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Responsible Inheritance for Christian Fathers: How To Make It A Blessing, Not A Curse · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  I think it's better to understand the problem of inheritance as a second generation dilemma. So the problem is that the first generation is oftentimes the one where through necessity, through hardship, you've accomplished a great deal of stability or success as a family.
• 0:18
  And now your children are growing up in a much more stable environment where they're not experiencing the kind of adversity that you experienced as a first generation, either believer or a first generation person who is really trying to build a very functional family.
• 0:38
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Family Teams podcast. So I am going to start up a conversation with my buddies, Chris and Riley. Chris and Riley, thanks for joining me today.
• 1:06
  Glad to be here. Thank you for having us. Yeah. Riley from the great state of South Carolina and Chris back in Eugene, Oregon. So there's a real confusion, I would say, in general, in the especially evangelical Christian world around the topic of inheritance, right? Like, how do we think about this topic? Is it a blessing or a curse to actually provide an inheritance, especially financial inheritance? We can talk about the other elements as well.
• 1:35
  to the second generation. And so there's an intuition that's really deep inside of, I would say, just evangelical Christians, that there's actually something negative about this, you know, about passing something like that on, that it does something to the second generation that's not positive. And I would say that there's at least a couple of places that comes from that I think are really important to dive into, right? One is just the New Testament's teaching about money and the trap of wealth and,
• 2:03
  And so do you really want to be giving that to your children? What does that create? Right. Another element of that intuition is just how it can destroy the motivation of a second generation. And there's a lot of stories like that. There's a lot of people that were born with the silver spoon in their mouth and ended up, you know, really struggling to have any motivation to achieve anything, you know, on, in their life, in terms of their job, in terms of their family, in terms of their.
• 2:30
  even their spiritual life. I mean, it can suck that motivation out. So I want to share with you guys a couple of perspectives in these video clips. And then I just want to have a free-flowing conversation with you guys. Just tell me what it is that this stirs up for you. What are some...
• 2:46
  reactions, you know, how you wrestled with this topic. And I want to get into the details a little bit because again, I think this is a really confusing topic. And from a family team's perspective, this is a really important topic. Like, I don't want to think about this in a very
• 3:03
  go down a family team's path, they start to think differently about inheritances, but then it really, you know, stirs up all these questions and tensions that I think a lot of us, especially those of us raised in the church, I think have, but I think everyone can relate to at some level. So I will play the first clip for you guys. We'll talk about that a little bit. Then I'll play the second clip and then I want to have a little bit longer conversation after that. So I will share this first one with you guys.
• 3:28
  This is an Instagram story from Myron Golden. This guy is a quite the motivational speaker. He's been taking over a lot of Instagram stuff. I don't know a lot about him, but man, he says some interesting things that I think are worth interacting with. So here's his reel on this. Okay. Awesome.
• 3:47
  In a world where instead of kicking our children out when they're 18, they come to work with us in our family business. And then when they get married, we give them a house so they don't have a mortgage and a family business so they don't have to find a job. And then we teach them an aspect of the family business so that when we die, instead of just giving them money, we give them a mindset, we give them a skill set, we give them a tool set, that they can perpetuate the family's wealth instead of decimating the family's wealth.
• 4:12
  See, we want our children to leave when they're 18. You know why? Because we're Americans. But the Bible says that then shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh. So biblically, a person leaves home when they get married. Oh, you mean I have to put up with them for that many more years? The reason you have to put up with them is because you didn't train them up. If you train them up, you don't have to put up with them.
• 4:33
  But imagine that as a world where your children don't have to start from scratch. Imagine if your parents would have set you up so you didn't have to start from scratch. Imagine how much further ahead you'd be. Well, guess what? As my good friend, Dr. Sonja always says, you may not come from a wealthy family, but a wealthy family should come from you. Imagine a world. All right, I'll play this beginning one more time because I want to talk about this. Where instead of kicking our children out when they're 18, they come to work with us in our family business. And then when they get married, we give them a house.
• 4:57
  Okay. I love, I love this. Um, you know, I think, I think we just, we have to be thinking a lot more strategically about multi-generational legacy, how to work as generations. So yeah, I have lots of thoughts, but before I dive into this, yeah, maybe we'll start with you, Chris, and then go to you, Riley. I'm really curious, uh, like, you know, when you just hear that clip or hear this idea and he kind of teased out a few elements there, you know, the first one being instead of kicking your kids out at 18. Okay. That that's, that's a topic. Yeah.
• 5:26
  There's providing something for your children, like a house or allowing them to have a place in the family's business. And then he started going down this road of, you know, the, you know, the way that we're like, are we designed to, to work together as a family? You know, imagine this world. So yeah. What, what did that start for you, Chris?
• 5:44
  Yeah, so this is really timely. So probably two weeks ago, maybe, I was listening to an episode of a podcast with Ali Abdaal, who's a YouTube influencer guy. And he had billionaire Andrew Wilkinson on there. Oh, yeah. And one of the things that Andrew said on there is he had this realization when they were telling him how many shares he had of this company.
• 6:08
  And he's like, oh, that's $250 million, right? Like, so this 36-year-old billionaire, and he starts like, I don't think he's a believer. So he's trying to like understand purpose and all of this. Like, what do I do? And he said something on that episode. He's like, my kids will get none of this. I'm going to give all of it away.
• 6:26
  And he said, maybe they'll have a house or maybe I'll send them to college, but otherwise they're on their own. And I was like, oh, like something, I don't know that that's the answer. And I think that's the extreme kind of like swing the pendulum away from these like, like you had talked about, you know, coddling and like destroying the family's wealth by not stewarding it in a unique particular pathway. Yeah.
• 6:50
  So that was one element of this. Like, what is the extent that we should be supporting our children in these regards? And I think it might have been you that taught me this, but thinking about Jewish families, like they actually, they'll fund a business and I think they can fail multiple times. And then finally, at a certain point, they're like, okay, we're done funding your stuff. You can come work with us or whatever. Yeah.
• 7:12
  And so just this weekend, my boys, we reached out to a neighbor who had just fell a tree. And we said, hey, can we get some of the wood and can our boys come and cut it up and take it out and everything? And what we were going to do is teach the boys an opportunity in entrepreneurship of like, okay, split the wood, bundle it, sell it this, you know.
• 7:34
  And I was thinking the whole time, okay, I've got to buy them these supplies at Jerry's, which is a home improvement store locally. And I've got to do all this stuff. So you guys, you're going to have to keep track of this and you're going to have to pay that back. And then you're going to have to pay taxes. And I was going through trying to teach them all these lessons. And then we went over to my mother-in-law's house and she was like, you guys should just come to grandma. Grandma won't charge you interest on anything or any of that, you know? And she had a totally different, like more generous approach to, you know,
• 8:01
  I will get you guys off the ground and help you start this business. And it got me thinking like, what is the right way to go about this? And like, to what extent are we supposed to be teaching lessons and maybe hamstringing at times versus like clearing pathways for our children? And so that's, yeah, those are my initial thoughts.
• 8:22
  Yeah. Yeah. So much of this, I think the tension around this topic is if you really value character formation, then this becomes a very difficult dilemma to resolve because you have character formation is primarily.
• 8:39
  done through suffering, through necessity, through hardship. And so when you sort of snowplow parents the future for your children, it creates a situation where they're suffering less. And so people that are, you know, of the impression, of course, and I think accurately, so the character is really what matters, a huge responsibility, then they're
• 9:04
  How, how does this work when you give your kids an inheritance? So yeah, I'll, I'll kind of tease out a couple of, you know, my thoughts about that in a minute. I'm really interested because even exactly what you said about the Andrew Wilkinson, the second clip is really describes that same philosophy that I think that is so common in our culture for, I think, again, for good reason.
• 9:25
  Like, like I think the, the, the weight of the argument, you know, even so far in this discussion, I think favors the people who are like, don't give your kids a big inheritance. I really do think that the burden of proof needs to be pretty strongly on those who are providing a lot of resources for their children. I think that, that we can, we can, I think make that case, but I think it's difficult case to make given the, the kinds of, the kind of world we live in. And so we, that's why I think we need to get into the details, but yeah, Riley, what did this start for you?
• 9:55
  Yeah, so I do have to also credit you for a lot of the mindset shifting that happened in me around a lot of this topic over the years. But one of the big things that stirs up in me is just the paradigm shift that needs to happen around the idea of parenting in general. There's a lot of talk around this, but just the individualism that's just so ingrained in American culture.
• 10:20
  societal culture. It's like, how dare you ever think of anything in any other term except the individual? You can't think of it as, well, you can't think of it as any kind of a team whatsoever. It all boils down to the individual. But, you know, that's, as you see through scripture, that's not the way that,
• 10:40
  That's not the least common denominator that the Lord created. He created a family. He didn't just create Adam. He created Adam and Eve who were intended to be fruitful and multiply. And so when you start to think about it like that, then you start being forced to ask questions like what he was asking in that reel is, okay, well, do I just want to leave my children out to dry? Do I want to make them have to go through the exact same thing that I went through?
• 11:08
  You know, like if you came from nothing, did they have to also come from absolutely nothing? And obviously they're like, you guys are kind of talking about there's wisdom to be had in creating hardship that your children have to overcome and having stipulations around inheritance and all this kind of stuff. But just to straight up say, no, you don't get anything of what I've created. You start from scratch. It's like shooting your own self in the foot. Right. Like why just doesn't make any logical sense to me why you would do that.
• 11:37
  If you don't mind me sharing one more thought on that. This is something I've kind of thought up myself. I'm sure someone else smarter than me said it before, but as I have thought about trying to build an inheritance, it's like a constant motivator for me is that I need to work twice as hard.
• 11:55
  to build a spiritual inheritance for my children as I work to build a financial inheritance. And so if that ever gets out of balance, that's a check for me. It's like, okay, if I'm working this hard to build a business or buy real estate or do X, Y, and Z and spend all these hours, then I need to be working twice as hard to make sure that they are raised up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Yes.
• 12:18
  Yeah. And what you're saying there, Riley, and this, this is, this is what I think if I could describe the dilemma, I think, I think that we think about this as a parenting dilemma. I don't think it is a parenting dilemma. I think it's, I think it's better to understand the problem of inheritance as a second generation dilemma.
• 12:36
  So the problem is that the first generation is oftentimes the one where through necessity, through hardship, you've accomplished a great deal of stability or success as a family. And now your children are growing up in a much more stable environment where they're not experiencing the kind of adversity that you experienced as a first generation, either believer or a first generation person who...
• 13:03
  is really trying to build a very functional family. So a lot of people come from really tough backgrounds and it creates a second generation dilemma. So the first generation, my experience is first generation kids and adults primarily learn through adversity, through the school of hard knocks. And because that's their intuition, that's how they learn things. They're like, well, I want my kids to learn from adversity.
• 13:25
  the school of hard knocks too, because that's how I learned. The problem is your kids are growing up in a much more stable environment. There aren't as many hard knocks. Even if you try really hard to take a lot of things away from your kids, they can sense the stability. And that's actually a really good thing. And so like you just said, Riley, I think actually...
• 13:46
  When you're raising a second generation, the thing that really causes kids to push the limits is the expectations of the father. You have to sort of raise the bar. And a lot of fathers won't do it because, again, all their intuitions are first-generation intuitions. And so they tend to keep the bar really low and just expect their kids are going to...
• 14:12
  discover character formation the way they did through, through really difficult circumstances. And of course life is difficult. So there will be those times, but man, there, there's also a lot of stability and comfort often you're probably providing for them. And so what I've just noticed is that when like you, we have to help fathers overcome this intuition that, and this is like
• 14:33
  Part of the reason why I, you know, I've been trying to understand this. There's, there's a few things that I, like I wrote recently. One of them is I tweeted this unpopular opinion, 18 to 25 is a more critical time for engaged parenting. You know, that always stirs up a lot of questions because people are really confused by
• 14:51
  By that, that's a really second generation kind of, cause the people who almost all the people who follow stuff I'm writing are, are solid first gen or second gen. And, and almost all of their kids are growing up in a, in a place of stability. And like Myron, one of the things he said in that Instagram reel that I think is really important is that you're responsible for your children until they get married.
• 15:15
  I believe that totally. And so if you think your kids are going to get married in their early to mid-20s, then you've got three, four, five, six, seven years of adult engagement with your son or daughter. And how is that going to play out? And this is where a lot of engagement in terms of cranking up your expectations for your children and providing a lot of challenge for them so that they...
• 15:41
  They aren't just sort of like, wow, I got it made. Like this is, you know, my parents have sort of snowplowed all the, all the obstacles. That's a problem. The other thing that Myron brought up is that, you know, we're, we have this sort of reset, reset button mindset, right? Like every generation is supposed to reset.
• 15:57
  I think this is devastating for families to think that what's actually best for your kids is that they all need to experience you hitting the reset button every single generation. And that I can't provide advantages to my children. This is the most anti-Abrahamic mindset that I could imagine. But again, this is a first-generation, second-generation problem. Abraham was really a first-generation guy. He left his father's house because his father was an idol worshiper. We learned about that in Joshua 24.
• 16:27
  And then, but Isaac didn't leave his house. And so this is why, you know, if you're an Abraham and Sarah generation, then yes, you do, you do, you're going to experience a lot of hardship. You're going to walk by faith in a pretty dynamic way. And you're going to learn a lot from, from adversity. Yeah.
• 16:43
  But if you're a second generation, and again, life's hard, there's definitely going to be adversity, but somebody, and usually it's the father, has to really raise the bar and say, look, with great power comes great responsibility. You've been raised in this family. I have high expectations for you and I know that you can achieve them. And so I'm going to be here to help you. And a lot of that gets really intense at 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. Like that's when they need to experience that. The problem is most...
• 17:08
  Most of us don't have any kind of intuition around that because we're all first gen in this sense, like first gen in that most of our parents said, okay, after 18, like, good luck, do your best, you know? And, you know, oftentimes our parents might, they might've been very supportive, but they didn't, there was nothing for us to like enter into after we became adults. It was everyone's expectation that the reset button was going to get hit, that we're
• 17:33
  You know, we're being sort of kicked out of the nest and it's time for us to fly on our own the way our parents did. And I think this is really a devastating kind of way to think. And this is where I've kind of gone back to ancient cultures, you know, like Jewish cultures, like you were mentioning, Chris, but the second, the second clip I want to play for you guys is kind of round out this conversation.
• 17:53
  Michael Knowles brought this up in a podcast he recently did. He's a pretty, very conservative Catholic. I think he comes from a background that is, again, a more ancient culture. He reacted a lot to this expectation that you wouldn't give anything to your children, kind of the Andrew Wilkinson statement. Let me play this for you guys, and then we'll continue to try to dive deeper and deeper into this topic. Yeah.
• 18:17
  Jeff Goldblum, beloved movie actor, Jeff Goldblum has just announced that, you know, he's somewhat aged. He's something of an elderly father. He's got young, younger kids than men his age typically would. And so he's thinking about the future, what happens when he's gone. And he says he's not going to leave his kids any money.
• 18:38
  Now that I'm raising kids, I'm no, you know, conventionalist, but I know the system that we're in. And I think sooner than later, but I don't want to scare them. They should figure out, I mean, I love the creative life. It saved my life. Yeah. But also this idea that, hey, you know, you've got to row your own boat. Yeah. So I'm not going to teach kids. Most people don't. Right. Right.
• 19:02
  Right. I don't think I'm not going to do it for you. And you're not going to want me to do it for you. You got to figure out how to find out what's wanted and needed and where that intersects with your love and passion and what you can do. And even if it doesn't, you might have to do that anyway. OK, I think we all hear this advice and we think good on Jeff Goldblum.
• 19:26
  Very American. You know, kids, I've made a zillion dollars, but you've got to cut your own path. You're not just going to rest on daddy's money. You're not getting daddy's money. You've got to figure things out yourself. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And there's some wisdom to this because many of us know rich kids who just inherited some money and wasted their lives, and it didn't make them happy, and they didn't flourish. Okay, sure.
• 19:49
  So we say, go out there, cut your own path. That's good. But that can be taken to an extreme too. That is, I think, a consequence of liberalism. That, because what is liberalism about? Liberalism is about the individual. It's about forgetting about tradition, forgetting about legacy, doing what you want, being innovative, creative destruction, individual effort, individual everything. Right?
• 20:16
  And that isn't really how society has worked for all of history. This is a really important first point, right? So it's really, we have to acknowledge that our opinions about this, our intuitions about this are extremely recent and very much based on kind of the very unusual elements of history that we're living in and have lived in the last like 80, you know, 50 to 80 years. We've lived through a period of remarkable stability,
• 20:45
  And when you think that stability is going to last forever, you don't need your family, right? The government can provide little safety nets for anybody, but we're all going to succeed anyway. No one's going to starve. And so in that environment, everyone can and ought to, this is the philosophy of liberalism, just...
• 21:02
  It should focus on self-actualization should focus on individual achievements should focus on their own individual identity, because you don't, you don't need to worry about the other elements, the, you know, just how am I going to survive or how we're going to protect ourselves or any of those things. Right. So, so we, we are living at the most extreme version of that in any other time in history, like, like Knowles is saying, this would have been anathema. I mean, it's so dangerous. If you told all your kids, Hey, I'm not gonna give you anything. Good luck. We're gonna hit the reset button. Many of your kids would die. Right. Like, like, like they're relying on you.
• 21:31
  And so one of the things we have to figure out is, is this going to continue for the next 50 to a hundred years in terms of the stability that we've experienced? Or is that an anomaly? That's one thing we can discuss. And then there's the whole philosophy of liberalism in general. And that is, if we do create a lot of stability, does that mean that we should shift the primary way that we think about life from sort of a family-centric view to an individual-centered view?
• 21:57
  And if that's true, it starts to make sense of this intuition. Don't give your kids anything. You're going to somehow unduly influence their individual development. So let's continue to listen to what Michael's saying here. That's not really how human nature works, as we talk about on this show a lot. So Jeff Goldblum, it seems to me, is going way too far in the other direction to say, I'm not giving my kids any money and they just have to figure everything out themselves because otherwise they'll become wastrels. Well, what if they don't? What if...
• 22:23
  Yes, you teach your kids to cultivate good desires and to work really hard and to be diligent and to find things that turn them on and get them excited to get out of bed in the morning and also give them your money and also give them a financial legacy and also give them some generational wealth. Okay. So this is the key, I think.
• 22:45
  The father has to raise the bar of expectation. This is another reason why we need fathers. So this is a fatherhood episode, you know, within the family teams podcast. We're trying these different motherhood episodes, different fatherhood episodes. I'm constantly getting just a, like just a shower of confusion coming my way about what is a father for? Like who, like explain fatherhood to me. It's just, it's all parenting. Yeah.
• 23:11
  And again, I, you know, we've had lots of episodes we've talked about. We've all defined, we've defined a culture. We've defined parenting as like all child, everything we're doing as families as parenting. And then we've subtly described parenting really as traditional mothering. And because there's this massive confusion about what is fathering.
• 23:31
  And so one of the things you need a father for that you're not going to have if there's not a father in the home is somebody who's going to raise the bar of expectation when you're in a period of peace and stability. That is a fatherly thing to do. It's very difficult for mothers to do that. I think fathers are actually built to do this, but we don't know it. We haven't trained fathers. They haven't seen this modeled. This is what Michael's describing here.
• 23:55
  How about instead of saying, I've got to keep this wealth from you because you might squander it and thereby ruin your life. What if we say, hey, I'm going to teach my kids to be good stewards of their inheritance. That I think is missing from...
• 24:12
  the American ethos right now on the left and on the right. And I think it's a consequence of liberalism, which ignores the past, which says we don't need anything to do with our forebears. They were probably racist and stupid and were so brilliant. We're going to do everything on our own.
• 24:28
  But generational wealth is a good thing. And I'm not just talking about money. I'm talking about generational wisdom. That's an important thing. Generational homes. You know, there was a home, I think it burned down in the 90s, but there was a Knowles family home in New Hampshire. It wasn't a particularly nice home. It's not like the Knowles family had any particular amount of money, but it had just been standing on this plot of land since the 17th century. It had just been there since like 1635 or something like that.
• 24:57
  And they made some additions to it. But it was a visible expression of a family legacy. With much money, without much fanfare, it was just there. And you could say, oh, that's cool. That was my family. Oh, there's some history there. There's a tie to the land and to the culture. And that part is really missing. That's the problem with the individualism that the right has embraced in recent decades. You know, we're conservatives, guys. We want to conserve stuff.
• 25:24
  All right. So lots of good stuff. I think that he's teasing out there. I like to like dive into, but yeah, Chris, why don't we start with you? What, what, uh, what did that start for you?
• 25:35
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• 26:07
  Yeah. Also connected to the first one we watched. And I think collectively, I'm just thinking through this. I've had lots of people talk to me about even just the idea of multi-generational family business, multi-generational resource. Like if you, you are stewarding assets as a family and you're inviting your children into that as part of the inheritance, you're going to have a lot of money.
• 26:29
  the question I often get is like, well, what if they don't want to be a part of that business or what if they don't want to do that thing? And I think it just gets back to what Riley started with, which he highlighted here is this individualism piece. It's like, I think if we can address the family versus individual piece first and then identify, okay, as a team, what is our direction? What is our mission? What is it that we are about? And that becomes...
• 26:58
  well-formed in a child through their adolescent years, I think it becomes like a no-brainer for them that, yeah, I'm a part of the father's business. Like whatever that business is. I mean, if this is an LLC or assets, whatever, it's, yeah, I'm in this. This is my family's thing. I think that's how you end up with Holmes, like, you know, his sitting around for
• 27:20
  multiple, multiple generations because it was mine. It was like, I didn't need to go do my own thing because I'm invited into a larger story with more characters and I have a part to play. And so I may be in error in this, but I think at least at this particular moment, I would say the vast majority of children should want to be a part of their father's work.
• 27:48
  To take over, to be a part of it, to continue it on. There's the exception that I think the children gifted with, you know, certain skill sets and different things that they ought to be doing that is, that is slightly different. But generally speaking, we should be creating household environments where children want to be part of the family business, even if it's not their thing, if that makes sense.
• 28:18
  Yeah. Well, I would say kind of my take on, okay, should kids, should they enter the family business if they feel a dissonance about the actual product or service or whatever the thing that's being produced is? So I think one of these you said is oftentimes kids are raised and, and have a sort of a general relationship.
• 28:40
  set of skills and, and they can apply that to lots of different things. And so sometimes the who is a lot more important to a lot of people than the what, like there's an obsession in our culture with the, what, what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do when you grow up? We don't ask who. Yeah.
• 28:56
  Is who a more basic question to ask than what? And so I think for most people, the who is more important than the what. Like, I don't really care. Like, I've heard people say this a lot. I don't really care what I do. I care a lot about who I do it with. If I do that activity, if I join that corporation, I'm going to spend the bulk of my life
• 29:18
  People that I really am not connected with, that I don't have a deep relationship with. If I do this over here, I might be slightly less interested in the product, slightly less interested in the service, but I'm going to be surrounded 40, 50 hours a week by people I love. And so that, I think, needs to be given a strong vote. However...
• 29:39
  I'd like to kind of caveat that as well and say that one of the ways to resolve this problem, if your kids are totally not interested in the what that you do, is to understand that the family itself is like a holding company. It's not necessarily associated with a single. And so I'm very big into in Family Inc. when we're coaching families.
• 29:58
  talking to them about this. Like, Hey, I want you to start three businesses, start, start a service based business, a scale business, and then start a legacy business. And a legacy business is oftentimes, you know, the, the different capital intensive assets, the investment thesis, what wealthy families call a family office. You start to steward assets that, that, that isn't the, what of that doesn't really matter. I mean, if you, if you're, if you ask most kids who really understand stewardship, Hey, I've got a fourplex that I want to give you to steward.
• 30:28
  would you like to have the $2,000 a month and free cashflow that comes from stewarding this asset? Most kids, you know, who are 25 years old and been well-raised are probably not going to say, you know what, dad, I don't really, that doesn't, you know, the whole property management thing isn't for me, you know, I really prefer to do this over here. It's like,
• 30:48
  Don't you, it's, it's an asset. Like our, our family stewards assets. None of us cares particularly about like none of us, none of us were what wake up every morning and say, I just love property management. You know, I can't wait for somebody to call me with their plumbing problems. Like, like that, that's not, that's not the proper thing.
• 31:07
  like level of analysis for this conversation. And so a lot of this is just, there's an obsession in our culture with finding your identity through your work. And because we are obsessed with that, this starts to feel like some kind of violation of people's individual identity when a family owns anything that they are considering or passing on to their children. And this goes all the way back to, I think what Michael is saying in this clip, that really the problem is an identity problem.
• 31:36
  We're trying to decide here whether or not it's healthy for us to give kids a family identity or should we pour everything into their individual identity? And so if the bias is, no, we're, and this is, I think the best way I've ever heard this articulated is Naval Ravikant when he said, life is a single player game. You're born alone. You're going to live alone. You're going to die alone.
• 31:57
  Like that, that, that is, that is the mantra of, of liberalism, according to what Michael Knowles is describing. Cause I, and I, and I think that's fundamentally flawed and I love Naval and I agree with like 90% of what he says, but, but that, that one I find completely off base. You know, we, we are not playing a single player game. We're playing a family centered game. We are born into a family family.
• 32:20
  We're designed to live our lives in and through and with our family. And if everything goes well, then God willing, we will die surrounded by our family. That's the kind of creature we are. And I think liberalism has lied to us about the nature of this. And this is why we're struggling so much with these questions, because our primary lens through which we see all of these questions is...
• 32:41
  You know, is this going to help build up my kids' individual identity? And if we give them anything, if we give them identity, we tell them about this house that, you know, we, we are, it's a part of our family. If we have family land, if we, if we have a fan, a strong family last name, if we have a family crest, if, if there's a family trust fund that, that helps us go on vacations together and, or have a family summit every year.
• 33:02
  All of that identity, all the stories, all the pictures, all of that is really grounding the individual into a family story. And it's all considered by many people and really, I think, by the philosophy of liberalism in general as a violation of what is most sacred in our culture, that we worship this value of individuality, of individual self-expression.
• 33:27
  Because we believe we're in a single player game. And so the last thing I want to say, and then I want to get your thoughts here, Riley, is part of what I believe about inheritance is that if you give your children an inheritance and give them the philosophy of liberalism and individualism, you are hurting them.
• 33:46
  And I do think you probably should give them nothing because you're not giving them any real identity with that money. They're going to think the money exists only for their own comfort. It is going to suck all the motivation out of the system. And so I would say, yeah, don't give them anything. Give it all away. And so I don't think this is a black and white answer. I think it depends on how you're raising your children.
• 34:07
  But if you're raising your kids to function as a team, if you're raising the bar as a father and casting a huge vision for your family multigenerationally, if you really believe what Genesis 128 says that the family is designed to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule, then who better to give that inheritance to than your children who have been raised to value those things? And now they're able to take the baton and like the Myron Golden Reel suggested, they're supposed to take the family farther.
• 34:34
  Right. The whole goal is that I want my ceiling to be my kid's floor. If that's what you believe, then of course an inheritance is important. And it's not just about finances. Every single area you want to give your kids an inheritance when it comes to their network. You want to give them an inheritance when it comes to their spiritual life. You want to give them an inheritance with regards to land. We want to give them inheritance with regards to wisdom.
• 34:56
  And so you just, you're constantly thinking, and a lot of this, this, this baton passing, I believe does happen in this, in this realm of time when your kids are in their twenties. Like, I think that's such a critical timeframe for doing a lot of this work because that's the time when many of our kids are beginning to, they really have an opportunity to just focus on like learning the most complex lessons of life. And, and so to live some kind of integrated lifestyle with their father so they can learn that, that's awesome.
• 35:24
  And so there's lots of ways we're trying to live that out, you know, because we have now, you know, three adult kids who are in their twenties. And so I'm trying to understand how to do this well. And I'm realizing again, like I'm mentioning that so much of the weight falls on the father, raising that bar and causing my kids to, to, to really understand that. Like, I'm not, I'm not interested in giving you anything of our family if you're going to squander it, but I have spent the last 20 years.
• 35:48
  raising you to be a good steward. And I trust you more than I trust anyone else. And so of course, I'm going to give you that. And I'm going to be watching really carefully as like, how do you handle that? How do you handle that resource? How do you handle that resource? And so I've got my hand on the faucet and, and my goal, and nothing would please me more than, you know, when I, when my kids turned 40, there's just, I, there's just nothing left that I feel, uh,
• 36:10
  that would damage them if I just turn the faucet all the way to 10 and say, please take everything and care for me and your mother. And we trust you. Like that's where I want my kids to head ultimately. So yeah, Riley, what does this turn up for you? Need a blueprint to revise your family to be a multi-generational team on mission? The book Family Revision by Jeremy Pryor is the book that summarizes all the big picture ideas you hear on this podcast. Available on Amazon or familyteams.com.
• 36:41
  Man, you stole one of my points that I was going to make. And so it's funny that you see it the same way, because I was going to say it's like someone who has not gone through the work of raising their children up, you know, in a way that they have a spiritual inheritance that actually impacts them and their character in their life. Yeah, please do not leave your children anything because it's going to make very powerful evil men and women.
• 37:03
  So, sure, don't leave that. But as I was kind of thinking through, I was trying to structure my thoughts. And for one, I think inheritance, money in general, is an accelerant. It's not necessarily, you know, money is not inherently evil. The lust of money is evil. But money accelerates what's there. I mean, you see King David in the Bible.
• 37:25
  He had lots and lots of resources. Abraham had lots and lots of resources. Solomon had lots and lots of resources. And you see them do amazing things with the resources they had. You also see, you know, King Nebuchadnezzar and so on and so forth just do awful things, the Egyptian pharaoh. All the way through, you see what it looks like. And so, yeah, to that point I made earlier of like,
• 37:49
  working twice as hard to build the spiritual inheritance of your children as you do to build their financial or asset inheritance. The thing that I'm kind of taking a little bit from your material as I've watched you throughout the years, but definitely resonates with me is the idea that,
• 38:06
  If you're a first generation in this endeavor, you have a huge task and a never-ending task. Because for one, you have to figure out the jack-and-the-beanstalk thing where you got to try to escape your situation. That's a whole task in it, though. Once you escape and you build something worth transferring...
• 38:27
  I'm kind of combining that with another thing you've said before, which I totally agree with, is the whole reason, you know, people talk about teenage years and they lose their kid, you know, to the culture in the teenage years because teenagers become fickle. And it's not that they're fickle. It's the searching for identity. And you refuse to give them one. And so they're going to search for it in the world and in their friends and so on and so forth. And so once you've escaped your poverty or your terrible situation,
• 38:56
  Now you have to be the CEO, the leader of your family. And what does a CEO do? They cast a huge vision. They raise the bar and then they inspire and lead those who are following. And so the rest of your life has to be devoted to doing that for your children. Yes. And, and if you do it well, I would go out on a limb to say, okay.
• 39:19
  that your kids are probably, and I'll have statistics to back this up, but I would say your kids are going to be a lot more likely to want to follow in your footsteps if you train them up like that. If you've cast vision, if you raise the bar and you've inspired and led them the whole way, it's going to be really tough for them to not want to be like their dad. And so I think that's huge. Can I say one more thing about what you said, Riley?
• 39:45
  So I just want to highlight that because I love the way you put that, that what's happening when what you're preparing for, we just make it really concrete. Is it imagine when your oldest child turns 18, are you prepared to be CEO of the family? And the way that the Bible talks about that role is using the word patriarch, right? So we talk about grandfather, which is not, I love being a grandfather, but our picture is oftentimes...
• 40:15
  Not what you were describing, Riley, this raising the bar, this visionary leader. Those are words that actually are associated in the Bible with a patriarch. And adult children who are going to inherit a lot of money need a patriarch at the head of that family. That visionary leader that they're inspired by, that they absolutely love.
• 40:37
  that there's no tension with in terms of like, I trust my dad's heart. I believe in what he's doing. And I can't imagine anything I'd rather do than continue to be a part of this team and both help as my father is trying to take the family to the next level and then prepare myself for when that baton is passed to me. That is a beautiful story that everyone I think ought to want to live into that we're completely stealing from this next generation
• 41:05
  By suggesting that, no, what you really need to do is just become an individual and start all over again. And I think one of the elements that makes that really painful for this generation is that we're, you know, this generation is the first one that's going to have less resources than their parents. And so the idea that like, oh.
• 41:20
  The expectation is that I'm going to get nothing from my parents. They're going to squand or spend the inheritance or, you know, get the RV and slap the bumper sticker on that says, you know, spending my children's inheritance. As they drive into the sunset, giving their kids nothing but an economy that is more, that's weaker than the one that they grew up in. They're violating the very sort of basic generational pact that we make with each generation. And that is that we're going to try to set this up so that you go farther than we ever did.
• 41:50
  And I think the resentment and frustration that this generation is feeling because that pact is being so badly violated is palpable. But it's so important to get back to first principles to understand why that's getting violated. The previous generation thinks they're doing you a favor.
• 42:06
  This is the basic philosophy of liberalism. This is where it leads. Everyone's an individual. I mean, I made this money. You didn't make this money. Okay, yeah, I might have had all kinds of advantages that you're not going to get, but I have no responsibility to you once you turn 18. Like, I'm an individual. Now you're an individual. We're just going to be friends. Friends that aren't, I no longer owe you anything. I'm not going to pass anything more on to you.
• 42:28
  You know, you can come to my house for Christmas or whatever, you know, hope, hope that you bring the grandkids around once in a while. This is ridiculous. Kind of this kind of story. It's ugly. It's destructive. It doesn't align at all with reality. And so we have to tell a different story. And the story that we're telling isn't, it's, it's all through the Bible, but it isn't even particularly like only in the Bible. It's, it's, it's just normal. It's the way that every society has functioned until very recently. And so we have to, we're just restoring something that's always been there.
• 42:57
  So yeah, that, man, that gets me stirred up. Thanks for sharing that, Riley. Yeah. Do you guys have anything else you want to say? Yeah. Can I say, I have like one more little two point thing that I want to add on the end of that is for one, there's a book I read not too long ago called The Treasure Principle by Randy Alcorn.
• 43:12
  And one of the points in the book that he really hammered home, and we may have heard it, but when you really just stop and kind of consider, I think one of the things that we all struggle with is looking at our resources and our assets and our money and our account and all that stuff and replacing the word our with his.
• 43:30
  It's his resources, his assets, his money, speaking of the Lord, and really understanding the idea of stewardship. Because I feel like a lot of Christians are so afraid for the Lord to give them stewardship over anything. And that's what they're really saying. What they think they're saying is, oh, I want to stay away from money, money, evil. But what they're really saying is, I can't take care of any resources or any responsibility the Lord gives me other than anything else.
• 43:57
  spiritual only, which is kind of a contradiction anyway. But, you know, teaching yourself and then training your children to look at this stuff, this assets, houses, businesses, money, these are all things that belong wholeheartedly to the Lord.
• 44:15
  It's like if I had a farm and you owned it, Jeremy, and you said, Hey, right. And you can live on this farm and you can farm on it. You can do all this stuff, but I just want you to maintain it, take care of it. I would need to call you before I decided to develop a, you know, 20 unit subdivision on your farm. Cause it's not my farm. Yeah.
• 44:36
  And we need to look at the Lord's asset the same way as that. And then the second part of that point was just that to cast a bit of a vision for the viewers, people listen to the conversation. Imagine what kind of impact the church could have if the church as a whole start to think about assets and resources in this way. And who better to steward the resources and assets of the world than those who trust in the Lord Jesus?
• 45:01
  That's right. Yes. Hitting that reset button, I think is killing us from a larger community perspective. You see all these other communities that understand this. You know, Muslim communities are much better at this. Jewish communities are extremely advanced in how they pass things on generationally. Christians are so bad at it that I think that we're constantly shooting ourselves in the foot every generation. And so just in conclusion, I just wanted to highlight what you're saying, Riley, about stewardship.
• 45:28
  I definitely don't think the answer to what we're describing here is to just carve out all your money into pieces and hand them equally to your kids, no matter what they're doing or where their character is at. God willing, you will live a long life and get to see your adult children and see if they're actually good stewards.
• 45:47
  And part of your response to their stewardship is that their actual inheritance is tied to that. I've told my kids before, I don't have the right to just give you these assets because they don't belong to me. I'm stewarding the king's assets. And so I'm going to do everything I can to train you to be a faithful steward of the king's assets, but I'm only going to be able to distribute resources to the extent that I believe...
• 46:12
  you can also steward those assets. Otherwise I'm being a bad steward by just handing you the resources. That's just not how it works. So awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for jumping on this today. And I love this topic. We're just scratching the surface. We're going to hit this one from lots of different angles, but that was a good way to dive into the thick of this one. So I appreciate it. Thanks guys. Yeah, awesome, man.
• 46:34
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