Homesteading Dad Explains Why He Homeschools 5 Kids and Marries Young

Chad Fleck [00:00:00] Right. Any consumer in our society should be somewhat concerned about inflation. It's, I think it's coming. I mean, you keep on blowing money into the economy. What do you expect to happen? You know, any, any reasonable person who understands the economy might expect that, but it's, if it does come then and it has come in some ways, then I feel like the way that I do my processes, that's part of what I'm preparing for.

Vance Crowe [00:00:27] I'm Christina Hudson Kohler, an egg processing manager living in Syracuse, New York, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today I interview a man named Chad Fleck. Chad is raising five children. He's homeschooling them along with his wife. He also is doing modern homesteading. Now, there are a lot of people out in the audience that do this sort of thing, but Chad is a really interesting character. He has all these thoughts about the way children can be educated and how to do this, and how to live out Christian values. And we have a wide ranging conversation that stretches from education to the industrial revolution, to just how to choose a church and what was important to him. This is a very interesting conversation and I'm grateful to a former guest and Jeremy Osh for sending Chad my way. We're gonna get to that interview in just a moment, but if you've been wondering, Hey, what should I do for the holiday season? All the news is telling me that there's gonna be supply chain shortages, and I'm not gonna be able to get the gifts. You may wanna consider doing a legacy interview. The a legacy interview is where I will sit down with you or a loved one and do an interview. It's a private one where we can arrange the questions ahead of time or I can just do free flowing. What we will discover your values, we'll talk about family stories that you wanna preserve and sort of make a time capsule that you'll be able to share with friends and family for as long as you have it.

Vance Crowe [00:02:00] This has been one of those gifts that people have written me and said, if my house was burning down and I could only run in and grab one thing, this is the thing I would grab. I've been able to interview grandparents and children as young as six years old, and it's really been a fascinating thing. So if you're interested in signing up for one of these Legacy Interviews, I'm going to have some time in late November and early December to do a set of them. You can book one of these at store Articulate Ventures. I hope you'll check it out. And also, if you are enjoying a conversation with Chad, just know there are a lot of people like Chad in the Articulate Ventures network. This is a place that is away from the tragedy of the commons of things like Facebook and Twitter. It's a place where you can gather, ask questions about things you're seeing in the media, come to speaking gyms, have morning coffees that we do online, and just have a community of people that are living throughout the United States that want to share what they're doing to get, get better, talk about some of the things they're thinking about, and just really be the type of people that are interested in this show. So if you're a regular listener to this podcast, you might enjoy joining the Articulate Ventures Network. You can do that by going to network Articulate Ventures. All right, without further ado, onto my interview with Mr. Chad Fleck. Chad Fleck, welcome to the podcast.

Chad Fleck [00:03:23] Thanks fans. Glad to be here. It should be fun.

Vance Crowe [00:03:26] You are a friend of one of the podcast favorite guests, Jeremy Osh, and he has been poking me saying, Hey, you gotta have my friend Chad Fleck on. He is an interesting character. And as we've started chatting, I have a lot of of questions for you. To start off, tell me a little bit about yourself. What do you do for work and kinda where do you live?

Chad Fleck [00:03:47] Yeah, I live in Eureka, Illinois, just right central Illinois between Peoria and Bloomington, if that gives everybody a frame of reference. And I work for a healthcare sharing group based out of Peoria for my day job. And I have a side hustle as I'd call it, doing some small farming activities and going to farmer's markets on weekends during the summer that I do with my family. I've got five kids, beautiful wife, and we homeschool our kids. And so that's part of their education in some sense is that they, they work with us on the farm and they go with us to the farmer's markets and they make money off of that and learn how to manage their time and money and things like that. So it all kind of ties together in that sense, but that's kind of the high level

Vance Crowe [00:04:36] Of me. It's funny to think about homeschooling your kids in today's day and age, because two years ago you would've been thought of as old fashioned or kind of off the beaten path, and then all of a sudden you are now probably at the leading edge of what a lot of people are thinking about doing with their kids. What made you decide to go down that path of homeschooling?

Chad Fleck [00:04:54] Yeah, this is our third year, so we were a little bit ahead of that, that curve. We, we had a number of friends that had done it, and some people that showed up in our church that were having good experiences with it. And so our oldest was in third grade in the local school system. And we, we had no problem with the local school system in, in any sense, specifically because of them. But he was falling behind a little bit and, and specifically math. And we just, part of us thought we could do better, like if we could give him more individual attention, where if you have, you know, lots of kids in the same grade, it's hard to give people individual attention, kids individual attention like they might need. And so, and that has proven to be true, just and from this sense, because we brought him home, we started working with him on his math, and he's ahead, he was ahead very quickly of where he was in public school. So that's like, just from an educational sense, but we also aim to put as much biblical doctrine into our kids' education as possible. And that's, that's one of the big things, the biggest things for us.

Vance Crowe [00:06:06] It's, it's interesting to think about teaching math, right? There are a lot of people spend all their lives learning how to be math teachers and then implementing it, and then to think like, hey, two dedicated parents can take a kid that's falling behind and bring them to being accelerated. Did you have a curriculum you used? Did somebody sit there and show you, Hey, this is what you need to be teaching your kids? How, how in the world did you set all that up?

Chad Fleck [00:06:28] Yeah, there's, there's a program we use called Teaching Textbooks and it has a math component to it or a math curriculum. And so really that's like, it's all kind of inclusive. Like we didn't actually have to do a lot. There's concepts that, you know, I, I think everybody does math certain way in their head, you know, that maybe the way they learned or maybe the way that they came to, to figure it out themselves. And so there is an element of that as we go through the, you know, a certain learning, a certain thing, long division or whatever it is, basic things at his grade, at the time, at fourth grade or so, then I could explain to him the way that I think it, way I, my mind helps it to work in my head. And I do think that there is a, there's a genetic component a little bit maybe to how a child's brain might work with their parents' brain. And so there's a reason that I ended up learning, you know, some of the weird ways that I do math in my head. And, and maybe that is how his mind works as well. That's just a, a theory, you know?

Vance Crowe [00:07:29] Oh, I believe that completely. So we've got, you know, a 14 month old and you can already see it's funny, I, I, I watch my child learn, you know, how to sit and eat and it, you, you start noticing that the urges that the child has, the things that they want are no different than the exact urges that we as adults have. We've just learned how to tamp them down, how to control them, how to put them more socially appropriate. But I can, I can just watch, I can feel the emotion building in her and I'm like, I know, I know exactly what's going on inside of you and I have to imagine and really hope that there's a big genetic component. 'cause my wife was an aerospace engineer, so I hope Violet picks up on that.

Chad Fleck [00:08:11] Well, great. Congratulations. That's, that's early or soon enough I suppose to say that you, you like congratulations for the child. It's good. Is that your only one?

Vance Crowe [00:08:20] It is so far, you know. Okay. We're going to, we, we had a way late start. So for listeners that don't realize it, Chad actually lives in the town that I grew up in and I became kind of an anywhere person. So I decided I wanted to go anywhere but here. And when I was away going to school and kind of doing the, kind of get out into the world, there was this idea that you had all this time in the world to have children. So I, you know, when I met my wife, we, you know, got married pretty quickly, but then just kind of kept waiting and thinking, oh, it'll be, it'll be easier in the future. And now, you know, we have one child, it was a long road to get here and we hope we can have more, but it's a totally different thing than what's going on with you. You have five children. When, how old were you when you had your first

Chad Fleck [00:09:06] 23? We had been married for three years also. So my wife, the story I like to tell about how early we got married, my wife graduated high school on a Sunday, right? Like normally high schools do. And we got married on that Saturday of that week. Now she had actually stopped going to school a semester early and started going to college, but she went back and walked in her graduation, but still, that's how old she was. And then we, we got, you know, we, for a few years, we just established our relationship and then we started having kids.

Vance Crowe [00:09:39] So when you think back on that, now you have kids, they're not that far away from your wife's age when, when she got married, do you still think, hey, that's a, that's a good decision? Or how do, how do you think about this?

Chad Fleck [00:09:50] Yeah, absolutely. So here, here's the way, what we experienced, her and I both moved out of our parents' houses and in together we never lived by ourselves like a lot of people do. And it's, it's my observation from seeing other relationships over time, just anecdotally that people, as they live and they live by themselves, they establish their own set of ideals about silly things like how the dishwasher's loaded and how the clothes are folded and what you keep in stock, you know, for food items and all these silly little things that don't actually matter, but they can cause like these minor friction points when you try to slam them together with somebody else later in life. And so, her and I just figured all these things out on our own, like we didn't know anything and we figured 'em out together. And I believe that that created a bond on small, silly things, but also bigger, more important things that are more difficult to find a match for later when you establish all your ideals about how to live life. So I, I pray for my kids that they would find their spouses early in life if that's what God has for them. I'm not, I'm not saying it's a failure if you don't, if they don't or if anybody doesn't, but I do think it's a good thing to start earlier. And by the way, I think that parenting is a young man's game, young person's game in general. Like, you know, the, the late nights and all of that. I think it's a good thing to do that while you're younger, if you can.

Vance Crowe [00:11:13] There's no doubt. I mean, my wife and I talk all the time about how while we were staying up late and going to bars and, and having a good time, we didn't realize that what we were doing was burning off that energy that you have to be putting towards a child that wants to climb up the stairs 25 times in a single night. And when you're 40, that's a lot harder to do than when you're in your twenties. But the, the flip side of that is you're 20 years old. Did you have a clear picture for how you were gonna provide for your family, let alone five children? That seems overwhelming to most people.

Chad Fleck [00:11:46] Hmm. Yeah, it was, I remember going through, like as Christians, we in a, in a bible church, we go through like some premarital counseling. And I remember sitting down with the pastor and he was like, well, do a budget. You know, like, how are you gonna provide? And honestly, at the time, I didn't have a job that would provide, I was still going to college. I intended to get a full-time job and we would live fairly meager lives, you know, while we were in college. And so I, I ended up like making this scratching together, this budget, and they were like, Hmm, I'm not sure if that's gonna work, but then I believe you make good dis make good choices and you know, you'll make, you'll make it basically right and God, God will bless you is the way I look at it. And so shortly before we got married, just two months before I had applied to some jobs in, up in Bloomington and I got a job at Singular Wireless at the time, if you remember singular wireless back in the day before they became at and t again after they got broken up in the seventies. That's a whole different topic, but they, so I got a job there, and this was shortly before the iPhone became a big thing that was exclusive to at t at first if you recall that as well. And so that ended up providing us a very good living because I got in at the right time. And so, and then I just kind of sta stepped that up in my career to what I'm doing now. And it's, it's worked out, you know, in a fabulous way.

Vance Crowe [00:13:10] So let's go back to the, the schooling. 'cause right now I'm in the process of trying to choose the first set of school that, that Violet goes to. And we're really fortunate just in the way that my job works and my wife's job works, we get to spend a lot of time with our daughter, but at some point there, there's times when both of us are going to work. When you think about what a kid learns in school that maybe they don't have at homeschooling, what, what's kind of etching away at the back of your mind about like, ah, may maybe they're gonna miss out on something? Anything?

Chad Fleck [00:13:42] Not really. You know, I, I played sports in high school, junior high and high school. There was things I learned from sports. I'm not suggesting there that there's nothing valuable about them. You know, I, I think there are sports in many ways can be a good microcosm for life and how you interact with other people and cooperation and things like that. So I'm not saying there's nothing good in them, but there's many things that there is good in that aren't required or not, you know, to be fully rounded individual. And so I love that my kids have more freedom. Like they get done with school in two or three hours at their age. Now that might increase as they get older, but I firmly believe young kids, elementary aged kids do not need to be in school for seven hours a day or whatever. They, it is, they are, it's just not that much education to be had that they need. In my opinion,

Vance Crowe [00:14:34] I'm in total agreement. Like I think that the, the mind is absorbent, but it's not, it's not absorbent for sitting at a desk. I, I, so I've been touring schools right now, and you watch the different philosophies of schools. So I've gone to like really traditional kind of schools, like, like the public or then private, but they're American, then Montessori and then this other one, Ty called Waldorf. And man, you, you look at the way that children are expected to sit in chairs or expected to, you know, stay inside the lines for hours and hours and hours on end. And I think like you're maybe preparing them for something, but I don't think you're preparing them for a future that that is going to exist or something. It, it seems so bizarre that we expect that kids are gonna be able to do this for eight hours. I mean, I was barely functional in that, in that situation.

Chad Fleck [00:15:23] Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think largely it's more or less of a, a babysitter is how a lot of people like to use it anyway because both parents want to work in today's culture because that's what seems to be valued. My wife had a photography business that had been growing and this was, this was her idea to start homeschooling the kids, but she had built that up over a few years and it was going well, but she decided just became convicted that this was more important for her to do. And so we stopped that and that little source of income. But that's the, that's the kind of thing you have to do to, to stick with your values. And I think too few people are driven by their values and are just driven by dollars really in today's, in our, in our culture.

Vance Crowe [00:16:08] Say more about that. Why do you think that is?

Chad Fleck [00:16:11] Why do I think people are driven that way?

Vance Crowe [00:16:12] Yeah,

Chad Fleck [00:16:14] I, I believe that that's what's been taught largely like even in the school system and certainly by the media, was that in our, in our, I think it's a byproduct of the capitalist mindset now, I love the capitalist mindset. I think it is absolutely the best societal way to handle life for, for groups of people. But with that comes a set of, I believe Christian values that are necessary in order to make it work properly. And so it's got to be checked by that. And largely as we've gone on through time, Christian mindset has been divorced from the capitalistic ideals. And so I believe that without that, and which tells us how to live life in the home, we got to a point where women needed to go and more or less be like what men were at the time, which were providers. And society has told them that it's important that all of us go to work and make money because that's how we provide happiness and goodness. But what it did was that it took women away from the mothers and then at an early age we're sending kids to daycares and then we're sending them to school. And really we're spending very little time with them in their developmental years. And I could even go back a step further than that and what the Industrial Revolution did and taking men away from the homes and home-based businesses like they used to be. But that's, that's a short version of a big conversation.

Vance Crowe [00:17:41] Yeah, I mean, I totally, I see that point. And when you're young and you're making money and you can combine two incomes, it's like, wow, the freedom that this gives me, like it's, it's freedom that I never had as a young person until my wife and I were able to combine our incomes. But then when you start having a child and you realize like, well, if I drop this child off at daycare and they are either going to cry and that's gonna break your heart. 'cause you know, like, hey, I'm leaving them behind with this person that's not their family. Maybe a good, good woman but not their family or they don't cry, in which case that also breaks your heart. It's not, that's not a good thing either, right? So, but, but in the society and the system that we've built up in particular, the, the really deep belief that in order to be a whole person you have to go to college and then people rack up all this debt and then the only way they can pay off that debt is if they, they try and pay it off the same way they maybe did a mortgage. And so they're going to work to pay off an education that they wouldn't need if they had figured out a way to, to keep their aspirations more in line with what they ultimately were gonna wanna do, which was to be a parent. And I know very, very few parents that don't say, I wish I could spend more time with my kids.

Chad Fleck [00:18:51] Yeah. And from the beginning, my, when we check looked at our long-term plans, my plan with our wife, our plan in general was that she would stay home when the kids came. And certainly during their really early years, like we were never gonna send 'em to daycare. That was the big thing in our minds at the time. But then we thought, you know, like we had experienced, we'd send them to school still, of course. And then my thought at the time was like, as our kids were in that age period and we're are going through that, that at that point my wife specifically should be very involved in this school, right. And should be making sure that the school is functioning the way that it should and that our values are being represented there. Which, you know, that's a whole topic we see in the news now, right? With parent involvement in schools. But then again, through no fault in my local school district as far as what they did from a values perspective, we decided that we could just do better. Like we can instill values in our kids better than any other person can.

Vance Crowe [00:19:49] Yeah. And like, frankly, like even if they could instill values, like you don't want a government bureaucracy instilling values, right? Like we see how they, I have no interest in it. E even even in a place like Eureka, where I know the teachers and, and I grew up with them, like, it's just not a system designed to be a value generator, right? It's, it's not, it's not one that can be circular in that way. So you had mentioned in the beginning that part of your farm income or the, the going to farmer's market, you bring your kids along. Tell me more about that.

Chad Fleck [00:20:21] Yeah, and so it, it obviously takes a certain amount of work on the farm daily, right? Somebody asked me just the other day, how many hours per day? And it's probably about an average of an hour a day over the course of the year. But they're involved in that, right? And that's just like, you know, fundamental work ethic stuff, right? You talk to any kid who grew up on a farm and I was one of those, so that I can speak to that the, the work ethic that you get from that and the positive memories and what you can track back to that are always a beneficial and good thing. So they get that. Yes. But so for example, I'll get into it a little bit here. I raise, we raise meat chickens here and we do it in a very specific way that we can talk about if you'd like that. But we end up with a bunch of chicken feet. And so this is a little bit weird, all right? But I was in a pet store a couple years ago and I saw this bag of dehydrated chicken feet and I thought, well, that is a byproduct that I'm not counting on right now that could generate some revenue, something interesting to take to the farmer's markets. And so I looked up how to do it. It wasn't hard. I got a little $40 dehydrator used from somebody and now my son takes, takes the chicken feet, we get 'em from the processor, we take 'em to a professional processor, my, our chickens, and then they give us the feet all cleaned and bagged up and then he takes it and he clips the nails off and he puts 'em in the dehydrator for, you know, a certain amount of time. And then he gets all the revenue that comes from the chicken feed. And so he sells 'em for a dollar a piece, you know, but we, we raised a thousand meat chickens this year, and so there's potential for $2,000 of income for my 12, just turned 13-year-old just by doing a little work and then going and actually trying to do some sales at the farmer's market.

Chad Fleck [00:22:01] So that's an example of how we use the farm for some level of education. Just real life, you know, experience.

Vance Crowe [00:22:10] Yeah. And nothing's gonna teach you more about, you know, mathematics, adding, subtracting than, than counting your own money. And then, then you're gonna get economics lessons, right? Where you get to really quickly learn about inflation or keeping costs in line, all kinds of things.

Chad Fleck [00:22:26] And just learning how to sell, you know, talking to people like I'm, I did sales for 10 years and I, I'm of the belief that everybody should do sales for a little bit, if nothing else, so they can understand when they're being sold to. But it's, it's good to know how to work with people in that way. And so my kids are, are getting to learn that at a, a pretty young age.

Vance Crowe [00:22:47] What else is on your farm?

Chad Fleck [00:22:49] Yeah, so I'd say our main component is, is the meat chickens and the way that we got into it. But we raised pigs also just seasonally. So we have pork products for, for we raise Thanksgiving turkeys, that's the thing going right now. And egg layers. I've got about 150 egg layers and we raise all these, we call it pastured. And so we raise them all in a, on a rotational, pastured basis. And this is kind of a, a bit of a movement that's happening in the,

Vance Crowe [00:23:18] Oh, my listeners will be very, very familiar with this. They, they kind of Joel salad and kind of moving things around. Yeah, certainly.

Chad Fleck [00:23:24] Yep. Yep. So I use chicken tractors, I rotate my pigs around the turkeys. I just set loose on a pasture, but I, I tell I market and sell them is through, you know, calling them pasture raised right. Access to grass. So, yeah. And then I, we have a cow, a milk cow for our purposes. So we get milk from our cow for our family's purposes.

Vance Crowe [00:23:45] And when you, when you interact with the world, how do people react to you now that they're finding out, hey, you're living this kind of, it's not quite off the grid. I don't know what you would call it. You know, like modern homesteading or something?

Chad Fleck [00:23:57] Homesteading, yeah, yeah. I, people are interested, you know, I, 'cause it's really just kind of a throwback to way most of human history worked with, you know, of course our modern twist as in like we get our chickens, you know, through the mail, right? For example. But it's really, I, I think about this a lot. Like what did people do before the industrial revolution? Most of human history pretty much operated in a try not to die sort of mindset, right? So it was really just about finding food or creating your own food and there was a lot more small farmers, you know, creating their own food out there. But the industrial revolution made it so we didn't have to, which I think has had some negative consequences as well. But people are usually quite interested to at least hear about it. Now they might not be interested to the level that they're interested in buying things from us, but when I explain how I raise chickens at a farmer's market, then almost always people are interested to try it because they appreciate the story and the effort that it takes to do it in that way.

Vance Crowe [00:24:57] Yeah. One of the things, so I lived in, in Kenya for a while and I'm probably in one of the last generations that'll ever see huge populations of people living without electricity. But one of the things that you don't realize when you have electricity and you have your entire lives is our concept of time is so totally different because we have artificial light. So we have no, not only does the average person living in the city not have any connection with the weather, you know, the only thing you care about with the weather is, oh, do I need to bring an umbrella or not? But you don't actually track how much rain you've gotten in a year. None of those things matter to you in the way they would've in a more agrarian life. But even probably far more profound is, hey, six o'clock rolls around and it starts getting dark out or, or in Africa it was a little bit later than that, like eight o'clock at night. The you, the only thing you can do is spend time with other people talking because it is so expensive to have flashlights with batteries and reading with lanterns are really difficult. And certainly there are some major downsides to that. We really love light, but the upsides to it was, I spent hours and hours and hours talking with people with no goal of like, Hey, I'm gonna talk with this person for an hour and then I'm gonna go get on something else. And, and that thing I think has so profoundly changed the human experience that it's almost difficult to describe if, if the closest you've ever come to that is maybe a day or two without electricity, it's, it's nowhere close to the same.

Chad Fleck [00:26:22] Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I think that the, the fact that the, you know, just the internet being a thing, we have no idea how much that has affected our society. I mean, we look at the positives of it, and this is certainly one being able to have a conversation like this and then other people can watch and listen to it. But like the minute, minute ways that this affects our society, I, I don't think we've even begun to understand. And that's the kind of thing you're touching on there.

Vance Crowe [00:26:47] I mean exactly. I I was just playing with the idea that, you know, we kind of have thought inflation right now, right? It used to be that if I wanted to send an idea to you, I had to get out a pen and write it down in a piece of paper. And I, I had to actually consciously spend money on getting that letter to you and then the time that it would take for you to read and absorb and you would see my penmanship and have that come back. Well now it's so rare that you have handwritten letters that that must fundamentally change how people absorb information back and forth. Two people disagreeing, two people exploring an idea. And certainly you get way higher volume of, of information through because of the internet. But I don't know that the value of it is, is nearly as high and, and I don't really know how to describe it other than this kind of thought inflation or communication inflation.

Chad Fleck [00:27:38] Yeah, it's an interesting way to put it. Thought inflation. Yeah, because it, I think there's a lot of positives that have come really. I think it's all triggered from the industrial revolution. I'm gonna keep on going back to that because it, it allowed really all that's happened, at least it was the major point, turning point. And there's, there's good things about it for sure. But these are tools. So we've been put, you know, what's been put in our hands, there's a very many series of tools and many of us have grown up with those tools being developed, but how we use the tools is important and we, it's hard for us to not use them the same way that everybody else is, but we have to consider what is negative about using these, using these tools in the wrong way. That's kind of just a high general way to put it.

Vance Crowe [00:28:24] So how do you think about allowing your children to interact with the internet in considering your homesteading world?

Chad Fleck [00:28:31] Yeah, I'm, I struggle with that because it, it is, there are useful things they can do with it. We certainly monitor and limit how much they can consume. But earlier you asked about what might they be missing when they don't go to a school, right? And this is kind of a weird twist that I realized later. We let them watch TV shows, you know, just streaming different things and we'll, we'll make sure that they're reasonable shows, but in those shows they, there'll be worldly concepts that come up and what is good about it and allowing them to consume some of these things is we'll be there, we'll hear it, they might ask a question even. And then we can actually have that discussion right then about what our values are in relation to that concept. You know, may maybe it's something we just disagree with or maybe it's something we wanna expound upon. And so I feel like that's a positive thing that we can pull out of, you know, bringing this stuff into our house, right? It's commonly used as a negative thing. And I'm not talking like, you know, anything crude really, but it's just like these mild sort of things that end up on the tv. And so you can use those things in a positive way still. And that actually helps because that socialization thing, you know, with being around other kids, but we get to be there still. So that's a bit of a side note, but yeah, well

Vance Crowe [00:29:56] It was shocking to me as I've been looking around at these schools, which is why it's top of mind is, you know, some of the schools would be like, you know, we limit the amount of time that kids spend on the computer to less than an hour a day. And I was like, oh my god, an hour a day seems like a shockingly large percentage of this child's life. And, and the, there's something for me, like if I read something in a book, it, it is absorbed in a totally different way than it is if I read it on a screen. And as much as I love to have the, the ease of a kindle or, or to be able to put my laptop on my chest and just kind of scroll and read things, I, I, as I imagine Violet growing up, I think I will be the frustrating parent that is obstinate about how, how little time she spends on the internet when, when, oddly enough I'm, I make a significant portion of our income based on the internet. So I have a, a really strong tension there and I'm always open to hearing how other people think about this. Yeah,

Chad Fleck [00:30:54] It's, it's really hard to swim upstream like that, you know, because, you know, violet will have friends that are doing all of this, this, you know, stuff that you don't want her to do, right? And they don't seem like such big deals that you really wanna put your foot down about it. And it's just one of those things, I'm sure you've heard the stories before where, you know, when you're a parent and your kid hasn't reached the age where you feel like you're gonna put your foot down about something, it's just, it's a tough road to hoe it really is when all of their friends are doing this and people that you, in your circles that you respect are doing something differently than you thought you would then you, you tend to easily rationalize and lose your values that you thought you had. And it's just, I'm not saying that it's impossible, but it's a, it's just a tough place to be, to be counter-cultural, you know, it's, it's hard.

Vance Crowe [00:31:43] Do you have girls? Do you have daughters?

Chad Fleck [00:31:45] Oh yeah, yeah. My oldest is a boy and the other four are girls.

Vance Crowe [00:31:47] So how have you thought about things like Barbies and, you know, the frozen movies, you know, you get into things like Disney and, and the commercialism that's there, but kids loving it, you know, really embracing it. How have you interacted with that?

Chad Fleck [00:32:03] We haven't been like too strict on like limiting those things. Now if there's different actual concepts in the show that are being brought up that we disagree with, then we'll be very careful about even showing them that show or movie. But again, it's, it's like, watch the movie, we'll be right here. We'll probably watch it with you and we might stop the movie and explain to you why this is a bad value. And so it's one of those things where we teach them our actual values and I think this is where homeschoolers have, have a bad rap a little bit for being completely sheltered from society. And this is where I see us exposing them to society in a controlled way. So yeah, let's watch the Disney movie and then I'm gonna explain to you why this is not important, right? Maybe this, you know, this dress and the way it fits or the makeup or hair or whatever. It's, I dunno, those things we can explain in that situation using a sort of real world example, at least the way it affects them. So that's my theory, you know, first time I'm doing all this, right. So that's, that's what I think. But I don't know

Vance Crowe [00:33:18] For sure. It's funny 'cause I'm definitely the, the person that was experienced, you know, went out and became worldly and now that I, I see the value of childhood and somebody I had on here one time, a guy named Yosha Bach, who's an artificial intelligence researcher. So it's funny that it would be him of all people that would explain to me the concept that the Garden of Eden is childhood, right? It is the period where you're, the wall is around you, you're learning all the names of the animals. It's a metaphor for the parents trying to keep their children in this space where they can be children and they don't have to know about the, the worldly things that are going on. And I see that now and want it so deeply for my child, at least for some period. And then you have to get ready and prepare them like you are, you know, by the more that they get exposed to things like farmer's markets and interacting with people. But for right now, I'm in the phase of I am building the Garden of Eden and what, what can I do to improve that? So I'm, I'm, I'm fascinated with the idea of, of the raising of animals. That's not gonna be something in my future I don't think, but I think it is a hell of a good path.

Chad Fleck [00:34:24] Yeah. And I, the main thing I'd want to encourage to people, most people who might see this is maybe you don't, you don't see yourself raising your own animals, which I think is fine, but I would encourage you to support the people that do, you know, find, find a local small farmer and try to support what they're doing. You talked about supply chain earlier, that's, we saw that in about a, you know, year and a half ago, right? We saw when all the lockdowns happened, the meat packing plants, specifically the meat processing facilities shut down for a bit and it caused this wrinkle and it really showed how fragile our ecosystem is for supply chain. And I, that helped me tremendously honestly because a lot of people had had to turn to the local farmers and I gained a customer base and a following out of that largely because I think that some people were seeing the benefit of supporting a small farmer because that might happen again. And it's not hard to see it happening again. When we just saw it recently,

Vance Crowe [00:35:30] It's almost certain, I mean like we, we have had egg producers come on that have said, Hey, we can't get our, the egg cartons and something as simple as a part that is what makes the egg cartons work could keep thousands and thousands of people from being able to get eggs. 'cause if you don't have egg cartons, you can't deliver eggs and Pigs and, and cows. We've added 'em all on there and I think that is definitely a take home message. I know that for Annie and I, many of the things we buy are that way. And now that I have violet and I am hyper concerned with what she eats that we'll just keep going in that path. And I, I think that one of the good things that comes from the internet is the ability to find farmers like that, right? Yeah. You don't just have to go to the farmer's market. You can go online, you can, people can direct you to, to that. So I'm, I'm right. How, how, how big of a percentage of your income, I don't need to know numbers, but like how much do you derive from doing this work with the farmer's market?

Chad Fleck [00:36:25] I don't rely, at this point, I don't rely on any of the farm income. And you said farmer's market. It's, I, I have a website and I, I drive sales that way. The farmer's market's really just about gaining the customer base. 'cause I really want people to come to my farm to get stuff right. And so it's really just like a, I'm in what year? Four or five of it? Four. And so it's really right now just like reinvesting in infrastructure and I don't consider any of that to be income.

Vance Crowe [00:36:57] So you mentioned, we talked about supply chain before the show got started. Are you seeing things that are more difficult to get right now? You're trying to reinvest it into the, the farm? Can you get everything you need?

Chad Fleck [00:37:08] Well, I was careful at, so for example, I built, I wanted to build an egg mobile, they're called, maybe you've come across this concept. Oh sure. Yep. Yeah. And so I try to find things that had like a little bit of upward, you know, structure on it already, let's say. But usually you just buy a trailer and then you build an egg cube on it, you know, and the idea is you can drag the egg tube around your pasture and then you can distribute the manure that way and Right. You know, there's benefits to it. But I wanted to do that, but I knew lumber prices were so high because of the, the, the, the lockdowns and what that did to everything. And so I didn't wanna spend any money on lumber. And so I ended up finding on Facebook marketplace, which is a wonderful tool for finding stuff like this. I ended up finding a structure that a couple, some high school kids had built to hang out in at one point during the lockdowns actually. And it was basically like a redneck camper is the way they called it. But I was able to modify that by no lumber and invest very little in it. Use some stuff that I had, had I collected and I got my egg mobile put together without having to be impacted by the supply chain. But it did impact me in that it's not as nice as I would like it to be. I might have to tear it apart and do it better later. But that's the kind of effect it's had on me is really just like having to scrap things together to, to make it, you know, worthwhile for me to do do.

Vance Crowe [00:38:36] It's weird man. The, the, the prices of of groceries, at least where I'm at has gone up significantly. Have you, have you felt that in your regular grocery bill?

Chad Fleck [00:38:47] Well, yeah, I guess in my regular grocery bill. Now, keep in mind we don't have to buy meat at all. Like we pr we provide all our own meat. And so I know that my costs for my meat items have gone up this year because the feed cost is higher. I didn't notice it anywhere else. My processing costs were the same still. I know my processors had a little hard time getting like, you know, like foam trays and things like that, right? That's the kind of stuff you've heard about. And so that was, that's been awkward a couple times. But for the most part it's all been about the feed. The feed costs have just been higher. And so my prices go up a little bit, but it hasn't been too drastic from my perspective as far as what we provide our grocery. Yeah, our grocery costs are a little bit higher, but not, not that much. I think largely it's in meat.

Vance Crowe [00:39:34] So my, my audience often will write me 'cause they know I'm, I'm really interested in watching what's going on with the supply chain and labor is the thing that's going absolutely wild. I was talking with a pharmacist the other day who works inside of a hospital and he said they were doing some wage comparisons and right now you can go to McDonald's and make two more dollars per hour than you can doing the, the kind of grunt work at the hospital that's like washing people in, in the bathroom. And I think that this is gonna come in a big way because I think that eventually the places are gonna realize, well, we can't keep employees, they're gone. We're gonna have to jump that price and it's not gonna be, you know, a dollar, an hour more, they're gonna raise, it's gonna be something like three or five or seven and, and then that is all gonna whip saw through the rest of the economy. And I think we've only just begun to, to see what, what's going on with inflation. Are you worried about inflation?

Chad Fleck [00:40:32] I mean, I I should be right. Any consumer in our society should be somewhat concerned about inflation. It's, I think it's coming. I mean, you keep on blowing money into the economy. What do you expect to happen? You know, any, any reasonable person who understands the economy might expect that. But it's, if it does come then and it has come in some ways, then I feel like the way that I do my processes, that's part of what I'm preparing for. That's a, that's a small part of the idea here and it's an increasingly bigger part of the home setting idea is that I'm ready to, to help myself and my family and then many other people around me. If we have, and I think of more in terms of not just inflation, but like the economy crashes sort of a thing. If I can have a sustainable system, then what else do you really need in life besides food, shelter, you know, food becomes one of the more important commodities I've had people encourage me to invest in silver because you know Right. You know the reasons for that. And I'm like, I'm investing in food because I think that when it comes to a point where silver is an important commodity, you're gonna gimme silver for my food. You know, like what else? What's more important than that?

Vance Crowe [00:41:45] If I want silver for my food, right?

Chad Fleck [00:41:46] Yeah. If I want, I'm sure I'd want that, right? Because food is the most important commodity to us.

Vance Crowe [00:41:53] So what are you paying attention to these days? You have five kids and you've got a farm and it seems like you must and you know, a regular job, but what, what else do you look at or read or watch?

Chad Fleck [00:42:05] I've derived a lot of my, my agriculture knowledge from YouTube videos, you know, the, the Joel Saladin types and I quite enjoy it seems like a weird place to get it from, but Facebook groups, I, I find Facebook groups to be a very useful thing for items that you're interested in, units of business you're interested in or items that you might own and, and just enjoy because there's a lot of people all across the world who, who are interested in the same thing. And they share articles from sources that I don't normally just read on my own and videos and things like that. And so that's where I end up getting a lot of my information. I have people send me stuff all the time. I had a guy send me a friend earlier, just send me a thing about how young people are turning to working on farms because they don't find it enjoyable to work in an office, you know, of this next generation. And so I, I really, I'm not, I'm not a huge like sit down and read a book type of guy. I aspire to be one. I'm more likely to do that in the wintertime. And that's the beauty of the cadence of the way I do farming is that the winter is the time that you rest more and then you hustle pretty hard through the warm months doing different infrastructure projects and things. But it's, it's largely ends up being from a, a religious angle or, or something in the agriculture realm as that's where I'm trying to head.

Vance Crowe [00:43:29] So let's talk about religion. Did you grow up in a, in a religious family? Is this just a part of your life? Your whole life?

Chad Fleck [00:43:36] Yeah. Yeah. I, I grew up in a, in a, in a Christian home, went to a similar church to what I go to now down in Springfield, the Christian religion, I believe you, it's still at some point you obviously have to make that your own ideals. And so I did that when I was a teenager, took hold of the ideals fully and realized the benefit to them and decided that was the truth. And so that's how we established our family, you know, my wife and i's relationship is built on that. We've trained our kids based on that. And frankly, you look around and this is not the reason to be a Christian in my opinion, but I I think that it's going well. You know, I, I like our situation. I, I like that it had us getting married younger because we believed that if we applied biblical concepts we'd be okay. We've been married for 16 years, nearly 15, yeah, 16 over 16. And we've got the five kids and, and they're good well-behaved kids, they're learning well, all of these things. And so it, it just, it's a good way to live. Life is one way to see, I

Vance Crowe [00:44:45] Mean it sounds like it, it sounds like you have quite a testament here of what a lot of people are searching for. We talk about a lot about on this podcast somewhere and anywhere people, and so the anywhere people are like, like me or at least what I was right, they, they say, I just want to go anywhere so I can see what's going on in the world. I can have this kind of cosmopolitan life. I can eat at interesting restaurants. And you have somewhere people that say, Hey, I don't, you know, the reason I'm going to stay where I'm at is because, or, or find a community and grow roots down deep is because it doesn't need to have all these things. But what I like are the relationships. I like the values of the community I like, and I think for a long time there had been this kind of un universal expansion towards anywhere people, but you see something happen like COVID and it feels like there's a pull towards somewhere, but it's, it's not exactly easy to just uproot your anywhere life and then start to try and build into, build it into a somewhere life. Yeah.

Chad Fleck [00:45:43] I'll give you an example about the way I see the values playing out specifically. We talked earlier about like how how early you have kids. And this is something that I think is very unique to, to now in the history of the world. My wife's grandparents gotten married young and had kids young and then my wife's parents did the same and then we did the same. And so my son tomorrow is going out with his great-grandpa to help him with his job, like just to be with him. And so my son gets to learn from his great-grandfather and there's, there's a shot actually at some of my kids' kids or kids in our family being able to meet their great great grandparents. There's potential for that and never has that been possible before. Now that might just seem like this course sort of nice to have sort of thing, but for my kids to be able to learn from that generation I think is wildly impactful in ways that we don't even understand fully. I just see it as a very good and valuable thing and it's, it's the Christian values that took us there because I, I think that the, there is Christian sentiment in getting married young and recognizing that that is sort of a young man's game, like I said earlier. And, and it's not mandated, but I think it's allowed for, right? And our culture doesn't necessarily allow for that. It doesn't seem to anyway. And so it, it seems more likely in our circles and that cadence, what happened there allowed for what we've ended up with here.

Chad Fleck [00:47:17] And I, I think it's, it's just an amazing thing. It's one of my favorite things to watch in life right now.

Vance Crowe [00:47:21] That's extraordinary, man, that actually warms my heart. That's, that's something that your family can only do if they are successful at transferring those memes from one generation to the next, to the next. And without that mimetic propagation, you don't have it. And I would say most people, their family is usually just as small as parents and kids or parents, kids and grandparents and that, that's it. You know, in my family that's certainly the case that the, my, my parents are in their seventies and so it's very, you know, it's unlikely that there will be great-grandchildren, but my wife's parents, you know, you see the value of being able to introduce Violet to her great-grandfather for her to be able to be held by him, for her, him to be able to, you know, tell stories and as long as he's around, he's able to jump that information around. It's not a game of telephone about what great-granddad used to do. It's direct mimetic propagation.

Chad Fleck [00:48:19] Yeah. And I, I was, you know, I've kind of been negative on the industrial revolution, but I know that I, I've tried to give it its positive credence. So the positive aspect is, you know, with medicine, right? And the fact and just knowledge of the human body. And so that's why it's a unique thing now is because people are living long enough to be able to do that. But it's, it's still somewhat rare because our culture has started to tell people, because we live longer, we don't need to have kids very soon. Right. So, you know, enjoy your younger years, right? And so, but if you, if you apply what I believe is basically Christian values, you have kids early, you end up with this like, beautiful thing that isn't guaranteed by any means, but it's, it's just the way it's worked out for us. And like I said, it's one of my favorite things to watch in life.

Vance Crowe [00:49:06] So tell me about, you know, in Eureka, I, I used to always tell people when I was out in the world that it was a town of 4,500 people. And at the time I think it had something like 13 churches. It wasn't what, you know, isn't do you go to church, it was which church do you go to? Right. How did you guys choose the one that you attend now?

Chad Fleck [00:49:24] Well, so the church I grew up at, it was a bible church in Springfield, fairly well known. It's not super well known, but you know, it's what, five, 600 people and I, first 20 years of my life, my grandparents had picked that church years ago for reasons. And so that was, you know, generational church that I had grown up going to. We believed there and rather strict biblical interpretation. And so consider that to be like, not rooted in tradition, but rooted in what the Bible tells us and how to live. So that's a specific kind of church. It's not a denomination, it's a non-denominational church. It's just, we're a bible believing church. So when I went to get, I actually met my wife, oddly enough, met my wife in California, even though she was from Eureka and I was from Springfield at a, a youth group church conference basically. And so it was like-minded churches. She happened to be go into that youth group from the church that we attend now. So really it was kind of an easy step over to this like-minded church, even though our family didn't attend there, they do now, but they didn't attend there at the time. We went to a couple other churches and kind of like tried to feel out what would be appropriate for us. But we ended up back in that sister church basically of the church I had grown up in.

Vance Crowe [00:50:46] And when you think about the future, and you see this kind of, we've been talking about the expansion and the contraction and people kind of, you talked about people wanting to work on farms and do you view that the Christian Church is going to be growing in the next few, you know, months, years? Or do you think this is something that is going to go down?

Chad Fleck [00:51:08] I am less concerned with the quantity of people that go to church and I'm more concerned with the quality of the people that go. And so I think it interesting thing about, you mentioned like McDonald's earlier in fast food, you think of McDonald's and like you think of seeing them everywhere. And I heard this pointed out at one point there's something like 35 or 40,000 McDonald's in America. So you mentioned earlier that Eureka has, you know, 13, I've counted 15 or 16 churches more recently. So what does that tell you? Like how many churches do you think there are in America if there's 35,000 McDonald's, right, there's hundreds of thousands of churches. But I don't think that our cultural values, the way that I see them, you know, in, in the ways that we can reflect that there's good church, there's that many good churches that are teaching actual good biblical living. And so I believe that what we've seen with the lockdowns and, and sort of the frowning upon Christians and the media and politically, I think that we're, we're coming to a point where there will be some level of persecution and we'll have less people in the churches, but better quality coming out of the churches.

Vance Crowe [00:52:22] That that's a fascinating answer. You know, it's funny when you think about the fact that in, so 20 years ago, in the year 2000, about 70% of the population said that they were a member of a church. And that had been the case for the last 60 years as long as they've been taking

Chad Fleck [00:52:38] That. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:52:38] And in the last 20 years, that's dropped more than 20 points. It's gone down below

Chad Fleck [00:52:43] 50%, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:52:44] And you think about this in terms of what you began the, the conversation with about capitalism and you thought that Christianity's centrality in capitalism. Do you think that the economy will stay a capitalist economy if less than 50% of the, the people are attending churches and have this sort of Christian concepts and the mentality that goes along with capitalism?

Chad Fleck [00:53:10] I don't think that it will work like it's supposed to. And I think that we will, we'll see problems like I believe we are now the, from the left, you know, from people who might veer towards socialistic ideas more. That tends to be the thing they bring up. It's, it's more like just how cold, you know, the, the market is, right? If you leave the market the way it is and just let it do what it does, then they see that as a cold sort of, you know, impersonal thing. And I believe the market is cold if it doesn't have ethical treatment in it. Right. If it doesn't have the ideas in it that it should. And so that's what I think is happening with this corporate America stuff is that people aren't, the corporations aren't informed by biblical ideas and they become cold and society will see that as a bad thing, which I, I believe that's exactly what's happening now.

Vance Crowe [00:54:04] Yeah, I mean you're totally in line with, I had a guest on one time named Larry Sharp and he made a point that he said, for every unit of community you substitute with the government, you lose that unit of community. So, and I think Christianity and community are probably one in the same, in in the sense that you're talking about it, right? The, if you make it so the government steps in and runs something, education or healthcare or anything, roads, bridges, right? For every time you make it so that the community is not the, the group of people that are coming together and you outsource it to a cold bureaucracy that coldness stays forever. That bureaucracy never just kind of goes away and gets returned to the community.

Chad Fleck [00:54:48] Yeah, absolutely. And I don't think that there's any, it's easy to think in utopian concepts when you talk about, you know, society and the way it should organize. And I, I think in a perfect world, you know, honestly, like I'd rather this there be no public school system, but I know that's not reasonable right now. You can't, you can't just take away the public school system right now. I, I know people that are involved with it closely and I know the type of kids that need help there. And so it's, it's impossible to just go to this new system from where we're at right now without just like establishing a new country somewhere. Right? But it's, it's still important to recognize what is right and what is good to try to work your way back towards that. And that has to happen at the, at the local level that you alluded to there. I

Vance Crowe [00:55:35] Mean, I think it is definitely closer today to being able to be eliminated than it ever has been before. I I, I also agree with you that it's unlikely that it will, but I think when people saw just how much their children were getting educated when they finally were watching them do these Zoom classes and seeing like what was expected of them, there were a lot of people I know I heard from many people that had been like, ah, I thought, I thought my job as a parent was to get them into school and then school would take care of it and then I'd be done. And then being forced every single day to listen to the teacher talk with these children and to have these, you know, absurd zoom classes that they were having. And I'm sure there were some that were great. I I'm sure there's somebody sitting here being like, Vance is totally off. That's not right. But I know a lot of people that said, I realized I was making a really serious mistake with my child's education and the amount of time they were spending at this place because I was in the classroom with them. So I think it's, it's, there's more vulnerability to that system than there's ever been before.

Chad Fleck [00:56:36] Yeah. The, the fundamental idea of bringing one teacher with 30 kids, I think we should question whether that's a good idea or not. I'm not sure looking at history and not all of history is documented well in this regard, but it's, it's a relatively new idea to put a bunch of kids that are the same age under one teacher. So I'm, I'm big on the apprenticeship idea, right? And just like putting, you know, individuals with somebody who knows how to do a thing. And that kind of matches with the home education concept, right? Because you put the kids with the parents who can teach them values and how to do things. And I think that can be true of, to re not totally replace, but basically like supplement what college is aimed to do because I, I just think that it's inefficient at if nothing else and gosh, entirely frustrating to have, you know, 32nd graders, right? I mean, think about that. It's just, it's fundamentally a weird thing to do and it has to be inefficient. And I think that's what we see. And

Vance Crowe [00:57:45] And until I started looking in education, it's, it's shocking that you don't even think like, oh, there could be different ways of doing this. You describe the apprentice program.

Chad Fleck [00:57:54] I

Vance Crowe [00:57:55] I had read about this program called the Waldorf School, and I had seen people kind of roll their eyes about this, but this is a very interesting program. I don't know if you're familiar about with this.

Chad Fleck [00:58:04] I I've heard of it, I don't know a ton about how it works.

Vance Crowe [00:58:06] So their concept is that children kind of go through phases in about seven year blocks. And the first seven years a child has a lot of difficulty being able to distinguish between the fantasy kind of dreamlike world that they're in and reality and that to push them into a, you know, formal rigid system is a, is a jarring thing and it doesn't maximize their potential. And so what they do instead is the kids all the way up until, you know, second grade or so spend the entire day, all of it outside, rain, snow, whatever is going on. And that their lessons are much more based around this kind of teaching kids to get along with one another, giving them projects where they can build stuff. And I went to visit one, I, you know, I was definitely suspicious of this when I read about it and I was kind of like, oh, here go the hippies. And I was there in the pouring rain, it was like buckets and buckets of rain. It was probably like 50 degrees out. And those kids were absolutely delighted. The teacher never had to raise their voice. They were in this giant area with trees underneath the canopy and they were working on things and you're like, oh my God, I I never imagined that this could work like this. And then you go into their classroom and, and they do a, a very different system where they have like about 15 students, 12 to 15 students, and they have one teacher, the same teacher for all eight years. And they're in this cohort that goes along together. And it's, it's just very different. And whether or not that's the right one, I don't know, I think you have to choose a path and stick with it.

Vance Crowe [00:59:40] But it's really important for people to recognize the system where we think a school is made up of classes, a class as a teacher and students, and then you progress, you know, one year after eight months or whatever a school year is and then those kids go forward a year and then they learn these different subjects. That's all constructed in our minds. There's nothing official about that. There's nothing more real about that than other things. But it's hard because it's, it's what we've always seen. That's the water that we as fish are swimming in,

Chad Fleck [01:00:08] Right? Yeah. I, I think a question that comes across my mind commonly, and I somewhat alluded this earlier, but it's really the other end of it, the way my worldview works, at least the way I apply it is how did God give it to us and what have we done to change it? And is that a good thing? So think really, even if you don't believe, you know, that God created the world the way he did and the Garden of Eden and all of that, which you mentioned earlier then, like how did people do it for most of human history and did they know something that is better than the way we're doing it now? It would be another way to look at it. So I'm thinking of it more from, you know, this beginning angle, like God gave us knowledge of how to do things in the beginning and for most of human history, just thinking like in terms of hunter gatherer and then even like, you know, ancient, ancient agriculture, that sort of thing. It was largely like you were just with your kids all the time. One of the verses for homeschoolers that they're fond of basically says like, teach your kids as you go. That's a verse in Deuteronomy and it's just a basic Old Testament command to basically just like always be with your kids and teach them stuff about how to live life. And that's how most of human history worked. Now we tend to have this idea that the things that we know now is better than what people knew in the past. And I think that's a dangerous way to think

Vance Crowe [01:01:36] A hundred percent. All you, all you have to do is go look at any one of the pyramids or, or anything in Central America to, and then go look at the mathematics behind what they had to do in order to be able to build, to construct some of these things. And you realize like, I would not have been able to contribute to that. I don't have an intellect that is higher than the people that was Desi that were designing this. They just didn't have the shoulders of shoulders of shoulders of giants to be able to stand on. But you have this kind of present moment, look what we've come past, you know, we figured out penicillin and we figured out how malaria is spread, but the truth of the matter is, I had nothing to do with those discoveries. I'm just the beneficiary of a long line of people that have discovered things that we've built on. But to your point, like we, we aren't smarter than those people. We're just living in a, in a different age.

Chad Fleck [01:02:29] Yeah. Yeah. And some of the things that we've done and have thought are good ideas and they, they maybe they are better for society, but we tend to just inherently think of them as good if they save us time or make our life easier. And that is not like having an easier life is not necessarily an inherently good thing there. There's benefits to having difficulties in life sometimes. And really all we've done is like almost every product we have, it seems like is just a way to make our life simpler and easier. And what we've ended up with is a bunch of time that we try to fill with other things and it seems to me we've filled it with lots of bad things that aren't beneficial to us

Vance Crowe [01:03:11] Or things maybe that are just like saccharin, right? They taste sweet, but they don't, they don't necessarily add anything. Right. It's, it's, I'm I'm, I'm with you on that and I, I also agree about the tough times, like the, I've never really improved myself that much. When things were on Easy Street, the things for me got way better when I was in a bad place and I had to figure out how to get the hell out of it.

Chad Fleck [01:03:35] Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, you know, I mean just working out, right? So working out is hard. It hurts your muscles, you know, and I think it's the easiest way for us to see it, but it's through that pain and actually breaking down to the muscle that it grows stronger. And I think this applies to other areas of life, not just the physical. It applies to the spiritual and the emotional and the relational I guess is the other one. And so I'm, I'm fond of this little, I don't know, I think haiku or whatever you call it, where strong men create good times, good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times and so on, right? That's kind of how society works over time and it seems very obviously true to me.

Vance Crowe [01:04:13] Well Chad Fleck, this was a fantastic conversation, great job from Jeremy Laco. You had mentioned you have a website you'd love for people to buy from you and come out to your farm and pick it up. Where can people find out more about your, your farm? Yeah,

Chad Fleck [01:04:27] You can find us on Facebook, red River Farms in Eureka or our website is actually Red River Farm is where you can actually order products directly from.

Vance Crowe [01:04:38] Well thank you so much for coming on and for exploring just a wide variety of ideas. I would love to have you in on again sometime soon. Alright,

Chad Fleck [01:04:46] Thanks Vince.

Vance Crowe [01:04:47] Thanks Jed.

Chad Fleck [01:04:48] Alright, bye Bye.