Ep. 1541 - Every Young Man Who Feels Lost Should Listen To This

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Joined today by Dr. Jacob Imam, who's a writer, speaker, founder of the College of St.
Joseph the Worker and a guy who talks a lot about an issue that I focus on a lot as well over the years, which is why I was interested in sitting down with him. And that's the issue of masculinity in the culture and specifically why so many young men seem to have lost drive and ambition that used to define, you know, being a young man.
And how do we get that back? How do we reclaim it? So Dr. Jacob

and Mom, thanks for joining us. It's a pleasure.
You know, when I was a young man, which I don't know if I qualify anymore, but when I was in my early 20s, I could think about that time for me being really just being overflowing with ambition, I can remember. And I'm still much the same way, but especially at that time and just kind of working obsessively towards my goals.

But then you look at, and it's not the case, we don't want to generalize too much, but many young men today, and I don't know if this is just me being an old fuddy-duddy, but I don't see that as much in many young men. There doesn't seem to be that same drive, that same just like, I need to get out there and do something.
Have you noticed that? And what do you attribute that to? I think it's impossible not to notice that today. I mean, everybody from the Karens and the bureaucratic white liberals that scream at young men for being incompetent and worthless, everybody too, the Jordan Petersons who are actually giving them something positive, a constructive way forward, is noticing that and saying that.
And obviously there's multi-layered reasons for why this is. But no doubt a huge part of it is that there is no activity of young people today.
You only have a character in your soul from the actions that you take. Characters comes from that Greek word that means like an engraving and a mark.
The way that your soul actually has a particular character about it, a particular identity to it, is because you've actually engraved it with your actions. And what have we handed young people today? We've handed them phones.
We've handed them computers. We've told them to sit in their rooms functionally through our marketing and our advertisement.
Just stay there. Don't move.
Don't do anything. And so I think that the shape of their bodies is much like the shape of their souls.
It's very much blob-like, undefined, not all that interesting, right? And so part of the resurrection of masculinity is certainly going to have to come through doing real things, transforming the world so that it visibly looks different. We just haven't even taught them that that's a good thing to do or how to achieve it.
How do we get to this point? How do we end up with the blob-like souls? The blob souls. How did we get to having blob souls? Yeah, how did that happen? Yeah.
I think that there's a problem when you don't have a load start. You don't have a compass of what you're actually trying to shoot for and achieve.
And I firmly believe that if holiness is not that lodestar, if that's not your north star, then you're going to keep going through these mindless cycles where one generation after the next looks up at their dad and say, what on earth were you doing? And their children are going to be just as right and justifiably saying, you were wrong. This was silly, just as much as they were of their fathers.
I see this also in so much in young men today that they are searching to even have an identity. I think this is something that screams out everything from them trying to dress in a certain way or post in a certain way.
Even their taking on of a certain ideology, whether that be left or right or a certain brand within, is a way in which they're trying to be a person, have an identifiable mark about them. But you don't get an identity just by claiming one.
The only way you ever get an identity is by giving of yourself to something real, to something greater than yourself. It's only at that point that you ever start to have a character that's worth having.
Do you think a man, a young man, needs to get married and have kids in order to, do you think that's a necessary component? I think much of the time. Yeah.
I think it helps tremendously. You definitely have to have some vocation that is pulling you out of yourself.
I mean, when your kid screams at 2 AM, it's not like, great. I'm so happy that I'm giving myself right now.
Right. I mean, that should be my mentality.
But you didn't choose the moment of giving yourself.

That's what I'm trying to say, right?

You don't plan out, you know, I'm done with work at five,

and I'm going to plan out the next two hours of serving at the soup kitchen.

As great as that is.

You know, it's when you're in a true relationship with somebody

that you don't get to determine when you are called to give of yourself or not. And that's what marriage provides.
And that's what kids provide better than anything in the world, I think, at that. What do you think about that? Yeah, well, I agree with your take on it.
And that's one of the problems with saying that, as you point out, that, well, you don't need to, you know, in order to be in service to others, you don't need to get married and start a family. Well, there are vocations.
The priesthood is one. So the way that I look at it is that every man is called to fatherhood.
I think every man is called to fatherhood. And for the vast majority of men, that will take on the literal biological sense.
For some, there's the religious life. But I don't think any man is called to just live entirely for himself.
Now, of course, the pushback that you hear is on the family piece and the marriage piece specifically is, well, it's a rigged game these days, you know,

getting married in particular. It's rigged against men.
The family court system is stacked against you. You go out and get married and who knows, your wife ends up being a terrible person, cheats on you, takes the kids, takes all your money, and your life is left in ruins.
And so why even do it? Why take the risk? You know, you're a sucker if you take the risk, this is what I hear. So how do you justify being a sucker and going off and having kids and being married? You know, I just think that's the most ridiculous thing that anybody could possibly say.

I mean, it's not even a real thought.

It's like, okay, great.

You don't want to have a life of love at all?

Great.

That's wonderful.

This is why there's no sexual, like real sexual attraction today, I think as well, right?

Because all, like what you just said, it was like a whole list of calculations.

You know, I got to check the box.

I got to do my background check on this woman. Like, see what she's done.
Like, what's her resume? I mean, mainly it's girls doing this to guys, right, too. It's saying, you know, how much is he making and stuff.
That's not talking about getting swept off your feet. I mean, at that point, you're just talking about research, right? But if you really want to have the opportunity to love someone, like truly give yourself and act in that act, become somebody, finally, like become somebody yourself, then that has to have serendipity.
It has to have risk. You know, being swept off your feet is before a person that stands out.
I mean, I think about the line from the Song of Songs, when the woman's singing that like an apple tree amongst the trees of the forest is my lover, right? I mean, there's a million different trees out there, but there's only one that stands out to that person, not necessarily to everybody, but to that person. I was like, great.
If you don't want to have anybody know you as standing out amongst the trees of the forest and go ahead and be lonely, you'll also be a waste on the rest of society as well, by the way, because you've never practiced how to be charitable in this perfect opportunity to, so that you'll never be able to take that habit and to actually die for something great one day either. And you're also, you're embracing a life of misery in order, because you're afraid that you're, that you'll be miserable.
Oh, you know, and isn't that the larger problem that's going on? At the root of all tyranny is fear, right? And I think this is a big problem of why men do feel humiliated today. I mean, we talk about men being purposeless.
I think they're also just being humiliated. Talk about those Karens, talk about the Jordan Petersons, but it's not just those people that are saying it.

Everybody knows it. I mean, a guy does not need to be told by somebody else that he's a wimp.
He already knows that he's a wimp. He's lazy.
He's sloppy. He's porn addicted.
You know, he's a joke. You know, he knows that about himself though, as well.
And in part, because there's so much fear. Like he has actually been dominated by the world and all of its interests over and against him.
And he's not able to show any resilience against them. I mean, I think about this, you know, in part because of what we're trying to do to like, actually, how do we get a guy out of that situation? Like, how do we raise him up out of that state? You know, and a large part of it is going to have to be he needs to fight against everything that's opposing him.
I mean, think about corporate interest today. I mean, corporate interest wants the guy to be lazy.
He wants the guy to have no skills. He wants to be, have the guy not know how to defend, guard and protect other people.
Why? Because then that guy needs to spend more money on stuff. He can't do it himself.
He can't do his plumbing. He has to pay somebody to do that.
You know, he can't grow his food. He has to pay somebody else to do that.
You know, he can't educate his kids. He has to have somebody else do that, right? I mean, take whatever scenario you want.
If you're being set up in the system of corporate interest where people say, you know, it's more profitable for you to be skill-less than not, it's not going to be a lot of motivation. I mean, everything in society is then going to be oriented to keep him where he is.
He needs to fight back. He needs to stop being afraid.
Shouldn't he also, and I want to get your reaction to this because you talk about the fear, and fear is natural. There's always going to be fear.
It's whether or not you let it dominate you. And also, I think you have to be willing to take risks.
And I think that's, in my opinion, that's one of the major roles that a father can play in the life of his sons in particular, also his daughters, but in particular his sons, is to teach them how and show them how to take good risks. Now, there are foolish risks that a person could take, but there's also good risks, and a man has to be willing to take risks.
So when I hear from young men, well, if I get married, here's the long list of awful things that might happen as a result. How do I know that's not gonna happen? If I go and get married to this woman and we have kids, how do I know that 15 years from now, she's not going to go and run off with some guy she met at the gym and leave me in ruins? And the answer, of course, is that, well, there's a whole lot you can do to guard yourself against that.
There's a whole lot. It's not just a roll of the dice.
When people talk about the divorce rate is whatever, they claim 40%. It does not mean that if you get married that your chance of getting divorced is 40%.
That's not how the statistics work. There's a lot you can do to guard yourself against it.
But how do you know for a fact those terrible things aren't going to happen? You don't. You don't know that for a fact.
Anything good you do in your life, it's possible. You can't look in a crystal ball and see exactly what's going to happen to you over the next 50 years of your life.
There's always a risk. And when you give yourself to someone who you love and you give your life to them completely, there is a risk.
Of course there is. But nothing good or worthwhile has ever been achieved by anyone ever in life without taking a risk.
And so that seems to be the breakdown with a lot of young men. It's like when you, yeah, yeah, okay.
Yes, it is a risk, but if you're not willing to take any risk with your life at all, you will literally never do anything. Yeah, that's certainly true.
I think one other question for them to ask, if they're like seriously in this predicament and they're not just lying to themselves and thinking about how to think about risk, you have to ask yourself the question, if this fails, was it still a good thing for me to do, right? Did I become a better person for just trying it out, right? And, you know, of course you have to do your calculation, figure, you know, as much as is, you know, warranted about figuring out who this person is that you're marrying or, you know, building your financial model, making sure that the numbers make sense before you take the leap into a new startup or something like that. But, you know, ultimately you have to say, would I regret the time? You know, would I become a better person even if this flopped? And I think that's like the ultimate litmus test.
Everything else is absolutely true. You can't get through life without risk.
But that's how you have to decide whether or not it's a good one. Today, the beverage aisle looks a lot different than it used to.
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It's one of the great things about having kids is that it's one of those things that once you do it in life and you have a child and you love your child,

you can never really fully regret. You can't regret.
There's a lot of things I did in my life prior to having kids that, a lot of mistakes that I made. I can't really live in regret about anything because I have my my kids you know and uh so even to your point if you go off and you start a family and you have children even if something goes horribly wrong and there's other ways it's not just oh your wife might leave you maybe someone gets sick maybe a child dies god forbid um but it's one of those things that once you've experienced it, you can never really regret it.
Because you're experiencing something that's so objectively good that even if things go off the rails somehow in some unforeseen way, you can't have regret. Yeah.
Yeah, no, we would call you a monster if you regretted that, actually. Yeah.
Going back just specifically to work for a minute, because the pushback on that that I get all the time when I talk about this, and I'm sure you've heard the same thing, talk about the value of work. You need to go out there and work.
And life, life is work anyway. And if you want to live, you have to work.
And if you're not going to work, it, only way to live and not work is to basically live off of someone who is working for you. Either way, work sustains life.
What I hear is, hey man, you know, all you're telling young men to go out and be wage slaves and to be corporate pawns and to live the, to just embrace this life of meaningless drudgery. Uh, I want more out of life.
What else are they going to do? Okay, well, I mean, look, it is interesting. If you go back and take a look at the ancient world and what they all thought the creation of the world was like, they all said the same thing.
I mean, think about the Atrahasis, which is like the Babylonian myth. It's like bestseller in the ancient world.
Like if you were a young Christian kid growing up today, your parents probably read to you the beginning of the Bible. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
If you were a good Babylonian boy 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, you were being read this myth, which opens up, in the beginning, the gods and not the men bore the load and handled the drudgery. They're complaining about work right from the beginning, right? And you look around at pretty much any ancient myth, and they all say the exact same thing.
Like, work is a bear. It's a drudgery.
It literally kills our desire to be free. It kills our ability to be free.
And then you go and look at the Bible, which is unique in the ancient volumes of creation myths, when it says that before the fall, God gave the gift of work to man. And actually does so right next to the gift of marriage before the fall as well.
Subduing and having dominion over the world is said right next to be fruitful and multiply. And you ask the question, okay, well, what's the reason for those two things being connected? You start there before even moving to why work is a joy and not a drudgery.
Well, you think about marriage and you start with something that is material, like your bodies, right? And children emerge from it. You know, just as you're saying, just something objectively good.
I mean, the spiritual emerges out of it a new soul, right? It's something that cannot just be reduced to pure nature. And then look over at the side of work.
Well, every work begins with a thought. You know, if you want to build a house, you first imagine the house in your mind, you first plan it out.
That's not reducible to pure matter either. A thought is a spiritual reality, right? It's a spiritual phenomenon.
And then you manifest it in the world. This is the original glory that is revealed in work, next to marriage, no less, that it actually is a way of bridging

heaven and earth together. And when God commands Adam in Genesis to till and to keep

the garden, he's using words that are more often used in the Old Testament,

abad v'shamar, to speak about the Levitical duties of the priests, that they are supposed to be

Thank you. often used in the Old Testament, Abad v'shamar, to speak about the Levitical duties of the priests, that they are supposed to be ritually keeping the liturgy, praying around the ark, keeping the law of God.
And so, okay, what does that mean? What does that unveil to us? Well, namely, that what our is supposed to be is, again, like marriage, a bridge between heaven and earth, a way of transforming the world so that it actually matters insofar as we're welcoming God into a relationship that he's already welcomed us into. And this is why I say that if you don't have holiness or this transcendent understanding of relation built and nestled in love itself, then it is going to be dissatisfying.
You are going to just feel like a wage slave. You're just going to be a corporate pawn, or you're going to feel that way.
Of course, there are terrible jobs that do bear more drudgery, and that's, of course, what happens after the fall. But if you don't have that fundamental understanding of what work is actually for, you're just going to make every good job a drudgery.
Everything's going to be a waste. I think when you do find, when Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree, the knowledge of good and evil, and God gives them these sets of curses, those aren't curses really at all in the way that we think about them as just pure punishments.
I think they're pedagogical. I think they're instructing man into a new way of seeing the world.
I mean, man in the garden didn't have to eat. I mean, God put him in the garden, gave him all the fruit to eat from.
Work was something that was inherently disassociated from the necessities of life or getting the necessities of life. He didn't need to eat.
He didn't need to clothe himself. I think the temperature was pretty good, you know.
What they were ultimately doing was seeing work, was taking on work as a way of building that relationship between heaven and earth and also building their own souls, actually engraving their souls with a new type of character through their activity. That's the original purpose of what work is for.
It's not for getting the necessities. Now, after the fall, it becomes that so that we would continue to work, so we would continue to engrave our souls, so as to

continue to grow, actually take steps in the pursuit of virtue. So even if you have a bad job,

that's what you have to be focusing on. But I would say, pick a better job.
There's some bad ones out there. There's some good ones too.
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Tap the banner to save the celery. I'm just thinking, I think one of the, maybe some of the confusion here is the distinction

between Jah. I'm just thinking, I think one of the, maybe some of the confusion here is the distinction between a job and work.
Because the way that people talk about it these days is they talk about it like, well, jobs are an invention of the industrial age.

And, you know, it's kind of the office space, just like going to the office and moving numbers around for no reason.

And if only we didn't have that, if only we didn't have this capitalistic system, then we wouldn't have to deal.

It's almost like we would live in a world with no work.

But it's like, well, no, actually, there was arguably, not not even arguably there was a lot more work to be done prior to the industrial age so we actually when people complain these days about well i got to go to the nine to five job you see these tiktok videos of people that are often you know gen z young people in tears because they've just discovered uh the drudgery of work and they're talking about, I got to go to work for eight hours. I get home at five.
Do you understand that you stand in very rare company in the whole history of humanity that you actually have multiple hours a day by your own telling where you have no work to do at all. Like that, that's very rare for people even on earth today, but certainly historically, you go back prior to the industrial age, that like didn't exist unless you were a pharaoh or, you know, the, you know, the emperor of Rome.
Well, kind of, I mean, I'm not going to defend them at all. I'm going to, I'm going to hamper on them, but I think a better critique of them needs to give them some due, right? And you actually do find in the Middle Ages, I mean, we know the number of days per year that like Benedictine monks worked, right? And it's actually about half the year, sitting around sometimes ranging from about 158 to 172 days a year that they would actually be working.
So there are occasions in history where we find an unbelievable reduction of work because systems are working so much better. Well, I guess this is the distinction of, so what are we calling work? Yeah, great.
So what I mean is, if if you're in the middle ages it would seem to be impossible that in most cases that you could go through even two days without doing some kind of work at least how we would define it today because you got to eat you have to churn the butter you got like anything like that yeah yeah yeah and so today we're in a situation where when you get home from work you you just open the refrigerator, you're saying, right. Everything is just there.
You can actually just do no work and sit around where I think prior, I think, you know, it's a blob like character of, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
No, I think the distinction you made between work and a job is, is gold, right? I mean, when we think about a job, we think about something that hopefully you don't mind too much doing, you know, that it pays well. And that's really the first thing that you say about it is that, you know, if you have a good job, you define it as I get good pay and I don't mind it too much, right? Maybe you even say, I find it interesting.
But a work, that's, when you use that word, it feels like it has more of a heavy sense of a vocational aspect to it. My godfather was a guy named Walter Hooper, who served as C.S.
Lewis's secretary at the end of his life. And when C.S.
Lewis died, he was wondering, you know, what do I do now? And a dear friend of Lewis's kind of looked him squarely in the eye and said, I think there's a work for you to do here and that always stuck with Walter to the last of his days that there was a work set apart for me to accomplish and he did it. You know, and that think, is when we start to look beyond the necessities of, after the fall, having to work so that you eat, and seeing beyond it to, this is fundamentally about the transformation of the world so that I can welcome more people into this relationship with God and myself as well.
And yeah, and I think when you're looking at a complaint against kind of the lethargy that is prolific today, I think the complaint arises because they don't know what their work is and what they're supposed to do. And they're going to hate their job until they've squared themselves with that more fundamental question, I think.
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Yeah, I guess if you don't have any sense of why you're doing it or what the job is for, then that is, it's like almost a torture. Yeah.
I think that there's two opposite ends of the spectrum. And in my mind, a life where there's just nothing to do at all is torturous.
On the other hand, a life where there's a lot to do, but you don't know what it's for. It's like the Cool Hand.
You ever see Cool Hand Luke, the movie? I missed that. It's a good one.
But in that movie, in order to punish Luke, Paul Newman's character, the warden has him dig a hole and then fill it back in and then just dig it again. Sisyphus, yeah.
Right. And there's no reason for it just to do it.
And I guess for a lot of people, that's what their jobs kind of feel like because they don't have any sense of, and in particular, if you don't have a family, you don't have a wife and kids, you don't have this spiritual sense, you don't have a faith. It does feel a bit like, what is any of this even for? You know what? I think there's the other side of it too, is that their bosses or the guys that founded the company might not have an answer to that question as well.
And therefore, of course, the type of jobs that those guys are then building, designing, creating are going to occasion that sense of hopelessness in them.

And so again, you got to give credit.

But of course, that's not the only job out there.

There's just an enormous amount of good work to be done where you can be your own keeper.

I mean, this is a part, of course, at this point I'm biased, but this is originally why I chose to help serve the skilled trades, is specifically because you can be your own owner. You can actually fulfill the American dream of being in charge of your life and having ownership over the means of production, if they want to keep using that same language that you're alluding to.
At that point, you can be responsible, right? I mean, in a real sense where you can't if you're just clocking in and clocking out. I mean, when Jefferson, Madison, they were like thinking about how on earth the republic was going to exist and perpetuate, they were thinking about the Yohan farmer, right? I mean, it's like the small farmer who could defend the republic, and he could take good charge of the republic, precisely because he could take charge of himself, that he was independent of larger systems and structures.
He was able to feed himself and provide himself by his own work. And it gave him a stability in a place to be a rock and a pillar for their communities.
Now, that is really quite a remarkable thing, because if that is truly the American dream, then we've gotten so far from that. Of course, we don't have to be farmers today.
I mean, I think the equivalent of the yeoman farmer today is the small business owner, right? But the idea is the same, is that he who has independent means can truly have an independent mind as well. He's somebody that can think for himself, that can

penetrate and cut through rhetoric and dissembling from all of the propaganda that is disseminated

today, that he's able, because he is secure in his own ability for material provisions,

to also be able to be a provision to himself and to others in terms of the spiritual ones as well, and to the thoughts that are actually making man free. And how does a young man get there? He's in a job that he hates, and he wants to get to where you're talking about.
Without cheating and applying to the College of St. Joseph, the worker, right? Yeah.
How does he do it? What's the, I mean, because what I hear is, well, look, look, it sounds great. I like the idea.
There's no opportunities where I live, though. These are the only jobs available.
All the good jobs are taken. The jobs that I'm in, there's no opportunity for growth.
Where do I go from here? Yeah. Okay.
I will answer that question. I promise.
But I think part of it is that you have to be open to jobs that maybe your parents didn't encourage you to look at. You know, I mean, when you talk about the skilled trades, for instance, the opportunities there are immense, but of course we have a great disdain for it.
And the world has always had a great disdain for actually manual labor. I think about here like the ancient Greeks, like the city-states of Sparta and Thieves that literally had laws on the books forbidding their citizens from engaging in manual labor.
Athens didn't have one of these laws, but Aristotle wrote in his politics, his treatise on politics, that the life of a tradesman was ignoble and inimical to the life of virtue. Cicero pretty much said the same thing, and at different occasions in Roman

history, similar laws forbidding citizens from engaging in manual labor hit the books as well. And I look at this and say, okay, the Greeks hated work.
The Romans hated work. And into the Greco-Roman world, the Word became flesh and spent most of the years of his life at the carpenter's bench.
That Christ's life was political dynamite because it completely overturned who you thought the lowly carpenter to be. I mean, he literally, as St.
Paul said, came in the form of a slave, right? And he's not talking, you know, in any sort of analogical sense. I mean, he actually is, allegorical sense, excuse me, he actually is coming in the form of a slave.
But if Christ truly, and I, you know, this is just true, it's authoritatively true that Christ reveals true humanity to us, then he has revealed something about the dignity of that type of work to us as well. And when you look then at his followers, those who came after him, they didn't take that for granted.
And here I'm thinking about the early monasteries, which were the early seats of education as well. There was a pace of life and a dance of the daily routine that moved around the chapel where the monks prayed, the library where they studied and carried on the most sophisticated and hard-earned parts of wisdom that we have still today, and then to the fields where they work and And that movement between the chapel, the library, and the fields was the model of their life, but it was also, I have to say, their business model too.
It was a way in which it was sustainable. And so you fast forward a few years when that monastic model becomes ingrained and instantiated in the very first universities, that was still part of the education, right? Where you find guys like Hugh of St.
Victor and St. Bonaventure talking about the trifold distinction of the arts, which are the liberal arts, you should say something like philosophy, theology, you know,

the more speculative and theoretical forms of knowledge. So the practical arts, which are like

politics and economics, actually, how do we govern and form the social order down to the mechanical

or the manual arts, which is like farming, which is like carpentry, which is like masonry.

And they fit together, not just because different people are good at different things, but because

I'm sorry. which is like farming, which is like carpentry, which is like masonry.
And they fit together, not just because different people are good at different things, but because you can't have the one without the other. What you believe is fundamentally going to change how you build.
And having the ability to build is going to enable you to have the freedom to think and to think freely and to think without

a tyrant influencing what's actually in your mind. So I think that there is a tremendous

dignity to many of the forms of work that the ancient world, and I would say our modern world,

has looked down upon, and that we have to put away the ancient pagan disdain for a lot of these jobs, and instead embrace something that I think is far more dynamic and far more sophisticated as a view of what they are. I think that the trades are a clear option for this.
There's over 500,000 open jobs in the skilled trades. And we're not talking about guys in an assembly line doing stuff.
We're talking about those who actually need to exercise their creative capacity to troubleshoot and figure out problems today that actually engages your mind wholly so that you can also then instantiate it with your body holy. I think that that is a real possibility for pretty much anybody in any city in the United States today.
That is a good opportunity. And I would say, you know, to take it a step further, one of the reasons why I'm so dedicated to seeing tradesmen, highly educated tradesmen, truly trained in the liberal arts is because a liberal arts education is almost least wasted on a tradesman because he is the owner of his own means of production, because he is of independent means and therefore has an ability to be of independent mind in a way that not everyone in society is today.
So if you're complaining about your job right now and you don't know what the next step is, then maybe you need to think in a wider horizon and see where true dignity lies. And so, and also if it's true that you don't see any opportunities where you live, there's always the option of moving as well, which is, you know.
I just think there's opportunities everywhere. Yeah.
yeah. And I'm not just speaking for the trades.
I mean, make it up, yeah. And that's why I'm always preaching, if you're, especially if you're a young man with no kids and no wife, you are in really this amazing position where you can go anywhere and do anything.
Yeah. And so there's really, like, you can move to Alaska if you needed to, or if you wanted to.
I mean, there's really no reason. Yeah, why not? And so I don't know, you got these young men that feel somehow tied down or like they can't move around when, why not? So tell me about the College of St.
Joseph's Worker. Tell me about that.
Yeah. So this is an idea that first, now it's reality.
It was a hope to find a way of being able to continue to train students in the classical liberal arts, but doing it in such a way as that they could simultaneously be financially stable all the way through college and not graduate up to their eyeballs in debt. And then also to have a means by which to instantiate these ideas into the world and not just leave them up in the ivory tower.
And so those were kind of two goals. I was in between my master's and my doctorate when I first started to write the model and I was doing it in part because I thought I was going to go off and be a professor and then be terribly guilt-ridden, bringing all these students into the classroom and knowing that they were going to, you know, get $60,000 in debt and go off and make a, have a $40,000 a year job.
And the math just didn't seem justifiable to me. And so we started to pick out a new model, a new idea where students can come and be formed in the Catholic intellectual tradition to earn their BA degrees, regular four-year degree, while also being trained in the skilled trades to earn their journeyman card to actually be able to work as a skilled tradesman on any job site in the U.S.
And because you get paid to train in the skilled trades, you graduate net even instead of, again, drowning in debt. So that's what we're doing.
This is the inaugural class that we're educating this year. How big is the class? We started small, trying to be nimble.
30 students is where we began. How long does it take? How long is it? Is it a four-year institution? It is a four-year degree.
Yep. You're out and done, commenced and all, just like every other university.
I mean, if you do your work, obviously.

It's in Ohio?

It is, yeah. We're in Steubenville, Ohio.
We straddle the river. We have some operations going in Weirton, West Virginia, just across the Ohio River.
It's a marvelous and historic area that we're in, but totally defeated as well, I would say. When people, you know, when people talk about the Rust Belt,

man, we are in the smack dab middle of it.

Our city is something like 18,000 people.

It was 38,000 not too long ago.

I'd say about 80% of the downtown

is all boarded up and empty.

It's actually a pretty rich opportunity

to be part of a revitalization effort in the middle of the downtown, simultaneous with this launching of the college. If any young man was listening to this conversation, what's the main thing you'd want him to take away from it? Yeah, you know what? I think that if you're a young guy that's struggling to find good work, I think you need to spend some time seriously, quietly, by yourself.
Realize, asking the question, what do I actually want to work for? And if you are struggling to figure that out, then go find the wisest person that you know. Don't Google this, please.
Goodness sake, do not Google this. Ask the wisest person that you know, like, what should I be working for?

And let that be just the first person you ask.

But I think we need to get back

to actually understanding what our principle ends are.

Like, what we actually have as a goal

and a purpose for our life.

Otherwise, you're just gonna keep taking steps.

It's like getting in a car and driving

without knowing the directions

of where you're supposed to go.

You're gonna go in the wrong direction.

You'll hit the, your foot will be on that pedal and You'll be going somewhere. You'll be working for something, but you might not hit that end.
You got to know where you're going first. Dr.
Jacob Maum, thanks. It was a great conversation.
Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me, Matt.
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