieval relationships. 

Even you look right after Thomas Aquinas died, you find in the 1290s the form of a company arising, but that is a cooperative, actually. The Peruzzi company is a great example of this: everybody was an investor; everybody was laboring in the endeavors. You only got out what you put in, prorated to whatever that amount was. So it was a very different system. That understanding of owning someone's labor was just categorized as slavery or servitude. It wasn't categorized as fine in the way that we characterize it today. 

Grant: So in this sense, if investing is supporting the labor of another, in what ways is stock investing even investing at all? And you allude to this in your previous comment, but I'd like you to elaborate on that a little.

Jacob: The previous comment could actually still stand obviously for a private company; but when you're talking about stocks in publicly traded companies, then you get into some really hairy areas. Because when you're buying stocks, you're doing that on what's called the secondary market—what we colloquially call the stock market. So in this regard, you are not giving money to a company. You're not giving money to them for their ventures. You're rather giving that money to another person. In a sense, it's more akin to going to the grocery store and buying milk than it is actually investing in the labor of another. Rather than actually starting a grocery, you're just going and shopping at it, you know?

So that's the way that things are done. You're not making money through interest; you're not making a prorated set of profits through the [profits of a] company. Rather, you're making money through price indexing, depending on what stock can sell for at the market at the time. So technically speaking, it's not investing; it's speculating. 

Speculating is a pejorative term today. We talk about high risk investments—risk big to win big. But the technical meaning of speculation is buying something not to use it, but to hold onto it until the price has risen only to sell it later on. That could be very risky; it could also not be risky. Risk is not the telling factor on what distinguishes investment from speculation. It's whether or not there's value add and people involved that that really defines speculation. 

Grant: In terms of the Catholic Church, what is the particularly morally suspect issue with speculation as such? Because you equated it to purchasing milk. If it's synonymous with the act of purchasing milk, that seems not so morally suspect.

Jacob: That's probably a bad example, because the point of milk is [to] drink it. Think rather about scalpers at an NFL game or an MLB game. What they do is purchase a ticket from the ticket box, and then they go to the street once all the tickets are sold out and they mark up the price.

The question here is where's the value add? And that's the problem that you find St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Gregory, the Great, Pope St. John Paul II identifying with speculation. The reason why we're able to charge for anything—morally speaking—is because we have given some sort of real gift to someone else through our work, and so we are able to receive a communicative reward for that work. But with speculation, there is no work done. There is no value add; there is no greater benefit for the community.

That's the problem that the tradition has identified really since the beginning. You look even at St. Paul's Epistle to the Thessalonians, and he says, “if you don't work, you shall not eat.” Periergazomai is a word that he uses there to speak about busybodies. He identifies those who don't work and just are a leech on the community as what we translate as busybodies: periergazomai. You look through how that term is used in various periods in Greek history, and some dictionaries identify it as haggling in the market, or buying up goods in the market. 

It's this similar principle that's coming out. If you're not adding value to the community; if you're making money; if you're able to earn a living through enterprises that are very clever and very strategic, but not actually good for the community, then there's a problem. And that just gets away from the more fundamental point of actually loving neighbor, which is at the heart of Christianity.

Grant: What about this idea that if you invest in the stock market and you get a gain, you can then reinvest that into real things. You can give it to your church, or you can grow the economy—we know that the economy, as such, is part of the common good. I guess there's this question of the ends don't justify the means, but to a certain extent they could. Right?

Jacob: Could it? [laughter]

Grant: Well, I don’t know; I'm asking the questions here. [laughter]

Jacob: No, the tradition's pretty clear on this one too. St. Paul writes in Romans, “Let us not do evil that good may come of it.” Pope Paul VI says we can never claim that—and he uses very direct and very damning language in his encyclical Humanae vitae when somebody tries to put forward that utilitarian argument. And then Pope John Paul II wrote an entire encyclical, Veritatis splendor, on that very problem. 

The answer is we can't, and the reason is clear too. We must always seek after the good, and we must cultivate the good through the good. So when it pertains to being able to take the funds received from investing and use them for a good enterprise or charitable giving, it does fall prey to that. But also, we have to ask the question of why would we ever actually invest? What is the good that's done in investing that would make the act itself worthwhile?

That's actually a really big question, and it might not actually come across all that clear at first because somebody said, well, the good is getting the money. Yeah, I understand; that's the reason why you want to do that. But what is the good of the act itself?

If I invest in a coffee shop, say, then I can actually see the fruits of my investment. I can see people gathering. I can see people enjoying the coffee. I can see the communal events hosted. I can see people actively enjoying what it is I'm putting my money behind.

But if there's not a clear answer to why am I speculating in this way—what is the act itself that's good—then we're doing it just for the sake of profit, and a Christian could never do anything just for the sake of profit. God's enemy mammon is just too against us there. 

Grant: So would you consider it morally permissible then to participate in IPO, wherein the actual cash gets transferred to a company in order to expand and grow?

Jacob: It's a great question. That is a very long conversation about IPOs. There's a number of questions about it. One is when you are a book runner for an IPO, then your ultimate purpose is to sell those stocks later on. And so while you might at first have a promissory of dividends, you often don't for companies that are just becoming public, because they are in an early season of hyper growth. And so those early companies usually don't give out dividends. Then you are actually engaging or even aiding in the process of speculation going on.

The other question is just growth rates. IPOs really do enable a company to grow at an exponential rate, and there's a question about that and a question about globalization that I think we need to consider before we just say that's good. But the other thing is that once you are a public company, the game's up. Your main goal for your company is then always to have continual growth. And that means that the original mission of what you're producing and why you're producing it is not always the focus. Facebook could become Meta—it's just whatever pumps up your value; whatever pumps up the price your stocks are trading for. And often that comes through share buybacks, which is the main technique that companies are utilizing today to boost their stock price. They're using their profits to increase their stock price, which does not communicate or really correlate to the real benefit and the real growth that the company is engaged in. 

Just look at Apple. From 2015 to 2021, their stock price quadrupled, and yet their profits were the same. It invites more financial techniques for companies to utilize that put off innovation. That's a huge problem. I hope all of us recognize that major innovations are not occurring at the same rate as they were even 40 years ago. And in addition to that, you have a wider gap between rich and the poor that occurs. And that's just one of these defacto things that we have to come to terms with. 

Grant: So if you think about the financial manager of a diocese, what’s the justification for speculation in the stock market? Is it just that they don't see it as speculation? Or they just haven't thought it through? Or they've considered it and disagree with you? What's the justification of your average financial manager of a diocese?

Jacob: There's a number of responses. A lot of them just have not thought about it at all. This is just what we've been doing for decades now. And so if it's just what we're doing, it can't really be all that wrong, right? I think that's a major thing, and I just have a ton of patience for everybody who's in that situation. I was in that situation. That was me. It just was not a question on our radar. So that's, I think, a big side of it. 

I think this question of ethical investments that has started to percolate in recent years, it's a good direction to go; but again, we're only considering the content of our portfolios and not the form of speculation or of the stock market itself, which needs to be questioned.

But what else could they say? Well, they could say something like—and you hear this actually a lot amongst folks at the Acton Institute—well, work actually has always been the justification for earning a return on your profit as well as risk. And it's right. That's true. Work and risk are always the keys. And they say that there's intellectual work being done, and there's always risk. But then there's the still the same question: yes, there's always intellectual work being done; but that's equating work with almost expending of energy. So you can charge for almost anything at that point, and that doesn't seem right. 

And in fact, it's not right. There's work in arranging a prostitution ring. There's work done in running large scale casinos. You'd be out of your mind and downright evil to say that those things are okay. I like to make that analogy to studying: studying is good, but there is studiositas and there's curiositas, a virtue and vice in the tradition and studying. Studiositas is really to try and be docile to the ways of the world so that ultimately you can be able to declare truth, to understand it better. It ultimately comes back to the common good—to help people see Christ's face more clearly, and then thus to be able to love him more dearly. But in curiositas, that's manipulative; you're doing it kind of as an autoerotic practice almost, ultimately for manipulation of the world, or your own pride of place within it. It's not for the common good. The same problem faces work. 

The other issue is risk. They say, look, in the medieval tradition, risk actually did allow for you to earn something back on your investments. And I have to say, absolutely. They're completely correct. But risk for the medievals—and this is very clear in their treatises—risk for them was not a principle. It was rather a sign. 

So what does that mean, that it's a sign and not a principle? Risk revealed true ownership in an enterprise. When you handed that money over to the tractor, to the merchant, to whoever was starting a new venture, your risk revealed that you were totally engaged with that person. You had formed a true societas so that his loss was your loss, his win was your win; and every time he spent a dollar, it was as if you were spending that same dollar. So risk was a sign of that principle of true ownership. But what you find in Renaissance and onwards is that risk actually was just a principle itself. But that's a non revealing principle as far as I can tell, because everything in life has risk. 

Grant: This is actually a really good moment to switch gears a little bit, because I was actually going to ask you in the next set of questions about this concept of ownership. Does holding stock in a company comprise actual ownership of the company? You alluded to that just now, but I'll ask you directly.

Jacob: It's a great question, and a tough one, in some ways. I like to refer back to the Venerable Fulton Sheen, who was just such a beautiful man. I love him so dearly.

Grant: I have my Fulton Sheen t-shirt on right now.

Jacob: No kidding. Look at that. So your hero and mine was asked this question once. I should preface this with, what an amicable guy, you know? I mean, he is just so lovely; it's easy to love him. And yet he was never scared of the truth. So he wrote once that “Defenders of capitalism, sensing evil in their system,” like to defend it by saying it has greater, more widespread ownership than ever, pointing to the fact that nobody owns more than 4% in this major corporation that is owned by baseball players and teachers, and heck even babies sometimes. But then he turns and he says, is that real ownership? Everybody recognizes it as it pertains to the farmer with his horse—that he not only has the right to use this horse and to ride the horse, but he also has a responsibility for caring for that horse. As it pertains to stocks, we often forget that the same principle should apply. So does it apply?

Most of the time, 99% of the time, it does not. We do not have responsibility over the companies that we are investing in, especially if it's a mutual fund, we have no ability to do so at all. We've surrendered that right completely. If we're just buying individual stock in a company, we rarely get to the place where we have any say over it. You can refer to a worker and you say, okay, there's a good, special exception there. Or somebody that's on the board, if you own a significant percentage amount. But there you have a difficult problem where it actually doesn't track the natural outlay of ownership.

Pope John Paul II—and not just him; I could refer back to St Bonaventure who wrote the preeminent treatise on this in the middle ages as well—understood ownership not to just be a legal and juridical matter, but a natural and metaphysical one. The more that you work the earth (or whatever enterprise it is), the more that you cultivate it, the more it starts to be impressed with your image and likeness, in the same way that God can claim ownership for the whole universe, because in some ways it reflects his likeness. Nothing is perfect—it’s humanity, of course. But we have this long tradition in the Catholic intellectual tradition that understands that everything in some ways reflects God.

So if ownership has this metaphysical backbone to it, then it builds up slowly in correlation with the work that we're expending, the cultivation that we are engaged in. But if we're just buying up ownership of a company, of the stock, then there's not that natural progression in ownership that really demands our responsibility. 

I like to also make the joke that if I go into Ford to see the long assembly lines because I'm a proud owner of stock, I'm not going to be welcomed as an august owner of the company; I'm going to be dragged out by security. Even if you take a look at the bankruptcy laws, I don't even have to get informed if my company goes under. I don't even get a natural right—I have to fight for getting any little bit of the leftover assets. The sense in which I own is very ephemeral, I would say.

Grant: Another concern that you have with stock owning is this question of the evils committed by companies that people own, but at the same time, we don't really own them. So are normal shareholders that own a couple stocks in Ford or Apple or whatever company, are they then morally culpable for the evils committed by those companies if they don't have any say over what happens anyway?

Jacob: There's a couple of different ways of answering this. The first thing that I would like to say about it is that at the very least it causes a scandal. So last year it was discovered that Pope Francis, who's technically in control of the Vatican bank, was investing in companies that performed abortions and created abortifitients. A lot of money in the Vatican bank was invested in these companies. Now, what did that do? Well, that caused a considerable amount of scandal for the church. And that's a serious consideration, actually; causing scandal can be a sin in our tradition, and it's something to be avoided. It actually is the vice that opposes the virtue of beneficence, according to St. Thomas. So the first thing that we have to do is avoid scandal. 

There is a question, of course, that people would not be underwriting IPOs if they didn't know that somebody would buy it later. So in some way you are participating or giving justification to somebody giving that original money to the company in the first place. And then there's also another predicament of the very distant material cooperation, where companies can get credit lines of credit as long as the stock price is getting pushed up.

So do we have meaningful ownership? No. There's just enough of an attachment there to make it bad, and not enough on the other side to say that look, I'm doing meaningful work if it was a good company. 

Grant: Obviously you're functioning out of the Catholic tradition, and I do not believe that we need to argue from a secular position. I think that our justification for why we shouldn and should not do things as self-sufficient. But at the same time, we are engaged in the public square to a certain extent. Have you had conversations with your sort of run of the mill fund manager, guy on Wall Street? How do your ideas sit with them? Is it just blank stares, or does what you're saying make any sense outside of appealing to papal encyclicals?

Jacob: Well, not all of this does just come down to matters of morality. The National Bureau of Economic Research did a long study and found that from 1989 to 2017, there was real equity growth in the States of $34 trillion, and yet only 25% of that was attributed to the production of real goods and the performance of real services. The majority was engaged financial techniques and price indexing, with share buybacks as one of the things they majorly focus on in the article. 

This is fundamentally a moral issue. I mean, everything is a moral issue; whatever we do, it's either a virtue or a vice. There's no in between this black or white, in some cases. But it does [also] give a problem that our economy is actually just getting worse. And we see this quite clearly around us. Our food is getting worse. Our buildings are uglier. Their longevity is certainly waning. Our clothes are cheaper. Look, if food, shelter and clothing aren't doing as well as they once did, then we’ve got to change something.

And more than that, we actually do have a significant breakdown of the family in society as well—an increase in anxiety, an increase in antidepressants, an increase in suicide. These are major problems because work is not as dignified as it once was. We are more cogs in a machine than creative performers in the economy. This is a major concern not just to Catholics, but it should be a major concern to just about everybody. 

When I share this, people are concerned; but we also are deeply in love with our portfolios. It's a way of getting easy money. And the fact is that it has become so normalized for us, that we think that we're going to be impoverished, that we're going to be destitute, that we're going to be on the streets without having our portfolios anymore. 

That was a little bit of my worry. Actually—what am I saying?—that was a huge worry of mine as I was anxiously, over my computer, asking the question, should I divest? My wife likes to mock me for that, because it really was quite painful. But out of it, I feel so free. And I've talked to so many that now have divested as well, and that's the recurring thing that I hear from everybody. I just feel free. I'm not calculating all the time. I'm not worrying about the future all the time. I'm cultivating my family in a better way. I'm cultivating my friendships in a better way. We're more bound together in love, and that is our focus. So anxiety levels have just dropped tremendously, and praise God for that.

Once you are out of the rat race and out of the system [you see] that, Hey, It's actually okay over here. It's actually okay to be out of the market. I'm not destitute, I'm not on the streets. Am I poor? Of course I am. Am I happier? You bet I am.

Grant: This brings us to a really practical question. Say for example, someone had $300,000 or $400,000 in a 401k, hypothetically speaking, and wanted to pull the money out. What would you tell them to do with it? And also recognizing the fact [that] there's major financial implications for divesting early from the 401k. What would you tell 'em to do?

Jacob: What age are they? 

Grant: For example, they are 42. This is all very hypothetical. 

Jacob: So I say at 42, you’ve got 17 years before you're able to take that money out without penalty. And even still, when you take that money out, you're going to feel hindered to take that money out in large quantities, precisely because you're going to get taxed at whatever income you're at, inclusive of that money, if we’re talking about the traditional 401k here. So in that regard, it's not going to make you feel free to wait.

And look at all the good that you could do now. So yes, you're going to get that 10% hit, and you're also going to get taxed at the income that you're at right now. So you're going to lose money; but you're going to gain so much freedom, not just in the question about anxiety and all that, but you actually get to start using that money.

That's a significant sum. If you had $400,000 in the market, with all the tax that you're going to get hit on that, you're looking maybe at something like $270,000 out of that, inclusive of whatever you're making this year—let's say it's 60 or something like that. That's a significant hit; that's nothing to scoff at. So at that point you have to focus more on the fact that you've gained $250,000 or thereabout, and not actually [that you’ve] lost whatever you had, because that was never money that you actually had creative possession over in the first place. Look at what you've gained, not what you've lost. 

Grant: More practically, what would you tell me to do with it right now? If I have $250,000, what would you tell me to do with it?

Jacob: I'll tell you like a few things that we're involved in. We live in a dilapidated rust belt town in the middle of nowhere, one of these small cities. I'd say about three quarters of our downtown is boarded up. There's very little that we have here. And we want to have a stable center to begin growth. One of the great things about our town is that when you don't really have anything, you have relationships; you have great bonds of charity with one another. So we're trying to start to build up our economy in a way  so as not to lose those bonds along the way.

So we're trying to cultivate a kind of a hub in downtown, and that's a brewery. We have two amazing guys who worked at breweries before, moved into town to start the brewery. One's been here for quite some time now. It's just so exciting to see them fully alive with great ideas—not just great recipes—for how to cultivate the community in a better way. 

We have the mystery cycle plays that we want to perform in the brewery, which are the liturgical plays of medieval Christendom that actually brought the liturgical calendar to life by being enacted—and not just in the halls of the church, but actually in the public square, bringing religion to the floor. There's things like that. Obviously I love their business model. I think it's a thing of beauty, and we're really excited to help this thing get going. 

There's a project, a new film on Blessed Karl of Hungary, that I'm really excited about, of the same ilk of the movies of Beckett or A Man for All Seasons. I think movies are something that have kind of destroyed the American mind. My wife and I don't have a television. But they also do serve some sort of remedial tool; and certainly to be able to screen a saint is something that I'm personally excited about. Some people aren't excited about that; but it's phenomenal people whose labor I want to dignify, and a message that I think will really help a lot of people. So that's one thing. 

We're considering investing in a roofing company right now, getting real people to work again, using their hands in a highly skilled craft, where you're not just putting on gross asphalt tiles, but nice slate again, and learning how to do these sort of things.

So just because you can't invest in the market, it doesn't mean you can't invest in real businesses. Obviously, I think for a lot of us, we have to also come to terms with, how much money am I actually putting in investments versus how much am I just giving away? And so far we've tried to kind of play at a 50/50 principle of giving away half to charity of what we're giving to towards investments. Again, kind of at that necessity principle: how much more do these charitable enterprises need versus our friends’ labor being dignified? And that's just a real question. We might not be doing it right, but I think we're at least stumbling in the right direction. 

Grant: I've noticed that you're concerns about 401ks are not relegated to the morality of stock investing, but more broadly to saving for retirement. You've had some critical pieces about even the concept of saving for retirement. How do you understand the concept of financial stewardship that I've seen in a number of responses to your work on saving for retirement? The idea that it's irresponsible not to save for your retirement, because it's taking good care of your money, and also planning for your future and planning for your children's future; that it's just a way to be careful with your money, such that you don't end up being destitute when you're 65 years old and you don't have an undue burden on your children?

Jacob: It is a great question that so many of us have, because so many of us have been trained to think that way. And I just don't think that's a proper way to think. But let me back up and try and give more reasons than just that answer there. The kind of the default mentality for us in retirement is to be with our kids. That's just the way that God designed it, is that we are going to be, at the end of our life, needing help. We came into the world that way. None of us could survive if it wasn't for our parents originally nurturing us, raising us. It takes us a very long time to be self-sufficient as human beings, and our life is actually bookended in that same way, oftentimes, where we do need help at the end to take care of ourselves.

What money does is not enable you to be independent. You’re not independent. You're just paying someone you don't know to take care of you. You're always going to be taken care of by somebody; but it's either someone that you know and you love, or somebody that you don't know and you pay. This is a major principle of St. Thomas Aquinas, that money takes the place for where love lacks. I can either pay my friends to help me move my piano, or I could pay a moving company to do that. We all have a million examples of this in our life. And that's the same question as it pertains to retirement.

Also in retirement, we have to make sure that we realize that we're not just taking a 20-30 year vacation. John Paul II says that work is fundamental to humanity, which means that if we give up on work, we're giving up on the cultivation of true humanity. That hits hard. That's tough to come to terms with; it's not fun to hear at first. But I think many of us have examples of this, where we see our family and our friends retiring and they just become more sluggish. They're not as sharp. They're not as fun. They're more vicious. And that hurts to see your loved ones go through that. 

You also see this in Sacred Scripture as well, when Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool. He has a bumper crop, and he tears down his storehouses and he builds bigger ones and says to himself: soul go at rest, because you have all that you need. I mean, is that not a story of retirement? I don't need the work anymore. I've stored up enough that I need. But what does Jesus say to him in the parable? What does God say to him in the parable? You fool. You fool! You don't want God to tell you, you fool! That's not a good thing to be called. 

So this is a major concern for us in the pattern and order of our society, where you work really hard, you try to retire around 65, between your 401k, your pension, and your social security. You go on a vacation just to, as someone recently said, pay, play and pray. That's not what we're designed for. We're designed for so much more. And part of the way that we begin to rebuild our great country is by building the family back up. Even the guy who created the 401k, Ted Benna, bemoaned the fact that 401ks actually started to break down the family—which is quite compelling to hear from his authority and from his vantage. 

Christ calls us to something more. I know not everybody listening to this podcast is a Catholic, or even a Christian; but that call is there for all of us. God himself has created us, and he's created the order of the world in a particular way, and rebelling from that order is not going to free us more. It's going to hamper us. It's going to cause more anxiety. And leaning into it is going to indeed make us happier, because that's what he designed us for. 

Grant: That sort of claim is so countercultural that I suspect even my own kids, at their very young age, have internalized the fact that mom and dad are supposed to take care of themselves after they retire. And having that conversation with your kids after they've been trained for 10 to 12 years thinking that we could take care of ourselves in retirement, I think it would be a hard conversation.

Jacob: It is in some ways. My mom, she'd say this jokingly and seriously, when I was growing up; she had the name of the retirement home that she wanted to go and move into in mind. And when she forgot something, she'd make the joke: just remember, this is where I want you to send me. A few years ago, I had to look her in the eye and say, I'm not sending you. I love you way too much. I want to be by my mom. I want to live with her. I want to take care of her. It took her a little bit to get used to that, because you don't want to be a burden on your kids. But gosh, it's just an honor to be able to get to do that for your parents. 

We played some role in helping my godfather die well some years ago, and that was certainly one of the greatest honors of our life. One of the most horrible—I loved him so much, to see him go. But at least you never have regrets at the end. And also I would say, at least for me, is that there is kind of that last injection of humility in your life, when—after living decades, being self-sufficient, being a leader in many ways—now you have to be taken care of again … that helps us to prepare for death well, to be able to have the humility we need to be able to see Christ more clearly. 

Grant: My opinion on this changed quite a bit after reading George Saunders’ short story “The 10th of December.” This is essentially the story where a man has cancer. He goes out to kill himself. He finds a boy fallen through the ice. He pulls a boy out of the ice, realizing that if he had killed himself, he would've deprived his wife and children of the great honor of being able to care for him as he died. And that was very chastening for me to think about—what I owe to my children in allowing them to care for me as I'm dying. 

Well, Jacob, we're coming at the end of time. I know that you have an international flight to catch, so I don't want to make you late, but I really appreciate you coming on and talking with me. It's been a lot of fun, and I'm so grateful for the work that you and Andrew and Marc are doing in Steubenville, and I'm really grateful for your faithfulness to the kingdom of God. I hope that we have a chance to continue this conversation, because it's been a lot of fun.

Jacob: Well, thanks. I really enjoyed it myself, and we will get you over here at one point. 

Grant: Awesome. That'd be great. Thanks so much, Jacob. 

Jacob: All right. God bless you. Bye.