Faith & Ale Podcast 12: Andreas Widmer

Thank you and welcome, uh, to our Faith and Ale podcast. It's great to be with you again. This is Don Arico of the board of directors of Faith and Ale Fort Myers, and we are honored to be joined by Andreas Widmer, um, who spoke to our Faith and Ale group just last week, um, down in Fort Myers area. And we're— we were just so delighted he takes some time out of his very busy schedule to join us. If you weren't able to join our in-person event last week, you would be happy to know that Andreas Widmer is the Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Director of the Art and Carliss Sciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America's Busch School of Business. And of course, he's had a long career in business, philanthropy, and investment. And, um, as, um, most well known as, uh, the young Swiss Guard who came to know, uh, Pope Saint John Paul II. And I'm delighted to speak with you, Andreas, and thank you again for taking the time to, to be with us.

My pleasure, Don. Thanks for having me.

So now you're, um, you're obviously at the, the Busch School of Business there at Catholic University. which has become a very prestigious school, particularly in Catholic circles, in terms of teaching Catholic-oriented business principles, free market business principles, which are things that are in rare supply these days. And that's how I wanted to start off and ask you, because you have such a wonderful message about how business can be a force for good. But there are so few institutions out there like where you're teaching, where you're employed today. And so how do we get that message out there? First, how do you do it in the classroom? And then secondly, how do we get that message out there that business can be a force for good without just placating to all the flavor of the day social justice movements. Because if you go across most Fortune 500 websites today, you'll find they all look almost identical. They're all promoting the same ideals, the same cause, the same things that are, you know, all celebrated in the media. But they don't— those things aren't necessarily fall in line with what a Catholic would say would be a force for good. So Yeah. How do we make that? How do we start to evangelize the business community as to what Catholic social teaching looks like in being a force for good?

So look, we have sort of this dichotomy, which at first it looks like a dichotomy, but 2 opposing sides that if you're in the current business world, you feel somewhere like torn between Wolf of Wall Street, dog-eat-dog world, and then the kumbaya CSR give back and, you know, to, like, you know, you make the money in the Wolf way, but then you give back and do corporate philanthropy and all of that. And that at first looks like it's 2 different things, but the truth is it is not. This is both, and this is the core of the issue that I see and that we need to address as Catholics, as Christians, and I would say as As humans, as people. And the problem is this: both of these approaches look at the outcome of work. They only look at what happens when you do work and you build something, and then they look at profit. It's a caricature in a way of the Milton Friedman famous essay he wrote in the '70s: the only social responsibility of a company is to create shareholder or to maximize shareholder return, which is often taken out of context because that's not the only thing he said. However, he does say that that's— I mean, look, that's the difference between a hobby and a business, is that a hobby is going to lose money and a business is going to make money. And I think it's a caricature of that, that we left— we took that one sentence, went all the way, and we ended up with something like this dog-eat-dog world. And this sentence I hate so much, it's only business, it's just business, nothing personal.

I agree with you.

There's— everything is personal in business.

Agreed.

But the first thing, both of these approaches are completely utilitarian, materialistic. We as Catholics, we as Christians, we do not do utilitarianism of saying whatever benefits the most people, and we're not primarily materialistic of saying the only thing that matters with work is what happens after work, namely the money you get. Yeah, that whole, whole thing about working for a living— very bad choice of words. What I, what I talked about last, last Thursday with— and everybody who was there, thanks again. I had such a great time. You guys have something going there.

Yeah, it's a great group of men. Great group of men.

Oh yes, and Mike was just delightful. It's— I enjoyed my whole time there. What I talked about is that we have to understand that— go back to saying, why do we work? Business is work, and the economy is work, right? This is all about work. Why do we do this? And the reason why we do this is that when we— a couple of things. I can take, you know, this is my pen, it's a fountain pen, and it's made out of metal, and it has probably some plastic in it and so on. There's about maybe 20 different products that go into this. Somebody took this, and put this together, the ingredients alone, maybe $4, $5 like this, but this is actually, it's actually a Swiss pen. And I probably paid $100 for this. Now, there is a mind, a human mind applied to this that makes this into a thing that is 100 times more, or let's say 20 times more valuable than the material that goes into this. In a sense, the person who created this made something out of nothing.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, this material was there. What I described is that this idea of saying, hey, why don't I make this pen, and I apply myself to it, and poof, here it is, and I can sell it, and it's actually worth more than its parts— that is an imitation of what we hear in Genesis, the story of how the world was created. And we can create Because we're made in the image and likeness of the Creator. Think about this. If you meet an animal, your dog, you can go to the zoo and, and, and meet the, the highest advanced chimpanzees or, or gorillas or anything that are 99% our DNA. They have never worked a day in their life. That's because they are not made in the image and likeness of God, the Creator, and we are. Right there, this tells you something about what work is all about. What I want us to focus on when we focus first, primarily when we say I work, what I want to focus on is to understand that because— I'm using this as my example— because I'm exactly 99.9% the same as some of these animals and they can't work and I can work, the conclusion of that is that work is not biological. It's not based on material. Otherwise, the gorilla— the gorilla is like you and me, Don, has a little more hair, right? Biologically, you take us apart, same thing. Therefore, it has to originate in something higher. This is when God— God made men and women out of clay. And by the way, if you pay attention in Genesis, John Paul always talked about this, made the animals out of clay as well. The difference is the spirit that he breathed into the nostrils of the humans, which is— we're not— I'm not in the image and likeness of God because God looks like this or looks like you. No, no, no.

Mm-hmm.

It's the inside. It's our attributes that we never die, and that we are creators. So when we work, we can participate in God's creativity. These people who did this, God allowed them to participate. It's like tapping into God's creativity. And as such, when we work, we are invited to continue creation. Now, something that John Paul pointed out is that when we do this, then when we create this, when you're creating this podcast, you and I, we create this podcast right now. After we finish this, is it going to live on and people can watch this when you and I are asleep?

Mm-hmm.

This is something that we give life to. It's in a way, it's very similar to how God created the world and now asks us to continue creation in a sense. When we do this, we imitate God. So right now, if you and I imitate God and we have the freedom to create this podcast, this product, and we— and when we do this in a way that we create goods that are truly good, we decide to provide services that truly serve, Mm-hmm. then we imitate God. And as a result, when you imitate somebody a lot and well, You become more like them.

Mm-hmm.

That is why work, if done like this, is a path to holiness. It's actually a part of the path to holiness. And so that brings me now back to saying, what's the purpose of work? What's the purpose of business? What's the purpose of the economy? Well, the purpose of that is personal holiness in that sense, that the imitation of God. And John Paul would say this sentence, which I just absolutely love, When we work right, we don't just make more, we become more.

Mm-hmm.

Right? We don't just make more, we become more. That to me is saying, if we go back into our business, if you go to work tomorrow and you go into your company or your office or whatever, I want you to think about this, to say, this work I'm doing today, who am I doing this for? And are the goods I produce truly good? services that I provide, do they truly serve? And that's the primary aspect of work. Now, if we really imitate God, have you ever noticed that God has never created anything that isn't profitable? There is not a tree, nothing, nothing in nature that doesn't spew out in a sense, you know, it's now going to be spring and you're going to see the creativity of God.

Right.

And the superabundance We need to do that too. It's, it's not— you see, this dichotomy sort of says, well, you get to make your profit in a bad way, but then you have to share it afterwards. That's a total fallacy. You should not make profit in a bad way. You should make profit in a good way.

Good profit.

And then what you're doing is actually, when we create like this, the person who created this, and let's say it cost with everything contributed to it, $20 to do this according with, you know, with all the cogs, and they sell it for $100. There's $80 extra in there. Did I— did the guy from this company in Switzerland, did they steal this from me? Where's this money come, the $80 extra? You know what that is? That is like the loaves and the fishes. That's new money.

Mm-hmm.

That there's never a certain— only a certain amount of money in the world. Every time we do this and you add value to something, you create new money because money is a measure of value.

Right.

Therefore, when an entrepreneur, I don't know, Bill Gates, you know, you name it, creates this value, that's theirs.

Right.

They created it. And actually an entrepreneur on average gets less than 2% of the value they create, they get themselves. And the rest, 98%, goes into society. And now you're telling me, oh, you know, you got to give back. You know, if you've done this well, it's not a matter of giving back. It's a matter of continue to be a force for good, which business in itself is. So just to, to summarize quickly, work itself has to pass— has to be good. It's not enough to say you have to do good after work.

Mm-hmm.

If work itself is a good thing, then you, you come out ahead of the time. You become more, not just make more. And so that's a deep insight that we need to understand and practice as Catholics. And I think that also, that approach also takes away this almost this guilt, this feeling that we have about work and about business and about entrepreneurship. And it helps us actually ultimately— well, one of the things that that the Catholic Church has taught for centuries is it allows us to make our work into prayer. I think this is a good way to round this out.

Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up Genesis. Um, and I want, I want to ask you a question on that. Obviously, going back to Genesis, work was actually one of man's first punishments, and that was part of the fall, was that he had to, had to labor for for his food, by the sweat of his brow.

Yes, but it's—

So now draw that out. I would love to hear you draw that out.

Work actually started before the fall. There's work before the fall and work after the fall, because the stewardship mandate to, you know, God to create humans. God created humans, and John Paul has a beautiful explanation of this beautiful mystery that is described in Genesis, of how God wanted to make somebody in God's image and likeness, which means that everything on earth is an object, you know, you can act upon. But God is, of course, a subject, an actor, like a creator. And so God says, we want to make somebody in our image and likeness, and the human person was the result of that. So in that sense, we're a subject, not an object. That we— this is one of the reasons why you never use a human person as a means to an end, right?

Right.

John Paul used to say, never say nobody works for anybody. We only work with each other.

Fantastic.

Yep. So, and so that, and, and we worked then with God. And before the fall, when we had the full freedom without sin, then we had our full freedom of humanity, and our will was strong, like untainted to do the good. Then we had the stewardship mandate, and we tended that garden, like we tended the perfect world, if you wish, paradise. Then by starting to getting corrupted, it's like a virus, if you wish. I sort of see this like a virus on a hard drive.

Sure.

So this virus comes in.

It's a great way to describe it, by the way.

Starts to corrupt the system. And then work changes over to include— you see, of course, then in work you started to have the temptation to do the bad thing, because before the fall, the human person didn't have the temptation to do the bad thing.

Right.

And now this is one of the things why I'm drawing out that you have the choice to create an addictive product and promote awful things on the internet and make a lot of money with it because people, you know, they're going to be addicted to it, or even a physical product that people ingest and get addicted to. And you can fall for that temptation and benefit from it in where the product is not truly good. You know, that temptation wasn't there before, that is there after. And in that sense, the work has become more painful because we have to overcome our will, or we have to apply— not our— we don't have to overcome— we have to overcome our base drive to rise up to the occasion and do good work. But work itself, the way it was created, was created before the fall. And work is very godly because think about it, the first thing that any of the great traditions. And, you know, the New Testament— the Old Testament starts twice the same way. And the first thing it tells you both times about the Lord is that, that God is a creator, that he works, that God works.

Much of it, much of his parables are around work as well, obviously.

Yeah, yeah, work. We make such a big I don't want to say mistake, but we're going into dangerous territory when we as Christians start to look down on business or somehow find this a soiled kind of instinct, or that making money is an evil thing, which is very, very much not true. You have as many corrupt people in any walk of life because of the fall as we have in business. And I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't walk around pointing fingers on that. And what we need to do as a church is to do a better job of forming the conscience of everybody. That's the business we're in as a church. We're in the business of forming conscience. So instead of pointing at business people and saying, you guys are evil, I think what we should do is all the people that start out with us in the church and to have a conscience inform their conscience so they make goods that are truly good and profitable rather than not. And then a big problem will be gone.

You, you mentioned earlier about how most of what an entrepreneur, um, re— essentially reinvests goes back into their product or goes back into human capital. And that has a ripple effect throughout society when they reinvest in human capital and those humans flourish as a result of that reinvestment. But what— I don't like the phrase, and I have a background, as I mentioned to you earlier, I have a background in philanthropy, but I don't like the phrase corporate responsibility. And I love the Catholic idea of stewardship, as you're mentioning stewardship.

I like that.

So how can businesses, not just corporations, but businesses and business-minded individuals be better stewards of society and their success? So that government does less. So how can we assert ourselves in a way where government is less inclined to be involved in our lives, and rather it's a much more Catholic approach of solidarity and subsidiarity?

So I'm glad you bring that up. So the thing is, right now we're looking after the easy answers. The easiest answer is always to tell people, want to do. And especially if those people are the other people. So, so I would go, Don, here's what you need to do. And then I don't have to fix anything like you do. And also then do, you know, because that's the easy way out. The hard way is to form a conscience to make people want to do something. We're struggling with this with the COVID vaccine and stuff like that, which is totally wrong approach, totally wrong approach. Like, go, go tell people they're stupid. That'll really work. Yeah, that'll convince everybody. Right. It's just even just from the psychological perspective of how you encourage people to do something that's good for them. This is a very bad approach. So what I would do is, what we need to understand is how society works and how the church teaches that society works. It has 3 circles. I don't know what you call 3 circles with an overlap.

Venn diagram.

Venn diagram.

Yep.

And so the first circle is the— is sort of the civic society, which includes the family and civil organizations, your bowling club, faith and ale, and the church.

Yeah.

And these are all in there. These are voluntary associations. You don't have to be a part if you don't want to, but these are the first, like, the first things we are holding dear to our hearts. And because we choose to be a part of that in a sense, and this is that which forms us, right?

These were major parts of American society in the first half of the 20th century.

Exactly. So that's the civil society. Then you have the government. And so that's the political society, the government, which has a right to make laws, to keep law and order, to defend us, and all these good things with the 3, you know, the 3 branches of government and all that.

beautiful.

And then you have the economic society, the business and the economics, and they create prosperity and value. Each one of these 3 groups has privileges. For example, the one on top is the only one that's allowed to use force, violence. The other 2 don't use— you can't use violence as a business or as a private person. The government can use violence, they can put people in jail, and they can, you know, do a war and all that kind of stuff, which we're fine with, because that's their domain. And, you know, there's checks and balances. Business has the domain of saying, we create value. This is something— this is what Friedman actually meant to say. If you're not creating value, and you're in that part of the diagram, you're not— that's like the government not governing.

Mm-hmm.

And, and, but there's always the government not being the government means don't, don't start a genocide, don't start a war out of nilly-willy right now, you know, and start to kill people for nothing. That's not what we mean. Morality is always a part of it. But guess what? Where's the morality coming from? That's the first circle. And we, church, we as Christians, we as people can point all the fingers we want at the other 2 branches.

Mm-hmm.

But the failure is that we in our families, in our lives, in our churches, and in our organizations are not teaching morality. So we end up having people who grab the power and run away with it and do awful stuff. And then we say, well, we need a law. You cannot make enough laws to make people moral. The only way this works is to go back into the families, back into the churches and teach conscience. And I think that's the great failure of our time, is that we're not doing that. This is a big part of what we're trying to do here at Catholic University. This is one of the reasons why I'm teaching. I want to come back and go to 18-year-olds, hopefully even younger. We have a high school program as well. And to do, in a sense, how John Paul reached out to me, Reach out to them and, and inspire them. It's not— you don't go with the stick. You inspire them because, you know, the true, the good, and the beautiful is supremely attractive. You just have to offer it.

Yeah, well, um, you, you paint a beautiful picture, and in that circle that you, you speak of, um, of civic society, of, uh, uh, you know, volunteer organizations, the church, the family. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, that circle has gotten much smaller in recent decades and in many ways self-induced. As we shrink the size of the families we have, we have more single-parent homes, less involvement in our communities. The church takes its step back from expressing its rightful place in society. And so we have self— the self-induced shrinkage of that circle. And now we're seeing it play out in 2022, what that looks like.

Yeah.

What, um, if, if Saint Pope John— if Pope Saint John Paul II were alive today, what would his observations about our society— and I know it's a very broad question, but What would his observations about business and its interactions with government and society today be? How would he evaluate that? Because it is— I grew up in the 1980s. You were a member of the Swiss Guard in the 1980s. I remember growing up under these 3 bulwarks of leadership of Thatcher, Reagan, and John Paul II.

Yep.

The world was a very, very different place. Now the lines are much more blurred between business and government, good and bad. And it's very hard to know who to trust, who is providing good leadership. And I would just love to hear what you think one of those 3 great leaders, JP II, would say about where we're at today in 2022.

Yeah. I, of course, I can't say what he would say. I can say what his memory causes me to think.

Mm-hmm.

And what I received, what I feel like, what I received from John Paul is this desire for personal excellence. You know, when I met him, I was so uncatechized and so oblivious that I didn't meet the Pope. I met an older man, an older gentleman. Yeah, I mean, he was in his 60s when I met him, who was very fit and very strong and was so attractive to me, like, that he knew who he was. He had a presence that just blew you away. And he was so other-directed. He was paying attention to me, and he had so much hope in me, more than I did in myself. Like, he, he saw way— he saw a future of me that I could only dream of. And that made me want to live up to it. And so this personal responsibility, and this personal excellence is something that I think he did over and over again, both when he was at the university to work with students and to have— you know, it's like what it says in the Bible, God loved you first, is for us to do this as well with each other. That to actually love the other person first, and loving them in a sense that shows them— is by not lying to them, but to show them the possibility of greatness that is in each one of us. Instead of going— you see, our temptation is now to say, well, something is shaking on the top, so let's grab the government and make laws and rules, and then everybody's tied down and can't misbehave. That's a fool's errand. Because that's never going to happen. What we need is to go the other way, go back into the families, grab what you can, and start to mentor the kid next to you. And that— I mean, look, Jesus, even he was— he did it himself. He didn't grab— he didn't throw over Pontius Pilate or the chief priests or anything. He took these 12, you know, not exactly learned men, maybe one of them, maybe not two. You can take Paul for that too. and actually see the potential in people. And I think this is something that John Paul— it's just his greatest gift to me was this, that he saw in me something that I didn't see, and he showed me a way to live that I greatly desired. And those 2 things together changed my life. And that's a classic recipe for evangelization. And I know this is a very simple answer I'm giving you, Don, but that, that is who he was. Yeah. And probably that's the best I can come up with now.

Yeah. What do you make of, uh, the idea that we are devoid of, of leaders today? I, I spoke of those 3 great leaders in the '80s, and there were others. There were other business leaders at that time that one could look to, uh, to try to emulate. Um, those, uh, people are few and far between today, or at least it seems so. Um, maybe they're not in the media all the time.

You know, I remember when I joined in '86, I mean, John Paul was not exactly the most popular guy. Neither was Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. So that's true, right?

You see this? That's true. Yeah, yeah.

Now, I wouldn't want to judge. That's the other thing. I, I'm as a Christian, I am actually not overtly political because I think that Christianity doesn't primarily play out in politic— in politics.

Agreed.

It plays out primarily in your family and maybe even more in business than government.

Yeah.

As well, in government, it's easier to, to promulgate or to pursue natural law and philosophy, that is reason, and we can figure this out, and as long as we stick to that. And so, so faith has a bit more to do with with— well, it has a lot to do with the family and civil society. And I think actually has a lot to do with business because I think, well, you know, I coach entrepreneurs, I do a lot of coaching of individuals who start companies or who run companies.

Yep.

And I actually believe that faith, faith in the future, in God, in humanity, in possibilities, is a critical ingredient in business. And I've never met a business person who's not— a business person, an entrepreneur who's actually building companies and so on, who's not highly receptive to this message of the transcendent, of God, and that there's more to the world than we can see. And so I think faith is even more important in business and in civil society Whereas in government, it's a little less. I don't tend to get involved very much in politics.

So let me ask you on the business side, are you finding that there are leaders in the business world that are willing to essentially stand up for Christian teaching and allow space for humans to flourish and not feel as though they're being stifled? Do they exist?

Yes, they exist. It's— the difficulty is this, and then this is how many of them solve it, is in, you know, a public company is a little bit like being on Facebook, where it's like there's a mob running on you. And if you say something that's being slightly misunderstood, they'll rip your head off and run with it. Right. Yeah. So it's very difficult in a public company, but there are companies that even in the public space, that it's always, you know, the French say it's the tone that makes the music. And I think this has a lot to do with this and how I think the majority of Americans, the majority of anybody has goodwill and will understand an argument and will understand the nuance on an argument. And so it's a little bit the tone that makes the music. But the most convinced business people I know on the Christian side and Well, even beyond, it's just the most convinced business people I know who are sort of weary of this whole wokeness of, you know, walking on a minefield the whole day without your clear intentions actually counting.

Right.

Where people just wait for a misspeak or a bad, you know, a bad turn of phrase or whatever, just to catch you on a landmine. They end up today not going public with their companies. And they make private companies.

Yeah.

Very successfully so, very, both very prosperous and very flourishing private companies. And that is a path that more and more people take that I see, that I work with, because it keeps them, you know, there's money, there's a lot of money on the sidelines nowadays. And there's a lot of investors who look for more than going onto the stock market. You let a certain aspect of of the true quality of your company out of your hands if you go on the stock market, because it becomes memetic. Like, you get sucked in with everything else and what you actually do and the actual performance doesn't really matter anymore, right? Because the whole sector or whatever, somebody goes on emotion.

Would you advise a Catholic entrepreneur That it's actually not just a safer space, so to speak, for that Catholic entrepreneur to flourish in private business as opposed to going public, but that it might actually be more Catholic because there is much more room for subsidiarity within a private Catholic business, private business run by a Catholic business leader or entrepreneur or Christian entrepreneur than in a public—

Don, it happens. It can happen both ways. I mean, just as an example, we're saying everything is quarterly and there's so much pressure on quarters and everything. And then, and then you have a guy like Bezos who doesn't make any money for years and years and years with Amazon and totally defies what does— what the street wants. And he doesn't care what the, what the analysts say, right? It happens. The other famous case with Steve Jobs, who just ignored what the analysts were saying and created an absolutely great company that was public. So it can happen, much rarer and much more peril in that path.

Hmm.

So I can't give a general statement of saying, should you or shouldn't you? I tell you what I would do. And I would not take my company public if it was today. And I did in the past, and I would not do it today. Not just because of that, but also because I'm sort of weary of the financial markets today, which you just get thrown into a bucket that is— there's a storm in that bucket that doesn't have much to do with what my company does.

Yeah.

I, I myself, just me, I wouldn't do it.

You mentioned the family several times in our talk. Catholic, uh, I as a father of, uh, 3 going on 4 young children, um, face a daunting task in raising children in today's world for a variety of reasons, but financial is one of the, the preeminent reasons that makes raising a family today very, very difficult. Obviously inflation is incredibly high right now. Well, that's a right now thing, but the cost of living in general, the cost of housing, the ability to be able to start a business on your own, you know, just the, you know, the challenges that might be in your way from a financial standpoint. And then just generally speaking, being able to afford a college education, whether someone thinks that's worthy or not. That is through the roof in terms of its costs. What would you say to families today, young Catholic families that are trying to raise their children in what is supposed to be a free market economy, but are finding more and more challenges in terms of how to survive, so to speak?

It's tricky. I think what we have today, this is sort of the big play that people think we have a free market economy right now, that what we're seeing here is the free market, and it isn't. It is a crony capitalist market, very large governments, very large businesses colluding together, and then under the mantle of the free market. I think we need to move back to the free market to actually get the kind of prosperity and growth that we had in the last 50 years, which speaks for itself. It was very, you know, very positive time of development in the world. We have never had as many— as few poor people today than we did in the history of humanity. And we're quickly moving away from that by— with this crony capitalism. So, but as far as just going back to the family, and if you listen to this as a young person, 2 things. The first thing is, you know, John Paul's, do not be afraid, put out into the deep. Look, if you would know the world ends tomorrow, you plant an apple tree today. I think that we— that what should your grandparents have said at the eve of World War II or World War I, or, you know, at the height of Hitler's power, of the thousand-year Reich? Nobody knew that this wasn't going to last for a thousand years. So I would put this into relation. What— again, I go back to you and yours, like to say you yourself. The first step is I need you to marry well and for the right reasons in the right way. So focus on your life, find a spouse that shares your values, that you can grow together. Don't find the perfect spouse because that— because be the perfect spouse, you know what I mean? Like, I know so many young people, you know, I deal with the college students all the time and they say, well, my person No, I want— be the perfect spouse and then find a person who likes that, and I think you have a good chance for a good marriage. And then once you have that marriage, I would take some risk. The Lord loves nothing more than for us to lean out the window and proclaim God and take a risk, in a sense, for God. And if you have a family and a growing family and everything, that is a risk. God. And then, uh, as you lose your balance, that God comes in and he catches you, and then you praise God, right? That's the— so, and then you lean out again and he catches you again and you praise him again.

Happens all throughout our life, right?

And he loves it. He's like a father. Like, he loves it, you know? You would love to catch your 1-year-old. She tries to walk and she falls, right? And you're like, oh, I got you. And it's never enough.

Right.

And so this kind of courage, you know, to have courage and to say, we're a bit— the news and bad news reaches us too quickly. I think we live in a beautiful, good world. And there's, you know what, starting a company is so much more easy today than it was even when I started. Can you believe it? I start a small company with every student that comes to the Bush School of Business in the first semester. And it does— and free, it doesn't cost anything. I've had students, they paid for their, for their entire tuition for the 4 years with the business they started in the first semester.

That's wonderful.

And tell me where else they can do this. And you gotta love America.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's still a lot of, a lot of beautiful things happening.

So courage, and go forward and, you know, put out into the deep. I think JP2 would say it again.

Yeah, that's great. I want to give— I want to wrap up here. I want to ask you, um, just to share with our audience, obviously, um, your work at Catholic University and any other things that you're working on that you would love people to pay attention to, or, um, where they can find, um, your book. And, you know, just share anything that you'd like to promote at this time.

So I'm, I'm glad you say that. Look, I'm— I just got this. I'm— this is going to be my new book. It's called—

Oh, fantastic.

The Art of Principled Entrepreneurship. And it's actually a lot of what we talked about here. Um, the earlier book I had is called The Pope and the CEO, and that's out and it's on Amazon and all that. And then this book is going to come out on April 5th. And you can also find me on, on social media, like on Facebook. I still— I think I'm still under The Pope and the CEO, but Also on the Catholic University website. If you do Widmer and CUA on your Google browser, you find me right away. And then, you know, I'm always happy to show students the university. We have a really cool program. So if some of you homeschool— we homeschool with our family.

As do we.

And we have a high school program, both for homeschoolers but for Catholic schools specifically, high schools. And it's called CEDE, C-E-D-E program.

Okay.

It teaches JP2— see, my whole shtick is to teach the theology of the body for business.

Okay.

And entrepreneurship. And we created— I have this course that I developed here at CUA called The Vocation of Business, or Business as a Vocation. And then we developed a course that is for homeschoolers and Catholic high schools. And you can do this. And then if you pay like the basic registration fee at CUA, you get 3 credits here from the university.

Yeah.

And so a student can do this and get some credit from CUA right away. And, you know, I think that's a great way. We need to reach students younger and younger to show them the right attitude towards business before they get spoiled from this materialistic, utilitarian point of view that says business is evil, but make some money and then give it to me. You know, it's totally screwed up.

Yeah. One of the great things that's come out of the, the pandemic is that people have found out how to, um, innovate using the school— the skills and the technical things that are available to us online. And homes, whether it be homeschooling or starting your own business Or, um, you know, just taking on new skills and learning how to get new certifications. All of that is at your fingertips now. And as from the beginning, God makes good out of evil. And there are a lot of bad things on the internet, but there's a lot of things that you can explore and improve yourself and improve opportunity for your family.

That's a brilliant point, Don. I couldn't agree more.

Yeah. So I want to, um, close with— perhaps you could close us with a prayer, and then we will Sure.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Lord, we thank you for having this time together. We want to offer up to you our work for— that we did today, tomorrow, and every day. We pray especially for all the children of the families that are listening or seeing this, for all the guys who participate in Faith and Ale, and for the speakers coming up. Especially Immaculée, I think, who's coming there next. And we put all of this under the umbrella, under the mantle of your Most Holy Mother, as we pray. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Saint John Paul II Pray for us. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Thank you so much, Andreas. I really appreciate you making time available. Thank you for offering your services to Faith and Ale, and thank you for your continued work at the Bush School at Catholic University. Um, you're doing wonderful things there, and, um, it's wonderful to, to hear your story of how it started back in 1986 to where it is today. So thank you for sharing that with the world.

Thank you, Don, and God bless everybody.

Okay, take care. Bye.