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Zuby's Solution for Failing Families: Make Fatherhood Cool Again · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:03
  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. We're here to do a quick fatherhood roundup. And so I have, as I've just been looking at various videos and reading various articles interacting on
• 0:30
  Exxon, these other places, I wanted to have a kind of an arena where I could have a conversation with some dads about some of these things and we could just sharpen each other and just kind of reflect on some of these ideas as they're bubbling up. And so I've got four thoughts that I want us to work out today. I'm joined today by Grant Stein, Landon Ellis, and Chris Cirillo. All three of these guys I've gotten to know through various family teams, things that we do, Family Inc. All three of them have done that.
• 0:56
  Chris and I are integrated, and all three of them are a part of various parts of 1000 Houses, 1KH. So welcome, guys. Thanks for joining me today for this roundup. Great to be here. Great to be here.
• 1:07
  Awesome. I did. Sweet. All right. So we're going to get started. So I'm going to share my screen and we're going to look at a few, a few clips. So we're going to start with a clip of Zuby, awesome rapper and deep thinker, believer. And he had some thoughts about fatherhood. So I wanted to get your guys' reaction to this. There's back in the home. Wow. And it seems especially here. Yeah, I know. Here in the U.S., a lot of people say fathers are disincentivized to be in the home. Don't get married. But the research shows kids do best in a marriage.
• 1:37
  In your experience and you as a man, what do you think is an answer to get men back to the table or do men need to come back to the table? Men absolutely need to come back to the table. Look, with most human behavior, it's a question of incentives. If you incentivize any behavior that you incentivize, you're going to get more of. Any behavior you disincentivize, you're going to get.
• 1:58
  Bless of, right? We all know this. Every single human being responds to incentives. And the truth is from, you know, again, from all these different angles, the incentive structures have been perverted and have been broken down over the decades. This is true at multiple levels. And look, it's not...
• 2:18
  I think it's important to not paint this totally bleak picture as if like everyone in this country or everyone in the world or whatever, it's all crumbling and everyone's lost their morals. No, most marriages last a lifetime. I think it's important for people to remember that. 65% of first marriages here in the US. Yeah.
• 2:35
  And on a global level, I don't know the number globally, but I would estimate it's over 70% of marriages last a lifetime. So I think it's when people are, oh, marriage is a failed institution. And I think it's important for people to get off the internet and actually expand their scope globally. Somewhere like India has an under 5% divorce rate. I think that's really important. I love that he's pointing out this issue.
• 2:58
  Doom and gloom, kind of extremely American-centric, Western-centric view of family and marriage. One of the things I love about Zuby's reflection is that he spends a lot of time in a lot of different countries. And yeah, India has a less than 5% divorce rate. That is crazy to think about.
• 3:14
  We are in an outlier. The United States has the highest percentage of single parent homes of any country in the world. And so, yeah, there is something going on here that's really deep. So we'll let them finish this. They've got the biggest population in the whole world. So I think it's just a matter of incentives. I think you have to look at
• 3:32
  Each different level, I think you have to... It's a hard question to answer because the truth is, it's not a simple answer. It's not something, oh, you just create this policy and cool, you fixed it. This is something that's taken many, many decades to get to where it is now. And it's going to be a generational thing. It's going to be a generational thing to fix. I think a good place to start would be to look at places and look at communities and look at groups of people who are...
• 3:59
  doing well and getting good results and things are going well and to see what it is that they're that they're doing right you can do this on a national scale on a state scale i mean even within a single state
• 4:11
  You could look at the state. Okay. Look at all the different counties. Look at the different areas. You can have very, very different statistics on all of these things. And you can just see, okay, what is, what is working and why is it working? What are the beliefs? So there's like, there's basically three topics I want to hit with, with you guys. The first is the idea of incentives. The second is looking at populations where this is working. And he's about to say something that really surprised me in terms of a solution to the problem. That these people have.
• 4:38
  Look at the people where this is all going great. Look at the people where it's going really badly and see, okay, what are the things that they're doing or they're not doing? Some of them I think would be quite predictable and obvious. Some of them you may be surprised by and be like, oh, that's interesting. That's something we should look at.
• 4:56
  But I think in a single sentence, I think it has to be made cool. Made cool to be a father? Yes. Yeah. Everything that is pro-social and is pro-family and we want to encourage of and have more of, it has to be made cooler than the alternatives. Yeah. Because in any group, in any community, in any place, especially when it comes to young people,
• 5:19
  what they see modeled and what they think is cool or aspirational, you're going to get more of that. All right. I found that's like a fascinating way for him to describe the solution. So we got three thoughts he's making here. He's talking about creating incentives for fathers and fatherhood. He's talking about studying populations in which fatherhood is being celebrated and is working well. But this third thing, which I thought, man,
• 5:47
  It really made me, just the way you framed it, that you have to make fatherhood cool and aspirational to young people. And this is one of the reasons why when you see TikTok videos of people just dunking on fatherhood or dunking on having kids or something like that, I'm like, that is the most dangerous. I think the Chinese understand, I think a lot of cultures understand how dangerous that is because it's not that hard to create just a vibe in a culture where young people all sort of collectively agree that, yeah, this is just aesthetically dangerous.
• 6:15
  Stupid. I mean, when I've talked, when I've had conversations with younger people and I hear them having an aesthetic reaction. This just happened, by the way, at my Shabbat table. It's just like on Friday night, we had a guy who I had just met. He came to our Shabbat table, a young guy, unmarried, you know, single, young, single. And he literally says at my Shabbat table, I hate kids and I never want to have them.
• 6:36
  And when my dad, I mean, my dad, my dad just like, he's like, what? I mean, it was, it was, I didn't say anything. I just sat back and it was an awesome conversation. But basically, yeah, he, this is an opinion that you can tell he spouts everywhere and he, he's just used it being reinforced. And he suddenly found himself in a place where that was less likely to happen.
• 6:56
  But yeah, Chris, what are your thoughts? I know you were. Yeah, there was a side comment at first, which was just like the whole India thing jumped off the screen to me when I was watching this because it's like, well, maybe there's a case to be made for families to partner together and more arranged marriages. And that was like one kind of.
• 7:14
  off the topic land of arranged marriages is a five percent divorce rate right yes and then that also was just highlighted too i think from a a faith standpoint like love not being this emotion like romance but it's actually this choice that we get to make and so that was interesting to me as kind of i think that's even a foundational element to this whole conversation and then as i think about you know his point of things being cool it was
• 7:43
  it's interesting to me to see, like we've removed all of the responsibility and ownership and all of that from fatherhood. And really there's this, this deeply entrenched leadership component to what fatherhood really is. And that is incredibly attractive for a human being who is designed to be operating inside of that. And so when we move like,
• 8:09
  I love the phrase that like make it cool, but really it's just like, let's do what we were designed to do. And all of a sudden, this is all gonna start working a lot more smoothly. Follow the creator's blueprints. It's amazing how much better that works. When you violate that at a deep level, that has a natural result of destroying the incentives. Because if I'm designed to gain fulfillment,
• 8:31
  through building a family and that, and you basically culturally destroy that, that expectation or even my ability to do that, then of course, how do I recover? And when you look, when you look at a place like India, you know, it isn't simply like if, if in the West, we just started arranging marriages, we'd have a 5% divorce rate.
• 8:50
  Because they have a culture that reinforces marriage and the kind of marriage, you know, Chris, you described, and that is that this is a decision. And once you make the decision, it's for life. And once and so and they had there's a pathway. There's there's a there's a pathway to thriving as a man and a woman, as a mother and a father in that culture. And we had that culture. We had. I'm not just talking about 1950s America. I mean, going all the way back, you know,
• 9:11
  Every culture that's existed in the West has had a clear blueprint for what it means to succeed. I was just listening to somebody who, you know, I think he's in his like 60s, describe when he was growing up, he said everyone he knew wanted to be a husband and a father.
• 9:30
  And so they were and they knew it was very difficult. So this incentivized them heavily to make sure that they knew how to provide for a family and that they were being attractive to the opposite sex. And it was just culture wide. And he said now is when I look at young people today, young men, there's that expectation is like, who knows what you want to be? And it's just confusion. And he said, but it required enormous amounts of.
• 9:54
  focus and sacrifice for us to become the kinds of people who would be marriable. And it was the same thing was true for for women. And so because we've we worship at this idol of individualism and freedom that takes freedom away. But now we don't have the freedom to get married and stay married. Like this is this is where the whole idea of liberalism sort of breaks down. Landon, what about you? What can I say to you in this?
• 10:14
  Yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting fingers to this. I think that the idea of incentives and the coolness of fatherhood are pretty closely linked, because I think that the coolness is probably the biggest incentive for a lot of men or lack thereof. And I think that one of the challenges with it is that I feel like our society as a whole is...
• 10:35
  thanks to things like the internet, it's getting so much more fragmented that even what is cool is so divergent among different heterogeneous groups. And like, so when you think about like, how do you fix this story that's being told? I think it's challenging because I think that on the one hand,
• 10:53
  There are certain pockets of society where I feel like the story of the value and kind of the urge to be a good dad is very present. But even the idea of what is it that it means to be a dad in those circles can be very important.
• 11:08
  different things to different people. And so I think that's a big challenge. I think another difficult thing for this, particularly for those more achiever types of men who might really get into fatherhood if they were to like kind of discover the bigger vision of it is that it's so easy by default in our society to only see kind of the difficult parts of parenting.
• 11:30
  And I know I've heard people comment about like, man, before I had kids, I didn't realize all of these great aspects of it. I just basically only noticed kids when they were misbehaving in public or something like that. And so I think that it's also incumbent upon us who want to see a greater vision of fatherhood flourish to share those good parts and the joy that can come with fatherhood and kind of enable those who haven't yet experienced it to know those good parts of it.
• 11:56
  Yeah, yeah, we do have to get the word out. There's nothing great. I mean, it's such an amazing part of this is the one of the things that the framings that for me has been really helpful in choosing fatherhood is to understand that if you think life is about ultimately just freedom in that definition is really my my freedom to impulsively enjoy whatever pleasure I want, then children are going to just wreak havoc on that. But if the purpose of life is really about meaning.
• 12:24
  then they are just a meaning explosion engine. I mean, you will have a life filled with meaning if you have lots of kids and you really buckle under the responsibility and challenge of raising them well and begin to really see a family emerge from your efforts.
• 12:41
  that produces so much meaning in your life. And so I think part of this has been the decision as a culture to call what is cool our very hedonistic definition of freedom, and to call what is uncool anything that really requires responsibility. And that, I feel, has been really presented to us somehow through media, through different avenues. So Grant, what did this start for you? Yeah, man, you know what actually came to mind was Doug Wilson's definition of manhood.
• 13:11
  the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility. That assumption. That's interesting. Yeah. The glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility. I was thinking about this in this context of that's not cool. So I'm actually going to push back a little of it against like, we have to make it cool. You know, it's not only is it not cool, it's actually kind of painful and it's maturing. And I think that's what's required. The reason I'm pushing back against this is I'm thinking about in my life, when I have so much freedom,
• 13:39
  to pursue what culture is going after, what we say is cool, it only leads to death. A couple of thoughts here. Proverbs 1, 19, it talks about how greed for unjust gain will take away the life of its possessor. And I'm thinking about like what's cool in the culture, getting money, having the newest thing. It actually takes away from you. It doesn't add anything to you. It takes away from you. And so I think this idea of making it cool in theory makes sense. But in reality, it kind of falls apart. Yeah.
• 14:09
  Because I'm thinking about what actually produces life. And what produces life is boundaries. What produces life is discipline. What produces life is kind of this idea of containment. Like when you know where you fit, you're actually free to flourish. And I think what we're missing is we have so much freedom. I'm going to join in with what you were saying there.
• 14:29
  that there's no direction on it. And so we're just wandering aimlessly. So, of course, it's about my happiness and about running away from pain and things that could be hard rather than running towards responsibility, which is what, I mean, what fatherhood ultimately is. It's responsibility. It's sacrifice. It's...
• 14:47
  is totally laying down your life for other people. Yeah. So that's what it stirred up for me. Yeah. So one of the things he said about, he kind of defined cool as aspirational. Like that's kind of what captured me. I was like, because like when you're on a sports team, for example, you can make sacrifice aspirational in the context of that environment. And in that case, when you're seeing somebody like just really pouring out everything they have for the team,
• 15:13
  people like wow you know and they would see that as cool but I think that maybe part of the problem with that word is that it's so fickle and shallow like it's sort of like oh it's it's whatever the culture likes today it's like trends that come and go or whatever and so yeah maybe using that word aspirational like how would you as you as you kind of were critiquing you know Zuby's use of the word yeah how would how would you think about it if we use that word no that makes a ton
• 15:43
  What do I say? There's these people you encounter in your life where it's like, yeah, I want to be like that. So, yeah, that totally makes sense to me. I just very personally, we encountered a family when we were in college who has four kids. And they just did things very different from every other family we'd ever seen. And in many ways, it inspired us to have the family.
• 16:04
  family that we have today. So I would agree that. Yeah. Yeah. Oftentimes it is a model you see that like, oh yeah, I would love to emulate that. All right. Last, last word on this, Chris, then we're going to move on to another topic. Yeah. I figured we wouldn't listen to more of the videos. So I wanted to highlight something that he said shortly after that kind of prompted some thoughts from me, but he was talking about like,
• 16:26
  OnlyFans and all of that kind of stuff and just thinking multi-generationally about the impact of our decisions. And I think that what's really interesting about this is most people would point, I think, to the main problem being selfishness and individualism, whereas I think the bigger problem is nearsightedness. Yeah.
• 16:45
  In a secular kind of framework, a secularist who's thinking multi-generationally is going to totally change the way they make decisions the same way that we would. And so I think encouraging people to think five generations out, it totally changes the way that even, oh, now kids are really important, even if I have a secular perspective and I'm an individualist, because I know that this is actually going to create the kind of
• 17:10
  world that I want to live in, you know, five generations from now, even if that world is totally different than maybe fundamentalists or, or Christian or, you know, whatever.
• 17:20
  Yes. Great point. Yeah. This is part of what I think when I was listening to this guy talk about how he didn't want to have children, I just was, it was always the frame of time that really struck me. Like if I was trying to figure out how to have the most fulfilling, even meaningful, like next three to five years or something, I could see why somebody could make that critique. Yeah.
• 17:43
  But once you start looking at multi-generations in terms of time span, then it becomes so important to have children and so meaningful. So I do think that, yeah, that's a great point that even as secular people, you can really see the time frame as being meaningful.
• 18:01
  really what causes these different values to shift. All right, guys, let me, so there's an article that Jeff Bethke shared several months ago. I just wanted to process it with you guys, because this is, this one is just like frame something up that I've been thinking a lot about and I'm still trying to figure out. So this is an article in Palladium. It's called Fertility Collapse Demands New Cultures by Malcolm and
• 18:26
  Simone Collins. So we'll read some of this and I'd love to get your guys' thoughts on this. Birth rates are falling much faster than many dominant narratives imply. The global fertility rate for all of Latin America and the Caribbean fell below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman in 2019. India will achieve that status in 2024. China is expected to be at half its current population by 2066. First generation immigrants to the United States fell below the replacement rate in 2019.
• 18:54
  already 115 countries representing about half the world's populations are beneath replacement and by the end of the century nearly every country in africa is projected to have a rapidly declining population even strict religious fundamentalism does not protect against the drop the 1980s to 2010s the average iranian woman shifted from having six point five to just two point five children wow
• 19:14
  Think about a drop like that in just 40 years. And as of 2021, it was 1.6. This drop is infertility beat China's one child policy. The U.S. meanwhile, the Mormon population in Utah fell to almost below replacement in 2021. This is not a canary in the coal mine moment. We've reached the metaphorical point of which the miners skin is sloughing off, all while many claim this dramatic drop is a minor inconvenience or even a welcome development.
• 19:39
  People underestimate how quickly this effect will be felt. South Korea currently has a fertility rate of 0.81. For every 100 South Korean great-grandparents, there will be 6.6 great-grandkids. At the 0.7 fertility rate predicted in South Korea by this year, that amount is 4.3 great-grandkids. So 100 South Koreans make 4.3 great-grandkids. It's as if we knew a disease would kill 94% of South Koreans in the next century. People underrate.
• 20:09
  how quickly this can become serious once it is felt. As recently as in the mid-1990s, South Korea had a birth rate of 1.7, which is close to the US present rate. Fertility collapse takes around 30 years before it causes a population collapse. And once that happens, the collapse is inevitable. If 70% of a nation's population is over age 50, and even though many of those people have almost half their lifespan left, they're not going to be having any more kids. That's pretty obvious.
• 20:37
  by the time you turn 50. Across the world, we see a similar phenomenon. Countries explode in population as access to modern wealth expands, then drop off and begin to collapse as income rises and lifestyle modernization sets in. While many countries have yet to reach this crescendo, most are well on their way. But why is this happening? Consider your personal social group. If you are like most in the developed world, around a third of your peers will have no kids and about a third will have two kids. If that group is to hover just above the repopulation rate, the final third must have over four children
• 21:07
  kids each. People misframe the question of stable birth rates when they ask, why is everyone in my community not having not having two kids? We already know.
• 21:17
  that in the modern world, broken matchmaking individual choice will drive a large portion of people to forego parenthood entirely. As such, if fertility in your community is to stay stable, it is up to a certain number of those who do have kids to have quite a few kids. Modern society should not be asking, why isn't everyone having kids, but rather, why aren't many in my community having five to seven kids?"
• 21:37
  When the question is reframed, the answer is still obvious, but subtle in its implications. Pure hedonic returns from having more kids diminish significantly after two kids. Even when the financial constraints associated with child rearing are completely lifted, there are only three reasons a person has well over two kids. If every child they have adds significantly to their family's economic prospects, if the family lacks the education necessary to use birth control effectively, or
• 22:03
  or is in a situation where birth control is not an option, or if there is some cultural externality motivating them to have lots of kids. This is so this is now becomes his thesis. This final reason is really the only thing that could possibly save us from this population collapse. So then he goes on to say,
• 22:20
  While economic gain has historically been a driver of high birth rates, the global decline in child labor and household business businesses with modernization has removed removed this factor. So the first factor is gone. Lack of access to birth control is also increasingly no longer a factor with a massive worldwide increase in female education, sex education and birth control availability. Okay, so that one's gone. This is favorable news in many ways, but
• 22:40
  It also means this future of widespread prosperity, female education, and modernization is inherently unstable unless prosperous, egalitarian societies can maintain or increase their population through sustainable birth rates.
• 22:51
  Many people have the intuition that when a population crashes, the amount of resources left to go around will increase on a per-person basis. And this boost in individual prosperity will create a new homeostasis at which populations reach a sustainable, more or less constant level or even start to grow. This intuition is wrong on three fronts. First, we have seen what happens to nations later on in the fertility collapse timeline.
• 23:16
  than ours like South Korea. Decline has not tapered off in any of the later stage demographic collapse nations. If there is an organic floor on fertility collapse, it is so low as to be irrelevant.
• 23:26
  So it doesn't taper off. Second, increasing individual wealth is associated with decreases in birth rate. While birth rate eventually recover at extreme levels of wealth, they only hit above repopulation levels when a family is earning between $500,000 to $1 million a year. In the same way that the birth rate begins to crash around an income of $5,000 a year, presumably correlated with an individual's participation in the modern economy, something similar is happening at the half a million dollar mark.
• 23:52
  Right half a million dollars a year may be the income level at which an average person is no longer compelled to be involved in the modern pattern of labor mobilization. They don't have to work or can at least work flexibly. But this is a relatively, this is a relative effect, not absolute. So rising resources, resources overall won't help. Third, given how much we have leveraged our land companies, cities, states, and nations, decreasing populations may even dramatically reduce wealth and trigger a cascade of defaults.
• 24:19
  So this, we've seen this a lot. And when people really play this out, this is not going to help society as a whole. So then he goes on and talks about these false, false solutions and really gets into and debunks. So it gets all the way down to this last solution that he talks about. This is kind of where I wanted to go. Cultures that last. The demographic problem seems very dark, but there is a silver lining that comes down to a final reason people have more than two kids. The presence of a cultural motivator. Suppose we manage to build a culture that is pronatalist,
• 24:48
  technophilic, productive, and pluralistic, but immune to the siren call of the talent beast. Suppose we authors have eight kids, and each of them has eight kids, for example. If this could be kept up for 11 generations, we would have more descendants than people currently alive on Earth and would have set the tone for the future of human civilization. This example is perhaps unrealistic and even undesirable, but it illustrates that a relatively small seed can have a big effect. Cultural mass extinction is avoidable if just a handful of families from each culture
• 25:18
  Their cultures would be made durable in the sense that they have children above the repopulation rate and they raise these children in a way that convinces enough of them to have many children and so on. But a future populated only by the descendants of very few family cultures is a failure scenario as it would be an increasingly homogenous world prone to fragility. The idea is a future in which as many cultures as possible, both old and new, cooperate and compete in a diverse cultural ecosystem, sharpening each other in the process.
• 25:45
  So I so he goes on and talks about this in various ways, but his solution, and I'll just read the last paragraph. Mainstream culture does not work. It does not motivate sustainable birth rates. In order to make the leap to a culture that does, many of us must create new cultures or significantly fortify those we inherited. Those who will throw their chips in with this massive cultural and demographic experiment by consciously creating a family and then raising it.
• 26:08
  in an intergenerationally durable culture will shape the future of our species. Is this an easy feat? No. But what makes this endeavor so appealing and hopeful is that it is within nearly everyone's reach, so long as they're willing to try. The future belongs to those who show up. So basically, if the whole future depends on
• 26:31
  whatever culture can become durably multi-generational. So if you discover a culture whose children, who have a lot of children, whose children have a lot of children, whose grandchildren have a lot of children, the future will belong to them. We know that's gonna happen. That's the only way, because basically the population collapse is inevitably a U-shaped curve, right? What's gonna happen is there's gonna be this massive decline in population as anyone who doesn't have one of these durable, multi-generational cultures is going to die out.
• 26:59
  And so when you get further and further close to the bottom of the U, then all that's going to be left is the handful of families with durable multigenerational cultures. And then you're going to see an explosion in population again, right? Because if anybody can create that kind of durability, if that exists, if that's possible, I mean, I think the authors are asking, is that realistic? Then there's going to be another population explosion eventually. And so this is now, this very much fascinates me because I am...
• 27:24
  This has definitely been, for me, a personal calling in my life. I have wanted and feel called to create a durable multigenerational culture in my own family and in other families. I see this as just a basic part of what it means to be a believer in the Bible. When I study scripture, and I think as Christians, we made a crazy decision to
• 27:46
  to adopt a modern Western view of family that is inevitably going to destroy the family and then disintegrate to a population collapse level. And if you adopt simple Torahic beliefs about the family that come from Abraham and from the Hebrew scriptures, which I believe the New Testament advocates for, I believe that was the primary curriculum for Gentiles in the New Testament was the Torah. Paul points out explicitly in 2 Timothy when he says all scripture is God-breathed, that he's useful for teaching, correcting.
• 28:16
  They were teaching the Torah. The scriptures he's talking about are what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew scriptures. So I think that this is possible to recover this, right? But this is going to be, I think this is the project. This is the project of our lifetime. We have to pull this off because something really crazy is about to happen in the next 100 to 200 years if we don't. But yeah, what does that start for you guys?
• 28:37
  I mean, I think that the speed of this change and the potential for this to be affecting like every hundred South Koreans combining for 4.5 or something like that, great-great-grand or great-caren kids, it's crazy numbers. And it gives me some hope in that the fact that these are exponential curves that take place here means that a shift in the other direction can have big effects too. But I mean, it does, I think...
• 29:07
  really raised suspicion that, as you've pointed out in other forums, Jeremy, that those who have the most kids are and can encourage their kids to also have the most kids kind of own the future. And I think that for those of us who are thinking this way, it's it presents an opportunity. And it also I mean, to the degree that you believe that this population collapse will take place. I think it informs things about.
• 29:28
  like where we choose to live, because for example, the American development pattern over the last century or so has been extremely unsustainable and relies completely on growth. And so what happens when population doesn't continue to grow as it has, I think that certain places will thrive while others don't and that sort of thing. There's an organization called Strong Towns out there that does a lot of research on that front. That's super interesting. But yeah, Chris and Grant, what do you guys think?
• 29:55
  Yeah, go to Chris. Yeah, two interesting things kind of jumped out to me to highlight. One is just, I think, reiterating the severity of the problem and the necessity of this. I think when oftentimes people hear about this population decline, and he alludes to some of it in his article, but he's...
• 30:15
  people just imagine like walking around the mall and having all the stuff that they've always had, but just with less people in their way or there's less cars on the road or whatever. But it's like, no, those roads still have to be paid for the tax dollars to support the infrastructure of the world that we live in still has to be generated. So you're going to be paying 70% taxes instead of 30% taxes. You know, it's like,
• 30:37
  Most people aren't thinking far enough ahead. And when you look at the urgency of this, I think numbers are even inflated in the wrong direction in the sense that I was looking through some of the statistics and that right now the U.S. has 42 percent of its population in an age range that is highly unlikely or completely unable to reproduce. Right.
• 31:00
  So the 45 year to, you know, death age range is 42% of the U.S. population. But then you look at, okay, 20% of Gen Zs are self-identified as LGBTQ. So they're not going to be reproducing. And, you know, 11% of millennials are the same. So they're not going to be reproducing, which is essentially taking another, you know, 6.5% off.
• 31:25
  So we're looking at by the time we, you know, sift all this down, we've got a third of our population that is capable of doing any kind of reproduction over the next 10 years. There's a huge demand on everybody to kind of shift in this. So that came to mind. The other thing that this reminded me of is there's a book by Phil and Diane Comer.
• 31:47
  called Raising Passionate Jesus Followers. And they outline a certain kind of calculation that is actually similar to this. They said, if you raised three children and trained them to do the same and follow in the faith, and that just continued absolutely, in 12 generations, which is about 240 years, about the amount of time that America has been established, you would have over a million descendants. Right.
• 32:13
  that are in the same faith as your family, which is just astronomical. So I think that is like another element to this conversation where it's like this idea of creative minorities. What can you do to change an entire population with a very small amount
• 32:30
  I think it's people underestimate the compound interest component and the seed planting and the harvesting and all of that that comes. And so they opt to like, well, what kind of impact can I have? I'm just going to choose my selfish desires and not have any more kids. Whereas, oh, you can actually have a huge impact by having one more kid or having two more kids than what you already have.
• 32:55
  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. Like what you hear? Be sure to leave a rating and review for this podcast wherever you use streaming. Thank you.
• 33:22
  Well, I think that the part of the discussion that this article was pointing out that I don't think I've heard really before or certainly has been underreported is this idea of the durability. Because what you just described, like from the Comers, the reason why that hasn't happened is because in three or four generations, people...
• 33:44
  start to join the culture and the population collapses. And so, and so the question is, is how do you create a durable culture, even in Mormon cultures, or like it's describing, even in Indian cultures, you have a lack of durability. In other words, within several generations, children's,
• 33:59
  in your family line, stop having large families. And so the question is, is there a way to create a kind of culture in which you could predict that three, four, five, six, seven generations, the kids are continuing to have large families, that they desire to have large families. And so part of what I have...
• 34:16
  been advocating for as a parenting style is to focus on your grandchildren, not your children, to basically say that if what you do with your children is your primary goal is instead of the happiness of your children or even the flourishing of your children, you make it your goal to raise good parents. So you're focused on helping your children
• 34:36
  You're saying we are a team gen one and gen two are a team for gen three. So, so, so, so we've done it with our kids and our kids are all five of our kids really want to have large families. They all are excited to have lots of kids. This has been a culture in our family. We've created us that, that this is a, this is a good thing that we're preparing for that. Like, like, like this is just a high value that has been passed on to them now.
• 35:00
  their ability to pass it on to their children is, will they raise their kids in the same way we raised them? Right? Because if one generation, our kids then decide, well, we're going to focus on our kids, their happiness, their thriving, then they're going to create a terminal generation where we're going to be back where we started. There's going to be a lack of durability. The only way this is going to work
• 35:18
  And so we've actually named like all of our organizations, like as a family or my consulting practice called third generation, our real estate portfolio is called third generation properties. The reason is I want to create a cultural expectation within my family that every generation focuses on the third generation. You do not focus on the second generation. Every second generation focus will create a terminal generation. Inevitably, we've seen this over and over and over again.
• 35:41
  If you focus on the thriving of the second generation, then they're going to say, great, they're going to receive that, they're going to enjoy that, and they're going to create, it's going to create a cultural expectation amongst the second generation that all this exists for their comfort, for their happiness, for their thriving. And so they're going to then develop whatever ideas they're going to develop of what that means, if that means that, you know, I have this individual expression, it's not compatible with a large family. Yeah.
• 36:05
  And so, so this is, and I do think there's exceptions. There's going to be kids that are going to come into the family that can't have children or that, that definitely have different callings or are called to be a single person or whatever. But, but, but in general, you want to have 80, 90% of your kids really excited to, to build a large family and, and it's, it's going to, but it's going to require them to focus on that third generation. This is a hypothesis, obviously that needs to be tested. And one of the problems with this whole problem is that you only get one shot at testing a hypothesis, then you're dead.
• 36:35
  like i'm going to discover probably my 80s if this is working or not right and i'm not going to have a i'm not going to have the time to go back and you know i would tweak a few things like you know it's over by then so this is this is i think one of the reasons why this is such a intractable problem grant what are your thoughts man this actually it to me it gives me a ton of hope it reveals the wisdom of god is what i feel like so genesis one mandate be fruitful multiply fills and do
• 36:59
  Phil rule. He didn't say, let's create a hundred men and a hundred women. He didn't say, let's create a business. Let's create an organization. He created a family, right? And this is something you talk about all the time. But to me, this reveals the wisdom of God in this, that the simple numbers, you know, six kids who make six kids in 350 years, that's 13 billion.
• 37:21
  It's the wisdom of God. And one of the things they said in there that really jumped out at me was a relatively small seed can have a big effect. And if you read the Gospels, I mean, man, Jesus is talking about seeds everywhere. And the kingdom of God is like, it's a seed. And so the thing that it really stirs up for me is this idea of revival, actually. And not revival of let's get back to something the church has had. It's a Genesis 1 revival.
• 37:45
  of let's go back to the mandate, let's go back to how God designed it. And one of the things he said in the article is he said, we're living in a world of dying systems. The way the world's working, the system's not working. And when you're in a world of dying systems, you actually have an opportunity that other generations haven't had. You don't have to go kill and steal somebody's land.
• 38:06
  and rule over them. You don't have to destroy the current systems. They're already dying off. And so there's an opportunity here to create this multi-generational kingdom system. And the beauty of it is the wisdom of God that's revealed here is it's already laid out for us. He gave us the instructions and the method and everything. And so we don't have to recreate anything. We just actually have to step into it. So for me, one of the things this did, it really reiterated for me, the Lord's been stirring me up about a 350-year family vision.
• 38:35
  And I'm like, 350 years is 13, 14 generations. And it's actually enough to replace the entire world's population based on these calculations with the number of kids that I have. And if all of them had those same number of kids. And so it makes me think like, Chris, I love what you said about selfishness is really nearsightedness. When you have that long vision and you're able to communicate the long vision,
• 38:59
  and to pass it down, you're literally unstoppable. And so to me, the wisdom of God is revealed in a family. And that gives me a ton of hope. And I feel like this is amazing that a cultural kind of article that's trying to just work through this is still, it's come to the exact same conclusion. So it fills me with hope. I agree. Well, one of the things that you said, Grant, that having a 350-year vision, there's actually a word for a man who has a 350-year vision.
• 39:28
  You guys know what that word is? Patriarch. Yes. Okay. And this was so ironic. So what is actually the root cause of population collapse is the lack of patriarchy. Like that is the cause. That is the cause of population collapse. The only thing that will cause a population to increase are patriarchs. Fathers who want to father large families because they have a long-term vision.
• 39:57
  And if you were to go to almost any university in this country, a state university, and ask the professors to come up with a single word that would give them a consensus for what's wrong with the world, the one word that's most likely to come out of that is the word, the thing that's most wrong with the word is patriarchy. So somehow the enemy has seeded into our highest institutions that the only thing that can save us is the actual cause of the problem.
• 40:25
  The cure is being mistaken for the disease. And this is very strange. It has to be the only way forward. If we cannot motivate fathers to want to raise large multi-generational families, that's the definition of this kind of durable culture. Now they would never say this, like you were saying in an article, they would never say, hey, there is a word for a durable multi-generational culture where you see generation after generation. It has to be fathers who are voluntarily choosing to have large families
• 40:54
  and that are raising their sons to want to have large families. That is usually the missing link for there to be a desire for this kind of culture, the definition of this kind of culture in some ways. Now, there's obviously lots of loaded ways in which people see that word as oppressive towards women. And I just think it's important to point out it's a very simple idea that you—
• 41:20
  that you have fathers who are highly engaged in the project of building large, strong, multi-generational families. That is the essence of what a patriarch is in the scriptures. It's not somebody who is oppressing women, but these things have been really recast. And I think they're causing a lot of, I don't think that this is necessarily the root cause of the problem.
• 41:42
  I think it's the root cause of why we can't find the solution. So I think there's lots of, there's a multivariant reasons why this is happening. This is why it's happening in every culture. There's lots of things. But if you created a very strong culture of patriarchs, I think it would solve this problem. But man, I think a lot of people are going to have a hard time with that solution.
• 42:01
  Yeah, I just think it's interesting, too, when you layer on top of that kind of just not just this vision for big families, but this vision for really the kingdom of God. Because I've seen this same kind of vision pop up increasingly in, you know, more of the technophilic, pro natalist, just kind of completely humanist camp, too, of like these certain people who are out there. They want to have a bunch of kids because they want to just kind of egotistically take over the world or something like that.
• 42:28
  And I think that it's pretty easy to start to paint that kind of portrait and make patriarchy start to look kind of ugly. But that when we're able to sort of fold in this idea of, hey, I want to have this family that executes this vision when it's actually a beautiful vision is really compelling. And so I think that's also the important part, particularly those of us with, you know, very
• 42:53
  vision-centric kinds of personalities anyway, to be focused on making sure that the vision is beautiful and good, so that it's beyond tearing down and criticism that is so common in our culture today.
• 43:07
  Yes. What's so interesting about the biblical, what it does to men is it causes us to want to serve and lay down our lives for our families, right? We are leading our families, but we're doing it in a way that is infused with that kingdom culture. And so that solution, yeah, it's interesting because there is this, I remember I was shocked when I, you know, Elon Musk has been one of those guys who has really talked about this problem. And there's this scene in his biography where he's,
• 43:33
  In his hospital, his wife is giving birth, I guess, to, I know a surrogate of Elon is giving birth to one of him and I think Grimes, one of their kids. In the same hospital wing, one of his employees is giving birth to a child.
• 43:50
  who he was a sperm donor for. And so he had two of his own, I think he's got up to 12 children now. It was such a weird, yeah, to your point, Landon, this is starting to feel almost like a little bit of apocalyptic situation with like, what is happening? Who's the father? Who's the mother? You know,
• 44:10
  it's this, it's very, it's very into using technology and in ways that is not, is not exactly a kingdom cultural way to do it. Right. So that, that I think is where we're going to see attempts at creating durable cultures that are going to be, they're going to sound like very pro children and, you know, trying to reverse this trend, but are not aligned with the kingdom at all. So yeah, it's going to be an interesting collision between these worlds. Yeah, Chris. Yeah. I,
• 44:38
  can't help but comment as a military guy, the way that this is all kind of coming into mind for me is almost like waves of an assault in a war, right? And so as we're talking about this, you know, all these interconnected topics, you've got going back to what Grant said, it's like Genesis 128, that's our blueprint. And all the things that we look at that are issues right now are just assaults on that. We've got the sexual revolution, we've got LGBTQ, we've got
• 45:05
  This attack on fatherhood and on population, all of this is actually just an assault on that blueprint and framework. And it's all so connected. And that's why 65% of households, I think, are going to have children that spend some or all of their childhood without their father in the U.S.,
• 45:27
  You know, the numbers are just getting astronomical and they're all interconnected. Most of the issues we have in society can root back to father issues. It's just like when you paint the whole picture and you start having these conversations with a bunch of guys that like talking about this stuff, it becomes so crystal clear.
• 45:46
  Yep, very much, man. All right, I'm gonna change subject. We're gonna look at a conversation that was had between, this is David French and Sky Jitani. Curious what your guys' thoughts are on this one. So let me pull this up.
• 46:01
  ran into the writings of a German social psychologist named Arnold Galen. And he wrote, interestingly, about what gives rise to fundamentalism. So the context of this is that question, why is fundamentalism growing? This is actually, from a trend perspective, something I don't think I was really aware of. I mean, I know that there have been
• 46:19
  like the mainline denominations have been falling off for years. And so it's, it's, it's inevitable that if there, if religion is going to grow, it's going to have happened through, through more of a fundamentalist lens. But Sky is about to unpack a reason for, for it. The theory, the guy he just quoted, I don't think I've ever heard before. And so let me share a little bit about his take. I mean,
• 46:38
  get your response to it. He argued that fundamentalism was essentially the inevitable outcome of consumer capitalism, which sounds weird, but here's why. So his framework is that every society has what he described as foreground and background decisions.
• 46:56
  So foreground decisions are the decisions that an individual consciously makes for himself or herself. Like, you know, you got up today and decided to wear a black shirt and a black hat. Like you you made that decision. It was you didn't think much about it, but you did it. You made a decision to become a lawyer, journalist, whatever. Those are foreground decisions that we make. Background decisions, he says, are decisions that essentially the society makes for you. So you never even think about them. They're just in the background.
• 47:25
  And he says what consumer capitalism does is it's constantly taking background decisions and moving them into the foreground. I'll give you an unoffensive example. You know, back in the day when Henry Ford started manufacturing the Model T, famously, you could get it in any color you wanted as long as it was black. Yeah.
• 47:44
  Because the mass production thing, they couldn't do multiple colors. And then as time goes on, manufacturing becomes more common. Well, now we can offer 40 different colors of cars, whatever you want. Or there was a time when ordering a cup of coffee, you're old enough to remember this as I am, ordering a cup of coffee, there were very few decisions involved.
• 48:02
  It was regular or decaf cream and sugar. That was it. Now you go into a Starbucks and there's like, you know, an infinite permutation of coffee options because that's what consumer capitalism does. It gives people more and more and more choice because it's a way of rewarding their individuality.
• 48:21
  So what he says is this then floods over into other areas of life. There's this thing known as the tyranny of choice. Like when you go to, if you've been to like a cheesecake factory restaurant,
• 48:33
  Oh, yeah. You know their menu? There's nine things I like on it, and there's 95 things on the menu. But the menu is a book with, like, chapters. Oh, yeah, yeah. Thousands, it seems like, of options there. And you're paralyzed by all the options in front of you, whereas it's almost easier ordering it at Chipotle where there's, like, four options, and that's what you get, and off you go. So the problem with all this, he says, is as you flood more and more and more choices into the foreground that used to be in the background, some people become overwhelmed by it.
• 49:03
  maybe more dangerous examples. When you and I were growing up, it never occurred for most children to ask themselves, am I really a boy or a girl?
• 49:13
  Right. Now, a tiny percentage of people probably did struggle with that question who have gender dysphoria, but it wasn't a question that most children asked. Every kid in America today at some age is consciously asking themselves, what gender am I? Or when we were young, it never occurred to me as well, what is the definition of marriage? The society just agreed on what marriage was.
• 49:35
  And now every single person has to consciously decide for themselves. What do I think marriage is? Is marriage between only a man and a woman? Could it be same gender? Could it be multiple people? All right. So, man, this is an interesting theory. I just like had me spinning and I was curious what your guys' thoughts are on this. But basically what, you know, this person, I can't remember the name of the guy this guy is quoting, but.
• 49:55
  But the idea here is that people need to basically live their life according to a fairly simple blueprint that makes some of the largest decisions in life for them, that kind of clarifies what the good life looks like, how to get it, and that if you flood people with enormous amounts of choice, you know,
• 50:13
  then one of the reactions to that is going to be fundamentalism. They're going to lurch for a more, a simple blueprint, something they could just like hold onto that gives them clarity and removes a lot of these decisions for them. I don't know if this is a good theory or not. I just had me spinning about what, like I do think that it's worth thinking
• 50:35
  asking what happens in society where we take all the most fundamental elements of society and for the sake of freedom begin to say everything's up for grabs do people suddenly become more free or
• 50:48
  very counterintuitively, do they start to look for a kind of fundamentalism, something that will eliminate choice. So yeah, I'm curious, any thoughts that answers up for you guys? I really resonated a lot with this outlook. I think that one of the things that...
• 51:05
  most motivates fundamentalism is just the emotion of fear and kind of just the idea of, oh, the world is big and bad out there, and I need to cling to what is the right thing that I cannot be threatened by. And this idea of choice being a threat of sorts
• 51:23
  and that there's suddenly so much shakier ground on which to build, I think makes a lot of sense. And I personally feel like in terms of what does this mean for how we live our lives, I think that one of the unique challenges of the time we live in is that we have so much access to so much information and different views and perspectives that it forces us to kind of level up as a critical thinker in certain ways to really grapple with what is it that...
• 51:52
  one is going to believe and and commit oneself to and uh like at a certain level you kind of just have to pick some pick where you're going to build your foundation and stuff but i mean frankly just transparently even in the last year and a half a lot of the ideas that you've exposed me to jeremy have kind of made me step back and like hmm
• 52:11
  I don't know. I think I think I need to rethink some things. And it's like, I'm still very much in active rebuild mode from that. But it's a much less comfortable place to be than just kind of, oh, I've got all my beliefs in a ducks in a row and everything's where it should be. But I think it's ultimately a better place to live is where one has more certainty to what one really believes because one is like questioned all the way down to the root. But it's certainly an unsettling place to be as well.
• 52:37
  And getting down, yeah, it's tough if our expectation is to have a world in which everyone has to basically construct their reality from first principles and that there's no blueprints from which they can really help them make these big picture decisions. I remember hearing one person describe what life was like in kind of a hunter-gatherer world. They're like, you could get married at...
• 52:55
  as a 13 year old man, because basically you by that time had all of the skills that you needed to survive and know how to make reasonably wise decisions for for a family by that time in your life. Whereas by the time somebody turns 25, it's like they're just getting started and.
• 53:15
  And it's getting more complicated. It's like, and the reality is that you have to make so many decisions by the time you reach that stage that it was probably going to begin to really shove your life in a certain direction. I mean, watching my kids, you know, facing the kind of decisions at 18, 19, 20, 21, I'm just like, wow.
• 53:36
  their level of wisdom and information that you need to have for the kinds of decisions you're making at that stage in your life are immense, you know. And so now we're having this, we're thrusting, you know, in some cases, we're asking five-year-olds, you know, to decide what gender they want to be.
• 53:53
  I mean, I don't think I have the wisdom to know that as a 49-year-old. I mean, that's an incredibly complex decision. I use every bit of my biblical knowledge, every bit of my experience as a father, every bit of my intelligence, everything I've learned about patterns and realities to try to figure out what does that even mean?
• 54:12
  And to think that a five-year-old is going to be, and that we're going to follow their lead. There's something so strange about just the premises behind that idea. And if you ask, well, where did that come from? Why do we suddenly think that's a good idea? The reason has to be because there's this idolatry about freedom, right? This idea in a society in which every other value is up for grabs. The one value is as Western Americans or as Westerners,
• 54:37
  We can all agree is good all the time. We just need more of it. And the more we get, the better off we are is freedom, like more freedom, more liberty. Give that five-year-old all the freedom they want. That's what's going to cause them to thrive. And this is this sort of this value that in balance with all of the values has so much going for it. But to put it at the very top of the hierarchy, it creates this bizarre culture that
• 55:01
  of, you know, all kinds of problems that we're just going to begin to see erupt. It's not always good to have more choice. It's not always good to have more freedom, but that's anathema to a culture in which it has collectively decided that that's the highest value in the hierarchy. Go ahead, Chris. Yeah, the gender piece is really interesting because like one of the things that jumped out to me that he mentioned was just the phrase rewarding individuality.
• 55:25
  And I think it points us back to the incentive conversation with Zuby earlier. Like, what are we making cool? And like what we incentivize, we then get more of. And the only way to reward individuality is to expand the spectrum of
• 55:41
  of things that could make you more individual. So we're creating like this plethora of choice. So we have this embedded system that is like, it can't stop as long as individuality or another way to say that freedoms are like the driver of it, right? This'll continue the cycle. And then the other kind of offshoot to this, just a more of a observation that I haven't fully thought through, but how this impacts the church is,
• 56:11
  I just think about like this idea of fundamentalism versus like liberty of choice, like, and how different denominations and the church as a whole has kind of done this back and forth with some of that. And I'd love to think more about that and talk more about that, too. It's been very confusing to me because if I go into a church and I go into a lot of different churches to talk about family.
• 56:32
  And it's really interesting. You know, I just got this email just a couple days ago. Could you please describe like, how are you going to present family in a way that's not going to make single parents feel marginalized? Could you explain how you're going to, how are you going to present family in a way that that makes single people not feel marginalized? How are you going to describe, I mean, these are, these are the most pro family, the people that are investing a lot. They're like, please, you know, family teams come out and do a workshop at our church.
• 56:57
  You know, in other churches that are I've had other I have friends who lead churches who have, you know, have made clear that they would never have someone like me on their stage because of not not not not because they disagree with anything that that I say or anything that we represent a family teams but purely because of the of the.
• 57:16
  the narrowness of talking about family in that large of a public arena is uncool and will cause people to feel marginalized just by talking about family in any kind of blueprint way, any kind of way to suggest that there's an expectation for the kind of family that might actually lead to more flourishing. And of course, that's what I'm constantly trying to understand is, does the Bible give us a blueprint for a kind of family? Right?
• 57:43
  man, that's a very disturbing idea for a lot of people. And I think that what I've concluded is that that choice that you want to have this, I think it was the very first line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. He says something like, that every happy family is very similar, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It's like, basically there is a commonality to what creates a flourishing family, Tolstoy is saying.
• 58:13
  And that there is a million ways to break that. And what I was really frustrated with as a young man was nobody was willing to stand up and tell me what that way was. Like that was such a difficult thing for people to be willing to do in the church, to your point, Chris. Like the church felt like we have to resist saying that because the culture has concluded that freedom is this highest value. And so they're gonna walk in and they're gonna hear what to them just feels judgy. Talking about family feels judgy.
• 58:42
  feels very judgy, feels very narrow. And I understand that. I think there's a legitimacy to that concern. It's just that I don't know that if given the kinds of
• 58:52
  cultural diseases we're facing, if that reaction is actually serving us well anymore, or whether or not we need to be honest about, yeah, there's an ideal kind of family. To me, the place that really typifies this idea is the existence of the royal family, particularly in England. And the idea behind having a symbolic royal family was really interesting. It was sort of like presenting to the whole culture, right?
• 59:19
  You know, the whole British empire. Hey, guys, there's an ideal to family. We're all trying to get there. There's a queenliness to being a mother. There's a kingliness to being a father. There's a princeliness and an inheritance that comes from being children in a family like that. And so you create this symbolic ideal. And we all know that there's all kinds of crap going on behind the scenes, right? Who knows what that family is really like?
• 59:41
  But when they get to when they're in public, they dress up, they look amazing. And we spend millions of dollars in tax money trying to prop them up and make them look amazing so that we all agree that wouldn't you know, that's kind of what we're all shooting for. And we basically have spent the last, you know, especially 20 years just like ripping to shreds that ideal. Right. This this show like a Netflix called The Crown, which just is like, let me show you like, guys, it's all fake.
• 1:00:05
  There's just like, there's nothing behind there. There's their real family, just like the rest of us. They fight just like the rest of us. They, they have marital problems. I think what's really weird. This is, is that guys, we knew that we knew that there was something. Nobody was, nobody thought that the facade was, was real. Nobody who really thought about it.
• 1:00:26
  What we needed was the ideal symbol. We needed that symbol. And now, thank you very much, you've ripped it to shreds. And so now we don't have anything to aim at. Now there is no symbolic ideal. Now nobody who's raising a family, no father feels like he's moving towards this kingly thing that he can see and that he has seen expressed or experienced. And so we're now untethered, unmoored in a sea of confusion, trying to figure out how do we...
• 1:00:54
  tack our way, how do we navigate towards an ideal? And who's willing to talk about that? We don't even want people to get behind pulpits and talk about ideal, an ideal when it comes to family. And so you've created the lack of judgment that people really do enjoy of not having that ideal thrust in front of them. But then you've also taken all the rest of us and we can't navigate towards the good life. Like we don't know how to get there anymore.
• 1:01:23
  And this is an intractable problem. And I think a lot of people have even framed what it means to be like a gospel-oriented community as a community that refuses to talk about any ideals. There's this really interesting conversation going on around Tim Keller, who I have had a huge, he's had a huge impact on me. I've listened, I've spent hundreds of hours listening to Keller sermons. I've read most of his books. But one of the things that has been discussed lately about Keller's legacy is,
• 1:01:50
  is that his decision to frame the gospel in such a way that we always sort of expose kind of what's lacking in the conservative way of thinking in a way, and then sort of subtly lift up the opportunities or good elements of sort of the left's culture, that this is a way of sort of gospel in a community. And there's some legitimacy to that. But I do think that I never really heard
• 1:02:14
  Keller, in all the hundreds of hours I've listened to him, lift up an ideal of family. He seemed very reticent to talk about the way he raised his sons. And he talked about his marriage, which was really, you know, The Meaning of Marriage is a really good book.
• 1:02:29
  There's some things I didn't like about it, but by and large, it was the thing, the things that I always felt most frustrated by were the things that were left unsaid about the family. And, you know, he was in a very particular culture in New York where I think people were pushing really hard into.
• 1:02:44
  this freedom value we've been talking about. And I think that he was trying to like tack closer to the culture and bring them into the gospel. But in doing that, because he was so famous, so popular, and so many people were listening to, especially Christian pastors through the gospel coalition, that there was, I think a real decision made by so many people to, to try to strategically avoid having these conversations about the ideal family.
• 1:03:09
  And, and, and man, I'm like, what do we do with this question? I am very interested in trying to understand how to, how to figure this out. But I do think we haven't figured it out. Go ahead, Grant. Can I add one more thing? I would say it's not just the family, it's anything where there isn't an ideal based on biblical blueprints.
• 1:03:28
  It's like anything that there's an ideal that culture has a differing perspective on, we have suddenly lost the ability to have a conversation about and frame out what the ideal is. I saw just yesterday a tweet, I think, from a guy who's same-sex attracted, but he grew up in a church that gave him the truth about sexuality. And he was so thankful. And he's like...
• 1:03:54
  Here's why I'm incredibly grateful and why I see such a travesty in the church right now with how they're addressing this topic, even as somebody who currently at this moment still struggles with these things, you know, from an internal, not an action-oriented perspective. So, yeah, I think the church could grow in this a little bit. Yeah, I was just going to react a little bit to the original question.
• 1:04:17
  video, the thing that really jumped out at me, or maybe what it stirred up, brought to mind, was this thing called the Strauss-How generational theory. I don't know if you guys are familiar with it, but it's this, I'm not saying I conform to this idea. I was only introduced a couple weeks ago, but it says that every four generations,
• 1:04:33
  Well, basically, there's every four generations, a society turns over. And it goes through these cycles. And it's specifically in Western, in the Western world, not in the world as a whole. And so, you know, some examples, recent examples would be Great Depression, World War II, before that, the Civil War. And essentially what they say is there's this cycle of kind of high times. From there, you go to what they call awakening. From there, you go to unraveling. And then you ultimately end in crisis.
• 1:05:02
  And they actually wrote a whole book. They're saying we're in crisis right about now. So it'll be interesting to see if it plays out the way. Like you said, Jeremy, this is a theory. And we'll see if it continues. Because Western history has been so short compared to history as a whole. But it really stirred up for me. Yeah, there's a couple different kind of versions of that. But those are the archetypes. But they have... Hero, artist. Yeah, those are... Yeah, they have kind of the archetypes. That's for like people in the generations. But even bigger than that is...
• 1:05:32
  you know, rebirth, awakening, unraveling crisis. And they basically say that as freedom happens through awakening and then ultimately unraveling, unraveling is where most of those freedom choices take place, where the fundamentals kind of fall away. And this really emphasizes choice that ultimately ends in crisis, which then everybody rejects. And then it comes to a reset.
• 1:05:57
  if that makes sense. And so I was just introduced to this recently. I've been kind of studying it a little, just thinking through, is this biblical? Does this make sense? But, but with what we're talking about, it makes sense like from a comparison of Western versus even Eastern thinking that fundamentally when those big questions are answered for you, you actually don't go through these, these same swings. And I thought it was just such an interesting idea of background ideas coming to the foreground and,
• 1:06:25
  and the overwhelming of choices. And, you know, I think the word that most of us are familiar with is like decision fatigue. And my wife tells me all the time, I don't I don't want to decide. You decide. I already have a million choices in front of me. And
• 1:06:39
  you know, it's a lot more than we've ever had in the past. And so anyways, it made me think about this, something that I want to explore more, just put it before you to read through. But as I've been thinking about it scripturally, I've been thinking about like Deuteronomy 5, Numbers 12, where it talks about how the sins of the fathers, the iniquity of the fathers are visited to the third and on the third and fourth generation to the third and fourth generation. And I was just thinking when I heard about this theory, I was like, kind of makes sense that every four generations things would...
• 1:07:08
  do this from a scriptural standpoint. And so I've just been mulling that over. And, you know, in the hope on the other side of that through the gospels that, you know, it's to a thousand generations for those who love him, you know, Deuteronomy five, it's specifically framed around idolatry. And so just thinking about, you know, kind of these principles of reaping and sowing. And as we sow these things, what we're going to reap is inevitable.
• 1:07:28
  So that's kind of what it stirred up for me. It's interesting because, yeah, you do want to ask, like, if this is a cycle, it is interesting to think about, man, yeah, saying that the cycle is a description of what God is describing there in Exodus, as opposed to the way he designed the world.
• 1:07:47
  He's like, no, no, no, I didn't design the world to go in this endless cycle where it takes three or four generations to get out. I designed the world for you to create these a thousand generations of those who love me and serve me and follow me. But you have to follow the blueprint that I've given you. You have to decide to obey and submit to the design that I, as the creator, have given you and the revelation that I have that I've given you. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
• 1:08:15
  One thing that's interesting is a lot of like white right-wing fundamentalists adhere to this theory and push it, which is kind of funny as we're talking about how this creates fundamentalism. Yeah. Like push it as a theory that they believe or one that they actually are actively using in some way. Yeah. So I think it's Steve Bannon is a huge proponent of this. He even created a whole documentary about it. I've been planning on watching it. I haven't got to it yet. Just to
• 1:08:39
  I've just been really curious about this idea as I've been introduced to it. And, you know, it's kind of the doomsday narrative. And they're saying here, it's been happening. It's going to happen again. This is where we are. So they're using it to push forward a fundamentalist ideology. Yeah, you don't have to think about that anymore. Look at where thinking gets us in the past. It ends in war. It ends in depression. It ends in issues and crisis. Let's get out in front of this thing. I'm not saying that I agree that that's happening or that's going to work, but that's kind of the idea.
• 1:09:07
  Yeah. The explanatory power of this and what, what, because the power seems to be in the productive force. It's like, oh, we can see where this is going. The generation that we're about to give birth to is going to have this kind of reaction. So how does that, if this theory is accurate, how does that create what we're going to choose to do? All right. Last one, guys. So I wanted to do something that was more on the business side that we could, we could look at. And then, and there's, I've been thinking a lot about a lot of people that I know, a lot of people that have been trying to build assets for their family have,
• 1:09:37
  have been really bullish on Airbnb as I was. So there was a discussion I wanted to play for you guys and talk about that a little bit. Finding with Airbnb is there's a lot of controversy with Airbnb, whether that be taking off the market, driving up the housing, but you are competing almost with hotels. So you're a competitor to Airbnb. What are your thoughts on that? There's a certain market of people that like Airbnbs. Unfortunately,
• 1:10:01
  I do a lot of consulting and a lot of people have been calling me lately, unfortunately, saying, hey, they bought Airbnbs and their rights to rent them were taken away by the local municipalities. I mean, they're ruined. They overpaid for the property. It's not worth it. So they're buying these properties. I thought a lot of the Airbnbs are just subleasing.
• 1:10:21
  They lease from the landlord and then put it on Airbnb and profit the difference. But to buy an Airbnb is stupid. A lot of people bought them. Condos, a lot of people bought houses. And now...
• 1:10:32
  Listen, you're running an Airbnb, you're running a little mini hotel, you know, and it all depends, you know, are you running it? Is there a host running it? You know, there's still a lot of work to be done. The money you're making on Airbnb you're earning. If you're the one renting them out and coordinating with the guests and getting the cleaning done and getting the repairs done, you know, if it's not, there's a cost to paying somebody. Listen, everything can work if you buy something right. You gotta buy it at the right price. Buy things at the right price and you should always be successful.
• 1:11:01
  So, you know, but Airbnb, I think it had its big boom. It's still going to always be around. And it took a lot of money out of the hotel business. That's a fact. Okay. But I think it's gone down. So, and you gotta be very careful in investing in them. So what do you, so I was interested in character. Yes, it's excellent. So this, I'm very interested in any kind of asset class that a family can get into and begin to, to build something that they can own. And I found Airbnb is to be.
• 1:11:31
  You know, once there's a technology or even a trend in society that suddenly shifts, what I've noticed is that there's an opportunity, you know, for five, it's like five or 10 year opportunity to rush in and really profit from that and build assets and really...
• 1:11:47
  Part of what I really want to encourage families to do is to escape the middle class, because I think the middle class is going to continue to shrink and you're going to, you're going to go one direction or the other. And I'd love to see kingdom households build, build assets and, and really get, get ahold of resources so they can have more, more children and more, more options and be able to, to, to do more ministry and, and create the kind of family culture that they believe that, that they want, that God wants them to have. But
• 1:12:12
  So the Airbnbs, one of these I was interested in is, are we starting to pass that five to 10 year trend? Are we beyond its peak Airbnb? I remember the first time, I don't know when, I think the first time I rented my whole house out.
• 1:12:33
  This is before Airbnb. I rented my house out on BRBO. It must've been like 15 years ago, maybe more than that. And man, it was crazy. Like we were just, we just booked up the entire summer. I mean, it was like, there was just so little supply, so much demand, but it does seem like something is shifting. I don't know if you guys have noticed this. So yeah. Have you guys had any thoughts about, about this asset class and what are your, what are your, what do you, how would you process this one?
• 1:12:58
  Yeah, I mean, I'll just say that I don't have experience in this space, but I definitely have been a little bit wary of it because of how much I've seen different gurus and everybody talking about it and offering coaching on it on all this sort of thing like it's just clearly, I think that I saw some numbers on it at some point that are not fresh on my mind but.
• 1:13:19
  some pretty significant percentage of Airbnb listings now are run by investors. So the way I see it is like, you probably can still make money in this industry, but it seems like it's gotten a lot harder and it's a lot more competitive and there are people doing it professionally. And so I think if you're just getting into it now, it seems like kind of a tougher thing to break into and there's more headwinds rather than tailwinds. But it also seems like there are
• 1:13:43
  ways to leverage it. Like another thing I've seen is people have offered services to Airbnb owners. And so that's kind of another potential way that depending on what it is might be a little less competitive or something like that. So I sort of feel similar to the guy in the video that it seems like there's probably still juice to squeeze there, but it's a lot harder to get it now.
• 1:14:03
  Yeah, it makes sense. Hey, Chris, great. You guys have any thoughts on this one? Yeah, I have thoughts. Always have thoughts on real estate. So just for a little background, my family is, my grandparents have a real estate business that my parents bought from them. And so I've been around it my whole life, had my real estate license in college.
• 1:14:18
  been around rentals my entire life. And the way I look at this, as I was listening to this, I thought it was very interesting. One of the things that jumped out at me is what, was there's just some wisdom in there on pricing. Anything makes sense at the right price, right? But kind of my big takeaway is that the markets that matter are saturated and the ones that became really saturated are now losing the right to do business. I think for me, it actually stirred up a ton of like government overreach feelings.
• 1:14:45
  And man, this doesn't, you can take away my livelihood with one law. And if you can do that with my house, what else can you do that with? It brings a ton of just thoughts there. But one of my thoughts was, I have some friends that really, when they look at it, when they're looking for property, it's not that they're trying to buy an Airbnb, they're trying to buy a property that has an Airbnb element to it.
• 1:15:05
  So, you know, a garage apartment, a tiny house about part of the land or, you know, I think that's still a really great opportunity that makes sense and works. But you have to do it in mind recognizing, hey, there's some sweeping kind of changes happening in the nation with zoning laws, with all these things that could pull this at any second. And so when you think about it from that way, you can plan accordingly.
• 1:15:29
  The other idea I would think, at least from trying to figure out a price standpoint, is do you know the market for regular rent and buy it like that and then test it? I was an Airbnb, right? Like real estate is still a great asset. Rentals are an amazing asset and they're not pulling away your rights to rent your home as a normal asset, as a normal lease. And so thinking through like maybe that's the strategy moving forward of, hey, I'm going to buy regular, you know.
• 1:15:56
  what's my cap rate on this rental and then move forward based on that and then test out the market.
• 1:16:03
  from an Airbnb standpoint. And if it ever goes away, I'm not totally hung out to dry. Yeah. It's interesting because I think the part of what's happened is as areas have gotten saturated, the actual quality of Airbnb has had to go up and up and up and up and the level of rehab and the amount of amenities that some places are offering really take it way outside of the ability to actually cashflow it as a regular long-term rental.
• 1:16:28
  Because I think that's always the best case scenario. If you've got multiple ways to make money on this property, then you're way more protected. But if you go all the way onto one and there's one law or
• 1:16:39
  you know, somebody, some big investor comes in and buys 18, you know, different houses and starts to rehab them and make them amazing. And now you're trying to like rent out your place and your vacancies just for this. This is what happened in Orlando. It was crazy. Like the, the, every, every new vacation rental development is, you know, twice as good as the last one they built from terms of like dollar per value you're getting. And
• 1:17:00
  I'm just like, I saw some of the ones that were built like 20 years ago. I'm like, oh man, these, these investors are getting crushed, you know? And that's, that's part of what, yeah, I think you have to be really careful. If, if, if it's got to do amazing for 20 years for this to, to really make sense, then you need to be really careful on an investment like this. That's definitely appears to either be plateauing or on the decline. Any last thing on this one?
• 1:17:22
  My other thought is it's never a better time to stay in one because the prices are coming down. That's right. Yeah. Yes. You can negotiate with these people because they might be a little desperate at these moments. Yeah. Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you guys so much for jumping on this today. This has been a really fun conversation. They'll round up. You guys appreciate having people to really process things together with. And I love getting to do this with you guys. So yeah, thanks for doing this with me today. Super fun. Thanks, Jeremy. Yeah, very fun, Jeremy. Thanks.
• 1:17:54
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