MATT REYNOLDS - How To Stop Wasting Your Time: Vital Lessons from "Undoing Urgency"

Foreign welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast. This is a weekly show featuring in depth conversations with authors, leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world. New episodes release every Friday. Will is a bit under the weather this week and so he asked me, today's guest, to introduce today's show. My name is Matt Reynolds.

I'm the founder and CEO of one of the largest online fitness coaching companies in the world, Barbell Logic, where our goal is to improve the quality of life of as many people as possible by helping them experience strength and the refining power of voluntary hardship. I'm a longtime friend of Will's and this is my second appearance on the podcast.

Today I had the pleasure of having a wonderful conversation about my new book, Undoing Reclaiming youg Time for the Things that Matter Most, published by Forbes and on sale now at Amazon or any major retailer where books are sold. In our conversation, we do a deep dive of the problem of urgency.

How virtually everyone is drowning in urgency and how that urgency often crowds out the most important things in our lives, diminishing our faith and spiritual disciplines, our calling as husbands and fathers, business owners, good citizens, and often comes even at the expense of our own health and fitness. Urgency truly is the enemy of the important. It was a huge honor to be on the show and I'm incredibly grateful to Will for his support and friendship over the years.

So I hope you enjoy and get a ton of practical value in our discussion about pulling weeds, undoing urgency, and learning to focus the bulk of your time on the most important things in life, which are almost never urgent, but that are most intimately tied to your personal core values. For those ready to go deeper, please visit willspencerpod.substack.com and become a paid subscriber for ad free interviews and exclusive content.

And remember, Will's sponsors aren't just businesses, they're allies, building Christian economic wealth for generations to come. Supporting them isn't just spending money, it's investing in an American reformation. And with that, let's begin our conversation with Will Spencer and me, Matt Reynolds, author of Undoing Urgency. Matt Reynolds, welcome back to the Will Spencer Podcast. Hey, brother, thanks for having me. I'm excited. Been a little while. Been a few months. Has it been.

I think it's been like a year or so since you came on last time. Yes, but not that long since you've come and stayed at my house and got to experience the Ozarks. That's right. For the first time, which was a blast. So, yeah, thanks for having me back. On the show that was August of last year actually hung out with you and Brandon and the crew. That's crazy. Time flies. It does. So I'm excited to talk to you today about your new book. Congratulations, Undoing Urgency, which I think is out now.

Well, probably by the time this podcast comes out, it will be out. But is it out like literally today? December 10th is the official published date. You can buy it on Amazon. I think it's gonna, like you said, when this comes out, I think it will already be out. And so We've already sold 7,000 copies, which is insane and broken. Yeah, Forbes, it's broken the records for Forbes already for pre sale. So they're excited. I'm nervous because I don't want to count my chickens before they're hatched.

And so some chickens have already hatched. We've already hit bestseller lists on Amazon pre sale, which is really rare to hit bestseller on. On Amazon. We'll see. I don't. It's really hard to make bestseller for New York Times and that's not why I wrote the book and so. But I'm excited. Forbes was the publisher and so it's nice to have a name behind it that it can actually kind of push it out there. It'll be in all the Hudson News and, and places in the airport.

And Hudson actually decided they reviewed it and they wanted as a face out book as a. As opposed to a, you know, just to see the spine of the book. So that'll be. If you see a Hudson News in January or February of 2025, it should be a face out in the airports. I probably will need to do an airport tour.

I thought it'd be cool to just go to, you know, just a handful, like do a circle airport tour of like some business trips and it would be cool, just walk in the Hudson News and Fancy as well as there's a handful of other book suppliers in the airports that aren't Hudson. And it'll of course be on Barnes and Noble and all the other places you can buy books. But Amazon is. Amazon is king at this point. So the goal is to. That's where the rankings come from.

And so yeah, that's the goal for sure from a ranking standpoint. But ultimately I just hope this book is a blessing to others and it changes lives. I think that I've read a ton of business books and there, there are a ton of business books I've read and I'm like, that's a good book. But it didn't really change my life My goal is I would rather change a handful or a few scores or maybe hopefully a couple hundred lives than to sell a million books and change no lives.

And so, you know, I'm not a, I don't make my money from writing books. I'm not a content producer for, for money. I run a service business. And so really the book was a thing that was, it just held a ton of bandwidth in my brain. Lessons I've Learned over nearly 20 years of business ownership and life and almost 25 years of marriage. And so I just put it all out there. And for those that get the book, the intro is pretty hard and very vulnerable and transparent.

But I think it's important because it shows humanity and it shows, I think a lot of business owners that have been successful. Right? And this is not just a business book. This is more of a lifestyle book. And it's also not a time hack book. I want to be clear. It's about how to leverage our time more effectively, but not in a time hack sort of way.

And so I think a lot of successful people if, if I end up being qualified as that, and I don't know that I do, but if I am, if I am, I think people often tell the story of just the wins and not the losses. But I think the lessons are really learned more in the failures than they are in the wins. And so there's a lot of failure lessons there. And these are stories that my family knows and my staff knows and people that know me know, you know, my pastor, my church know.

But I still had to call my mom and say, you know, I need you to read the intro because, oh wow, you know, this is, there's some painful stuff in here. And so, but I think, I think it, you know, one of my favorite business books I've written, going down a rabbit trail already is, is a book called the Hard Thing about Hard Things written by Ben Horowitz, who is a co founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which is one of the biggest venture capital and maybe private equity firms at this point.

These guys are interesting. Marc Andreessen was just on Rogan last week. He was. And these guys are prototypical long term liberal Democrats in the, in the tech space and completely flipped for Trump in the last year or so and the pushback and the things that they're seeing in that world. Ben Horowitz wrote a book called the Hard Thing about hard things. He obviously now being the founder of a major multi billion venture capital firm has been very successful.

But his whole book is almost no wins and all losses. It's all like, this is how hard it is to build a multi billion dollar business in America today. And the things you're going to have to deal with, not because of America's culture, but because this is just how hard business is. And it is so cathartic. As a matter of fact, I'm about to go on vacation. By the time this comes out, I'll probably be in Mexico with my family.

I hope that I am and Lord's blessed to have a business with where I can, I can work a little bit down there and spend some good time with my family. And so I probably will listen to that audiobook while I'm sitting down on the beach. There's a, there's a cathartic thing that happens when you hear other people's struggles who have gone through very similar struggles as you. And so that's what I wanted to do to intro the book was to kind of lay out the story of, look, I do, I do not.

I have not done this well. I do not always do this well. And so these are why I've learned these lessons. Not because I crushed it, but because I didn't. That is an incredible way to start the podcast. And you've given me so many different paths to go down. So. Okay, so I think first where we'll start is I think it's necessary for the audience to have a bit of context of what Undoing Urgency is about. Sure. And the structure of the book.

Because then I want to get into sort of what you said about the actual process of running that out over the course of being a business owner, an entrepreneur or whatever in today's cultural climate. So let's start by talking about the book Undoing Urgency. Like, what's the structure of it? What processes are involved? Let's fill in some gaps for people. Yeah. And I'll even expand. It's not a business book either. There's a lot applicable as you get into the later third.

And I'll back up and I'll lead into this. But there's a lot of business things that we've learned over the years that we talk about in the book. But this really applies to, I think almost everybody. And it's because of this, when I was a kid, if someone in the 80s and 90s, and probably same thing for you, if somebody came up to your dad or to my dad and they said, how's it going? How you doing? Same sort of question we asked today. Question hasn't changed the Answer's changed.

Question is, how's it going? How you doing? The answer in the 80s or 90s were good. It was just sort of a flippant answer that like, yeah, it's good, it's good, right? It was sort of a small talk, right. And now it doesn't matter. If you ask the business owner, the soccer mom, the church leader, how's it going? The answer is busy. I'm busy. Like you hear that way more often. And I. And so the concept of the book is that we are really all drowning or most of us are drowning in urgency.

There are there. We have set up our lives surrounded by urgency of things we have to do all the time. And what that urgency does is it crowds out the important things. And so Charles Hummel wrote a book years ago called the Tyranny of the Urgent. And he said the, the urgent is the enemy of the important.

And then building off of that, Eisenhower, President Eisenhower has this matrix that we can get into if you want to talk about details where he said, Eisenhower said, when he was president, actually at the end of the war as well, he said, I have two types of problems. I deal with the urgent, which are almost never important, and the important problems, which are almost never urgent, which tells me that there is a dichotomy there between the urgent and the important.

And I think what we tend to do is get caught up in the urgent and it crowds out the important. So if you think about the things that are most important in your life, and certainly I would love to get into some of our core values. My core values, your core values. But for most of your listeners, that's going to be, you know, family and faith and health and fitness. And even for me, being a CEO of the company, like the CEO stuff, not the in the trenches stuff in the business.

If I, if I'm drowning in the urgency of the day to day, what ends up happening is it pulls me from being the husband that I need to be, or the father I need to be, or the leader I need to be, whether that's in church or business.

And I want to do things to pull from the urgent, non important things as much as possible, work on the things as efficiently as possible that are urgent and important so that I can focus the majority of my time on the things that are most important and often never urgent. It is never urgent to spend time with my family, to my, with my kids, with my wife. It's never urgent to get the workout in today.

It's never urgent to do my spiritual disciplines it's never urgent to do the vision casting for the business, but all of these things are wildly important in my life. If we're not careful, we spend all of our time drowning in the urgency, working in life, in business, in church, not on life, on business, on. We work in it, not on it. And I don't want to drown in that.

And I was telling you before we even started the call and I kind of stopped, like, let's talk about this during the, during the podcast is that this is still something that I deal with every day. I have to get up every day and think, okay, what are the important things I need to accomplish today? And that's a list of one or two or maybe three things. And what are the urgent things that need to get done? But like, it is not five years from now, I will not remember that this existed.

And that's a list of 25 things. If I'm not careful, I spend all my time doing the 25 urgent non important things or urgent and somewhat important things. And I crowd out the stuff that's the most important in my life. I miss the workout, I miss the spiritual disciplines. I miss the time of my, the quality time of my family and for the urgent. So that's really what the book is about.

It's about setting core values, understanding your core values, which I love doing a podcast like yours because I think our core values are similar and most of your listeners are gonna be similar to our, to mine, but identifying what those core values are and then leading a life that is in. In is in congruence with those core values.

I think if we look at our time, if we look at our calendar, if we look at our, if we do a time audit, we'll often see that the things we're spending our time on are not cohesive with the things that we really think are important. And so ultimately that's what the book is about.

So it opens up with a lot of those core value pieces, how to identify that and then how to set the major goals in your life to get the stuff done that needs to be done so that you can open up the time to be the person that you actually want to be. Not just today, but to build a legacy of who you want to be. When you're say 80, I want to be the jacked wise grandpa that loves Jesus.

And if I'm not living a life, because the problem is I don't wake up at 80 and get there 80, it's actually not the goal. That is the thing that brings the Joy. It's the 60 years before the 80, before I'm 80. It's from 20 to, it's from 20 to 80. It's the, it's the process of living a lifestyle that is in congruence with, with those core values. So that's really what the book is about. And so it goes like a lot of books do.

And I think I read a lot of books and that are, I mean I read lots of books. The first third or first half, I'm like, I get it, I get the, I get the thesis. I don't need to read the rest of this thing. For, for us, we wanted to make sure we had value throughout the entire book. So the book is, you know, starts at kind of the 50,000 foot view. It dives into the more personal view and then gets into the tactical. Here's how you actually do this on a day to day basis without being a time hack book.

Because I don't want to be a time hack book. Right, okay. So just to, just to back up. So the, the important tasks that you define those are based on your core values. So it's not as if you just show up to the office during the day and you make an arbitrary judgment about what tasks are important and what are urgent. The important tasks themselves are determined by who you are as a person, the things that are most important to you.

And that is what determines whether something is important, not some external deliverable by someone else's based on your own expression of what's essential in your life. That's a great explanation. And I would just, the only, the only pushback I would have on that is I would say those are the most important things.

Okay. And so coming back to Eisenhower, Eisenhower saying, okay, things are either urgent or important, but when you really look at it and Stephen Covey and 7 Habits are highly effective people. I think it was the first one to talk about this. Brett McKay's talked about this on Art of Manliness, other books have talked about this. But it's created what is what we now call the Eisenhower matrix. And I talk about this quite a bit in the book.

Eisenhower didn't come up the Matrix, but the reality is that there's actually. You can took. You can look at every single thing that you do in a day or in a week or a month or whatever, and you can put those in one of all of those tasks, all of those things in one of four quadrants. So you have the things that are not urgent, not important. And I would qualify those things as like binge watching Netflix video games, Internet porn, doom scrolling social media.

Some of those things are very clearly immoral, I. E. Internet porn. And some of those things are not necessarily immoral. They may be amoral, but they are not urgent, not important. And our argument would be for that quadrant one, non urgent, not important things. We should literally purge them. We should eliminate them from our lives. And then quadrant two would be the things that are urgent but not important. I'll give you an example.

As we're doing this podcast, I'm almost certain a team of guys are going to show up and clear all the leaves. We have 16 trees in my yard and they're going to. And it's, it's, you know, early December and I've got all these leaves in my yard and they're going to clean up the leaves. I'm in an hoa. If the leaves aren't cleaned up by the end of the weekend, I'm going to get a letter from the HOA to say, clean up the leaves. Right. Urgent, not important. Right. It's the. So. Right.

That's exactly right. Grocery shopping. Like, I don't grocery. Like, guys, it's $10 to have any grocery store deliver to your front door. So that's urgent because you need food, but it's not important. You don't need to spend two hours going grocery shopping. I can spend 15 minutes on the app buying the groceries, and the groceries show up two hours later on my front doorstep, mowing my lawn, a lot of housekeeping chores. We have a housekeeper.

Maybe you can afford a housekeeper once a month, once every two months. Maybe it's every week. Maybe you have a housekeeper that lives in your house. It doesn't like your financials will determine that. But I don't want to clean my floors and baseboards. We keep a clean house. We're not messy people, but we hire people to do those things. And so it also may be things like basic.

I have an executive assistant that handles the vast majority of my emails, my calendar, my podcast, you know, interviews, things like that. Those things are often urgent but not that important. Housework, like whatever those things are in your life. And so we want to, in that quadrant two, we want to delegate or automate those things. Delegate has been the primary factor over the past 40, 50, 60 years. As AI comes in, I think there's more things that we're able to automate.

I think those are fine. That's another conversation we can have. We're gonna try to leverage as much as we can, technology to Automate things like calendar setups, calendly, you know, there's tons of apps that help make you more effective that you don't have to do. So these things that are urgent but not important.

Then quadrant three, which is where most of us who are business owners or say executives, upper, upper level managers, we have a ton of stuff that we have to do that's urgent and important. And this is where the differentiator between what you said is there are things that I have to do every day. So for example, today, this morning at 5:15am I recorded a State of the Union address.

We call it the State of the Union for my company to put out to all of the employees, the entire staff, staff of a hundred, plus another 300 coaches. And that's urgent and important. The State of the Union needs to go out. It's Q4. They haven't heard from me in a while. It's between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They need to hear that thing I need. It took a long time to set up. It's 5:15, it was still dark outside.

I'm trying to set up lighting and you know, and, and you know, ring lights and I went in my daughter's room and she had a makeup light and I was like, I need this too because it's too dark in the room and you know, set all this stuff up. Teleprompter. The thing, did the thing urgent and important. The urgent and important things, those daily tasks, those emails that have to be responded to that the EA can't do.

The, you know, the, the project management list, the daily tasks that are important and urgent. Especially as you move up in the, if you're in the corporate world or that have to be done, those need to be done very efficiently. So going back again, Quadrant one, non urgent, non important. Eliminate. Quadrant two urgent, not important. Delegate or automate. Sorry. Quadrant three urgent and important. We want to do those effectively, efficiently as possible.

That means no notifications on the phone, no notifications on the computer. Often doing those when other people sleep. For me, that's when people are still sleeping. In the morning it might be for, for you, it might be late at night. My queue is about 80 at 8 o'clock at night, as you know me, I go to bed early and I get up early. So I get up early, I get great work done and that work in the morning, very early. From like 3 in the morning, 3:30 in the morning. I don't set an alarm.

You've, you've stayed with me in my guest room. I just wake up, make coffee, go downstairs, walk the dog. This time of year, it's cold outside, wakes me up a little bit, get a little burr, get a little, little chill will come in and I knock out work for, for three or four hours before my family wakes up and I'm doing urgent and important work. Family wakes up, do my workout.

And then the key there is, if I do that efficiently, it opens up the most time possible for that quadrant four, which is extremely. That's the most important stuff, but is never urgent. It's the. It's the being. It's spending time with my family, with my wife, with my children, it's spiritual disciplines, it's reading my Bible, it's working out, it's health, it's fitness, faith, church. It's those things, those things are like, it's never urgent to read my Bible.

It's never urgent to take my wife on a date, but it's extremely important to me. And if we're not careful, we drown in the urgency and it pushes out the importance. And so I want to instead get rid of the things that are not urgent, not important, delegate the things that are urgent, not important. I want to be as efficient as possible on the things that are urgent and important, which I spend a lot of time doing as a CEO so that I can free up as much time as possible.

This is really a discussion about freedom and versus bondage of your day, of your time, of your schedule, so that I can be free to do the things that are most important to me, that will leave the legacy that I want to leave as the husband and father and Christian and church leader and leader in the business that I want to be. I want to spend the most amount of time doing that thing. And that is the Eisenhower matrix. And that's really what the book fleshes out long term.

Okay, this is great because maybe you can help me answer a question, a personal question that I've been struggling with. So I've noticed for myself that the best time that I have in terms of mental focus, clarity, et cetera, is when I first wake up. So I've struggled with what I do in that time. What I can do in that time is I can write or I can, which is for me is urgent and important work, like original creative writing, putting my thoughts into some solid form.

Or I heard people say, well, the first thing you should do when you get up is you read the Bible. Or I've had a trainer, a doctor who was actually as Dr. Joe Bova. I don't think that you were on that stream with us. But, but yeah, he said, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he said, you know, the best time for men to lift is first thing in the morning when they wake up because their testosterone is at its highest. So those are three different things that I can't all do at the same time. Right?

And, and, and when I, if I work out, then I want to eat something first. And so if I eat before I work out, then by the time I get around to doing any work, I mean, I don't have a gym in my house, I have to leave. And so it just obliterates, it obliterates that focus time. But it seems like these three important and somewhat urgent things. Well, maybe working out isn't quite so urgent, but you know, these things vie for time. So how do you solve that?

It sounds like the first thing you do is get up, make coffee, urgent, important work, and then work up. Okay, but I unpack that. But I don't think that's the right, I don't think that's the only answer, right? So I think figuring out what will allow you to do this best is the best answer. So if I got up at 7 or 6am or something like that, practice middle, I would work out. I would work out first thing. That'd be the first thing I do.

Okay, Because I get up at 3 and because I have a home gym, because if I deadlift at 3:15 in the morning, what? That's a fast track to divorce. That's a joke. My wife. So, you know, I can't deadlift downstairs in the gym because I have a home gym at 3:15 in the morning. So what I do is I get up, I make the coffee, I focus as much as I can.

I walk the dog, get cold and sit down and have this routine where I give myself about an hour to an hour and a half of urgent and important work and even occasionally, whatever urgent non important work that I can knock out very, very quickly and not send to the, to the ea. I do first thing. So I do that first. And I'm still at Listen at 3:15, even though I wake up and I'm awake and my brain is going enough when I lay in bed that I know I have to get up. I'm not, I'm still a little bit groggy.

I'm not like I couldn't get up into a state of the union at 3:15 in the morning. I'm still, you know, occasionally pouring water into my coffee grinder where that's not where the water Goes right. And so, and so I get up. Yep. And I make the coffee and I do the work. So I work an hour, hour and a half and I knock out as much as I can efficiently early in the morning. And then when my wife wakes up, I. And, and for me that's also like online coaching because I'm still an online coach.

I coach my clients, I break down their videos. I've done that for tens of thousands of hours. So I'll do that stuff. And then when she wakes up at 6:45, we'll often walk around, we walk around the neighborhood, we talk about the day and then we come in and we prep and we do a workout. And then I come in from the workout and I have the protein shake or the post workout eggs or whatever and then I sit down and I start to do the important work. And so that's how I do it.

By the way, I left out the thing. So I do the urgent work for the first hour and a half because, and then I read my Bible, I do my spiritual disciplines and that's because of this. And this is just me and this is my personality. I have a really hard time focusing on the things that I'm reading and trying to learn. So, so for those of your listeners, hopefully most of whom are Christians, are reading their Bible and doing their spiritual, spiritual disciplines, I have a hard time.

My brain is not functioning at full capacity immediately. It takes a little bit of time, but the time that it takes, say an hour or less is stuff that I can still knock out, the emails and the project management stuff.

As a CEO, if there are questions that are being asked in the company and I can't answer them, by the time the rest of my company wakes up, some of whom are on the west coast, many of whom are on the west coast, so two hours behind me, if that question isn't answered, their work stops until they get an answer from me. So I do urgent, important work. First this is just me. And then I do spiritual disciplines. I often make another cup of coffee, I go to the bathroom, I make another cup of coffee.

When I'm doing urgent and important work, I've prepped all those things. I've gone to the bathroom, tmi, but I've gone to the bathroom, I've made the coffee, I've. And then when I do urgent and important work, I'm not allowed to get out of the chair. I'm notifications off hammering. Urgent, important work. That's how I do it. I get up very early in the morning I do that for an hour, hour and a half. Then I go make another cup of coffee. I take a five minute break a lot of times, walk around.

I might even go outside on the back deck. It's cold. I might hit. I've got a cold plunge, you know, I've got a hot tub, things like it might sit in the sauna for a few minutes, just kind of like get the blood flowing in my body. Hit the cold plunge, then come in and do the spiritual disciplines. Because for me it's hard. I wish I could focus on the spiritual disciplines if the cloud of urgency wasn't hanging over my head, but because for my personality it is.

I will have anxiety reading the Bible while I know that there are questions that have to be answered and I could answer them in five or 10 minutes. So I answer the questions first, then I take a little break. And when I say a little break, I'm talking about a five minute break, a ten minute break, max. Another cup of coffee, ready to go. Now I'm in spiritual discipline mode. I read my Bible and it's not a. Check it off the list. I want to be in a place. And this is why I don't do it first.

Because I think if I did it first, it would be like, just get through the next chapter of 2 Kings and I would just read through. But I want to like, I want to dive into the thing. I want to really do it right. Yeah. And so then it's spiritual disciplines. By that time, my wife has woken up, we go on a walk, we work out, we eat, we shower, and we don't shower together, although there's nothing wrong with that. But she takes a bath, I shower, and then I get to sit down and I get to be CEO Matt.

And I get to do the things that are most important at that. So now it's 8am in the morning. I have done urgent, important work. I have done spiritual disciplines. I have trained, I have eaten, I have showered, I've dressed for the day. I'm not in pajamas or sweatpants or whatever. And it's CEO time. And I go to a private office just, just which is here. Luckily, thank the Lord, here in my home, I've got several places I can do this.

And I sit down and I start to do the important work that is less urgent. So it sounds like what you do is you, you get up at 3, which I think is probably not going to be feasible for a whole ton of people. That's a, that's a, it sounds like a biological it sounds like a wiring thing for you. I know that. Something I even want to do. Right? Just FYI. Oh, okay.

When I came to stay with you and you went to bed at like 8 or 9, I actually wanted to ask, was this something that you trained yourself to do over here? It's just who you are. Yeah. There are pictures in my. Actually in my library because of where the sun is right now, not in my office. And in my library, I have a bunch of scrapbooks that my mom gave me because my mom is a boomer and kept lots of scrapbooks. And you've probably seen this.

The boomers are now giving their kids all the crap that they owned over the years. And their Gen X and millennial children are like, we don't want all this stuff. But in. I looked, we took. We walked our kids through a few months ago, the scrapbooks. And there's a picture of me sitting crisscross applesauce. You know, cross legs. Okay. You've not heard that term? Never before in my life. Oh, you're not a. You're not. You weren't a kindergarten teacher. Well, Spencer so. Correct.

So when you sit on the floor with your legs crossed, kindergarten teachers call that crisscross applesauce. Okay. I don't know why I didn't invent it. Okay. And my mom and dad always woke up really early too, like 5am or whatever, somewhere in that ballpark. And in the Midwest, before the very early news comes on, which might be 5:30am or 6:00am in the Midwest, we have a show called Ag Day, like Agricultural Day.

And it was an hour or maybe two hour show where it was farmers talking about the day's price of pork bellies and corn and how the rain was and things like that. And so she has a picture. She got up and I'm maybe 2 or 3 years old, and I'm sitting in front of one of those big box tube televisions, you know, with the television, like in wood. In casing. Yeah, wood paneling. And I'm sitting. Yep, exactly. Right. I'm sitting on the floor right in front of it. Like this close. It's amazing.

I'm not blind. And with the sound way down. And I'm watching Ag Day. But I didn't grow up on a farm. Again, I'm a Baptist preacher's kid. But that, that was what was on TV in 1982, when you woke up at 4 in the morning and you were 2 or 3 years old. So I would wake up and I would just like turn on ag day and I would sit crisscross applesauce in front of the tv, on the floor, on the shag carpet and watch this show. Somehow my mom caught a picture of this. She's like, you've always been that way.

I've also like, you can see as the sun goes down like I'm hot and sweaty and red and I've always been hot natured. She also has like, I'm a big guy now, lift a lot obviously, but I've also been like very hot natured. And she has a million pictures of me at 3, 4, 5, 6 years old, just sweating profusely from my forehead. Those things are innate in me. So the waking up early and the being very hot natured and sweating is normal. I know that's not normal for most.

And so understanding your circadian rhythm of when you wake up, when you go to bed again, by the end of this podcast my, my IQ will have dropped to about 85. And so, so don't like, let's lower expectations for the end of the podcast because it's bedtime and that's, that's when I spend time eating, watching great movies. We watch documentaries, like we're a big documentary family, love watching documentaries as a family. And, and so, you know, I talked about the non urgent not important things.

Binge watching Netflix or streaming TV I would call non urgent not important. But for my family there is actually a thing that I would actually take some of those documentaries and things that we learn and talk about. We pause documentaries about 10 times during every documentary and we talk about the history behind the thing that we're watching. So we're watching a thing on Churchill or watching a thing on World War II or watching a thing on whatever.

And I stop and I go, wait, do you understand what just happened here? This is what's going on. And we talk about the thing and so that take for us and it's just us and I'm sure it's some others, but not everybody. It takes that streaming television from quadrant one to quadrant four. Because now what we're doing is we've eaten dinner together at the table, we've had family worship, we've done the things we've decided we're going to watch.

Like I'll watch insure noble Chernobyl right now, which we've, my, one of my daughters and I have watched. My wife and other daughter had not watched. And I was like, this is an excellent historical documentary about what happened in Russia and Soviet Union, 1986 and the nuclear meltdown. So we're watching this thing, and that is a learning experience for our family that we enjoy. We just never watch more than one episode in any one night after that. It's board games, it's talking.

It's more family worship. It's going to bed, it's doing what? Whatever. We just don't do four hours of TV together. Right. And so. So it's. It's not that I'm saying that, by the way, we've also done family vacation or family thanks. Like Thanksgivings and holidays where we. We break out the old Nintendo 64 and we all play Mario Kart together. And it's a blast, the four of us doing the thing. So I'm also not saying that video games. Like, I'm not a video game guy.

I. I'm not a video game guy primarily because I'm scared of what it will do to me because video games are amazing at this point. I'm like, yeah, give me a good World War I or World War II video game and I might get sucked in forever. So I stay away from the thing. But playing Mario Kart for 45 minutes with my family, that takes it from a quadrant one to a quadrant four. Like, this is a blast. You know, we make popcorn, you know, we drink. It's eggnog season. My family loves. Do you guys.

Do you drink eggnog? I have drunk eggnog. Yes. Not a fan. I mean, I. It's not something that I crave. It's not something I crave during the holidays. I grew up not celebrating Christmas. Eggnognog was something that I had way later. Yeah, yeah. They don't like you 8. You don't have 8 days of eggnog in the Jewish culture. 8 days of matzo ball soup. That sounds way worse. I would much rather have eggnog. Yeah. So, I mean, a good matzo ball soup will blow your mind. It is true. I have.

Yeah. That is true. Yeah. I mean, so I want to be careful in putting judgment on the things outside of like the Internet porn and the. And the, you know, doom scrolling or the binge watching. It's. It's the. The what? I would, what I would say the fault or the sin is in the binge or. And obviously with porn, immoral. But, you know, for things like us, like, we will often watch a show at night as a family. After dinner, we talk about the show. We learn from the show.

We're not watching Game of Thrones. We're watching a documentary that has historical evidence that matters. Maybe good Maybe bad. And we talk through the thing like, hey, let me tell you the, this has been skewed this direction for this reason. And so we do those things. And so that's the way my daily schedule works.

But what I want to be careful of in the book, and I was careful in the book, is saying everyone needs to wake up at three or four in the morning, work in the morning when everyone else is sleeping, doing the urgent and important work spiritual disciplines work out so that by 6am you've gotten all those things out of the way and it's time to just work on the important things. Because I think a lot of people are wired the opposite. And I think that's fine.

If you wake up at six or seven or eight and you have your own system in place and you're most creative at 7 or 8pm and when my, as my IQ is winding down, yours is cranking up, I think that's fine. There's no judgment there. The key is identifying what are the things that are urgent, what are the things that are important, focusing on things that are important when they make the most, when they're most effective.

That's helpful because I think not everyone, like I've tried to force myself to get up at 5 and it'll work really well for a couple days. But I find that it's very difficult for me, you know, because I'm a social person, to get to bed at 9. I just, it's just, it might be an impossibility for me. It is also an impossibility for me to get to bed at 9 because I'm already sleeping. Exactly. For the opposite reason. Right?

Yeah. But I have recognized inside myself that, that there is benefit in the early morning hours before everyone else is awake. And I think this is why Benjamin Franklin said, because he is the origin of this phrase, early to bed, early to buy makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. And I think that's why he said that because he recognizes that a man has such a diverse range of responsibilities that extend outside himself.

That I've noticed for me, as soon as I'm aware that the world has started waking up somewhere around like 9:00, something like that, my whole day changes. And then later in the evening, like for example, after 10 or 11, when I know everyone's sleeping, then I, then I get that focus time back.

So, you know, I think to some extent there's, we may be wired to have this maybe environmental, situational awareness that there are people that have legitimate demands on our time and our Energy and our attention. Yeah. And we have to be present and available to them, including family members, subordinates, employees, etc. Right. Or, or just the next person down the line of the information management management chain.

Yeah. But to wake up early and to have that time where it's like, I'm not responsible to anyone right now or I'm going to knock out, as you said, those emails that, you know, for your fellow executives that need to, that they need to have in their hands in order to work that day, like to take care of that, you know, those demands. But if you have that time for yourself and whatever it is, 90 minutes or whatever, I think that's, that's invaluable to have whenever you can. Whenever you can get it.

Yeah, for sure. I think the thing that doesn't change is that people who are wired to work and work well, and I would argue most men, that's really what we're called to do in Genesis 3 is to do this thing. We will find a time to work when everyone else is sleeping. That's right. So whether that's early in the morning or late at night, find the time that works for you. I don't care. Like, I coach a lot of people that do this. So when I say I don't care, I'm not saying I want you to do it.

I just don't care what time of the day it is. Right. So whatever time is most sustainable. I get the same question as a strength coach. Should I work out early in the morning? Should I work out in the afternoon? Should I work out at night? I say whichever one you're going to do consistently for the next 10 years is the one you should do. If that's 5am, if it's 3pm or it's 10pm, I don't care so long as you get the workout in.

And so if you're someone who wakes up, this is a conversation I've had with Brett McKay from Art of Manliness about motivation and discipline, which try to there, there is a famous influencer, Navy Seal who often takes pictures of his watch at 4:30 in the morning. And I don't, I don't do that because it's at 3:15 in the morning and I don't want to feel like I'm better than him and which obviously you are. He's a, he's a good dude, he's fine.

And, but the point, the point there is that for, for us, I want people just to do the thing that works. And so if training at 5 in the morning works train at 5 in the morning. If spiritual disciplines at 5 in the morning or 6 in the morning work, do, do that. If it's 10 in the morning, do that. If it's 3 in the afternoon, do that. And if it's 10 at night, do that.

There is zero chance I would comprehend anything I read in the Bible at 10pm we occasionally have a church, I mean, you've been to some of our church stuff. You know, a social event, a dinner that goes to 9 or 10pm and I mean like, I can't, I'm just, I, I, I can't comprehend anything at that point. So for me it's early in the morning. That's when the comprehension comes.

And for me, you know, three in the morning, 3:30 in the morning, four in the morning, whatever it is, till seven when my wife and kids wake up, that's my best work of the day. That's the most efficient work of the day. And again, coming back to that quadrant, the urgent and important work is the work that has to be efficient. And let me be clear, quadrant four is not about efficiency, right?

Family time, husband time, parent time, spiritual discipline time, occasionally workout time, could, could be, but you know, health sort of stuff. That's not about efficiency, that's importance. And so we're trying to make time to do that stuff. So as, as we get deeper in the book and we talk about the tactical aspects of the game plan of goals, actions, metrics, execution. I'm not applying goals, actions, metrics, execution to how good of a husband I am. Right?

The, the point there is to apply those to the previous three or certainly two quadrants so that when I get to the husband time, I'm not like, hey, we got an efficient 45 minute date right now. Like everybody knows this, right? This is actually got asked this on a podcast.

I was like, yeah, we don't apply that to the things that are most important, that those tactical things for efficiency occur on the urgent things that actually matter that are urgent and important, or that are urgent and maybe not as important, but have to be done purging quadrant one and still making as much time possible for that. Quadrant four. I want to spend as much time possible in the word. I want to spend as much time possible with my wife, with my children.

Nobody looks back and says, I wish I was a more efficient, you know, I worked more as a CEO, as a, as a business owner, as a whatever. And so I do want to be efficient at those things. But the reason I want to be efficient at those things is so I can do the things actually matter to me, which come back to my core values, which is being a great husband, great father.

The legacy I want to leave of the jacked wise old grandpa that loves Jesus, that goes for generations to come, not just to my children, but to my children's children, into multiple great grandchildren and great great grandchildren that I will. I may never know and they may not even know my name. But if I set the culture, if I set the values in my family now, the values can be passed down.

So while like I, I don't know the names of any of my great great grandparents, I know the names of my great grandparents. I've met them as a child. I have very small memories of them. I know my grandparents well. And they're really the ones who I think helped us. They accepted and took on Christianity and sort of turned us into a covenant family, I would say. But beyond that, I don't know. And so the reality is how much value has been pushed down from.

My grandpa was here for Thanksgiving last week and he's 89 and it's. I'll get choked up. This might be the last Thanksgiving we get with him. He's pretty frail. He's still mentally pretty sharp, but really physically frail. And I've lost my dad. And he said, you know, you're not going to be long and you're going to be the patriarch of the family. You're going to be the leader of the family. And I thought to myself, I already am. And I wasn't gonna say that to him. Cause he is still alive.

But the reality is that my job is, because he is a wonderful man who loves Jesus, is to carry the torch and carry the ball down the field. And I want my children and my children's children and my children's children's children to carry the ball down the field even if they don't know my name. I hope the values that I instilled in them because of the time I spent doing the important things and not the urgent things that I'll never remember. No one will ever remember the urgent things.

The basecamp project management and the emails and the podcasts and all the things, no one will remember that. But the values that I instill in my family, while they may not even remember my name and they may not be able to say, great grandpa Matt Reynolds did this, if I do it well, it can last generations to come right to it, to a thousand generations. That's what the Bible tells. Like that.

That is, I think, a Promise on some level that we can have faith in, that we can pass down to our children and our children's children. You are consistently one of my favorite podcast guests. You know that? I mean, that's, that's what. It's crying. I'm red. I'm like, I hope, I hope people are listening to this, not watching the YouTube video. Please go over to YouTube and watch this right now. So, no, I mean, that's, that's really what it's all about.

And that's, that's why your book is important, right? Undoing urgency. And we were talking before we started recording the reason why I think this matters contextually, just to zoom out to the hundred thousand foot level. I think we all agree that with the election of Donald Trump about a month ago, Christians now, and everyone's been saying this, Christians now have a window of opportunity to build.

And depending on who you talk to, that window could be three months, six months, you know, maybe a year, four years, who knows? But we feel that there's a window we've been given. And everyone has been saying we've been given a reprieve doesn't mean we won the game, right? We've been given a reprieve, and praise God, hallelujah for that. How long that reprieve lasts, who knows? But we know that we have it.

And I've observed for a long time that one thing that Donald Trump did from his 2016-2020 presidency, that I think is unquestionable, I think there are a lot of questions we could ask. But the one thing that was unquestionable, unquestionable to me at the time, was that he had provided air cover for men to build. Whatever else he did, there was air cover for men to build.

So that when the storms of 2020 came, a lot of men were more antifragile than they would have been under a Clinton presidency, a Clinton, Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016 would have been devastating, right? So because men built from 2016 to 2020, when 2020 came along, it was hard, but a lot of people experienced quite a bit of growth. For example, the guys up in Moscow, right, Canon. Because they had, they had done so much building beforehand.

So now here we are, here we are run the clock forward additional four years, right? Or eight years, I suppose, from 2016, where we have another window to build, we have this time. And this is. This time is a very, very precious resource every single day. So how do we go about it? In, in order to build, in order to solidify what we need to solidify in order to have a, and in order to have a long view for what's coming down for our families to come.

That is, I think, how Christian men and Christian women who support them should be thinking about this moment. That's why I think this book, Undoing Urgency, is so important to come along right now because time management is not something many people have learned from their fathers. Sure. It wasn't something that I learned. My dad just worked all the time, and so I just worked all the time. And you didn't identify the difference between urgent and important. And like, what was the thing?

They just, he just worked. That's our dad's generation. They were just, they just worked. Yeah, there was like, work, life, balance. What's that? You know, it's, it's, it's just work. Right. And, and that's great. It's, it was, it was great for me until I was around 18 or 19 years old. Right. But it just, it's not a way to live. That's a good way. It's a good way to burn out. It's a good way to, you know, work yourself to death. It can pay off later.

So now there's a question of, like, well, as a, as a, as a Christian man, I have to balance my daily label labors, my daily responsibility. Add something onto that that includes like, well, how to build for the future. Add on health, because we're fighting an obesogenic culture. Add on spiritual disciplines, and in my case, you know, no family yet, God willing, that's coming soon. But I'm thinking about that as well.

And that all has to be managed properly with the right mindset and practices, period. Because it doesn't get done spontaneously, as I'm sure that you know. Yeah. So I, I think the first thing we do is we look at the call of men in early Genesis, in Genesis 2 and 3. So, so one, we're called to work. I, I, I would challenge anyone that says that men are not called to work. We're called to work no matter what. Now the, the, the value of that work.

Let me get in, I'll put a, put a flag in it for a second. We're also called to be fruitful and multiply. Take dominion. Like all these things matter. These are all important things. And then what is the work that happens after the fall is that you're going to work the ground all the days of your life. Thorn and thistles are going to grow up. And so the reality is, is that if we don't Work and cut the thorns and thistles. It will choke out the fruit. And so our job.

And so this is where the important stuff comes in. And I think if you spend all your time cultivating the ground or planting the seeds, but not. But not cutting out the weeds, pulling the weeds, cutting the thorns, then it's all for naught because the fruit never grows. And so obviously, there's. What I love about your podcast is I can go. I can go into covenant theology with this, but. Yes, you can. Right.

So the reality is that I used to think of covenant theology as what I would call Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. It was like this thin little stalk, and every time you got saved, it was. Or not every time, but when you got saved, you became a little branch on this crappy little tree. Only that's not the picture that's painted in scripture. It's this beautiful, abundant olive tree that grows and that our job is to cultivate and do the things that create fruit. They will know us by our fruit.

They will know us by our work. They will know us by the work that produces fruit. These are all pieces of gospel, pieces of scripture that are given to us that are very inerrant, infallible, Word of God. And so. And so for us, I think it's very easy. And of course, we know culturally, you know, Paul didn't understand or the New Testament, like, God knew what was coming.

But, you know, the AI revolution and enter the Internet and the very small world that we live in, like, the vast globalism that we live in today, like, all that sort of stuff was not really probably considered at the time, while the Bible is still completely applicable to that for us, we have to take the Bible and apply it to this crazy culture that we live in. We don't. We don't say the thing that's written in the Bible is no longer applicable because of the culture.

We say, how do we apply the Bible to the culture? And the culture's freaking crazy, right? And so we live in a world where it's very easy to get for our work to be choked out by the thorns and thistles and weeds. Our job as men is to pull the thorns and thistles and weeds, or pull the weeds and cut the thorns and thistles so that we produce fruit.

And whether that means in the work itself, in the actual work we do for occupation, whether that means in cultivating our family, our homes, our marriages, our children, our churches, these are the things that matter. And the. The problem with time management in 2024 and the opportunity that we have now in 2024 and beyond for some period of time, is that men now have an opportunity to pull a lot of weeds and cut a lot of thorns and re. And reduce the thistles tremendously. Right.

And this is what is so powerful. By. Again, like, do I think Donald Trump's a Christian? Probably not. I don't. Probably not, right? No. But God puts leaders in place and I think about, you know, it's almost still a joke, but I don't think it's going to be a joke in another year. Like the, The Department of Government Efficiency, the Doge with Elon Musk and Vivek. You look at a guy like Elon Musk, you talk about men building things, right?

I want government to get out of the way and let guys like that just build. Yeah, but not just him, because he's exceptional. We can look at him and say, yeah, but that Guy's got an IQ of 180 and he's like, crazy. But, like, I want that for all men. I want that for all families. I want that for all churches. I want that for the good of humanity. I want that because Christ sits on the throne and because we have an opportunity to build and to grow.

And so if we are bogged down, come back to the absolute deepest of the trenches, we have an opportunity to build. But we binge watch Netflix and we play video games, we look at Internet porn and we doom. Scroll social media. No, like, we have to plant the flag and say, we're not going to do it. We are going to build. We have. We have no idea how much time, but we have some time to build something that is incredible, that will last beyond us, that will go. That will go far beyond.

Like, so you obviously, you know, I'm not. Neither one of us are Catholic. There is a. I think it's a Benedictine abbey where the monks are. I don't know what, do monks go to abbeys? I don't. Outside of monasteries. Maybe it's monastery outside of Tulsa. And there's a long story there that I won't get into the background. But anyway, that it built over years. And those guys, while I don't agree with them theologically at all, they. They are playing the long game.

These are guys who have built the cathedral out of rock that they. From the land they bought on, that they bought and, and built and built, you know, the old rock, if you've ever been to England or Scotland. And they've got the old, you know, stone fences, the stone walls, they've Built that they gathered the food and the garden, they've planted the gardens, and they, they're playing the long game.

And so I think for us, the most important work we can do right now is play the long game and play the long game as efficiently as possible. And that sounds a little bit like a, like a dichotomy because, like, how can you play the long game as efficiently as possible?

Well, I want to plant as many seeds as I can right now and cultivate as hard and fast as I can while I'm not up against the rest of the world who's fighting me tremendously as they have been the last four years, to cultivate these seeds, to plant these seeds, to grow these. I don't, I don't. Do you have a yard at your house? No. Okay, so I'm kind of a yard nut. I'm like a. I'm a 45 year old and then pretend that I'm a 70 year old.

I'm the guy that, like, wants to have the nicest grass in my yard. The roots get the strongest in the late fall, going into winter. The best time to plant grass is actually in the late fall and winter because the roots will get strong during the winter and they will come up incredibly green and strong and vibrant in the spring. If you plant grass in the spring, it might take. But there's.

I would say there's a 70% plus chance it will burn up because it won't be strong enough by the time the summer comes. It's gonna, It's. It's. It's the parable of the sower. Right. So the, the key is, is that we, we plant when the soil is ripe. We cultivate when the times are good, which we're now, praise be to God, for four years or two years or six months, whatever that thing is, so that the thing lasts long term. That is the point of focusing on the important.

And again, coming back to the book, if we drown in the urgency, think about how many times in your life, and maybe even right now, you look back and you think, like, how fast time has passed. Now. We've lived in a really weird time because we've had Covid in 2020 and 2021. And however long you want to extend it, like there's been this crazy. And the macroeconomic condition has changed dramatically and the political climate has changed dramatically.

But, but for most of our lives, like, I look back on, I don't know, 97 through 2000, and I don't even know what I was doing right I don't know what I accomplished. Right. And so we have a time right now where we have to work in a way that is playing the long game, but we do that in as efficient manner as possible so that by the time the enemy rises up again, and it will. The roots are as strong as possible.

And we've planted the seeds and cultivated the plants and the tree, the olive tree, the fruit, the things that are as strong as humanly possible to withstand the enemy at that point. Like, if we have a time right now where we don't have. Hopefully we don't have enemies spraying DMT and Roundup over. Over our gardens. Right. Like, that's not dmt. Hopefully you don't have. No, not dmt. What is it? Ddt. Sorry. DMT is a different. That's a different thing.

Yeah. You know, we don't have the crazy fertilizer. We, you know, whatever the thing is. And so you get what I'm saying? I do. So. So, you know, we've got. We've got a time where now's the time to. There's a term I want to use that I can't use on this podcast, but to take the world by the cojones and do the thing. Can I say that? You just did. Yeah, that's. Whatever. And so the point is, like, we want to do good work in the stuff that matters that's important.

And so this all comes back to, I think, understanding what your core values are and what really matters. What's the legacy you want to leave? What's the long game you want to play? What is your. What do you want your family to look like? Not in 20 years. Which 20 years matters. Like, I think you should think about 20 years, but in a hundred years, in 200 years, what. What does that look like?

Well, we have an opportunity right now that I think we're going to look back in history and say, like, we have an opportunity to plant the seeds that will become the fruit, that will become the fully grown fruit trees. The. These incredible trees that bear fruit a hundred years down the road, 200 years down the road, and hopefully 20 years down the road, hopefully five years down the road. But the fruit is better 200 years later.

The best wineries are coming from these French and Italian wineries that are coming from vines who have been there for 200 years that have made it. Like, you can't create great wine out of a new vine. You can create decent wine out of a relatively new wine. But I want to create a fruit that matters and so no one will look back on. No one will remember Barbalogic. No one will remember Matt Reynolds, the CEO of the company. They'll remember the guy, hopefully.

Or even if they don't remember the guy, they'll remember, I hope, the values that I created in the family, in the church, in the community that I live in, that will last for generations to come. Like, that's. And that's the difference between the influencer mentality, which is like, I want to be popular, I want to be known, versus I want to build something that lasts far beyond me, is with the same thing I think we've talked about in a previous podcast.

I couldn't care less if my business doesn't need to be based on Matt Reynolds. My business needs to be strong and healthy outside of me. And so. And my family at some point will have to be strong outside of me because I'll be dead. So I get to use my time wisely to focus on the things that are important, to plant the seeds, to cultivate the plants, to build the trees, to do the things that will last for generations beyond, far beyond my lifetime. Like, that's what we're trying to do.

And we believe that is true because Jesus sits on the throne and is king right now, and he is, by his grace has given us the ability to have a time that we believe is a time of peace where men can cultivate and grow and build. So I want. My desire is for everyone else to get out of the way and let people, let men build. That's great. I mean, I love what you said there about the influencer mentality versus the builder mentality. Right? What are you. What are you going somewhere?

When I came to visit you guys, you gave me the book the E. Myth Revisited. I have that on my shelf outside, so. And one of the things that I think is relevant about that classic business book to now is that there's a difference between, you know, all of the business practices are contained within you as an individual versus have they been externalized so that someone else can do them? And then. And then something begins growing organically as a result of that. Right? So then you.

Then you've built something that lasts for the generations. Even if you don't, it still runs. And I think that's a vital mindset because I do believe that it's very easy today to sneak in the idea that we're going to live forever. And I don't mean that anyone actually consciously thinks they're going to live forever, but to live without an awareness of our eventual death. And as a result of that, we don't think what happens after us because there is no after us.

But if we think as men in terms of, well, there will be an after me, what will live on after me. I think that's, that is a way to think about things that can feed into the notion of like, okay, if there will be something after me and I want something to continue on that isn't necessarily just my name, but my influence. Right. In terms of, in terms of what I've created, what does that mean for me today, right now, this morning as I just got out of bed? Yeah. You realize first, it's not about you.

Right. I think that's a really important understanding is to say it's just not about me. And then two, I think you see the dichotomy. We've talked about this, I think on the previous podcast as well, of a hopeful or post mill eschatology versus several generations. A couple hundred years of generations who thought. Yeah, a couple hundred years of people who thought, like, generation Jesus is coming back right now, today.

I don't think they played the long game because I thought, I think so many people thought that they were the last generation. Yeah. Now we may be the last generation, but I don't think we are. Right. And so, and so, like, I don't know if Christ is going to return a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now or 10,000 years from now. So. But I don't, I don't think he's going to return in my lifetime. It'd be great if he does. Lord, come quickly, like, please.

But if he doesn't, then I'm playing the long game. Because Christ sits on the throne. We've been called to go and make disciples, teaching them, like discipling them, baptizing them, and teaching them everything that he taught us. Right. Like that's the point. That's the long game that we're playing. And so that starts with our family. I want to create that covenant household that, that lives hundreds of years beyond me.

Like, maybe the best thing you could do as a man is create a culture and a value system and a, and a covenant familyhood and potentially even a covenant community. Covenant business. Like, maybe not covenant business, but you know, the value system is still attached to the business that lasts so far beyond you that they don't even remember your name. But the values still live on. And the values are not. This is again, something I can't say on most podcasts. The values are not My values.

The values are the gospel. Like, that's the point. And so I'm trying to create that in my family, in my church, in my business, in my. And listen, there are lots of people in my business, and some of them will listen to this and they'll be like, the heck are you talking about? You know, and it's like, but, but this is the. This is. The advantage that I have as a founder of a business of this size is that everyone understands exactly what our values are in our business.

And they would say, they would understand that this, the creation story of the business or the story of the business is the story of the founder. Now, what is the story of the founder? The story of the founder for me is this is the story of the. The power of the gospel in my life. And this is the important thing. And so when I'm caught up in the urgent, I'm caught up in the thing that's not the story of the gospel.

And the way it's changed my life, the way it's changed my business, the way it's changed my marriage, the way it's changed my children, the way it's changed my church. In our church. Like, again, you came down here. Our church has doubled in size in, like, the last four weeks. He was in your living room. When I was down there, it was. In my living room. And we bought a building. It's doubled in size.

And I haven't had conversations about this, but I just can imagine there are original members in our church, most likely, or early members in our church, who are terrified about the fact that it's doubled in size. Oh, sure. Because it just naturally has to, on some level, change the culture. There's lots of people to deal with. Like, there's. There's new problems. What do they believe? All those sorts of things. But again, what are we doing this for?

Was the goal 50 years from now to be 25 people in a living room? And let me be clear. The goal is not to be a mega church either. Sure. The goal is to change between there. That's right. The goal is to change as many people as possible in the power of the gospel and to literally carry out the Great Commission. And when we get to a point that we're big enough to make more churches, like, that's. That's part of the goal.

And so I think if you push back against that, I would challenge it because, like, that's what we're called to do, and that's what I'm called to do as a husband not make new churches, but to. To create that value stream that comes from the gospel of the power that's changed. This is what's so beautiful to me about people. You actually, honestly, like, you are a great story of this that are probably. I think you've talked about this enough.

The first true, like, covenant Christian member of your family. Yeah. And so. And so there is. You know, I'll get choked up. I'm praying for you to find a wife and have some children, have some covenant babies and like, because. Because you are the new branch on the olive tree. And it doesn't look like Charlie Brown's olive tree. It's not this skinny little crappy trunk with individual. Like, here's Will, and then eventually here's his wife. A different branch.

It's. No, no, no, no, no. Like, off of that branch comes a wife and children and grandchildren. Sorry. And so, like, that is the beauty of life. And so, again, we get so caught up in the urgency that we miss the forest through the trees. We miss the olive fruit through the. Through the trick. Like, we don't get it. And this is the stuff that matters. And so the point of the whole book, if you get. Buy the book, great. Love it.

But if you don't understand the value of the thing that is, don't drown in the urgency. Focus on the stuff that's important. That's what matters. Like, there's beauty in that. Like, I want to actually hire. By the way, if you're listening to this and you're an artist, I will hire you. I want to create a. What my. What my view of what the olive tree looked like, which is Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, was for all of my life and what the olive tree actually looks like now. And I want.

And I want to put them on both sides of my office, like, one on the left and one on the right and say, like, it doesn't look like this. It's not a single branch with lots of little individual branches coming off. It's this beautiful olive tree that grows fruit off of fruit, fruit off of branches. And also sometimes branches get cut off and grafted in. And those things are beautiful, too. Like, that's all God's work.

We just stay faithful to the gospel, and these are the things that are important in life. And when we drown in the urgency, we miss it. And we'll blink, and it'll be four years from now or two years from now, and the Congress will change. And, like, it doesn't change anything about Christ sitting on the throne, but Right now in America, we have an opportunity to build. We have an opportunity to grow. We have an opportunity to develop and cultivate that olive tree, those plants and those.

Those trees and that growth. Like, those are the things that we have to do right now. And if we. If we sit on our laurels or if we get. And I think most of you guys are probably listening to your podcast, aren't. They're not lazy. Maybe some are. I'm sure some are, but most are probably drowning in urgency. And both the lazy and the overworked miss the important. And the important is the thing we have to focus on.

Just want to back up to something you said a moment ago about the first Covenant member of my family. You're the first person to say something like that to me. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean. I mean. I mean, you're right. I'd never really thought of it that way. And I. I guess this is probably going to sound funny. You know, I'm used to being an outsider for so much of my life. Right. So from travel, that's what I am. You're just a walking outsider, whether you like it or not.

And, you know, journeying through so many different, you know, religions and political orientations, like, I'm just used to being an outsider. And it's only hit me in the past four to five months, really, because I'm also kind of new to reform theology, to this kind of world that's much bigger, and there's more to it than I realized, especially today. And so it's only hit me in the past few months, you know, like, no, Will, you're part of this thing. There's a. There's a Spencer branch.

Yeah. That didn't exist before your conversion. That's right. There is. Is there anything more beautiful than that? No. That's incredible. Right. And so. So you are. You are the branch of the Spencer family. And now. And. And I think that's why you feel the weight of creating more fruit, having more family, leading the family that you currently have to Christ, finding a godly wife and having children. Like, that's where. That's why the pressure.

That's why you feel the weight of that, is because. Yeah. And it's not. And by the way, let me. It's not to put humanistic pressure on you at all. It's just like, I think you get the gravity of it. Like, it's. If everybody in their conversion is their own branch, then their own branch is nothing special. Right. But if you're the first branch of a family, and you build a thing. Like when I wrote my. When I signed the book to my grandpa a couple days ago on Thanksgiving, Matt, I couldn't even.

There's no way I could read it on here because I would get so choked up. He and my grandma were the first Christians in my family, and I understand the gravity of that. There is incredible weightiness to that. And so, man, first off, thank you for being able to do the podcast, to be able to talk about these things, because I don't get to talk about this most podcasts. I'm going on business podcasts and lifestyle podcasts and someone, you know.

But to be able to have the freedom to talk through those things like there is, when we talk about the important things and you can read it in the book, it's not. I don't gloss over it. It's pretty evident, while at the same time not shoving it down every reader's throat, still being published by a mass publisher. Understanding that that is the most important thing.

Understanding, like, our role that we play in building into Christendom, in building into our families and our church and our community, and not because God needs us, but because he delights in it.

That's what's so incredible, is that because he chose to love us before the foundation of the world chose you, you now get to delight God by building fruit with his, obviously with his help tremendously, or even all his work in building fruit on the Spencer branch, which did not exist before you, which is pretty incredible. It is. It is. And I hadn't. That sounds silly. I'd never really thought of it that way before because most of the questions.

The. Most of the questions that I get asked are about the family that I have left behind or that left me behind, or however you want to look at it. In fact, I was. I was on the new St. Andrews, the university in Moscow. They just had me on their podcast of flames and crowns with Lennox, California, I believe is how you say his name. Yeah. So. So that'll be coming out tomorrow when we're recording. It will already have been out when people listen this. Listen to this. And he. Like. Like the.

Like Crosspolitik, like so many other people have asked me, like, about the response of my family to becoming a Christian. Yeah. What was it like being an ethnic Jew who became a Christian and being left behind? Which is a perfectly valid question. It is. But a much. I would argue a much more important question is what's it like being the first guy, the first branch on the olive tree for your family? And what sort of weight do you bear to build the fruit off of that thing?

God, I hope people don't watch this on YouTube and watch me cry and turn red. Can you guess if you are watching? Can you just listen to it, please? I might just clip this out and post it on Twitter. Well, no, no, it's like, it's so. There's so much we in it, man. And like, you know, I hope Sunday, when you take communion, which we take every Sunday, that you. That you feel the weight of it, because the. The gloriousness of it is. Is it had nothing to do with anything you did.

Yep. This is the goodness of the gospel, that it's everything that Jesus did to do that, to. To. Well, here's what's wild. Here's another wild thing that maybe nobody's ever told you. Your family got cut off the olive tree and then you got personally grafted back in. Yeah, that's wild. That's wild. Yes, it is. Yes. I remember I read Romans 10. There is gravity to that. Oh, I remember when I read Romans 9, 10, and 11 the first time, like, oh, well, there it is. I'm out and I'm in.

Yes. That I have thought about. Yeah, that I have. But I mean, how to let that land in me has been a. Has been a big challenge. Like, I think I acknowledge it. I'm consciously aware of it. But the emotional. What you're talking about, the emotional weight, the emotional gravity of it. Perhaps I've never quite let it hit me before, or maybe because I've been looking back at what I've left behind, I haven't yet fully turned to acknowledge what it is I've been grafted into.

Yeah. So, you know, and that. And. Which is natural, right? Which is natural. It's a. There's a grief. There's a grief process. Yeah. But, yeah, I. I do feel the. I do feel the weight of that. And I do believe, as Doug Wilson talks about the Deuteronomic blessings for faithfulness. I've read those passages and have them all marked up in my Bible. And, And. And I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. Right.

Well, I mean, like this time two years ago, like, if I were to go back and look at who was my guest on my podcast in November 2022, I. Off the top of my head, I don't know, but I. But I know I'd had Doug Wilson on at least once by then, but, like Covenant theology, I didn't know what that was. You know, soteriology like all these things have unfolded over the past couple years to the point now where it's like, oh, wow, maybe I can finally understand this for real in an embodied sense.

It's not head knowledge. Yeah, right. It's feeling the weight and the emotional reality of it and then extending that into the future. You're the first person to say anything like that to me. Others may have thought it or felt it or seen it or, or simply assumed that it was implied. But, but, but to hear it said to me is. Is very meaningful. It's very meaningful. So thank you. Yeah, it's true. And I feel. I feel the weight of it for you, you know, and I feel the weight of it for me.

Like, I've got two daughters who, you know, one of whom has a serious boyfriend. And you think about, again, like, your olive branch, which is a branch with one. Essentially one olive, let's say on it, one piece of fruit. And your goal is to, like, get that thing to branch out and produce lots of fruit, obviously through the work and power of Jesus Christ. Same thing for me. Like, you have to recognize that you don't have total control over that thing and you stay faithful to it.

And I get worried about, like, who my daughters are going to marry and if they're, you know, are they going to give me lots of grandkids and coveted grandchildren and all those sorts of things. And you realize, like, a lot of that's just sort of out of my control while I still try to plant those seeds and, and build those values. And you. And you realize, like, God is just sometimes God is just good and God has been good to you.

And it's really an amazing story that you don't have to be this thing that is a spindly little crappy branch on the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, but that you get to be part of this incredible, voluminous, fruitful olive tree as part of the family of Jesus Christ of Christians, which is really, really cool, man. I wish I could give you a hug right now. So I'm glad we. We got through it. So here's. Here's what I would challenge to your listeners.

Here's my sales pitch, because I would love to hear how much of that comes through in the book. So for those of you who are listening to this, not to listen. I run a company that's a service company. We do fine. It's not about selling the books. I couldn't buy the book. Get the cheap, but. But find it on sale. Get it. I don't care. Go get it, the library, used copy. Whatever, doesn't matter to me. Right. I think, I think the Kindle and audible, like all those things are going to be on sale.

Like whatever. Get a sale. Yeah, it's, it's. But I would love, I would, I would love to hear from your listeners and I'm super easy to find. Matt Reynolds, Barbell logic. My email is easy. I mean it's all over the place. You can find my email. You can. If you spend 30 seconds and you can't find my email, your IQ is too low to send me an email. But if you read the book and you listen to Will's podcast, if you listen to this podcast, I want to know if you feel that thread in the book.

Because I've tried to read, write a book that is not a overtly in your face Christian gospel centered book that has these threads that run through it that I can be very proud of that I can pass down to my families and these values are still stand and for people who know me, I want those things to be. And look, I'm very open about being a Christian and these are my core values in the book. I say those things, but I'm not talking about olive trees and olive branches.

But like I think if you listen to this podcast, I would love to hear. If you buy the book and read the book, I would love to hear from you. Reach out to me by email. I promise you I will read the email and I will respond personally. My EA will not respond to your email. Like, do you see that?

That thread, that ribbon that binds this all together of like what he's really trying to tell you guys is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the thing that's most important and family and faith and spiritual disciplines and even health on some point. Because again, I think health is important. It's been in the. Without going down the Pluto. It's been nuts the last couple weeks on Twitter of fat pastors and all the things that we see.

But I would just say like the health and fitness piece, like this is what I do. There's been a weird crossover for me and that I've been very reformed and Calvinist and things for years and I've been a strength coach for years. And for those of you who are still watching YouTube, even though I'm crying and I have a red face and all this stuff, those felt separate so my fists are not together.

And then something happened and I started to do podcasts like Crosspolitik and, and the Ogden guys and Moscow guys and all the, whatever, all the guys and those worlds, like, combined and there started to be this ribbon that binded that together. And what I see in the health and fitness space, not to be judgmental against quote, unquote, fat pastors, because I don't want to be that. It's that if we're playing the long game, if that's the goal.

And like, yes, you know, like Paul says, if, if I get, if, if heaven is tomorrow, like, lord, come, like, let's do that. But if, but if not, I don't just want to walk my daughters down the aisle at their wedding. I want to walk or be there for my granddaughters and my great granddaughters and man, if God blesses me, my great great granddaughters, to walk down the aisle as well, I want to play. And so I can't do that if I'm not healthy.

And so, and so while the health is not this on the same level as the spiritual health and the values and the family health and the leadership in your church or in your business or whatever, the things are like, there's still a long game there that we're trying to play. And I realize our days are numbered, but I also think there's, you know, again, read Proverbs and read Ecclesiastes and you get to see, like, the dichotomy of both of those things.

I still think that there is Proverbs is pretty clear that God. The tendency is for God to bless those with a long life, with those who work and take care of their bodies and do the things. And we're not guaranteed it. Right? Like, you can do the thing, you can die at 25. But I want to not do the things that will kill me at 50.

I want to try to do the things that will allow me to see the long game that hopefully I planted a value and building of my family's olive branch for 40, 50, 60 more decades or years to come, four, five, six decades to come. And so that's where the health piece comes in. If you are unhealthy, you're not, almost certainly not going to watch your great grandchildren walk down the aisle at their wedding. And what a joy to be able to do that. If you're able to.

If the Lord spares you and you're able to be healthy through that. So that's where the health stuff comes in. And I think that's where there's importance there. So certainly for me, being a Christian first and a Christian leader, both in my church and my business, in my home, in my family, and my spheres of, of influence and sovereignty with my family, with my wife and my children, like that's, that's number one for me.

Um, but I would love, like I have eternity to enjoy Jesus and so I would love to see if the Lord blesses me and he terries to be able to see another, another four, five, six decades of what the Reynolds family looks like from now. Unless it goes bad. And then I'll let God can kill me anytime he wants to. He can do that anyway. Yeah, it's true. And so I think, I think that's where the health part and I think that's why I put that in the important piece.

I would certainly put it as A, you know, whatever 1B or something below those other things. But I think that's still really important. And so I think it's important for us because we have fallen into, it's such a. We, we live in a time of such excess and, and we can eat, you know, we can doordash anything.

We went to our home and we can, we can eat junk and we can eat food and, and then we get up in the morning and we study scripture and we, and we are good dads and, and good husbands and we do those things. But we don't take care of ourselves or we drown in urgency or we drown in stress and we have a stroke or a heart attack or whatever and you're like, man, you missed it and you didn't have to. And so that's where I think the health piece comes in.

I just, I just, at this point, man, I, I've been a professional strongman and a professional power lifter and I just don't care about how much weight I lift. Like, I still love to lift heavy. It's still super fun and I still do, but I, I just want to lift to be, to be healthy. I don't want to live to be. I don't care about the strength any. Like I'm strong enough for anything life can throw at me at this point, right?

Like to this day, like in my late 40s, I'm, I'm strong enough for anything life will throw at me, but I'm not necessarily strong enough for the stress of 18 hour work days, which the strength doesn't help, right? And so at some point I have to focus on do I really want to see the fruition of like literally the fruit of the olive tree of the Reynolds branch in my family? And I do.

And so I want to be there, not to just watch my daughters or walk my daughters down the aisle, but to watch their daughters walk down the aisle, and again, if the Lord blesses, maybe their daughters walk down the aisle. That's always been one of the tough parts about the Christian conversation regarding health and fitness is trying to land in a why in a godly why. Because a lot of people will resist the call to fitness because they'll immediately jump to, well, it's all about aesthetics.

And I don't want to be vain. Right. They'll throw it into the vanity category. And I, I don't think, I think that can be a proper category depending on how some men conduct it. Right. And, but I think in, in general, to dismiss, you know, weight training, healthy diet. Right. In general, as, as a category of vanity is wrong. But I think fruitfulness, prosperity, health, sober mindedness, I think all of these are far more accurate categories.

I've said for years, if you could snap your fingers and give anyone 24 hours in their ideal body, whatever, that looks like their ideal body weight, and at the end of 24 hours, they would have to go back to wherever they were when you snapped your fingers. At the end of 24 hours, they would be begging you. They would change meaningfully. They've never known, because most people have never known what it's like to be, to be either truly fit, truly strong, or, or both.

Whatever, whatever that looks like. Right. And so because I know that when I started the renaissance of men, when I started this podcast, whatever, four and a half years ago, four, four or so years ago, that was the, that was the, the fittest, the strongest and leanest I'd ever been in my entire life. I had unlocked a whole new level of energy, of clarity, of mind, of motivation, et cetera. And so naturally, a lot of fruit came out of that. And that's. That stuck with me.

And so I often challenge people to say, like, how would you be, how would you perform in your everyday life? How would you feel if you had just checked that off your to do list? It doesn't mean 8% body fat up. On stage at a body not typically healthy. Correct. Actually, something between where you are now and there, right? Yeah, exactly. And £20 off of anybody. I would. I give, I give everybody a mulligan of about £20 today, you know, and I think that's a product of so many different things.

Sedentary lifestyle, you know, probably air conditioning probably has a lot to do with it. Just for men. Well, because we don't have to. Our bodies don't have to resist the elements anymore. And I Think we don't, we don't work manual jobs. We sit at a desk. Yep. Like all those sort of things, like why was food. Why was. Right. Processed foods. Why? You've seen the pictures of, from the seventies on the beach where there's nobody that's fat. That's right. Why is nobody fat on the beach?

I'm gonna, I'm gonna again, I'm. By the time this comes out, I'll probably be in Mexico surrounded by fat people. And, and right. And, and, and I struggle with the same thing. Like it's this, this. There is this thing that when I am overwhelmed with urgency, one of the first things to go for me is often is the food and the alcohol and the training and the, and so those things and you follow that and the next thing you know you're like, wow, I've put on £25 and I'm less healthy than I was.

And so my body weight is fluctuated tremendously. I would just say that for me and for our business. And again, this is not a pitch for the business, but for. It really is. You laugh at barbellogic. I'm loving all the pitches. You can do them, man. Our focus is normal people improving their quality of life by experiencing strength and health. That's the point. It's not about 22 year old kids who take pictures of their abs and post it on Instagram. That's just not who we train.

And I'm not going to say that every kid that does that is in sin or whatever. I think that aesthetics, everyone wants to look better. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I think aesthetics are a byproduct of performance improvement and quality of life improvement. If you improve your performance and quality of life, strength, health, et cetera, the aesthetics will improve.

You'll feel better about yourself aesthetically, but more importantly, you'll be healthier, stronger, perform better, quality of life will be better. I want my quality of life to go up year after year after year. And here I'm in the mid-40s, hit a peak around 50, 55 and hold until I'm 90, 100, whatever, and then die. And that's okay, there's nothing. Because what most people do are the opposite. They hit their peak at 19, 20, 25 and they slowly decline into this.

They osteoporosis and osteopenia and they lose, lose all this muscle and lose all this bone density and they, and they, they get so frail that they have to go into it. I don't Ever want to go to go to a nursing home, you know, so I want to maintain quality of life and then just the Lord take me. That's okay. That's right. Yeah. No, I think that's a good way of thinking about it because I think a lot of our culture is also in terms of short term thinking, I'm going to live forever, right.

Me centric, individualistic, and then also heavily youth centric. It's a strange phenomenon. I see people all the time on Twitter, like, oh, I'm 30 now, it's so over. Like what? Right. I believe firmly, I've said this to countless people, a man does not truly become useful until he's 35. And I would say his peak is 35 to 45 or 35 to late 40s. And then I think you can maintain that lifestyle for probably another two decades.

I mean, we've had tons of clients that, man, we have guys that are 65 years old that deadlift over 400 pounds and that's plenty strong for anything life throws at them. That's right. But not, not only are they strong, and I say that maybe like, and they're not 300 pounds, right? They're, they're 185. Exactly. And they're strong and they're healthy and they're lean and they're, you know, we do their blood markers and their, their metrics are strong.

And so I think those things are important because, and, and so I'll be careful the way I say this because of the things I've seen, even on X this week, I want to stop calling it Twitter because it's X now. Because that's true. Right? It's earned the right to be X. After helping Trump win the election, it's earned the right to be X. But because of the arguments that I often see with this thing, like, I, I would love.

If you are listening to this and you are a pastor or a church leader who's struggling with this, again, please reach out to me. I will not try to sell you something that's not the goal. The goal is to help you understand what you need to do to move forward. And so, and so the attacks on the older boomer and late Gen X pastors that are, you know, overweight on some level, not morbidly obese, but nor, and maybe morbidly obese, but a lot of them are just, you know, somewhat overweight.

I think that there is a, a simple, hard, effective solution to those things. It doesn't take six days a week, two hours A day. Did you say hard? It's still hard. Yes, but it is simple. Like, it's not complicated. It's not. And complexity is seductive. Right? So people want to, and I see, you know, we see this in theology all the time where people argue about any weird variation, especially reformed theology that we're both in. But like the simplicity of the work is, is, there's beauty in that.

But to be clear, simple does not mean easy. That's right. Simple is. And simple plus hard equals effective. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm the guy you're talking about, I'm the 45 or 55 or 65 year old pastor or church leader or deacon or whatever, or just dad. And I have to get this under control again. Reach out to me, like, shoot me an email. I'm not going to try to sell you something like one.

I, I don't even have space on my roster to take you, but I will definitely give you help and I will help you because I, I want, I want you, if you're 45, 55, 65, in the same way that I want me to be able to see multiple generations of your family watch the fruit grow that you spent your life planting. Like, I just, I don't want to be the farmer that, that plants the seeds and has this little seedling and then dies and never gets to see it.

And I know you get to probably see it from heaven and all this, but like, I want to, I want to hug my grandkids as they cultivate the same plants, as they cultivate the tree, as they cultivate the fruit. Like, those are the things. And that's why health matters. It's not so you can deadlift 400 pounds, which is cool, but like, that's not number one. Number one is quality of life, improvement and health and, and those sort of things.

And so, so I, so I, in the book, I qualify that as, as one of the important things to me now again, I think it should be probably important to most. Just like, I think if you have family, family should be, there's other things. Like, you know, being a CEO of a company is not going to be important to some people. Or, you know, potentially Christianity is not going to be super important to some people, like religion, whatever. Is not that. Read the book. Should be, should be.

Again, yeah, thank you. But that's okay. Like, I, I, there, there is also a thing that we've seen as we train people at Barbell logic that happens that when, when people Take personal responsibility for their health and their strength and their performance. It, it is often the first step in a movement in the right direction. And by right, I mean right. In the right. And so they. Yeah, in the. Yeah, but also right direction. Yes. So, yeah. And so it's, it gets them out of victimhood mentality.

It gets them out of, you know, I was raised with a, you know, bad parents in a bad situation with a bad hand of cards. Like, okay, in the fifth grade, I'm okay with you using that example, but at 41, I'm not. Like, at some point you have to take responsibility for like everybody, like genetics, social, socioeconomic status, family, upbringing, background, whatever that is. At some point you just had to be like, I'm a grown up and I have to take responsibility for my own actions.

It's amazing what putting a bar on your back and squatting does for people that have never done that, who've played the victim mentality their entire life. And so that, that sense of responsibility that comes in is wild because I've watched clients and coaches and employees.

Again, if you're listening, you're an employee and you're not this, it's okay, move that direction and not play the victim because there's something about like, I have to have personal agency to be able to get strong and take control of my own health. And again, you. And I understand that there's still like a sovereignty of God piece here that God still kind of controls on some level of those things.

But, but I'm, I'm certain if you sit at home and binge, watch Netflix and Doordash all day and drink too much alcohol, you're not going to wake up one morning with six pack abs and healthy. Pretty sure that's not how that works. And so you still got to put in the work. And, and so yeah, it's, it's, it's an important thing too.

Not as important as the legacy and the virtue and the values and the family and the olive tree and all the stuff that we talked about, but still pretty important because I think it just dramatically improves your chances to see the fruition of that labor. And I think seeing the fruition of the labor is wonderful, but I still think the process of the labor is actually where the joy occurs. The fruition's amazing. Like, right, the seeing the fruition is great.

Or you know, like the, you know, the concept of Michael Jordan winning championships was wonderful for him, but three days later he just looked to the next championship. Yeah, Kobe Bryant looked at work and just Said, like, there's value in the work. I'm going to enjoy the championship, but I'm going to enjoy the work more. And so I think for us, we have to have the same attitude. Like, there's just.

Right now, there's a time in 2024, going into 2025, where we have an opportunity to enjoy the work that is important that God has entrusted us to, to build our families, build our communities, build our churches, build our businesses, build our homes, build our bodies in a way that God can give fruition to. He can bless, he can make better. He doesn't have to. He's not guaranteed. We're not prosperity gospel people. But at the same time, I think that we're still. Whether he does or not, right?

It's Shadrach, Meshach, and Nebednego. Right? Like, we know our God can bless us this way or can deliver us. We believe he will, but even if he doesn't, one, we will be faithful and choose rightly. And two, he is still faithful, and he is still God, and he's still sovereign no matter what. So. But our job is still to do the work and let. And then let God build the fruit. Our job's not actually not to make the fruit. Our job is to do. We're called to the work. Amen. This is great.

I'm grateful that you're on the podcast so we can talk about this stuff, because I don't get to talk about this stuff, because all these things do fit together. They fit together in a very important way that I don't hear a lot of people synthesizing. You have a lot of bros who, you know, who say, don't be a fat pastor. You know, strength is Godly. Amen. Yes, true. Fantastic. Right? You know, health, all that stuff. And then you also have the concept of legacy. You have the concept of building.

You have the concept of family. You have the concept of the olive tree. All this stuff, it all fits together into a cohesive vision of the Christian life. That's right. All of these pieces are part of a whole. And I think one of the things that's really exciting about probably the reformed theology world, despite all the insanity that's going on. But one of the things that's exciting is this recovery of covenant thinking.

This is, as far as I can tell, this is a topic that I've only heard talked about increasingly over the course of the past year. Right. It's only recently that I've noticed that it's coming up more and more, probably because of The Baptist to Presbyterian superhighway, that's. That's going on right now. But this way of thinking in terms of covenants enables all of these different aspects to be melded together into what do I do as a man today to think about my.

Myself, my household, my community, my church, my family, my legacy? Right. All these things fit together in the notions of covenants because we have commitments that. Binding commitments that God makes to us, that we make to those around us. And by carrying through those binding commitments, that I think is what makes for a good man. A good man is a guy who does what he says he's going to do. That's your man card. The price of your man card is. Is accountability. Right. And so.

And so I think there are a lot of boys, you know, in. Some of them are driving adult male bodies. Yeah, sure. Who avoid responsibility because they want to avoid accountability. Sure, right. Yes. The old Driscoll. The old Driscoll line. Boys who can shave. Yes, that's great. I'm not necessarily promoting Driscoll, but, like, that's the line he would use. It's boys who can shave. Right. They were boys on a man's body.

On the other hand, you have Doug Wilson, who says masculinity is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility. I say it all the time. What does sacrificial responsibility look like relationally? It looks like a covenant. It looks like a commitment. It looks like accountability. And so stepping into the sphere of accountability. Right. Means you've now taken on all these different covenants around you. Maybe not.

They're not all theological in nature, but they'll have to be managed with your individual commitments to your time. That's right. So that's. That's how I see all these things fitting together. And that's why it's exciting to have this conversation, because I've been thinking and creating content. I've been thinking about masculinity for 20 plus years, 24 years at this point. I've been explicitly creating content about masculinity for four years plus.

And now here we are, all the pieces are finally fitting together with theology. It's such an exciting. It's such an exciting moment collectively for Christians, for men, and for me personally. Yeah, I've gone through the same thing. And I think, you know this about me. I have a history degree. I was a history teacher in my first career, and I recognize that I was taught history where there were these pieces of history and they were all siloed and they were like Completely.

Like World War I and World War II were completely separate. And, you know, and. And. And the American Revolution and Civil War were separate. And you. And then you realize there's actually a ribbon that binds all of those together. That's right. And I think what you're discovering and what you just laid out is that there's a ribbon that binds all of these things together, from the most important things of, like, that.

Like Christ and him crucified at the Gospel down to the less important things, and then understanding, like, how our role as men, as fathers, as husbands, as men who are strong, as men, who are capable, as men, who are powerful, as men who can work, as men who can work in the field. And by the way, to be clear, there are many days where the thorns and thistles grow up around the things that I'm building. I built a very successful business.

And yet there are many days I sit down with my wife, and I go, I have a term, and I'll say, thorns and thistles. And she knows what it means. She means. It means, like, I've been up since three, and it's seven now, and I've been working for four hours, and it's all been thorns and thistles today so far. And then she knows how to handle it. Doesn't mean, like, I'm gonna fly off the handle or anything, but it means, like, it's been hard already in the first four hours. Right? And that is.

That is okay, because that is still, like, there's a goodness in the God that. That's the brokenness of creation that we look forward to eventually to be restored. Right? Where. Where the stones cry out, where the. Where the. All of creation is groaning for, like, every time someone comes to Christ and says, is this the last one? Is this. Do we. Are there. Sorry, Are there no more thorns? Are there no more thistles? Right? And so. And there are days where I'm blessed. Today was a day like that.

I mean, I've been on podcasts and meetings for, like, probably eight hours today, and the Lord has just blessed me with conversations like this. And I'm like, thank you, Lord, for a day that wasn't full of thorns and thistles today. You. I didn't. You didn't owe that to me. That wasn't something that was. But. But there's still. There's still beauty in the days where the thorns and thistles are there, because you look forward to a day that is to come when those go away.

And we also get to celebrate the fact that Jesus sits on the throne right now and is the king of the world right now, today. Like Jesus is Lord, period. Right now, today. And so these things, understanding as men, the ribbon that binds all those things together, I think is one of the most important things that you can possibly understand, especially for your listenership, which are probably mostly guys like 20s to 40s, I would guess, somewhere in that ballpark. A little bit older now, actually.

Okay, it's 30s to 50s, whatever. 30s to late 40s, whatever. To understand the ribbon that binds that all together, to understand, like, how does my Christianity, gospel, fitness, health, fathership, husbandry, church leadership, business ownership, there is a ribbon that binds all those things together. We are called to work well, to do the job to the best of our ability, but also to understand how all of these things kind of flow together. And they do flow together. They're not siloed.

And so when I was a history teacher, when I recognized that I could, When I learned how to teach the ribbon that. That bound all of those stories together, that's when it. That's when it was internalized in my students. If it was just World War I over here and then World War II over here, it's like World War I created World War II, and here's how. Yes, it did. When you were able to unders. When you were able to explain that, like, the ribbon was the thing that I hope.

And I know, because it's been many years I've haven't taught since 2012, that my students have reached out to me on social media and Instagram and stuff like that and said, you were my favorite teacher. And here's why. Because you, like, you. You made it all real. Like, you made it alive. And so this is why we watch documentaries as my family, because I'm able to. To build that and tie that ribbon together. But same thing. We do the same thing with, like, here.

Here's why we follow the, you know, regulative worship as opposed to. As opposed to normative worship or whatever. And so we walk through those things together so they understand the. The tie that binds those things together. That ribbon is the thing that you literally can. It's almost like it's not a perfect linear line, but they are the major milestones of your life that you can see.

And looking back in hindsight, 2020, Fanny Crosby, famous hymn writer, was blind and say, look back, and I can see that these things all tied together and they all pointed back to Jesus. That's the point. So I want to take that thread idea and I want to be respectful I know it's late in the day for you and you've got some important family time, maybe to watch some documentaries, but I want to back to something that you said early in the beginning and see if we can tie it all together.

Sure. You talked about how vulnerable it was to write the introduction to your book and you talked about at the beginning Mark Horowitz or Horowitz's book. Ben Horowitz. Yep, Ben Horowitz. His book, the Hard Things. Hard thing about hard things. Right. About the, about the amount of failures that they've had to go through, that you've had to go through to build something.

And so I want to, I want to take that and run it through the filter of what the ribbon is through the, through the lives and the careers of successful men so that people don't walk away thinking that like, oh, this is an overnight process, that it's all sunshine and rainbows and skipping down the yellow brick road. You know, the process of getting anywhere of value involves failure. It involves false starts, it involves treasured projects. Not working out involves mistakes and sin.

So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that and sort of tie it all together for that process for you. And now to here. Well, I think the thing that is required is an unwavering and brutal self awareness of your failures, which I think most people often don't want to talk about. And certainly our parents generation. The reason I had to have the phone call with my mom, the reason I had to have the phone call with my in laws who are both, love them both.

If you're listening to this, love you guys both. But they are literally middle of the bell curve. Prototypical boomers. You don't talk about that stuff. Yeah. And I go, I gotta talk about this stuff. Because that's where the lessons were learned. And the hardest conversation I've ever had in my life was going to my in laws 15 years ago and saying I was unfaithful to your daughter. And man, I begged my pastor to be there because I was afraid her dad might shoot me. That's how scared I was, legit.

But he didn't. And they were of course devastated. And it wasn't like, we forgive you and it's okay. It wasn't. It took some time. But the ribbon that binds it all together is the self awareness of there will be sin and there will be failures. And if you look at passages like Matthew 18 and church discipline and things like that, we often look at that in sort of a negative light. But the Reality of those sort of things is like the purpose of that thing is reconciliation.

And by the grace of God, he completely reconciled my marriage by the power of the gospel. And so the lesson is learned in the failure. If you'll allow yourself to confront it, be upfront about it, confess it, repent from it, be open and honest. By the way, both my wife and I held that in for, I don't know, a year or two. And, and it just, it ate, it ate us alive like cancer. And until we finally were, were able to tell those stories, we weren't able to get freedom from it.

And so, and so for me, telling those stories, there's freedom in that. It's not bondage. It's not bondage to the sin. It's that I, I'm no longer a slave to sin. I'm, I'm a slave to righteousness. I'm, I'm, I'm free from that, right? So that's not who I am. And still that's who the enemy sometimes comes up in the middle of the night when I wake up at two in the morning and, and the enemy's like that, that's still who you are. And I'm like, wait, that's not who I, that's not who my.

That's not where my identity is found anymore. And so the ribbon that binds it all together is to understand that like we are, we are by nature depraved, we will sin and fail. And I pray desperately that most of the readers in my book don't sin and fail as much as I did in those years.

But that if the lesson isn't learned, if the repentance doesn't come, if the turn away from the sin doesn't come, if the knowledge isn't turned to wisdom that's then passed down to others and turned into action, that it was all for naught. If I hide the sin my entire life, even if I repent it to my pastor and my wife and the people that it affected. But I tell no one, no one else who can learn.

And so the reason that a book by a very secular humanist, Ben Horowitz, Hard Thing about Hard Things, is so powerful to me as he talks about the struggle. How much more powerful is our conversation about our struggle with sin and depravity and failure and not resting on God's sovereignty and his goodness and his grace and the atonement and his.

And God the Father, wrapping us in Jesus's cloak of righteousness, like all of those things, like those are the lessons we have to learn and pass on to our community, to our family, to our people, to like everyone that's within our spheres of sovereignty. That's where the ribbon is that binds that together. And so, you know, also for me as a guy that owns a business, it's now, you know, a good sized business. I don't want those skeletons in my closet. I want to tell the story.

I want it to come from me. I don't like. And I've told my wife, I've told my executive assistant, I'm like, listen, there may be a day you get an email from someone that I had a relationship with 15 years ago, 20 years ago, I don't know. But I got nothing to hide. I've told the story. Yeah. So it doesn't come out and become church discipline because of something I've never confessed. It's a thing that I've confessed, I've repented of, I've told.

And this has been a hard conversation even with my church, even my local body church, to be able to tell those. And as I'm, I'm, I'm an elder in training at this point. And your listeners may listen to this and be like, if he's ever gone through that, he's disqualified. You may be right. Like, I'm not an elder yet. So we're working through those things. But the reality is is that the gospel has the power to reconcile all sin.

And so my job is to live a life faithful of a church leader and an elder and let God impress upon the heart of my pastors and elder and elders and church body if I'm worthy of that. And I'm not worried about it. But I think the real value comes in the lessons learned. And so I've learned lessons from more lessons from the failures than from the successes.

And to give those lessons that I've learned in failures, I desperately hope that people learn some of those lessons and don't have to go through them on their own. They're going to go through their own failures. Hopefully they don't have to go through some that are as insane as the stuff I went through. And then what's beautiful about it, it's, it's almost like if I go back to the ribbon equation, the ribbon feels like tattered and dark and stained and black and dirty and gross.

And then I was reconciled out of that. And for, and again, what the gospel says is like. And then God wrapped me in the cloak of Jesus righteousness and Jesus atoned for all those sins. None of those sins that I committed 15, 20 years ago were surprises to God. God knew that those things were going to occur in eternity past. And so that was, that's my story. That's part of my story. And so I'm able to take those things.

I'm able to take those deep, dark, horrific, painful, often telling the stories. I feel okay right now, but I often tell, if I have to tell the details of those stories, even today, 15 years later, like, it'll tear my stomach up and I'll have to go, I have to be like, I've got to pause the podcast and go sit on the toilet for a few minutes. Like, it's that, it's that painful and for real is tmi. But that is what it is.

And, but that ribbon goes from tattered and black and dirty and gross to, to white too. Like, even though I am still depraved and even though I'm still sinful, and even though I still struggle with sin, God still sees me as positionally righteous and sees me with the cloak of righteousness.

And so then that leads me to the grace driven effort of then I want to tell people the story about the things that God has led me through and saved me from and reconciled in my marriage so that they don't have to go through it, so that they can learn those lessons for their marriage, so they can learn those lessons for their parenting and leadership and business and church and whatnot. And so for me, that's the story. And so that story is told in the book. And again, I would love.

If you read the book and you feel that and you see that and you hear that, I would love to hear your own testimony about what that meant to you. And so, yeah, it was, it was tough, man, putting that stuff out to my family and to my friends and to my, my staff. Actually, my staff was very concerned. They were like, very nervous. Like, some of them still haven't read it and a bunch of them are going out.

You probably saw on Instagram, I signed a bunch of books yesterday and they're, they're going out. One's coming to you and, and you know, they're like, what are the stories you're going to tell? And I'm like, here we go. I mean, what, what at this point, I've told it on the podcasts, I've told the stories. And so there. If without, without the depravity and the sin and the devastation of the sin, how good is grace? Grace isn't good without that. And so we, we understand how good grace is.

And so when we get a day like today that I've had where God has just been so gracious to me and given me great conversations with people that I love, that means less without the sin and depravity. Now I wish it didn't. I wish I had all the benefit of the grace and the goodness without the sin, but I can't. That's the whole book of Romans. That's what it is. There is how good is grace without the sin?

Like the potter that makes the vessel for destruction gets to also make the vessel for incredible benefit. Right. Like for this beauty and this elegance. Well, if every piece of pottery is beautiful, then is anything beautiful? Right. So you have to have some that are made for destruction. I've lived a life of both the elder brother and the prodigal son. And I think that's, I hope, the beauty of my story and that I can, I have a tremendous connection to both of them.

I have lived the life of elder brother first, prodigal son second, and then hopefully somewhere where I'm not a self righteous older brother in my older age, but living more of a life of, of as close to holiness as I can. And so I think that gives me a unique perspective that I speak to in undoing urgency.

Well, I just want to note one thing, that of course your staff members will be concerned about some of your personal stories, but the reality is that there will be a number of people, executives, staff members as well, who knows, probably not for your company, but out there who will have had their own episodes of unconfessed infidelity. That's right. And they will look at that and they will know and they're.

And they will always be sleeping, wondering when the skeleton is going to come out of the closet. That's right. And as painful as it is when the skeleton comes out of the closet, it is always better to take that responsibility onto yourself and own it and step into a place of true humility and courage than it is to be confronted with it out of the darkness.

Yeah. And so, and so that courage that you showed, you know, yes, of course there might be a, I don't know, we might call it a reputation hit or something like that with it. But realistically, the reputation hit of when something is revealed, you know, that's the sort of stuff that gets so much worse.

And so I applaud you for having the courage to put out that story in a book, in a published book, because I remember reading that section of the book and it just sets the stage of like, okay, this is a real guy. This isn't. This isn't a guy who's posturing himself as a master of the universe. This is a guy who took his licks and showed up and kept fighting, and this is what he built out of that. So even more than I think taking my licks, but I deserved them. I made my bed and I had to lay in it.

And so it wasn't that I was an abused child that didn't deserve it. Like, I deserved every lick I got. Yeah. And. And there were lessons to be learned from those things. So. Yeah, man. So thank you. Thank you for letting me tell my story. You're welcome, man. Always a pleasure to have you on the show and to have these really heartfelt, brotherly conversations about the things that are most important to us. I'm always blessed by them especially so this time. Yeah. Love it, man.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. You're welcome. Where would you like to send people to get the book? Real quick, the best place to go is probably Ryan mattreynolds.com so I go by Matt Reynolds. Ryan Reynolds is a famous actor. As you know. Matt Reynolds is an infielder for the Cincinnati Reds. I believe Ryan mattreynolds.com is a great place to go get the book, but you can get on Amazon or any place that you go buy books.

I will say that Amazon probably helps us in the rankings more potentially for New York Times bestseller list and Amazon. But man, I would just be honored. It's not really about that stuff. It's about, I hope you read the book and it changes your life. If it does and it makes an impact, please reach out to me. I'm Mr. Reynolds, Barbell hyphen logic.com Again, my email is really easy to find. If you just search Matt Reynolds at Barbell Logic on Google, my email will show up.

If you send me an email, I will, I promise you I will respond if you read the book. Also, if you read the book and you love it, I would love a review because it helps on Amazon as well. Tremendously with the algorithm, which is just the game you have to play these days. Um, but if you don't love it, like don't leave a review or leave a one star review. If it sucks, like, it's okay. Like, just be honest. I'm not asking for, you know, non honest. Like be transparent. That's totally fine.

Tell me what you love. Tell me what you didn't love. Would love to have feedback on it. The memoir is probably coming in a couple years, so I might have to sell the business before I get to the memoir. But the memoir is going to be nuts. And so, yes. Yeah, just imagine the Intro expanded about 15 chapters. It will be. But I think I have to tell that story at some point, like, the full. All the details of all the stuff, because it's just. It's crazy.

And it's not all just sin and craziness, but just the craziness of owning business and, you know, times that you. You're, you know, you're running a business that's, like, worth a bunch of money, but you can't make payroll and you put, you know, $50,000 of your own money, which is pretty much all you have in your account, into the business checking account to make payroll.

Like, there's so many stories like that that are just do or die moments that could have broken the business and could have killed the business entirely. That again, by God's grace, he's allowed us to thrive and just change a lot of people's lives for the better. And so I'm very grateful for sure, both to him and to great friends like you and the rest of my reformed community. So thank you so much for having me on the show. Amen. Thank you so much, Matt. Thanks, bro.