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The Family Model That's DESTROYING Us (And How We're Rebuilding) · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  It feels like family is designed to fail. People talk about family as designed to be dysfunctional. It's sort of punchline, like, of course, all of our families are dysfunctional. We're not aware that we are participating in a vast experiment that has failed, that we are operating a family with the wrong operating system.
• 0:16
  The Bible actually never describes the kinds of families that we're building today. People in biblical times, they would say that's probably going to break. And we're seeing it break. But instead of taking a big step back and saying, did we lose the design of the family somewhere in the past? We just keep doubling down, tripling down, quadrupling down on this bad design. The level of.
• 0:36
  Financial, emotional, and schedule-based burnout that families are going through seems to be where the rubber's meeting the road. And our plea at Family Teams is, hey, it doesn't have to be that way. A family can be a strong, dominant, flourishing ecosystem within itself, but also beacon for those around it and where it's coming from flourishing, not from burnout. I love the way guys design family. We do have to kind of shout it from the mountaintops just to make sure that people don't abandon
• 1:04
  This incredible gift, it is such a beautiful gift. 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.
• 1:26
  Welcome to an exciting episode of the Family Teams podcast. I'm going to be your co-host today. My name is Kurt Storing. I've been in the Family Teams ecosystem for the last couple of years and has completely changed my family's life. And I'm really excited to dive in today because we're going to bring an episode to you guys that's going to take us from what is going on in the world and why does family seem so hard, which, I mean, I'm feeling that. You guys have seen people in your network all over the country feeling that things are just tough. But then we're going to walk through...
• 1:51
  Actually, what we can do about that, because family teams, you guys have come up with a very practical biblical view of family that I think is highly applicable to literally everyone who follows Bible. And so, guys, we're going to jump into that today. Jeff, Jeremy, thank you guys for joining me. I'm super pumped on this. And Jeff, I want to start with you, man. What are you seeing as you're walking through your work right now?
• 2:11
  that families are struggling with. Because I want to give guys a sense that like, we're really seeing them because you guys have a very unique perspective as fathers of big families and growing other people's family team. So Jeff, what are you seeing on the streets people really struggling with right now?
• 2:24
  Yeah, I mean, I think we're seeing a lot of things. I think, you know, one of the things that's kind of slamming most, obviously, into a lot of families right now, both Christian and unchristian, and it's coming even up in political town halls, et cetera, is the level of whether you want to call it burnout or kind of being maxed out that families feel, financially, economically, school, sports, et cetera. And Jeremy, maybe we can get into this later, but me and Jeremy both watched a really good show
• 2:48
  podcast debate on feminism a little bit ago, and she even mentioned, I believe, Elizabeth Warren's Single Income or Dual Income Trap book from 30 years ago, which is a hilarious... We can get into what that book is and what that looks like, but I think sometimes in these moments we have to realize, hey, we actually created...
• 3:04
  more of this problem than we realized based on culture, economics, the banks, incentives, and all these things, which is kind of interesting to think about. But before we get into like explaining why we got here, I just answering your question straight that that is where I feel like we're seeing it pretty significantly is the level of
• 3:23
  financial, emotional, and schedule-based burnout that families are going through seems to be where the rubber's meeting the road. And I think kind of our plea at Family Teams is, hey, it doesn't have to be that way. There's a lot of reasons for that. There's a lot of factors, and there's absolutely not just one trick solution. But it doesn't have to be that way. A family can be a strong, dominant, flourishing team.
• 3:48
  ecosystem within itself, but also beacon for those around it and where it's coming from flourishing, not from burnout. But Jimmy, I don't know if you want to elaborate on what I just referenced that we were talking about, but, or if you would add anything as well, but yeah, that's how I'm saying. That's what I'm seeing.
• 4:02
  Yeah, I think the one way that we see this is just it feels like family is designed to fail. There's almost like people talk about family as designed to be dysfunctional. It's sort of a punchline. Of course, all of our families are dysfunctional. None of us really knows what we're doing. None of us are really flourishing. And marriages predictably fall apart as often as they succeed. There's so many rifts between kids and families.
• 4:30
  and parents between it, you know, siblings and just on and on and on. And so they're really only one of two possibilities, either, either it is designed really poorly. Or we are attempting a novel, new design of the family that is broken. And, and I think that that's, that's,
• 4:48
  what we think has happened. Like we've actually adopted a novel design of the family, but we decided to adopt it culturally before any of us were born. And so we're not aware that we are participating in a vast experiment that has failed, that we are operating a family with the wrong operating system.
• 5:06
  And that the Bible actually never describes the kinds of families that we're building today. If we would have articulated the kind of family design that we're using now to people in biblical times, they would likewise, just with any level of wisdom, say, yeah, that's not what we're doing. I don't know how that's going to work. That's probably going to break. And so I think that we're seeing it break. But instead of taking a big step back and saying, okay, is...
• 5:32
  Did we lose the design of the family somewhere in the past? Can we figure out what happened? Can we look in the scriptures to find maybe the original blueprint? Instead, we just keep doubling down, tripling down, quadrupling down on this bad design. That podcast that Jeff mentioned, a lot of what's happening with the ideology around
• 5:49
  male, female, you know, around all of these conversations. There is an intuition inside of Western people that if we just have more individuality and more freedom, then we're going to fix these problems. We have one solution to every problem. And instead of actually taking a step back and looking at the design of this thing to figure out why this is breaking predictably, we just can't continue to go further into the problem.
• 6:15
  to exacerbate the problem to the next level. And then we're all shocked when it doesn't actually fix the problem. So yeah, I would say that's kind of as, when we get into the details, that's what's wrong. And you can see it in all kinds of, we're mostly talking about symptoms now,
• 6:30
  You know, culturally, we're like, you know, OK, families are burning out. Families aren't financially thriving. We we're having less kids. Fertility has collapsed in every single country in the developed world except for Israel. We've got these massive alarm bells that are that are like going off all over the place and everyone's, you know, scurrying around, super confused about what's happening and why things are so hard. Why is marriages continue to fall? Why are why are kids more depressed than they've ever been?
• 6:58
  And we're blaming a lot of things on those. And there's a lot of variables, I'm sure. But man, there is a really basic reality to when you're a part of a flourishing family where you feel like you belong, where you understand who you are, where you came from, and those roles feel very intuitive and very life-giving to you, a lot of these problems can go away or be addressed. But if you also create a totally destabilized relationship,
• 7:23
  home environment, family environment. Yeah, you're just going to take whatever problems exist in the culture and make them 10 times worse. Jeremy, you made me think of, I think I texted to you yesterday, but the Emma Watson interview on the Jay Shetty podcast, I believe. Fascinating to basically talk about the symptom that you just said. I mean, she's kind, she's gracious. I appreciate the way in which she carries herself.
• 7:43
  you know, super combative in any way. But she, as she's speaking, I'm like, oh, she is such a representative of our culture right now on how she's talking about marriage, how she's talking about divorce, how she's talking about individualism, how she's talking about dreams and passions. And she's going on these riffs of, I think her exact line was, you know, the pressure that we are feeling to marry in culture, which by the way, I disagree with that fundamentally. I don't think, I think there's always been way more pressure to get married. Yeah.
• 8:08
  Like we're the most I think the pressure is the lowest it has ever been. Yes. And she said in her exact words where the pressure to get married is violent and cruel violence and cruelty. Like it was very harsh language about how significant she was kind of saying we need to put our guards up and make sure we individuate. We self actualize and don't allow that.
• 8:28
  Don't allow that to push over the pressure of marriage and kind of like stampede ourselves. And that's really problematic because I think I would argue actually the opposite, that you become in some degree, unless you have the singleness calling, you become the best version of yourself when you get married. And so that's a fundamental disagreement of how culture sees marriage and family right now is they actually see it as a hindrance rather than the best version of yourself. I think as I was researching this,
• 8:54
  There was a really interesting sociology and research that actually has a name for that, and it's called, I believe, the Michelangelo phenomenon. And essentially what it is is the belief that when you get married, you sculpt each other into the best version of yourself. And I just love that language and that framing.
• 9:10
  That actually there's research to back up that one of the ways one of the most dominant ways you can become the best version of yourself Which is actually a pursuit of the culture right now But they it's misguided with where they put it is to get married and have kids And so that's what we actually say. It's the opposite We say that's one of the worst versions of yourself And so I just found that really interesting as like a cultural tell on one of the biggest podcasts in the world with one of the biggest celebrities in the world kind of saying like
• 9:35
  a marriage is problematic, I needed to individuate. She didn't say it was problematic now, it was a classic, I needed to find myself, I needed to individuate, I needed to actualize for 20 years beyond a normal marrying years to do that.
• 9:48
  So it seems like we're swimming in this sea that we don't even know exists. It's like the fish, like, hey, how do you think the water is today? And he's like, what do you mean water? But this is the culture we're in, that we've forgotten that we've actually been living in this experiment that is having all these repercussions like you guys are talking about. And I want to maybe poke some holes in the beliefs.
• 10:06
  that people have coming into the family team ecosystem. Because I know, for me, coming across your content for the first time, having you on my podcast, Jeremy, it was like, you can believe other things than what cultures told you? It was a shock for me to even think that there were other ways to do things. And it was wisdom that I was missing that I literally didn't know existed. And so as we go into this next part where I want to talk a little bit about what's going on, the underpinnings of this, because I think a lot of people...
• 10:31
  will kind of have this wake up moment when they hear this. I want to talk about some of the beliefs that people enter into the family team's ecosystem with that are just, that are wrong, that are wicked in many ways, that are holding them back from living a family life that you guys have seen thrive. So Jeremy, maybe start us off. Like what are some of those beliefs that most people have, even within the church about family, that we can just poke a hole in in the latter part of this episode? We're going to go right into that. Be like, this is why this isn't working and this is how you can actually fix it. So do any beliefs come up when I say that?
• 11:00
  Yeah. I think that maybe one of the – we named the entire organization and family teams because one of the first beliefs that we come across is that almost no one today thinks their family is their team. And I think that's actually really important. Did God design families to work together, or are we just a group of individuals trying to just draw resources from sort of almost this club environment?
• 11:24
  But we're not actually a team. We don't do anything together. We're not educating together. We're not starting businesses together. We're not doing ministry together. We live under one roof. We try to catch up with each other on meals occasionally. We have sort of the vestige of father, son, mother, daughter, these relationships. But we're not actually functioning day in and day out like a team. Now, that's very unusual. Yeah.
• 11:47
  People have to understand that for thousands of years, you would exist and live your life with and through your family team. That was just totally normal. And so you would, as a son, when you're 10 years old, you go off to the field with your dad. If you're a daughter, you'd be hanging out at home with mom. You were constantly together. And that would also go generational. Grandparents would be very involved, uncles and aunts, cousins, all these things. There are cultures today that function that way.
• 12:14
  And they are far more functional in terms of their experience of family than we are. Now, the problem with that and what the reason why this is super counterintuitive and the reason why Western people don't automatically see the problem and then fix it is because we have been sold the idol of individualism. That anything that takes away from your individual freedom is always bad because that's the absolute highest value in our culture.
• 12:37
  And so you can't do that. You can't you can't proffer a solution that requires me to potentially fit a role in a family. Well, to have any kind of predefined idea about what a mother is, what a father, what a son is, what a daughter is, that that is going to take away some amount of individual freedom. And that is a nonstarter. And so they will never find the solution.
• 12:58
  from where they are now because they have a idol in front of them they believe is the highest value and it is always going to block their ability to see the family as a team or to value families a team now the weird thing and this is something that we're constantly pointing out is that if you voluntarily join a team like you're a part of a sports team a soccer team or you know then all of a sudden all of these incredible attributes all of a sudden start happening and we love it we're intoxicated by it we're like oh yeah i'll take on a role i'll sacrifice for the team i'll
• 13:26
  I mean, we just we immediately function in a completely different mode. All of a sudden, our brain changes and what we expect from the team changes. And we embrace the idea of being a part of a team and we flourish and we love it and we're intoxicated by it. We want to watch it on TV. And like this is something that we all like. But we don't ever imagine that that is actually the basic the basis of what a family is.
• 13:48
  Man, Jeff, do you have any thoughts when it comes to men? I know you're doing a lot of work with men right now. What are men struggling with when it comes to leading the family? Because what you just said, Jeremy, I want to touch on later, which is to give examples from your guys' lives to show fatherhood is amazing. Having a family that works the way God designed it is actually amazing. So I want to put a pin in that. I want to come back to it. But as I'm thinking about this, Jeff, guys just think, don't know.
• 14:13
  They don't even know what's possible. So I wonder if you want to talk into the men listening just about what there is to look forward to in family and why they might not be accepting that right now. Yeah, I have a few thoughts. And then I even want to hear Jeremy maybe add on to that as well. One thing I've really been processing and wrestling with is how, and I think it kind of keys into what Jeremy talked about with, we are so addicted to individualism is so the water we swim in. It's such our, it is the idol. Yeah.
• 14:39
  meaning like it is at the layer behind the layer behind the layer behind the layer, is a few hundred years of philosophy and culture that has said the most important thing is you and anything that hinders you is the most problematic. That's really, really difficult to kind of get around. But one huge byproduct of that that is really interesting that has happened in Christian circles, I've noticed, is that I think it has made us...
• 15:02
  over-emphasize one-on-one pastoring in exchange for the power of principles. Does that make sense? And this is kind of what I've been wrestling with, is we are so addicted to pastoring to the exception, for good reason, by the way, for good reason. Compassion, gentleness, hey, we are one-to-one people with sheep and with shepherds and all these things, right? But what's interesting about that, though, this is how I've been thinking about it, and then I'll answer it directly, Kurt, is I've actually been thinking about it
• 15:29
  Yeah.
• 15:49
  Where, okay, based on your circumstances, based on this, based on this, I'm going to give advice based on this. That's fine, right? But here's maybe another way to put it. If one person comes up to me and says, hey, I don't really want to be married or I'm not getting married, you might say, not a big deal. 10,000 people come up and say, I don't want to get married. That's a bigger deal. If 5 million people come up and say, I don't want to get married, you just turned the entire country.
• 16:13
  into a really bad spot. Does that make sense? And so what I'm wrestling with is those polls of like, okay, at some level, it's totally okay if one person comes up or whatever and says, sure, like, what is the consequences of that? I understand. Maybe you want to go travel. Maybe you want to go live, whatever.
• 16:29
  But here's what I'm wrestling with. At what part are we all responsible? And this can even answer your men's question, Kurt. At which part are we responsible for actually how we're contributing to the five million, to the dynamic, to the country, to the ideology, to the stories, to the narrative?
• 16:45
  And that's a really interesting conversation that I don't see a lot of people having is, okay, you can believe something is one, but it's because we're addicted to individualization. We don't realize the impact it's having on our culture. When it is overwhelming, overwhelming research in science that says a country does better when people get married, get married young, and have a lot of kids. Right.
• 17:05
  And a country does really bad when they don't get married, get married older and don't have that many kids. And so it's like, are we allowed to stand up and say that? We should be. But when you do that, then it's the, well, what about the person that's single that's really going to hurt their feelings? That actually might. I want to be gentle. I want to be kind and I want to be compassionate. But at the same time, there's a level at which principles establish the ideology and narratives of a place.
• 17:27
  that I'm really wrestling with like the weight, the weights we're giving to these. Does that make sense? I don't want to take it into a dovetail, Jeremy, but does that kind of make sense on how I'm considering that? And I think it impacts men specifically as well because then I think that's the fatherhood conversation of the fatherhood of a men go, oh, I don't really need to take up the mantle that bad. My wife's got it at home or whatever.
• 17:45
  Well, it's like, yeah, but if we have five million fathers that are not living in their God-given identity for what it means to be a father, that's going to have a lot bigger impact, right? Yeah. Rather than just being a cute, nice Christian family. So, I don't know, Jeremy, you got any thoughts on that kind of the principle versus the pastoring thing? Yeah, that's a really good point. We are obsessed with being kind to the individual no matter what it costs to society as a whole.
• 18:04
  And that's a huge, you know, you think about like going after war or or doing something that is so clearly like you have to be willing to sacrifice yourself for for this larger community that you're a part of. Yeah, that makes no sense anymore. In this hyper individualized age, you're just going to ask yourself, well, that's not good for me. And so this is, of course, happens to women all the time. You know, having children is really difficult.
• 18:25
  And so if you were just to design the easiest, most self-fulfilling way to live, then you're probably not gonna choose this family path. And one of the weird parts about the way that family has been created now is that it never really was a decision. Like if you go back 100, 200, 300, 500,000 years,
• 18:43
  people weren't necessarily deciding to have or not have children. They knew that, you know, you want to have sex, you're going to have to get married. If you're going to get married, you're going to start having kids. Like, it was sort of an automatic thing. And so we have created, through our technology, the first culture that's ever existed, that where all of these have to be proactive decisions that you can make or easily use technology to stop from happening.
• 19:07
  And so we have to create this problem, which is people are, instead of naturally going through this progression that I think is best for society's flourishing, when every single person decides what's best for them as an individual, then obviously that's going to really hurt society as a whole. And so we're just beginning to see the fruit of that. And I think that that doesn't mean that the
• 19:31
  The individual doesn't also flourish in this. The problem is when you have to go through some really hard things in the short term to get to a much more long term flourishing, the ability to sacrifice things that are individual for for something that's much more important to say that the individual is important. And I think that we need to care for the individual. The problem is that there's a hierarchy of importance and the individual is not on the top of it. And so it's it's high, but it's not the highest.
• 19:57
  And so there are things higher than the individual. And I think individuals have to be given the freedom to make the decision to put those things first, right? We should decide if we wanna go to war, that should be a decision hopefully an individual gets to make, but that's a decision that we as a society should encourage them to make in the context of what is in the best interest of everybody. Same thing with all these family decisions. It's like we have to make a decision
• 20:22
  about what's in our family's best interest. And there's some kind of natural transformative thing that happens to our character when we make difficult decisions to voluntarily sacrifice our individual desires for the sake of this larger community called the family. That's when you really see people's character transform.
• 20:40
  So we've got individualism, individualization as this multi-hundred-year experiment now that's leading to where we are. We've got the culture that comes from that, and we've got almost infinite orders and layers on that individualism that has resulted in the culture we have today. This is super easy for guys to just blackpill on. Like, I don't want to figure out how to do family in this, and yet I'm married and I got kids and like...
• 21:05
  Dude, I don't know what to do now. So I want to get to the place where we shine a little bit of light, which, by the way, is God's light, guys, in case you're wondering. But I also want to make sure we're not missing anything. Is there anything else before we move on here, principle-wise, belief-wise, any undergirding philosophies that we can get guys to understand, get families to understand is not actually in their best interest, that family teams specifically works against?
• 21:30
  And it's cool if there's not. I just want to make very sure we're covering a stable foundation that most people would just assume is the norm. But to your guys' point, definitely isn't if we look at history. I think a really simple to understand one that tends to be a light bulb moment for guys when you just kind of take a couple minutes to read the history of the Industrial Revolution is just realizing essentially what that did, it did a lot of things, what that did for families is it took the economic...
• 21:58
  producing meaning engine out of the home, which is not the absolute most important thing for a family to have at the bullseye, right? That's the Lord, discipleship, salvation, etc. But what we do in our vocations is really, really, really, really important for who we think we are, who we think we are, what team we think we're on, what role we're playing. And so kind of when the Industrial Revolution took fathers out of the home and,
• 22:23
  and essentially put them somewhere else on another team, that was a pretty significant, that had a pretty significant impact. And now because of the individualization, what's happening is, Wendell Berry kind of says this, the wives and the kids are now racing to go get on those other teams as well. It's like everyone's just trying to vacate the home to go get on other people's teams.
• 22:42
  And so is it super easy to bring the economic kind of power and meaning engine and purpose engine back into your home? No, it's not easy at all. I think it's sometimes even a 10, 20-year play. And sometimes it doesn't even just look like, oh, you own your own business. It's not that simple.
• 22:58
  But I think trying to put some of that energy as like a magnetic force back at your kitchen table metaphorically, like in your home, not in someone else's team, from a vocational standpoint or a ministry standpoint, meaning like one of your dominant ways in which you use your body in the physical world, ministry or vocation. Technically, those are, I would say, even the same thing.
• 23:20
  How can you pull that back home even 10%, 20%, 30%? And most men tend to come alive when they realize that, hey, that's why actually they don't love home is because they're kind of being activated over here in a way that the home doesn't have the meaning and purpose for. But they also get excited to realize that like you can bring it back. You have the invitation to bring it home. And so I would say that's one that I think has also really impacted us that we've missed.
• 23:42
  Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think those examples really highlight that family is this epicenter of purpose when you are being a team, when you are bringing things back into the family. I would say the other one for me that this one actually got me the most. This is what kind of flipped me when I was 23 and single.
• 24:00
  and living in the Middle East, was the idea that family, by its very nature, God designed to be multi-generational. And I never thought about it that way because we have a problem of purpose in our culture, which the idea of team can really help alleviate, especially if you are a believer and are on mission, working as a team, on things that are really purposeful. Your whole life becomes full of purpose.
• 24:21
  But there's also another problem we have culturally, which is belonging. And I think that people are desperately searching for community. And they don't realize – and part of this belonging is also their identity. Like, who am I? Where do I come from? And so we have –
• 24:38
  told people that in our culture, you're doing your kids a favor if you give them no family identity. Like it's so good if your kids are just kind of searching and asking questions with their peers or finding their identity and maybe a future vocation or something, instead of saying that, no, we are all a part of a multi-generational family. And when I was living in the Middle East as a single guy, I saw these Jewish and Arab fathers who were just all so excited about having children and being dads. And I was incredibly confused by their level of passion.
• 25:08
  because it wasn't something I was familiar with seeing where I grew up in Seattle. And when I started to ask them questions, I started to see the ecosystem that they were actually born into. They were surrounded by grandmothers and grandfathers, fathers and mothers, like generations, stories that go back 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 generations. They saw themselves as a part of this family line and that they inherited all of this incredible deep identity.
• 25:37
  And they lived it and experienced it every single week at the Shabbat table where they would tell family stories that would go back, you know, hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. And so they were so excited to give that to their children because they just felt they felt like so much belonging and so much identity. And we think we do our kids a favor by stripping all of that away and making sure that they have absolutely no identity. And, of course, what happens is they don't belong anywhere. And so they start looking for something, something within themselves to cause them to know who they are and where they belong.
• 26:07
  And that is incredibly dangerous. It doesn't only destroy the family, but it destroys the individual. And so this is part of the deconstruction we're watching happen. We're watching the hyper-individualism first started by destroying the family, but now it's turning on the individual and destroying the individual him or herself. Because that's not actually – you cannot create identity purely disconnected from any relationships.
• 26:30
  We're designed to actually be grounded in our identity, in these historic familial relationships. And then from there, we would understand as believers what it means to be part of the family of God, why Jesus' favorite title for himself is son, why God introduces himself to us in the New Testament as our father. The church is these brothers and sisters and these sibling relationships that we are headed towards this ultimate relationship.
• 26:54
  kingdom where we're going to be the bride of Christ and be at the father's table at the wedding supper of the lamb. I mean, this, this, you can't understand the good life. You can't understand the gospel. If you, if this is all destroyed, if your whole understanding of family based identity has been replaced by hyper individualism, it is the death of identity is the death of belonging. And then the evaporation of purpose and meaning. And so we, this is, this is why we can like really solve these problems. But the, what's bizarre to me.
• 27:23
  is that even though all of this is super clear in scripture, the Christian church, the way that in the West, the church we have essentially decided to adopt the same philosophy and theology of family the world has. And we are basically a 10 to 15 year lagging indicator on what's happening in the world. Whatever things are happening to their marriages, happen to our marriages, maybe 10 or 15 years later. What is happening in their parenting happens in our parenting 10 or 15 years later.
• 27:47
  We were doing nothing to stop the erosion because we decided to abdicate our theology of family. And so when I see pastors constantly proclaim this, all of my favorite pastors, even to this day, virtually all of them, they seem to articulate the Western, this very recent idea of family. And then they read it back into the Bible.
• 28:07
  And so a lot of what we do, if you go to family teams and like follow us on social, you know, we're spending a lot of time just like trying to like throw up a red flag. Hey guys, like that's, that is pure Western individualism. And you read that back into Genesis. Do you have any idea how strange that would have sounded to Abraham? There's nobody who thought that way 200 years ago before that.
• 28:25
  This is a purely modern idea. It's not working at all. It's destroying the family, but we're adopting it. And so we're supposed to be salt and light to the culture. We're not supposed to be drug along as a lagging indicator of their own dysfunction. But because we haven't actually studied the scriptures and don't understand the theology of family that comes from the scriptures, we are experiencing the same destruction that they are in the family. Man, that was really good, Jeremy. Any final thoughts on that, Jeff?
• 28:51
  No, no, that was awesome. That was just a mic drop. Okay, let that simmer in your ears for a second, guys. You know what? This is so exciting for me because it was a revelation to understand that you could love to be in family. I just, you know, for me, broken home, saw my dad, saw my mom. It just, it's like, why would anyone want that? And yet there was something in me that we got married early and thank God for that. But I didn't know that you could actually enjoy this thing we call family.
• 29:18
  I was like, you just suffer. You kind of suck at it. You yell at your kids. Anyway, so like that's my history of it. And so to come into this realm and to see, especially when I came across family teams, there was this idea of multi-generational wisdom. And that, I think for me, just a quick touch point for anyone listening. Imagine that there was some vein of wisdom that you could just connect your family to that would then lead you to at very least feeling purposeful.
• 29:41
  I'm going to say loving, but at the very least feeling purposeful when you're in family. That's to me what you guys are talking about. This idea of these Jewish families who are passing this down because they know how good it feels, how amazing it is, how purposeful. And then their kids want to have kids, want to have kids, want to have kids. And man, like that ideal of for me, 125 great grandkids on my front porch and in my front yard, like, dude, that's what I want now because I see that you guys for me, and I thank you guys for this, have opened up that wisdom.
• 30:08
  that multi-generational wisdom that said, Kurt, you don't have to figure it all out again. Because I was spending hours every week, and this was really important to me, but I didn't know that it didn't just come from me. So I want everyone to hear this who's listening, that this is what we're talking about, this existing wisdom that you can tap into. And I want to get there in a second, because the wisdom itself...
• 30:27
  is naturally God. And we're going to talk about why you guys see that differently than the pastors you were just mentioning, Jeremy. But I think it would be really powerful if you guys maybe just want to take two, three minutes apiece and describe your life based on this vision that you now have. Because I think we should do a better job of making family exciting to people. Because why else are they going to try if they think that it's just going to lead to divorce and misery and etc. So if you guys are cool with it, would you humor me? And give me a three-minute snapshot of what life looks like
• 30:56
  in relation to what the culture says life should look like. Yeah, that's great, man. I think, I mean, so just to give some context for folks out there. So we have four kids, 11, 9, about to be 7 in a few weeks, and then a fresh baby. And that's actually what I was even going to highlight on, actually. So we're not out of the woods by any means in the sense of living super deep, multi-generationally with the generation that's below us.
• 31:18
  meaning they're getting married, they're having kids, etc. But we do with our parents, and that's a huge, huge blessing. And so first of all, just vouching and affirming what you said, Kurt. But I would say second of all, yeah, I mean, I literally like three days ago, just looked at a list and it was like, I love our life so much. And what that felt like was coming from 10 years of deposits, because it's really hard. It's certainly really hard when they're little. It's actually hardest, I would say, when kids are 10 and under, because you're applying so much money.
• 31:46
  change to the system and kind of like guarding of the system that culture wants to just crush. And you're not having a ton of the feedback loops yet until you start, I would say, getting into these tween era, you know, teen era, then adult era, et cetera. And so a lot of it is for this like long play, which I think is really important. But also I think God blesses us even
• 32:05
  In the midst of that, I would say, you know, highlighting on one particular area is I would say we probably would have had less kids if we didn't believe what we believed. So that's a pretty –
• 32:21
  That's a pretty common truth I hear from other people, but also that's one that I'm saying is true for us. And specifically with our last baby, Jaden, who's it's almost a seven-year gap from the first three to him. Man, highly recommend. I almost feel like I wanted to do like a product review yesterday. Like he was like a baby off Amazon. I almost want to be like, yeah, 10 out of 10. Highly recommend a five-star review. And even that gap, like we didn't plan it that way, but there's a lot of blessing to that man and what it has done is
• 32:47
  is, and again, have the kids you feel like, absolutely have the kids that God has told you you need to have, but I would also challenge you saying, are you really asking God how many kids you should have, or are you just asking culture? But if that's one, that's one. But for us, it was having a bigger family, because I think this leads to that. You have to understand that, see that, and understand that kids are a blessing rather than a curse, because there is this subtle belief in culture that kids are kind of like a liability rather than a blessing for the world.
• 33:14
  And so when we had specifically Jaden, though, the best way I can put it is it feels like having him, which he's nine months old now, so this last year, has unlocked parts of all of our hearts in our family and just turned us into different people. Like he has literally just unlocked something in our family, what it's done to our oldest, what it's done to our son, our other son who got a brother and who feels like his – just, yeah, and then our youngest, Lucy, our second youngest now.
• 33:40
  It felt like we unlocked the Incredibles or something. It feels like we were right on the edge, and it's like, okay, now we are this. Something about it. It was like we were missing a piece of the puzzle for our family specifically, and we stepped out in faith because of what we believe and what we felt like God was asking us to do.
• 34:01
  And it just unlocked levels of joy, sacrifice, teamwork, blessing that really I don't think I could have found those levels of things outside the home in just as significant of a way. So I don't know. I kind of went into a micro perfect example rather than talking about it generally. But I'm just seeing it. I'm just seeing it. It's like, oh, the deposits we've made the last 11 years plus bringing another fresh one in is just like, oh, we're a team. Like we are a team. And this team is functioning perfectly.
• 34:27
  is fruitful, is operating, has a mission, has a purpose, and it's really, really life-giving. So that's what I would say. Jeremy, what about you? That's so good. By the way, what you just said there, Jeff, if you want to contrast to these two ways of looking at this in film, The Little Mermaid versus The Incredibles, I think, is one of the best experiences.
• 34:44
  contrast. You have one that's obsessed with hyper-individualism and like, she just like, oh, please get me away from my family. And you know, she leaves and never to come back at my legs. I don't need you guys anymore. Um, and then you've got this team that in Incredibles, which is every, every single member of the team, this is true of everyone listening to this, your family, every person that God's put in your family, he put there for a reason for you guys to function together. And so you, every, you guys have superpowers. And so there's nothing quite like seeing all that come online. I mean, you've experienced this maybe in sports. That's like a
• 35:14
  of what family was designed to be. What do it look like instead of just playing the kind of the video game version, you actually played the real version, which is you got to actually do really meaningful things with all the different superpowers God's placed on your family. So I would say, yeah, our family experience is getting closer to that as well. I mean, we live in a four generation house. We are constantly working together.
• 35:35
  I mean, this week, we're going to host over 300 people in our house for the festival of Sukkot. That's not going to happen because, you know, we're, you know, hiring caterers or whatever. It's because every, every member of our team has, you know, their own roles. And, and it's not just like, it's not even like we're barely surviving. It's like, you can't imagine how beautiful it is.
• 35:55
  Like the kinds of things that my daughters are sewing and watching my sons build the sukkah yesterday was like incredible to watch. They're all construction work. So it's just like this experience of doing really meaningful things together. We help each other with businesses. We launch ministries together and help lead those things together. It's just a lifestyle of you live together, you live with the people you love the most, you build things with the people you love the most, building the kinds of things that you think are most important
• 36:25
  Um, like that's my life on just a typical day, typical week. Um, and I'm just like, yeah, this is just a good design. It's not, this is not by means of bragging. I just, I'm like, thank God gave every one of us this really amazing thing. And it's just designed really, really well. I was listening to, uh, we did a podcast, um, clip on this guy, uh, James, uh, Sexton, who's a famous divorce, the most famous divorce lawyer. And he's just like, God must hate marriage because it fails half the time.
• 36:53
  And I was like, you know, he was talking to a pastor or former pastor when he was having that conversation. I was just like, it's so unfortunate that I totally understand what he's saying. As an atheist, that's a really good depiction of what is at stake when we don't live out a very different way of experiencing the flourishing nature of family. It doesn't mean that our family isn't broken, doesn't have all kinds of problems, that we're not...
• 37:17
  you know, experiencing the fall and challenges with sin, all those things are happening while we're a part of something that is functioning at an incredibly high, beautiful design level. So I want to make sure that the full picture is painted. It is a beautiful thing to be a part of a family that's functioning generationally. It doesn't alleviate all of the problems that the gospel came to help us overcome. But I think the one thing we can say is that God is a really good designer
• 37:47
  of the kind of community, and the people today are obsessed with community, but I think the way they really want is family. They want a place to belong. The psalmist says that God placed the solitary in families. And I think that if you take family out of the equation, you create the loneliest generation that's ever existed. David Brooks, he said recently,
• 38:08
  that when Americans become wealthy, they purchase loneliness. This is because we think that what we need is more individualism, and we don't realize that when we use our wealth, we use our technology, we use all these tools to distance ourselves from each other, that we're actually...
• 38:24
  making the problem much worse. And so it's hard to live in a four generation house. Like there's a lot of hard things about that. Like there, we have to have difficult conversations about, you know, who's gonna, you know, mow the lawn and you know, why didn't, why is the kitchen a mess again? And like, there's, there's, there's problems like, um, but there's also the fact that my dad, you know, had this vision this month, month of October. He said, I want all five of the sons of the family, all five of the men that live together on this street for us to just pray every, every night. So every night we've been going out and doing prayer walks.
• 38:53
  The five men that are all here on the street living together. And we just follow my dad's vision because my dad heard this from the Lord. And, you know, that's logistically impossible to do if we were all putting kids in car seats and driving. You know, but we get to experience that because my dad, like he lives here and we want we he's a patriarch in this family and we want to honor whatever God's speaking to him.
• 39:16
  And, you know, that's something that any of you men who are listening to this, you can do that for your family. Like, your best years of your life should be, you know, your 70s, 80s. Like, if God gives you a long life to see your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, those should be the most precious, most amazing years of your life.
• 39:33
  But if you purchase loneliness with your technology, with your wealth, with your opportunity, then of course you're not going to experience that. You're just going to hit the reset button the way most Americans do. So, yeah, I love the way God's design family. We do have to kind of shatter from the mountaintops just to make sure that people don't abandon this incredible gift. It is such a beautiful gift.
• 39:54
  Thank you for letting me put you guys on the spot there, because I think we need much more of this in the culture, people saying what you just said. And so thank you, because I know it's not a boast. It's a thanks to God for the design that he's actually put together and you guys have faithfully lived out. And so this is where I want to go now. I want to go to what has God laid out.
• 40:13
  Because to most people listening, they're like, yeah, sweet, but I've never heard my pastor talk like that. I don't like when I'm reading the Bible, I don't really get how you're putting all this together. But you guys spend a lot of time thinking about this, studying this, and then making it applicable through family teams. So I want to go into some of the answer to this problem, the many problems we've talked about so far.
• 40:31
  based on the biblical model, the Abrahamic model of fatherhood, all of the things that you guys talk about, and then go into like what family team specifically is doing about it. So where would you start if I was like, okay, guys, I need to know that when I'm reading the Bible, when I'm going to church, I'm actually not being told the full story, maybe not for anyone's fault, but where would I start to understand the solution here?
• 40:53
  Yeah, I think, you know, Genesis, the beginning is obviously a good start. Very good start. Anytime you want to read a story, understand a story, start at the beginning. But I would say there's a lot there. I think the most simplest way to explain it that really unlocked it for me, you know, 10, 15 years ago, is kind of trying to put yourself in God's shoes or understand God's perspective, perspective,
• 41:16
  pre-humans. Okay. So you kind of like, what was the problem going on in the scriptures? So God shows up. He wants to bring his blessing, goodness, order, and fruit and who he is to the world. He wants to kind of like, that's actually a part of the nature of God is that he's almost like forever spilling. The cup is forever spilling over. Cause that's what it means when you're, when the triune God is like loving one another in relationship and in family together, technically, is it, it always love always has a multiplication to it, like by its technicality.
• 41:45
  That even, I think, applies on a lot of other things we can talk about with birth control, etc., and all these things. But it has generativity to it. So God is spilling over that blessing into the world, okay? And he wants to. And he wants to push it out into the world. How is he going to do that? Because it's untamed, right? There's Garden of Eden, but outside of the garden, it's kind of still an untamed kind of chaotic place.
• 42:07
  nature. And so it's just very simple to understand, well, how is he going to do that, right, before humans come? You know, what would you do? And it's like, there's so many different ways to do that, right? Like, if we were actually God today, and we needed to bring blessing and order and beauty and goodness into the rest of the world,
• 42:25
  How would we do that? You know, a lot of us would probably start the United Nations, you know, or we would, you know, get a nonprofit going or we would start, you know, some big churches that meet in warehouses and have them serve the city. Right. Whatever. You can go on and on. We can start. If it's Elon Musk, you're probably going to get a bunch of robots together. Right. And see if they can solve the problem. But it's interesting when you really realize at the end of the day, God's primary choice to solve that problem was creating a
• 42:51
  A man and a woman, a father and a mother. That was his primary solution when he had a blank whiteboard, right? And then he says, hey, this problem is so large, you two actually can't do it really alone. So I'm going to give you a capacity. I'm going to give you a capacity to multiply yourself literally.
• 43:09
  to literally make more of you so that you can go do this job appropriately. And that's just kind of like when you see it from that perspective, it's kind of wild to realize how much it makes sense, but also how interesting it is that that was God's solution. There is other ways, of course, you can bring blessing and order into the world, even today as we're on earth as humans. But I do think it's fair to say his plan A or his dominant plan is through families.
• 43:31
  And then when you think about a nonprofit or a church or whatever these other things, those are most healthy when they're what? A collection of healthy families. So it's like that is the building block. That is the Lego piece that kind of builds the rest. And so that's where I start and kind of understand that like, you know, another way to put it succinctly is God's vision for the world was to bring his vision into the world. He wanted to use multigenerational family teams on mission, right? And so it's kind of three buckets, multigenerational,
• 43:59
  Family team on mission. So multigenerationalist, he says, hey, it's going to take you a long time to do this. I'm going to give you a capacity for kids. Right. Family team. He said it's not just men and it's not just women and it's not just one human or just two humans, but it's actually male and female put together as one. And then on mission, he says, go create, subdue, bring order, et cetera. So that's how I would articulate it. I don't know, Jeremy, if you have anything you would add to that.
• 44:20
  Yeah, that's right on. Yeah, it's all really encapsulated in the mission statement that God actually spoke over the first family. So everything Jeff just described is right there, Genesis 128. It said, God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over creation. Right.
• 44:36
  And so this, what he's saying is, number one, he says it to them. And so the family was designed to be a team. This mission he's about to give them is not given just to the man or just to the woman. It's given to them as a family, but not just as a family, but as a multi-generational family. You'll notice, like, I don't think Adam and Eve could subdue the earth without generations, right? Just the two of them. So this mission had to be passed. The baton had to be passed from one generation to the next as they multiply out. And so...
• 45:02
  Family, in its basic nature, the way God designed the first family, was to be multigenerational. So that's a multigenerational team. Of course, again, he gave all five parts of this mission to them as a team, and then he gave them the mission, right, to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule. And that's all rearticulated by Jesus in the Great Commission. When Jesus says, all authority on earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you.
• 45:26
  That commission has in it exactly the same elements, right? He tells them to be fruitful. What is that? To make disciples, to multiply. That's to make disciples and make disciples, right? He's told them, teach them to obey everything I've commanded you. Then he tells them to fill, right? To go to all the nations, to subdue, which is to teach them to obey everything I've commanded you, and then to rule, which is...
• 45:46
  It's where it all started. All authority has been given to me, therefore go make disciples. And so basically what we have is God designed a commission to the family in Genesis 128, be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule. We fumbled the mission, right, through the fall. And then Jesus came back.
• 46:03
  reconstituted this family of God and says, I want now you guys to go back out and retake the earth by being fruitful, multiply, feel, subdue, and rule through the making of disciples. And so it's important for us to understand we're a part of both missions. In our family, we talk all the time about both missions. We are trying to have lots of kids. We're trying to fulfill the Genesis 128 mandate to be fruitful, multiply, feel, subdue, and rule as a family. And
• 46:26
  what are we doing? What's the actual activity we're about? It's all about being fruitful, multiply, feel subdued, and rolling through the making and multiplying of disciples. And so I just love the fact that the gospel is really, really clear, that the whole Bible is clear about this whole arc of the story. And it gives us tremendous clarity around mission and not just the what of mission or the why of mission, but the who. That's what we're talking about here and that the family was actually an integral part of that.
• 46:54
  My goodness. Okay, that is so much clearer than anything I've heard anywhere else. So I appreciate you guys breaking that down. And I want to talk about putting the boots on the ground now. Because as we move into the last part of the episode here, I think that, man, we've got a lot of things to consider, a lot of things to think about, a lot of things to challenge ourselves and hopefully be convicted by that you guys have heard on this episode. And, you know, obviously, look more into what you guys have put out, listen to the other podcasts to get deeper on the theological side. But now what?
• 47:20
  Right now we've got family teams. So what was your guys' vision for that? And why is family teams the vehicle through which families can actually put into the world what you just talked about? Yeah, I think it's what we just said is that like that's that was God's plan A. I think the way I would articulate then what does that start looking like is I think the jump is easier than you think. And what I mean by that is we we actually are a culture of teams all over. Just the vacuum has had happened in the family.
• 47:47
  Right. Meaning and here's why, because other places, a team is very, a very strong team when there's a missional component. And we have a lot of places like that. The Navy SEALs, the Golden State Warriors, sports, business, Apple computers, you can name it on and on and on and on. So it actually is easy to make the jump then when you ask yourself, well, what do they have?
• 48:06
  Because again, like Jeremy said, they're actually a simulation of the truest thing, which is our family team. But what does a true family look like? And again, that's a big one. Mission, right? Every team has coaches. They have training modules. They have vision. They have roadmaps. They have uniforms. They have secret handshakes. You can get as cute with this as you want. But I think that's a very – I always tell people that should be step one is start whiteboarding what you think a team is.
• 48:30
  And then pick a few and backward and back them up into your family, right? And we do, of course, articulate ones that we think are most important or the easiest, lowest hanging fruit, highest ROI. I would think rhythms would be one of those. And so maybe Jeremy can talk about that one. Meaning successful teams always have rituals of meaning and purpose and kind of rhythms of, they have cadences, right? They have cadences of, you know, when you're going to practice, you know, when you're going to play.
• 48:56
  You know when you're going to go to the weight room. You know when you're going to go do that retreat once a year that gives your team a bunch of meaning and purpose and value and connection and friendship, on and on and on. And a family really understanding rhythms and the power of what rhythms can do for a family is a huge pace that I always tell people to start. And we say when you jump into that too, then Sabbath being one of the main ones that you can jump into. But I don't know if, Jeremy, if you want to dovetail on that one to some more.
• 49:20
  Yeah. Yeah. We, a lot of it is that we've abdicated the creation of rhythms to every other group. If you talk to your coach, your key for kids are involved in a sport. If a teacher says something like that, oh, you can't graduate without coming to this class is going to interfere with the coach is probably going to back off and say, okay, you can.
• 49:38
  I understand that because the teacher is important. The coach is important. But if you say, well, my family's doing this thing, you know, it's like that's not respected. We don't expect families to actually lead. We expect families to abdicate leadership to every other team that Jeff was describing. And so the question that he's answering is how do you begin to lead a team? And that is that you have to start designing rhythms that actually begin to form the family's culture.
• 50:04
  And so I would say one of the first rhythms, we always tell people, like, it's really amazing to start with some kind of multi-generational family meal. Like, there's one thing that practice that I believe will just restore the family just naturally, and that is three generations, one table every week. If you get your family to that at any point...
• 50:22
  Something will transform in your family. Three generations, one table every week. Now, a lot of you guys, the best you can do is two generations. You start designing that meal now so that when your kids have kids, that three-generation experience starts to happen at one table every week. So that's something that we've been practicing for over 20 years. It totally transformed our family.
• 50:43
  And so I would say if you can start that with just two generations right now with the aim of getting to that third generation, as soon as either an upstream generation is willing to join you or your kids start having kids. But you want to and this is how we started. We for seven years, we just did this as two generations. And we had to really cultivate a family culture around the table. Table culture is so important to create. This is the place where we.
• 51:05
  talk about our family story. This is where we pass on those identities. We create this meal, not that weekday meal that a lot of people talk about where you quickly have like a bite to eat for 20 minutes while you all go off to do your own thing. Now there's one time a week where we are just a family and we're gonna spend hours just being together and enjoying each other.
• 51:24
  make that a lot of fun. And so we talk a lot about how to equip families to do that, but that's an example of a tool, an ancient tool. If you go to Israel, we just saw every single Shabbat, all the families are just, I mean, people in their 20s, 30s, they're all going to mom and dad's house with their kids because this was such a powerful experience. And I think this is the reason, this is the real, I think the hidden reason why if you look at every single developed nation now is below replacement rate, except for Israel.
• 51:51
  And we've lived in Israel multiple times. And I'll tell you guys that they practice this multi-generational meal better than anyone else. And one of the great news, like Jeff said, there's really basic tools that once you start implementing, your family just starts to transform into a multi-generational team. But you've got to get a hold of these tools. And they are the absolute best in the world at this tool of the multi-generational family meal. And I think that when their kids start getting married, they really want to have kids as soon as possible to be able to...
• 52:20
  Invite them into this incredible environment that is the multi-generational family that's been established. And so if you guys can create that for your future grandchildren, start now. Like start as soon as you can. Begin to create that family culture and you will transform your family into these incredibly fragile, you know, one generation nuclear families into this very vibrant three generation, four generation, multi-generational family.
• 52:46
  So I want you guys, as we finish up this episode, to give us a quick rundown of just a couple of the tools that we use. Because you've just said some very specific tactical things, but there are a number of ways that people can actually implement this. One of which is learning the tools, which you just mentioned, Jeremy, through the accelerator. But you guys also talk a lot about business. Do you want to just give a little bit of a cliffhanger here because we'll do more episodes on this? But how does this whole business Family Inc. thing fit into the family team's mission?
• 53:12
  Yeah, I think one thing that, you know, go back to the very beginning of the episode where I talked about kind of the economic engine kind of leaving and being evacuated from the home. You know, one of the things that we like to help people is try to bring that back in. And there's many different ways to do that. But one really obvious way is business ownership.
• 53:29
  When you own something, you have more control over something, which then allows you to have flexibility around bringing it back into the home to some degree. And I don't mean like that you're packing stuff at your kitchen table, even though we have a lot of fun stories where people do that. And that is also fun and enlist all the kids. And it's a blast. I just mean like the kind of.
• 53:45
  ownership of bringing something back into the home, even philosophically and mentally, that your family is running something, your family has a project, whatever. And so one way that we help is both through Family Inc. and a lot of other various things to try to say, hey, is it possible, whether it's starting a service-based business, starting something in tech, starting something online, something in the influencer space, whatever, where you can try to gain a little bit more...
• 54:11
  Freedom and time and energy that usually people are attracted to do for themselves in our culture, but then leverage that for your family, both for entry points for the teammates, generational asset building, etc. There's a lot of pros to business ownership that align pretty well with kind of the family team's idea. Because, again, back in the day, this was true of everyone pre-industrial revolution. Was everyone enormously wealthy and had all these things? No, no.
• 54:38
  But they owned their own economic engine. They either tilled their own fields, they were a blacksmith, et cetera. And so there is something to the fact that we have given that up that is, I think, had an impact on families in a specific way. So I don't know, Jeremy, if you'd anything or if that covers it. Yeah.
• 54:54
  Yeah, well, Solomon says in the Proverbs, first get your fields in order. After that, build your house. And this does something to the family. When you have your assets you can work on together and they start to, instead of pull your family apart, they begin to draw your family together. Like Jeff said, that's not necessarily, we're not saying that everyone has to do this. There's lots of tools to restore the family. But once you start thinking this way.
• 55:18
  You start to oftentimes have this greater value for family. And usually the first thing people say when they begin to think, oh, I'd love to have that economic engine, but I'm not an entrepreneur. Maybe 10 percent of the people in America or whatever are entrepreneurial. What about the other 90 percent?
• 55:33
  And what people don't understand is that about 90% of small businesses are actually not owned by entrepreneurs. They're owned by their simple service-based businesses that are designed for a particular region. You know, your local plumber, electrician, all these, these people are not tech entrepreneurs. We've been really conditioned to think about business ownership from the perspective of tech or products that are inventions like Shark Tank. But most businesses are not that way. Most businesses are...
• 55:57
  just trying to offer a service that, like Jeff said, you own. And the reason and the why behind it isn't because I'm wired to be an entrepreneur. The real why behind it is that I want to be integrated with my family. I want to get to actually be productive and spend time doing what I do most of my life with the people I love. I find it a tragedy.
• 56:18
  that people spend the best hours of their day with people that are not permanent relationships in their life. It's odd to me that we've designed the kind of lifestyle where you spend most of your time and almost all of your productive time away from your family. We see that as totally normal. I think that's very strange. Like, why wouldn't, again, if you look at Genesis 1, why wouldn't that be the exception?
• 56:39
  And I think there are exceptional reasons potentially to earn your income that way. But if you can restore that, like, let's do it. And this is actually one of the best times I've ever seen to restore these things. A lot of people are abdicating that responsibility. And so part of what people need that aren't like entrepreneurs is they just need good coaching. And so we've pulled together, you know, the five or six best coaches I know, people that are successful.
• 57:02
  that are leading lots of businesses, people that are entrepreneurial. And we've created a program so that people can have access to that kind of coaching and lots of business ideas, because we just want to help other families get to the place where they can also live this integrated life as a family. So we just want to restore that for families that are ready to take that. And that's a pretty advanced step, but people really need to consider whether or not to do that. And I know that that could be really disruptive. So how do you do that in a way that doesn't
• 57:26
  compromise your ability to provide for your family. Like that's why we want to be on the ground with families when they're making this transition to figure out, okay, how do we, how do we do this in a, how do we choreograph this very carefully? Because we want to see you guys restore this. But we also want to be really careful that you do that in this way that actually is a blessing to your family.
• 57:44
  Yeah. Okay. So guys, Family Teams is the ecosystem in which all of this is happening. We're going to drop in the show notes below or in the description on YouTube, all the links to Jeff, to Jeremy, to Family Teams. But I highly encourage you guys at the very least to subscribe to this on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you're listening, because this goes out every week and has for years. So there's no shortage of how to do this for free every week in your ears. We just want to bless you guys. It's blessed me personally.
• 58:09
  Jeff, to your point, man, I felt like we were one teammate too short. And so we're having our fifth in like three months from now. And I'm sure it's going to be the same with number six. So we'll see if I convince my wife. Anyway, final thoughts from you guys or are you feeling pretty complete?
• 58:24
  I feel good. I feel good. I just appreciate you guys listening. I don't know if Jeremy, you have anything as well, but I would say, yeah, it's a, it's one step at a time is, is how you build something like this. And so, you know, I'm even, you know, 10 years into thinking about some of these ideas and it literally does feel like every other day. It's like, Oh, just getting started. Just still understand. Like,
• 58:41
  It's a, in a good sense of the word, you actually realize you have more time than you think because you're building a multi-generational project, not just hitting the eject button when your kids turn 18. So I would say be encouraged and feel grace in that, but continue to put just one foot in front of the other.
• 58:56
  Yeah, 100%. This is not about getting more busy. There's a lot of times what we don't realize is that the disintegrated life is extremely exhausting and very busy. And so when we start integrating these things together, we start having experiences where we're spending time with each other while we're doing productive things, while our kids are learning. And so this starts to actually make your life a lot more simple. I know that the transition can be challenging, but part of this is that, yeah, the modern hyper-individualistic life, it's hard to do that with just two kids.
• 59:25
  and try to make sure that everyone's hyper-individualistic goals are, but once you start functioning like a team, having a larger family, this doesn't necessarily multiply the amount of work, but this is a very different kind of lifestyle. And so if you're interested in just having a complete makeover of your lifestyle design as a family, like that's what we're here to help you guys think think about how to do. And we think this is incredibly valuable for mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, like each of those roles is so beautifully designed by God.
• 59:55
  And we want to see you guys experience the fullness of what that looks like. So, yeah, we'd love to be able to help you, like Kurt said, like continue to follow what we're doing if you find it helpful, because we want to equip you guys. We don't want to leave you with this idea as sort of like a theory. This is working for us and for hundreds, if not thousands of other families. And so we want you guys to join that if it is something that you really believe in. Thank you guys so much for being here. Jeff, Jeremy, thanks for joining us. And we will see you guys next week for another Family Teams episode.
• 1:00:23
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.