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Has Technology CONQUERED The American Family? · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  There's a deep-seated mentality that's wrong, in my opinion, that all technology is morally neutral. I think that's a fundamentally flawed assumption. All technology has some motive behind it. Just to say that technology is a tool, you can use it for good or you can use it for bad, is a very naive way to approach technology. There's going to be some kind of exit that families will have to take unless they want to continue going down this road.
• 0:26
  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.
• 0:44
  Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I'm here once again, my friend Rory Groves. Rory, I'm really excited about this new project you guys are kicking off and I want to hear all about it. It's on Kickstarter and we backed it, Henry and the Great Society. It's a book you guys are republishing. So kind of walk me through what the book's about and what motivates you guys to jump into this project.
• 1:06
  Yeah, certainly. Thanks again for having me back. It's good to be back on the show. Really appreciated. Since the last time I was on, we've heard from a lot of folks that were following along and building their own family economies. And so it's been really neat. And I appreciate you just allowing me to be a guest on the show. Absolutely.
• 1:23
  So, you know, just kind of taking it from the top, this book, it was originally written several decades ago. I think it was about it was over 50 years ago that originally came out and it's kind of fallen out of print. You can find used copies here and there and things like that. And so it was it's kind of one of those books lost to time. But the book Henry and the Great Society is just in a nutshell. It's about a farm family that's in roughly kind of the mid 20th century. So like the 40s, 50s.
• 1:51
  And this is just about the time where, you know, America is modernizing, of course. And all of the modern conveniences that we're used to today, all the electricity, the plumbing, the gadgets, the automobiles, the paved roads, all of these things that we just kind of take for granted today, we're just beginning to make entrances into some of the more remote, rural locations of America.
• 2:17
  And so this story is a, it's a fictional story, but it's a true to life, you know how that is, of kind of an author's recounting of his own experience growing up as modern times, modern conveniences begin to make their way into.
• 2:34
  And it describes how this family is impacted one little convenience at a time. And not only this family, and they're a Fitz, you know, something like a Fitz generation farm family that...
• 2:49
  always had everything they ever needed right on the farm and had done so for, you know, going back as far back as this author could remember. But the whole community is fascinating to see how small little enhancements in technology and in convenience and in money and what it did to a whole community and really, um,
• 3:11
  began to, it came in on the promise of how much their lives could be improved if they would adopt these new things. But really what ended up happening is it was robbing these families and this community of the relational types of integrity and the bonds and the truly valuable things that make life meaningful in exchange for relationships.
• 3:36
  you know, stuff. It's kind of like, it's the essence. So, I mean, even me describing it this far, here we are, we're a family. We moved to a farm 13 years ago. We started building a home economy. I started involving my family. We started inviting others and we're like, Hey, you know, this simpler life, there's actually a lot here. And yeah, it's not necessarily a materialistic life. It's not, um, there's not gobs of money waiting for you on the farm, but there's something else that's really valuable. Yeah.
• 4:05
  And the way it brought our family together has been, you know, our heart cry since the beginning, since we've been trying to share this aspect of a simpler life with folks. And so when you get right, when I came across the story, it was essentially...
• 4:23
  Like, this is what we were trying to communicate to people of how could how could we order our lives and our families, our professions? You know, my main focus is on a professional life that involves your family, the family economy. How could we do it in such a way that that builds up families, not just make it about the paycheck or the status? And and I know a lot of people, you know, they don't just want to make it about the paycheck. I get that.
• 4:49
  But if you read an account of what it was like before all of this modern encroachment, it's a very sobering story. And it really makes not just us think, but we've come into contact with so many other families that have either read of it or heard of it or we shared it with them. And it really made a deep impact on their families to consider the impact that technology is having and that modern conveniences were having.
• 5:18
  Uh, and undoing the things that really brought life meaning in the first place. So that's, that's kind of the initial, um, what the story is about. I don't want to give away the plot too much, but it's a, it's a cautionary tale is how I would describe it. And it's one of those things when you read it, you realize you see yourself in the story and you realize just how much you've been caught up in a lot of this as well. Hmm.
• 5:42
  Yeah, I love those stories that take us into an inflection point. In the past, when a generation had to make a decision to go one way or the other, we are the recipients of their decision to go one way. Exactly. And we were born in their world, and we don't remember, or we weren't a part of, we didn't get a vote on the decision or the fork they decided to take. And so the only way to go back to that fork in the road,
• 6:08
  usually is just to go through kind of a historical archaeology. Like, you got to go back to the past. There's a couple of shows that I think of that are of this vein. So, you know, Downton Abbey, a lot of people are watching that. That's like this inflection point right before World War I when...
• 6:24
  you know, the, the UK was going through this crazy inflection point between kind of the, the ancient world of the aristocracy and these different class systems that they had in England and then, and what they have today, which is totally different, but it was really that moment where a lot of that stuff was being sorted out. There's also a movie, uh,
• 6:40
  I don't know if you've ever seen this one, Rory. It's called Avalon. It's a fantastic movie about this inflection point that happened. An immigrant family that comes to the United States, they are totally a multi-generational family. They're all working together. And then you watch over the course of about 50 years, the generations just kind of dissolve as they bring in TVs into their home and they start adopting all these technologies. Yeah.
• 7:03
  And it's a sad story, but it's also a great movie. If anybody hasn't watched it, I highly recommend it. Just it's a great discussion point. And so, yeah, I find these really interesting. So these inflection points and you've got Henry the Great. And I'm kind of curious about the title. Why does he call it The Great Society? What is that referring to there?
• 7:21
  So, so that's good. And by the way, that, that story you said with Avalon, I haven't seen the movie, but it sounds like it's a very similar premise of how some of these things came in and kind of, uh, um, ended up replacing something that was better, um, on the, on the promise of being better, of being the good things in life. But to that point, Henry's name, the main character in the book, who's, he's the father of this farm family. And, um, uh, yeah.
• 7:47
  He's experiencing the slow and gradual changes of modernity. And so the Great Society is kind of a term for just all of the 20th century innovations that came into really a simple, self-sufficient way of life that had been the normal way of life for the previous 400 years in American history.
• 8:12
  And so that's what it's just kind of a general term for, you know, the great society. All, you know, all of the modern conveniences and advances and automobiles replacing your horses and buggy and tractors replacing, you know, the plow horse and TV is replacing story time around the fire with mom and dad. These you can kind of get a sense of it. It was all of it happening all at once all across America.
• 8:41
  Again, when you see it and you begin to evaluate your own life against it. Now, we're here, and this is what I've said, is that this author was a prophet. I mean, when he was saying these things, they were happening. They had just finished happening. He wrote the book, was originally published in the 60s. So it was very recent memory, and everyone reading it would have seen themselves in it. But now we're 50 years later. Yeah.
• 9:04
  And none of those promises of the great society have come true. We're now deeper into this immersive tech world and social media. And we have, you know, all of these maladies of mental health issues and people are more isolated. I mean, it speaks very profoundly to our situation. Yeah.
• 9:25
  And what I like about the book and what really gave us—so when I came across it, I felt like, well, first of all, I would love to share this book with everyone that we're connected with because it's Gather and Grow. Our ministry is about reversing these trends. These are the problems that we're trying to address is the fragmentation of the family.
• 9:47
  And so I felt like this would be the perfect tool to put into people's hands to just to do that, to begin the conversation of how do we how do we recognize the kind of snares that we've become accustomed to, but also what do we do about it?
• 10:02
  You know, the book, it doesn't really answer that question. It's a story. And everyone's story is going to be different of how you find your way out of, you know, exodus, if you will. There's going to be some kind of exit that families will have to take unless they want to continue going down this road.
• 10:20
  And so one of my desires was to add a chapter to the end of the book, like add an afterword, and begin to share some of the things that people are doing and what we're doing in order to try to give people some practical steps to begin reversing these trends. So it's both a tool for conversations, but also I really am hoping that it will begin to give people some hope for the future if they can begin to take some serious steps and be inspired by what other families are doing. Awesome.
• 10:50
  Man, so needed. Well, I think it'd be good to go maybe a layer deeper into the problem. So let's get a little more depressed before we talk about solutions. By the way, if you guys aren't, there's a Kickstarter. You can go to Kickstarter or go to gatherandgrow.us if you want to back. That's right.
• 11:07
  Henry the Great Society and get this beautiful book that's coming out in the spring. So we backed it. We're so excited to see this come out. I cannot be more pumped about a project like this because this is, these are the kinds of stories that people really need to heighten their intuitions. But I want to talk to you and ask you, Rory, about this. There is an intuition that I don't, I'm trying to understand the root of it. And that is.
• 11:31
  The intuition that you're describing that sort of says, hey, isn't a car just a faster, like faster than the horse? Or isn't, you know, you look at any convenience that we have that we experience and just say,
• 11:48
  Oh, it's solving, you know, the telephone is solving a problem of, of like letter writing. And then the email is solving their problems. It's just a better, it's a, you know, it's a better way to communicate. Everything's just better. It just, our intuition is it's faster. It's more convenient. Therefore it's better. Like, so we have that deep intuition. And so it doesn't matter how bad things get. People always seem to think, well, we just need an even more advanced technology. Yeah.
• 12:14
  Like that, that, that, where does that intuition come from? That, that, and what are we missing when we, is there any way to like, kind of,
• 12:23
  sort of put a new intuition into our, into our minds to help us evaluate these technologies that are coming at us? Could we just swallow them wholesale because it seems like, oh, it's a, you know, it's a dishwasher. Everything makes things faster and more convenient. Isn't that always better? How do we evaluate these things as they're coming online? So, I mean, I'm glad you asked that question because that is this book. This is, this entire book is, is bringing that question up of evaluating the impact of, you know,
• 12:50
  technology and advancement and all of these kinds of things. Let me jump back and then I want to jump into the answer that. So we're doing you mentioned the Kickstarter. So what we're doing is we're doing a crowdfunding campaign to raise support to publish the book. But also, we felt this was the right time for us as a ministry to begin publishing more resources on this topic. And so we're this we're using this as an opportunity to start a publishing house with Gather and Grow. Oh.
• 13:15
  So that's the reason for doing it this way rather than just sending it off to the printer and having some copies of done up. We really want to begin a whole new facet of our ministry and begin to help families on a more practical level with this. So, but to answer that question, I think there's a deep-seated mentality that's wrong, in my opinion, that technology, all technology is morally neutral.
• 13:42
  I think that's a fundamentally flawed assumption. All technology came from somewhere. It came out of somebody's mind or some team of people's minds, and it has some motive behind it. So just to say that technology is a tool, you can use it for good or you can use it for bad, is a very naive way to approach technology. And I would say that's probably the first fundamental intuition that people have.
• 14:10
  Um, different authors have written quite eloquently on this. I mean, Wendell Berry, uh, Neil Postman amusing ourselves to death. He talks about the entrance of television and what that's done to society. I mean, fundamentally change the way that we communicate with each other as a society.
• 14:26
  And every one of these technologies is going to do something like that. So one of the things I think that's that's that's at the heart is we've been divided and conquered as a people. We used to make decisions as communities.
• 14:42
  We don't do that anymore. We make them as individuals. And without some kind of governing effect of a community, what kind of impact will bringing, say, a Walmart into a small town, what will that do to our town? For example, those are conversations that a lot of small towns used to have. Hardly anyone has that conversation anymore. It's just kind of taken for granted. Well, Walmart's bigger, cheaper, faster. It's better. Therefore, it's better.
• 15:11
  Well, it's better if you measure one metric, which is the bank account or cash flow or things like that. It's not necessarily better if you measure things like the relationships inside of a family or a social capital in a community of people depending on multiple different businesses and business owners and supporting each other for a way of life. If you measure things besides just the profit or the economics of it,
• 15:39
  Actually, I wouldn't even say economics because really relationships need to be considered in the economy. If we burn out all of our relationships, we will not have an economy in which to transact business. There has to be a basic level of mutual trust. So it's not it doesn't just reduce down to money. And I think that that's what has happened as we've begun to become more autonomous and individualized.
• 16:05
  Our consumer transition to from a producer society to consumer society. We're looking on very surface level preferences and everyone is marketed to on an individual level. So I think all of those things have culminated in the intuition that you're describing today is that we don't live as communities. We don't live as groups. We don't see ourselves as part of a group. We see ourselves as me, myself and I.
• 16:31
  And therefore, the quick calculation is the dollar at the bottom of the ledger. And that's about all that we go for. Okay. So, yeah, the idea that it's we've reduced to a single like major metric. And as long as that's going up, this is you can see this with nutrition, right? You're like, oh, as long as we get a calorie as cheap as we can get it, we can, you know, it doesn't matter the fact that we've just we've.
• 16:56
  There's all these nutrients, all these minerals are missing. We've reduced it to this one thing, and therefore, you know, it's good enough, and we can see what it's doing to our bodies. Well, there's something happening to our communities at level of reduction. There's something you said, though, that I don't think I've really explored much. You said we've been divided and conquered because...
• 17:14
  these decision-making bodies have ceased to function. And now we have been reduced to being individuals marketed to, and that has left us open to these communities that are out there, like very, very sophisticated teams, billions of dollars coming in. And it's like, it's just not a fair fight. Like they're coming in, the Walmart team is saying, we're going to put a Walmart here.
• 17:37
  They've got all this incentive. They've got their consultants. They've got their team. They're ready to rock. They're throwing money around. And there used to be, to face that, a fair fight between, okay, yeah, you've got your desires, what you want to do, but we have our community's plan and what we want to do. And it seems like, yeah, I'm curious how that has broken down. What used to exist that would have stopped this?
• 18:04
  uh, this kind of, um, thing from happening? What, what's the alternative vision and why is it that we fall prey so easily to being divided and conquered as individuals? Like you described, these are great questions. I really liked this podcast. Um, I'll just give you my, my opinion on that. Uh, the,
• 18:24
  You have to keep going back. The archaeology comes into play here. You have to keep digging deeper to another layer and say, how did we get here? We did not get here. This did not start in the 50s. I mean, advertising and earnest started probably in the 20s or so, the kind that we see today.
• 18:40
  This goes way back. And you've heard me write and talk about the Industrial Revolution. Yeah. And it really even goes back deeper than that. But let me touch on a couple of things. First of all, the role that the church plays in modern society is vastly reduced.
• 18:58
  vastly reduced 150, 200 years ago, the church community, whatever the community was, whatever the denomination was, it would have had a pivotal role in bringing thought leaders together to discuss and weigh these kinds of decisions. And I'll give you one example of that is we still have it around today, but that'd be the old order Amish and some of these Anabaptist communities. Yeah.
• 19:24
  They they do this still to this day. And now we look at them and say, well, for sure, they you know, they're way backwards and they're not. But I would I would wager if you go in and test, if you could measure the health of their relationships in their families and in their communities and hold that up against the typical American neighborhood. I think you'd see a pretty vast difference, even if we don't agree that, you know, they they should have electricity or something like that.
• 19:50
  But my point is, larger, is they take it seriously as a faith community. They have a reason, they have an ethic for why they're making the decisions that they're making. That used to be the case for all of America. Everyone belonged to some kind of community. Even if it wasn't a faith community, they had their local villages. And they made decisions together about these things. That was a natural firewall to some, you would never be in some corporation, you know, Lloyd's of London or something, wouldn't have been able to just come set up shop and,
• 20:20
  the Pilgrims Plymouth Colony. You know, none of that stuff could have happened unless it was something that was deemed a good for the whole community. What happened as we industrialized, it first started to impact the families, but it also impacted the communities because it began to individualize work.
• 20:39
  It no longer work was a team effort. It was an individual effort. We needed someone to pull this lever or to, you know, weave this loom or to whatever, you know, dig this coal. And it began to break down that mindset that life and production and work is supposed to be a community effort.
• 20:58
  You know, farming, we used to be farmers. So now 98 percent of the nation, more than that, probably aren't involved in agriculture at all. But we were at one point, we were like 90 percent of us were farming and farming is a very natural community type of vocation. I mean, you need help if you're farming.
• 21:18
  And it's very obvious that you depend on each other. Well, as our work changed, all of these things began to shift and change. And I think that's where it just was one long train from becoming a producer society to a consumer society, coming from a community-based sufficiency where you had to basically raise and produce everything you needed within a community, a village of people.
• 21:44
  To becoming, I'm just going to order it on Amazon and a drone's going to drop it off, you know, like in 24 hours. That is one long, continuous line. And I think it didn't happen with one thing, but I think it was a series of a million decisions in that direction. I see.
• 22:02
  Yeah. When I think about what happened, there's sort of like this perfect storm of things that occurred. The economic separation that you're describing, where these bonds, these natural bonds were dissolved, and now we're individual cogs. They get re-stitched into larger corporate machines, and this has really wreaked havoc. So there's the economic separation.
• 22:21
  There's a theological one that you described as well, that there was sort of an understanding that we existed in a theological community where let's have conversations. Even the word ekklesia was primarily used in Greek as a governmental body. And it seems like we sort of lost that part of what the church is all about, ekklesia being the Greek word for church.
• 22:41
  I'm curious what your thoughts are about the philosophical reasons, because there's one thing that every time I try to broach this topic, if you were to go to a group of people and say, hey, guys, look what's happening to us. We're being divided and conquered. And you can get you can convince them sometimes of the economic argument. Hey, guys, let's start to function more like a family team. Let's start to let's create an engine of economic productivity inside the family. We've we've.
• 23:04
  We've been successful having those conversations with some families. But I would say that what I slam up against, which is really, really hard to overcome, I'm curious what your thoughts are about this, is the philosophical assumption that freedom is the ultimate value and that anything that reduces personal individual freedom is just intuitively wrong.
• 23:22
  And that is so deep inside of the ethos of Western culture. And I'm curious how you work on that or how you collided with that because, you know, you have in the Constitution, you know, families never mentioned even a single time in the U.S. Constitution.
• 23:38
  We are seen or perceived as individuals by that document. And I think that over time, there has been this, the one value that we as Americans can all agree on is high. And I do think it's a high value is freedom. Freedom is very important. And our sort of national mythology is all obsessed with lifting up this single value.
• 24:00
  I think the problem is that even in the founding of America, if you were to ask most of the founding fathers, what is the highest value in your life, your family? I don't think they would have said freedom. I think freedom to them was something that was really important for the government to value so that we can get on doing the things that are really important to each of us, which to them were much more important. Their faith was way more important to most of them than...
• 24:22
  Then it's value freedom. But today it's the one thing that kind of stitches us together. And I think therefore, because we can agree on how it supports it somehow has, has like made its way up to hierarchy so that when you have these conversations and say, Hey, let's like fight the Walmart people like, well, no, no, no, that's a violation of freedom. Hey, let's, let's talk about like whether or not we should adopt this technology as a community. Well, who are you to say that?
• 24:45
  Even as a father, who are you to tell your kids what technologies they should adopt? And I think that intuition is sort of philosophical and it has become theological.
• 24:55
  It is. And I've got a great book for you to go look up. It's called Freedom is Killing Our Liberty by A.Z. Adams. But he makes this exact point, is that the founders vision for liberty, which is really what they were after, liberty, has to be sustained within some kind of moral, ethical framework.
• 25:19
  Otherwise, what you have is you have liberty devolving into pure freedom, which is libertinism, which is just everyone doing what is right in their own eyes. And you ultimately end up with the tyranny because you have a strong man that has to come forward and, you know, put down the law, lay down the law.
• 25:37
  And that you actually end up in captivity and bondage. And this has happened over and over again throughout history. And so that's the flaw is our idea in 2025 of freedom is not the founder's idea of liberty in 1789 or 1776.
• 25:56
  Just like our idea of of individuals has radically changed what what was written for our Constitution. They were always conceiving of families as units, as whole units, even if they didn't specify the word family. They were not speaking of individuals acting on their own accord. They were they were speaking of of families as the base of society and family units.
• 26:22
  Usually it was the father who would say vote on behalf or buy land, but it was always on behalf of the whole family. You only saw situations where women, for example, were involved in voting if they were not married because they could be landowners, but they could not split up the family unit. They had to be part of a small, you know, a miniature community called the family to participate in the larger society. So...
• 26:50
  I would just say that that's one thing. Our notions of freedom, freedom is not the ultimate goal. And it's certainly not the ultimate biblical ethic, right? It's freedom within the constraints of what is right and what is wrong. And so that traces back, really, if you want to get what's the philosophical underpinning, it's the great enlightenment. If you really want to go back, it's the great enlightenment. It's this idea that man is the measure of all things.
• 27:17
  And man will only be perfected when we remove all of this dogma. You know, Marx was big about that, you know, removing the church, removing all of this dogma that corrupts man and allow him to flourish in his natural state. That was, it wasn't, I think it was Descartes, but...
• 27:36
  Don't quote me on all the philosophers. I'm not. I'm not that. I just have read enough to know that it most of all of this that we're walking out right now started four or five hundred years ago. That influenced the founders quite a bit.
• 27:52
  But that was shortly before the French Revolution, where we saw what the logical end result of unrestrained, immoral man, what he can do to another man. And so we have the different founding because our country started with the framework of a Judeo-Christian ethic. So we had this natural constraint that was constraining individuals internally.
• 28:14
  And of course we want freedom. Of course we want freedom. But people took for granted the fact that we did it within the bounds of like the Ten Commandments. I mean, there was like some basic framework that we did that. So that framework's gone. The church does not have that kind of influence anymore in cultural society, in our secular society. So now we're pushing, pushing, pushing for freedom like it's the ultimate right. But it will not in the end produce the freedom that people think that it will. It will ultimately end in bondage.
• 28:41
  That's right. The Bible is so nuanced about this. It really describes the, freedom's important, but it's like when Paul gets into incredible detail about the topic of freedom in Galatians, where he's saying, you know, it's for freedom that Christ has set us free, let's not be yoked again to slavery. And he describes the need to be filled with the Holy Spirit in order to truly be free because we have inside of us sort of slavery, right? This idea, we have an anthropology, an idea of man that is that we,
• 29:08
  there's a natural bent towards what's wrong. And therefore, if you just give people that kind of libertine freedom, it'll actually enslave them. That's a much more nuanced position that we have. So yeah, I agree. We are existing in the world that Jean-Jacques Rousseau built. That was the name. I was looking for Rousseau, yes. I thought that's who we were talking about. Yeah.
• 29:27
  He's he's if anybody wants to understand the real roots, I think, of the level of individualism. Rousseau is really the philosopher. You know, we we we think the thoughts of dead philosophers. The vast majority of Western people think the thoughts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yeah. And it's an absolute disaster. He is a candidate for the worst.
• 29:50
  philosophical father of all time. He abandoned his children. His idea, the level of libertine freedom that he believed in, his life is almost a parable of where our entire society has been going ever since we've adopted his framework for understanding the nature of freedom and the individual. So that's a disaster. We don't want that. But I want to dig into a little bit, Rory, of this solution. One of the most important and most overlooked leadership roles a man can step into is leading his own family.
• 30:18
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• 30:50
  I've been really interested, you know, Micah 4, George Washington was famous for quoting Micah 4 constantly, right? And in Micah 4, he says, every man lives under his own vine, his own fig tree, and no one makes him afraid. I think he quoted it over 30 times when he was in office. He had a very clear vision for what he hoped would happen in America, which was that there would be these communities that,
• 31:14
  that themselves would own the means of their own livelihood, and they get to work together. And this vision has seemed to be over time replaced. So I'm curious how you think about the nature of the vision, like the good life. Like how do you think about the good life? What's kind of underpinning either the theological underpinnings of your vision for that?
• 31:35
  Yeah. Where do you how do you obviously this is, you know, like you mentioned, the Henry the Good Society is really describing the destruction of that. But I think it's really good to take some time and build up the picture of what that could actually look like. Absolutely. And that's my the whole goal with this project in the first place is to give people hope.
• 31:55
  Okay, everybody knows there are problems in the world. We don't need to be told about that. But what a book like Henry and the Great Society can do is it can open your heart to really taking stock of things and to making changes, like substantive changes in your life that will yield good fruit and hope.
• 32:16
  But I think we need the first step in that is just to recognize where we're really at. And to be very honest that the trajectory that we're on is not going to end well. If we just continue chasing the dollar, we just continue a bigger, faster, cheaper. Yeah, this is not going to produce. It hasn't produced it to this point. So I think the first step in hope is recognizing our need.
• 32:40
  And our bondage, I would just say it flat out. We're in bondage. It doesn't, it's like an invisible chains. So a friend of mine calls it the invisible chains of modernity. We don't, it's not until you try to wrestle against them that you recognize you're in bondage because all of a sudden, let's just say, let's just say, for example, a father doesn't want to work 60 hours a week away from his family in an office. Maybe he wants to do something at home with his children, like farming. Yeah.
• 33:09
  You can't do that. Sorry. It's like, good luck. Good luck with that. But why? Why are we in a society where you can't choose to live off the land anymore? Well, first of all, nobody knows how to live off the land. Second of all, you can't afford it. There are so many options that have been priced out of our modern life.
• 33:28
  And so I think, so the first step is understanding the situation. The second step is then breaking free of it. You can't break free of bonds that you don't know you have. So here's what I would say. First of all, the genie's out of the bottle. I don't know if we'd even call it a genie. We're not going to go back to pre-industrial America. Well, not in the short term, I should say. We might go back to pre-industrial America, but that's probably another podcast. But the...
• 33:59
  We're not going to be able to fix the whole world. And so don't get caught. What I would say is if you're listening to this and you're saying, well, this won't work, you know, as a society to do some of to roll some of these things back. Will it work for your family? Is there something you can do just for yourself, just for your own clan? Okay.
• 34:16
  Don't try to solve the whole world's problems with this. Let's just start with one family at a time. And what I would say is, yes, there's a ton of freedom still for family, especially in America, that there's a lot of creative ways that you can begin to reclaim some of those lost ways of life.
• 34:35
  And I would say, you know, for me, a big one, the big one is work. How do we work? And what you've been doing, and we've been on very parallel journeys here, but what you've been doing is to try to find ways to bring families together in a team that can at least they can spend their working lives as much as possible together.
• 34:55
  There's also things like education. So we homeschool our children. That was a decision we made early on and never regretted it. We do things together like family worship every day, every night, almost without fail. We will gather together as a family and...
• 35:11
  sing some psalm, hymns, psalms, and my son will get his guitar out now that he can play, and we'll sing some songs that way too. We'll do a little scripture reading. We'll do a prayer together. It's a family event. I mean, my children, we expect it.
• 35:27
  That's a very strong, incredibly beneficial thing that every family can do no matter where they are in life. They can do family worship together. So what I would say is begin looking at the things you can do as a family and don't worry about the larger picture. And it might take you some time to get there to build a family team or a family economy that will actually be able to pay the bills. But it's happening all the time. We are hearing from families.
• 35:56
  all over the country that are moving this direction. They're getting homesteads or they're building a family business and they are finding success doing it. So that would be my hope. I would, I would like to leave people with. Yeah.
• 36:08
  100% agree. Yeah, I think that for so many people, they don't realize you can make this decision. I know that when you went to your high school guidance counselor and talked about what career, nobody said, well, would you like to form a career that you can work as a team with your family? Like nobody asked you that. You got involved in a career as an individual. The divide and conquer happened to you.
• 36:30
  and you are living way, way on the other side of that divide, you can go back. And this is what we're finding. And I agree that the family has the ability to go back like no other group. It's difficult maybe to get your whole church to go back or your whole town to go back.
• 36:47
  But your family, like God has made you a little sovereign family. There's things that you can decide to do as a family unit and say, hey, guys, let's go back. Let's do something different. And that's part of, yeah, we're creating communities. Both of our efforts here are to create communities of people that can...
• 37:05
  can really support each other in that decision because that is such a power move. When you do that, uh, all kinds of things become possible. Uh, and you know, every once in a while, if I ever get discouraged, uh, like, like you mentioned, Rory, I like to, there's this little, um,
• 37:21
  hotel up in Amish country in Ohio. And I sit there and watch the guy, you know, like pushing, you know, his, his plow with his sons. And I'm like, if he can do that, the spectrum between where the typical modern family is and where that guy's at, there's a lot of room for us to recapture things. You don't have to go all the way back to, to the Amish life. There's so many steps you can take to move your way back to a family centered family team kind of life.
• 37:46
  Um, and yeah, that I, I think that the amount of hope for individual families is really high. And I like that you're focusing on that because you can get really discouraged looking at the macro. Yes, exactly. And the other thing I would say as you're sharing this is you have no idea what kind of inspiration your family is going to be to other families who are also stuck. And they don't, they don't know how do we, we know something's wrong. How do we get out of the situation?
• 38:12
  It just takes one example for people to say, there's another way. We could bring our kids home and school them at home. That's an option. Or we could open a workshop in the garage and father-son could work together and do something. I mean, who knows what it is, but just to have the examples.
• 38:32
  It's being a light and that's what God uses to bring other people to find each other. That's right. So you find other like-minded families that are trying to walk this out. And then you've got community. You've got the starts of it or the potential for it. And so you just continue doing what is right for your family, what you feel the Lord put on your heart to do. And it's going to inspire and encourage a lot of other people. And that in and of itself is fuel to help you keep going. Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. Yeah, there's a...
• 39:00
  I just heard on a podcast a couple days ago, David Brooks say, all cultural change happens when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy. I was like, that's it. That's great. All cultural change happens when, like our little families are like little laboratories. And if your little laboratory figures out a better way to live,
• 39:20
  then there will be hundreds if not thousands of people that will go, can you teach us how to do that? And I would love to maybe, the last thing I wanted to chat with you about, Rory, is since our last conversation, we've been getting your newsletter, and one of the things I just...
• 39:36
  love about what you guys have done is you've created kind of these different analog ways of communicating that I feel like so effective. But I think everyone would look at those and say, you can't do that. No, no, you have to. That's got to be an Instagram. And so I'm curious how you
• 39:52
  um, attempting to open the door so people can see, you know, what the Groves are doing without reintroducing a bunch of technology that you guys feel like might be antithetical. Like, I'm sure you guys have to draw the line. You have a website, you'd use Kickstarter. Like, how do you make these decisions? Because this is so difficult to figure out. Well, I mean, with careful discernment, I guess is, is the same thing. I mean, there, there are, um,
• 40:20
  I came part of a clue to understanding who I am is I came out of the tech world. All I knew was hyper, you know, uh, uh,
• 40:31
  specific or tailored marketing and and promotions and in emails and tweets and all this stuff that was that was my professional career for a long time. So when we started something like a family economy, I was like, I don't want any of that. Like, I want it to be us on a farm. I want to be working, picking pumpkins with my children.
• 40:54
  And the newsletter began as not, I think this is partly a key to it here. Now I'm thinking this out loud as I'm sharing this. I appreciate it. It's like, it's like, um, you don't know what a thing will become. So, so when I do something like a newsletter, it was like one evening where I said to Becca,
• 41:14
  I think it'd be fun to like put together a family newsletter and like, let's print it out and mail it to people. Wouldn't that be fun? And so, cause, cause we were at this point, we were, you know, like sharing here and there about what we were doing. We were inviting people to come down and learn about treat happy and making maple syrup. And what we just, it just was kind of like, huh, that's an odd idea, but sure. You know, what up? So we had like 30 friends that signed up and it just was amazing.
• 41:39
  Honestly, like a long Christmas letter that just kept going and going and going. But what was really like, I just really felt something about it. It felt counter-cultural and in a good way.
• 41:55
  And our kids, you know, we could kind of help them. So part of what I'm saying, and we can help them learn to write as part of contributing and sharing what children can do in a family economy. But I'm saying I didn't over strategize it. I just took one step and then took another step. And then all of a sudden it kind of like that was going on for years before our ministry. In fact, Jeremy, like the book wasn't even an idea, Durable Trades, which is really what
• 42:23
  like open more doors for us that came out of me writing and reflecting about this life in the country. And I started writing and some of those became chapters in the book later on. But again, none of it was like masterminded. It was just, it seems like this would bring our family together. That was kind of the critical, uh, litmus test of whether we did something or not. Does this bring us together? Yeah. Not, can we make money doing this?
• 42:50
  Which not is that's not bad. I mean, you gotta, we have to pay the bills, but it didn't start with that kind of heart. And I think that's part of the reason why it's been able to grow in, in a sustainable way where we're at today. So the technology to answer that question is how, you know, I mean, yeah, I'm not opposed to all of it.
• 43:08
  We don't use much of it because they're just, again, it's just what's that heart? How does Instagram bring our family together? Well, it really doesn't. So you don't see us on there that much. I don't have Facebook at all. You know, the stuff that I am still plugged into, it just, that's my metric is I want to be present with my children, especially in the young years. And I want to be very discerning about whatever we bring in. It's got to pass a pretty high bar. That's good.
• 43:34
  Yeah, I like kind of where you landed there. I looked at a situation. I sort of had kind of an inkling. It sounds like it started with, okay, here's something. I'll process it with my wife, see if she's getting excited about it. Then let's just kind of see it as a family. And part of what excites me is it seems like this would be unifying for our family.
• 43:54
  And a lot of those really analog methods just involve younger children way better. I mean, you don't want to get your eight-year-old on social media. So if you're going to do these things as a family team, you're going to have to embrace some of these older technologies or these older methods. And if you do that and you see that, oh, there's, you know, oh, and it's starting to, like, people are starting to subscribe. People are starting to, like, get value out of it.
• 44:20
  Yeah, that's a really good process. And I'm sure there are probably experiments that were left on the cutting room floor for you guys. Oh, yeah. Oh, completely. I mean, our whole history is left with all kinds of failed experiments, but that's okay. Yeah.
• 44:35
  I mean, at least we tried. I mean, we had fun doing it, and it teaches you. I mean, entrepreneurship is the best teacher there is. Running a business, there's nothing else quite like it to teach you all aspects of being a productive adult. So I absolutely, and the other thing, the newsletter itself, so I started with 30 friends and family people in our church and things, and it was just nothing. I mean, it was, like I said, it wasn't something that we perceived would be
• 45:04
  a part of a vocation. But it just kept growing. Like people kept passing it around and, and, and then we started to move in towards ministry and,
• 45:16
  And it was like, well, this is a perfect vehicle to describe the family economy in process. Because that's what a family, it's not like it's a one and done, one size fits all formula. The family economy is a process. And if you read over the course of a couple of years, you'll see my oldest son, Ivor, you know, he's raising rabbits and then he's moving into woodworking. And then Elsie's starting to learn fiber arts and spinning on a, you know, spinning wool on a,
• 45:45
  And then they're selling it at a fair that we host. And it's like a slice of time in our family as we're trying to build this out and learning as we go. And the newsletter itself becomes part of our economy in the sense that we're publishing this now and it goes out to thousands of people.
• 46:05
  All just word of mouth, because there's there's this heart. There's this connection of like, how can we be encouraged to do the same thing? Yes. So good. Remind people how they can get on the newsletter. Yeah. So if you go to gather and grow dot U.S. OK, just it's on the website there to scroll down to the bottom of the page. There's some button on that page. You can click and you can sign up and get it. We send it out for free. We ask for donations if people would like to help offset the cost. But if you can't, we're happy to send it to you free of charge as well.
• 46:33
  Awesome. Yeah, I love, love that. The newsletter and that's meant a lot to us. I've really enjoyed it. And yeah, it's very inspiring. So Rory, thank you so much. If you guys, we mentioned some of the books, Durable Trades, The Family Economy, and of course, this new one that's coming out, Henry and the Great Society, which you can find at Kickstarter. Yeah, any other places people can find you guys or that you want to.
• 46:54
  Yeah, I mean, just everything we're up to will be on gatherandgrow.us, and the Kickstarter runs through November 6th, so I'm not sure where this will drop, when this will drop, but if folks are able to get a pledge in there, it would really help us get this publishing house off the ground, and there's videos on the site. You can kind of learn more about it there, but we really appreciate it. Anyone who feels it and wants to support and kind of see more of this out there in the world, we appreciate your support. So excited that you're...
• 47:23
  doing the publishing house. I think that's a great move. Um, and it sounds like if they miss the Kickstarter, the book will be available kind of in mid spring of 2020. Yeah. So we're shooting for like a May release for the public release. And if the Kickstarter will have additional benefits in it, we're going to produce an audio book. We hit one of these stretch goals. So everyone who orders the book by November 6, we'll also get that
• 47:46
  thrown in and so it's actually become a pretty fun project in and of itself to just you know as a community i guess you could say trying to do something together that we could definitely not do on our own it's been a really neat experience yeah i like that about kickstarter those little bonuses and it kind of gets the creative juices flowing and exactly how can we engage with people that are kind of early adopters of this awesome well thanks so much for jumping on here today thank you so much jeremy
• 48:11
  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.