Parental influences have also been diluted by the way in which most current members of the Church earn a living. In times past, one of the great influences that unified families was the experience of struggling together in pursuit of a common goal—such as taming the wilderness or earning a living. The family was an organized and conducted unit of economic production. Today, most families are units of economic consumption, which do not require a high degree of family organization and cooperation.

Pres. Dallin Oaks, Oct. 2025

I wonder if the Saints, myself included, are taking this seriously enough. What would taking this more seriously look like?

Lately, I have felt a push to stand more independently, to have my own income stream. I have had an idea for a business in my mind for years, but now I feel a renewed push to make it happen. I have made more progress on this in the last few months, than I have any other time I worked on this idea.

We all know, there is no strict line separating the Temporal from the Spiritual. (D&C 29:34-35) Business can be just as spiritual as working in our garden. Or as spiritual as Adam and Even working in their Garden.

Self-Reliance is as much a Spiritual principle with spiritual blessings, as it is a Temporal economic one. What would it take to make your family a “unit of economic production”? It does not have to start big. For instance, Pres Oaks talks about having a family garden.

There are two reasons for us to focus on Self-Reliance and to take it more seriously than we have been.

First, because the Prophet and Scriptures have spoken about it. For example:

That through my providence, notwithstanding the tribulation which shall descend upon you, that the church may stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world; D&C 78:14

There are other verses we could quote as well. But there are spiritual aspects to this that are significant. They are blessings we will need.

Second, also because the impact of AI. AI has not yet had a huge effect on jobs, but it will. As I have argued many times, Isaiah 19 records something just like this – mass unemployment and people mourning because of it. The economy will be turned upside down. I think it is almost certain that this disruption will be on a scale far greater than the Great Depression. Much intellectual labor will become like the forklift in a warehouse – useful, important and powerful but also just a common, everyday piece of equipment. It becomes a tool like any other.

A LOT of people will lose their jobs in the upheaval. But, the converse is also true. A LOT of people are going to get rich. Some will get crazy rich. The same tech that enables a CEO to run a company without a workforce, or a minimal one, enables you just as well.

Read that again and burn it into your mind.  The same tech, be that AI, Robotics or whatever else, that enables companies to not need you, also enables you to not need them. And frankly, I think you would handle the money better than they would. The same reason they could get rid of employees, enables you to manage a virtual workforce as well.

Of course, this does not eliminate the need for capital, judgement, customers, reputation or hard work and all the minutia of running a small business. But what it does do is vastly and radically reduce the amount of labor and specialized expertise needed to build something useful. This is more easily doable at this exact moment in history, than at any other time. In my opinion, 2026-2027 may be the peak time to act, the best time to start. The productive power available to an individual relative to the possibilities is rapidly increasing.

Is AI ready to do everything yet, or replace everyone this week? No, certainly not. But one does not stand on the tracks looking at an approaching train, just because it hasn’t hit you yet.

I think it would startle you just how good AI is getting. I say this, because it even startles people who have been in it a long time. It just solved one of the greatest problems in mathematics. (Allegedly)  Ignore the other drama around it, for the moment. It just solved a puzzle that has perplexed the best mathematicians for over a hundred years. There have been other mathematical problems solved as well. If it can do this, it can help you solve problems as well. The problems you can solve are only limited by your initiative, imagination and the Spirit of the Lord. Not to negate the importance of things like capital, but the crucial lever is faith as both a spiritual and temporal principle of power, and revelation. God can open the way, but only if we act.

I think it is time for the Saints to stand more independently, economically. I am not speaking this by authority, but only by the feeling in my heart, and what my own eyes can see. I feel are approaching a hinge point in history. Tremendous problems, and extreme persecution, but also extreme potential to grow both spiritually, and materially. And we are going to need both. The Lord will save his people, but we need to act in faith.

I would encourage all of you, to earnestly consider, and to pray you and your families, whether you should be building an income stream, productive skill, family enterprise, or other form of economic independence outside your primary employment. I sincerely suspect, that for many the answer is yes.

For two centuries, industrialization and economies of scale have steadily pulled production out of the household and into factories, corporations, and offices. Husbands, wives, and children increasingly became participants in separate economic systems rather than members of a common productive one.

AI, robotics, distributed manufacturing, online markets, and cheap automation may now be pushing in the opposite direction. For the first time in generations, a household may be able to command tools, expertise, productive capacity, and access to markets that previously required an entire company.

That does not mean we should recreate the farm economy of the nineteenth century. It may mean something much more interesting: recovering the family as a productive unit, but at a technological level our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

President Oaks pointed to what was lost when the family ceased to be a unit of economic production. Perhaps one of the opportunities of our moment is to recover and restore what was lost.

So I would ask the question seriously: What could your family build together?

Perhaps it is a business. Perhaps it is a garden, a trade, an investment, a cottage industry, intellectual property, a family enterprise, or something we have not yet learned to imagine.

The point is not merely to make more money. It is to become more capable, more productive, more united, and more independent—to become a family that can act rather than merely consume.

We now have tools that make that possibility unusually real. I think we should use them.

September 11, 2001. 25 years have passed—25 more nails in the cross—but we remember. (more…)

Charlie Kirk was murdered one year ago today.  I drove by UVU for the first time in a couple of days a couple of days ago. I was surprisingly affected by it. The transsexual Antifa milieu that encouraged his assassination and may have been more heavily involved than just encouragement has had nothing happen to them and it seems unlikely they ever will.

I had an extremely peculiar thing happen to me a couple of days ago. Although it was meaningless in itself, it had deep spiritual significance and an interesting lesson.

We were visiting some family and we get up earlier than most so we have had an hour or so in the morning where we are just quietly dinking. A son had found two dice and was rolling them. He got a double and crowed softly, “A double!” He rolled some more and got another double. “Two doubles!” Just to mess with him I said it didn’t count because it was his second double and he had rolled two threes. Then he got his next double and it was two twos so I told him that didn’t count either.

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A lot of guys want to be intimate before there is intimacy, romantic before there is romance, peace before victory

Cryptic entries from my notebook. The meaning is lost in time.

* The most important part about the temple is the home

* Joe Blow, by his lights, turns on the charm

* The right wing needs more thought terminating cliches

* Story: procrastinating hero

There is no context. You have here the sum total of each entry.

The strength of youth is is trying to do things you don’t know how to do.  We call it ‘potential,’ but that it what it comes down to.

We are all of us young, in that sense.  The advantage the actual youth have is that they know it.

The new youth program rollout was today.  One could quibble about aspects of it.  There was the cringe trend of always naming girls first and putting boys second.  There was the description of mission and then family as if it were standard for all, not just the young men.  But  there was a great deal of good and above all there was the wonderful phrase, “focus on future family.”  Wonderful.  More please!

On the sweetness of Mormon life

You are walking your wife down the hall at church.  She is ill and is holding on to you.  Her footsteps are small and hobbled.

“I feel like I am a spectacle,” she says.

What she is is faith in every footstep.

Two weeks ago my brother-in-law invited me to a concert. Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. The rest of our families were doing other things on a Friday night, so it was just him and me. I asked my wife, who is from New Hampshire, if she knew this place in western Massachusetts I’d been invited to. “Of course,” was the response, so I knew it was well-known in the region, at least among people who think a lot about music. Physically the place was lovely: dozens of acres of lightly-trod grass parking, and the “music shed” a roofed, open-walled, 90-year-old structure with seating for thousands surrounded by more grass for picnic blankets and camp chairs. Similar to the much younger Wolf Trap in Washington DC’s Virginia suburbs. Earlier rains diminished attendance on the grass; we arrived not many minutes before the program began and set up our chairs in a fine spot near center-front.

My brother-in-law looked at the printed program. “There will be ballet dancers.” That turned a wheel in my memory. That’s right: Appalachian Spring was originally composed as a ballet. I had never seen it performed that way, only as an orchestral performance. I enjoy dance immensely, so this would be a special treat. (more…)

The last dream of my recent dreams was long and involved and I will only able to recall a few of the details here. It is the setting that stuck most in my mind. Here’s the setting. We–meaning me and some vague unspecified other people, probably family members, although the only one that I ever specifically interacted with was my mother–are on a high ridge line looking west over the south end of the Utah Valley.  Though the geography is not what you would see if you were actually there; instead its a slope up from the foothills and then the middle third becomes very steep, almost an escarpment although it is climbable mostly not using your hands so not completely vertical, maybe more like a 60° slope or 50° slope.  This very steep slope ends in kind of ridgeline and then the mountain continues beyond that but at a more normal slope, not nearly as steep.    I’ll also note that the the flora and fauna actually don’t seem typical of Utah valley nor the rock.  The rock is a dark brown that I think is probably basalt and there are junipers and cedars.

In this dream there is at the base of the mountains some kind of BYU extension campus or secondary facility–call it BYU-Spanish Fork for convenience–and then up at the ridgeline where we’re at is a semi-independent facility or organization but it’s associated in some way with the BYU satellite campus or satellite institution below us.   It is our parent institution in some way.

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Only prophets can understand prophets.

There is, of course, the obvious reason, the same divine source is able to give understanding much better than your own attempts to understand the divine source as filtered through another person. But the main reason is different. The main reason is that to understand someone we have to be able to put ourselves in their shoes. We have to wrestle with what they wrestled with, grasp what they grasped, be surprised and overjoyed by what they were surprised and overjoyed by.

The gospel is process knowledge, not a formula. Becoming a prophet is more or less something like an initiation and you have to follow the same initiation to receive the same results. Lehi cannot stand at the tree shouting to you how good the fruit is and you feel the savor in your mouth.

Saturday night, I had a horrifying dream.

There was a city, and either because of the heights of the buildings or because of the hills in the city, the church had a site people could visit where you could walk out on these walkways that were high above the ground, maybe 100 to 200 feet. The walkway started altogether in a little reception area and a flat space, and then branched out and meandered a bit. Each walkway had a color and a spiritual theme assigned to it, and you’re supposed to think about that theme as you walk the walkway. It was a bit low rent, frankly. The walkways were just concrete floors and rough, waist-high, whitewashed concrete walls (white except for the color coding). The view directly down wasn’t anything spectacular, just a couple of layers of road, a freeway, and an overpass.

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My brain’s favorite 3:00 a.m. thoughts are the ones that make it hard for me to get back to sleep.

Here’s the doozy it woke me up with in the wee hours this morning.

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