Couple Things with Shawn and Andrew - Jeremy Pryor

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Today we got to talk about one of our biggest passions in life and that’s family. Our incredibly wise guest, Jeremy Pryor, is basically an expert on this, as he’s founded several businesses and nonprofits including FamilyTeams, which provides training content for families around the world. He’s also a husband and dad of five so he really knows what he’s talking about :)  We got to dive into how to build a strong family unit, what we can learn about the importance of family from different cultures, leaving a legacy for generations to come and more! This was a really important conversation and one we’ll definitely revisit to stay on track with our own family “team”  :)  Love you guys! Shawn & Andrew Follow Jeremy on Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/jeremympryor/ Follow our podcast Instagram  ▶ https://www.instagram.com/shawnandandrewpods/ Subscribe to our newsletter  ▶ https://www.familymade.com/newsletter Follow My Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/ShawnJohnson Follow My Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnjohnson Shop My LTK Page ▶ https://www.shopltk.com/explore/shawnjohnson  Like the Facebook page! ▶ https://www.facebook.com/ShawnJohnson Follow Andrew’s Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/AndrewDEast Andrew’s Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewdeast?lang=en Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up, everybody. Welcome back to a couple things interviews with Sean and Andrew. Today we have a wonderful guest, Jeremy Pryor. I came across Jeremy's work about two years ago now when my brother, Guy, and I started navigating what it means to have a family legacy. We started kind of taking the reins of leading not just our own immediate families, but our extended family. And it's been a really fun project. And Jeremy has contributed a lot in this space. And he talks about families. He wrote a book called Family Revision, among other books. He creates a lot of videos on this topic and really is a thought leader in this regard.

But he's a partner at family teams. He's a director at 1KH.org, president of third generation properties, and author of Family Revision, How Ancient Wisdom Heels a Modern Family. They host these wonderful conferences in Cincinnati where my brother has attended frequently, and it's kind of just a workshop on what it means to have. a meaningful family and today's conversation was really fun we dug into some some good stuff and do you have any takeaways we talk about a multi-generational like living all of the traditions that he's implemented within his family that he believes will have like a lasting legacy how to build

what he calls your family team um just a lot of really great takeaways how to like unite your family as a whole what excites me about this is i heard someone once challenge men to some spend as much time strategically building their family as they strategically build their careers and businesses. And I think Jeremy helps me, has helped me navigate doing that, like focusing that energy, knowing what that even means. So thank you, Jeremy for joining us. If you want to find out more about Jeremy and what he's up to, we'll include the information down below. But without further ado, we bring you Jeremy Pryor. Jeremy Pryor, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. I'm really excited.

because I've read through several of your books and you have sparked this curiosity about families and what they could look like and I'm excited to dig in that today so thanks for joining awesome yeah so good to be here with you guys all right so you are the the family culture guru all right and I'm curious first maybe we could start and talk about what got you into this topic yeah yeah I would say that I I am so interested in this topic, not because I always was excited someday to be a dad or a father. I kind of came into this fairly reluctantly, and I assumed, and I grew up in the Seattle area, I just, I saw so much brokenness that came to family that I really had kind of an attitude as a young, single guy, just of like, I don't know if this thing works.

I don't know if I want to have kids. I was a youth pastor in a culture where there was just so much brokenness and family. And my family grew up in was great, but there was just so much brokenness around us that I just lost a lot of hope. And I had then gone to Israel for just a semester abroad. I was there to study Hebrew. I was obsessed with the Old Testament. I was much more interested in these kind of deep theological questions than necessarily real practical ones like the family. but I just kept on running into the scene of fathers and children.

It was so predictable. And I remember one day I was just sitting on a bench in Jerusalem and saw a whole group of fathers pushing strollers with all their little kids in tow. And I was just like, why are they doing that? Like, why are these dads so end up being fathers? So I started doing a deep dive because I was super into theology. I just wanted to understand the why behind it. And as I was talking to different Jewish fathers, they just kept on reference. referencing Abraham as being the reason that they wanted to have children.

And I was like, that is so weird. Like, Abraham's in our Bible. But I'd never, ever imagined that in studying Abraham, I would find a motivation for being a father or having a multi-generational family. So I started to go deeper into the lens that they see family through. And I was sort of shocked that it's like put on a pair of glasses. And then suddenly you see these things. And I saw what these dads were seeing.

and it was I mean it was like so dramatic for me it was like somebody just flipped a switch and I went from somebody who I don't know if I want to have kids they seem to get in your way to like I just want to be a dad I want to build a multi-generational family I want to be a grandfather and a great grandfather just like all of these Abrahamic desires and I saw and I experienced with these these fathers saw an experience so that was I'm 50 now so I was 23 then And so it's been a journey. You know, we now have five kids. And, but that, that was really the, the catalyst that sort of flipped, flipped my perspective. I'm curious, if you contrast that, uh, dads with the stroller scene with what you are more familiar with here in the Western and, and in the U.S. culture, describe the, the, the difference. Yeah. So in a Western context, the father is probably, uh, in most cases, the one,

who's least interested in the family. The family is an almost essentially almost a maternal entity, right? And that the dad sort of orbits around in a lot of cases. And so you have oftentimes, and that's why I think we love using this analogy of the nest. So that's kind of what the family in a Western context is a lot like. In the Middle East, the person who's probably most likely to be passionate about the family is the father. They see themselves as a part of a family line and that their grandfather handed something to their father. Their father is handing something to them. They're going to hand something to their son and their son's going to hand something to their grandson. So that's that's the sort of the patrilineal line of the family. They are hyper

aware of it and they feel a deep sense of personal identity with it. And so as they believe that's the essence of the family, they just, they really, everything else sort of fuels the family. So their work exists not as a pursuit of some kind of individual identity, but it's a way in which they can provide for their family. They think about their family in completely different terms. Help cast the vision for me. So the intergenerational aspect of it, you mentioned this idea of handing something down. What exactly, like paint the vision for what an intergenerational kind of, that Abrahamic family looks like. Yeah. So an Abrahamic family, it starts where when you're born

into this family, you don't feel like your story just started. You believe that you're a part of something that precedes you and your identity is rooted in that larger family story. And so you see yourself primarily not just as an individual. You are an individual. That's one of your identities. But your family identity as a son or a daughter, future as a father or mother, eventually as a patriarch or matriarch, these things are the elements of your life that provide sort of maximum meaning. And so you see yourself primarily from that perspective. And so the stories of your ancestors are very important to you. And your thoughts about what you're passing on to your future descendants is really motivating so much of your, of your, of your

work, your action, even your faith is deeply rooted in what came before you and what you have the opportunity to pass on. And so it's where you find just the grounding of your meaning and your identity. So we live in a culture that that sort of like everybody starts very much like as a blank slate. Like people say, tell me your story. You'll, you know, if you go back very far, it'll be like, well, I was born, you know, in this day and in this area of the country. And so you tell your story very much as an individual. You're not telling like this generational family story. Your story started with you and it's going to end with you. Your life is essentially a single player game. And that kind of hyper individualism is extremely recent. And it's very,

very historically unusual. If you thought this way most parts of the world or most times in history, you wouldn't survive. But we live in a culture that is unusually safe and prosperous for the individual to completely jettison the past and live for themselves alone. That's a very unusual situation to find ourselves in. So we do have the option. We do have the option to say, I want to primarily think of myself as an individual, and I want that to be the center around which all of my identities really orbit. But is that the way that God, and this is what really got me, as somebody who really is interested in kind of first principles and what does the Bible say about this? And what's a God's eye view of family like? As I started diving

deeper into that question, does God primarily see us as individuals? And how does he, why did he start the family? Why did he create the pairing of male and female? Why does he give us the ability to reproduce children? And how does he conceptualize this? And you have on the very, very first page of the Bible, God describing and actually proclaiming the mission statement of the family when he creates the first family he tells them he says he blesses them and says that them be fruitful and multiply fill subdue and rule over all creation so this five-part mission he he has that sort of pre-existed the family he then created this unit in which it had this this purpose this clear meaning and that meaning the purpose the mission statement he gave it it can only be accomplished through

a multi-generational effort right you can't fill subdue and rule the earth as just adam and eve like that's not possible. Clearly, that's why it started with be fruitful and multiply. They had to have children and they had to build out this family line in order for them to accomplish the mission God gave. And so the family essentially is a team. They're designed to work together to accomplish this mission. He didn't give this to just a man or just a woman. He gave it to them. So he makes them a team. Then he gives them a mission that is multi-generational. And that mission is what they're designed to do from from the beginning so that that's a very different way of viewing family we don't we don't think about family that way hardly at all in the west again the family in

the west the best way i think of to describe the way we see family is a springboard for individual success a really good family is one of which you you kind of have this sort of center of nurturing where you feel like you belong but its design is to launch you out and so fathers and mothers who have done their job the best you sort of they're kind of graded based on how well are the individuals in the family flourishing, you know? And so it's all based on their individual action. And that's why the nest is a perfect example, because the nest is really only there for a very temporary period of time. It sort of self-destructs, all the chickies fly away. Everyone goes and does what they goes and lives their life independently, and the whole

thing starts over again. So that's one way to conceptualize the family. It's a very recent and a very modern way of thinking about family life. The problem is it doesn't seem like, it works. I mean, it breaks down spectacularly. Like we have a crisis that is really difficult to even quantify. The United States just became, in the last two years, just became the number one country in the world of single parent households. So we have more single parent families in the United States that's just specifically our country than any country in the world. So we live then exist at ground zero of the destruction of the family. And so one of the things we have to-

But what's the problem? Sell me on the problem of that. Why is that an issue? Because I think- Let's zoom in a little bit. Yeah. So it doesn't appear that children were designed to be raised by a single parent. It's a really difficult tragedy.

Recently, there was a report that was released that kind of shocked the internet. This, this is the report went viral just like two weeks ago. And basically, they asked, what was the single greatest predictor? of, of a good mother. And so they, everyone listed their ideas, what they thought the greatest predictor was. And they said, well, we know what the single greatest predictor of, of being a good mother is. And it is a supportive partner. In other words, like, it's incredibly difficult, like, to, to be a single mother or a single father. We were not designed to, to, to raise our families alone. And I would say the same is true even for an intact nuclear family where there's a husband

and a wife. I don't think that they were designed to raise their family alone. I think that they were supposed to be nested inside of a larger extended family unit. And this is what you see in other cultures. You know, probably an example of a culture where there's a lot of intact extended family support is in the country of India. So in India, the divorce rate is 1.1%. I mean, a tiny, tiny, tiny infinitesimal fraction of what it is in our culture. Now, they've held on to a much more classical view of the family and of marriage. But what we've decided as a culture is, again, we've sort of adopted the idea that the individual is the most important thing in all society, that all identities should be rooted in the individual.

And this makes family life extraordinarily difficult. We absolutely rebuff the idea of roles in the family. the idea of the permanence of the covenant. All of these things are really, really hard on us culturally because we've adopted the individual self-expression as being our highest value. And there's no question that family and marriage collide in major ways with that value. I feel like there's so many things that you've said where I'm like, yeah, I've actually felt that.

I've seen that. I do feel like especially in culture today in the Western world even having gone through we have three babies we have a five year old a three year old and a 10 month old with every pregnancy I felt that it's almost like it's not cool

it's looked down upon it's seen as a weakness if you have help with the family if you're living with your family if they're close in-laws are villainized anymore in our culture it's not cool to be dependent on your family in any way, shape, or form.

It's almost like our culture puts up on a pedestal the single mothers, the single fathers, because they're the strongest out there when, like you're saying, it's actually, it's been made biblically to be a community project where our world, I feel like, is more and more saying, no, you shouldn't have community. That's actually a weakness of yours that you need it.

Right. Yes. Yeah, David Brooks, on one of his books, he wrote that when Americans become wealthy, they purchase loneliness. And I was like, once I read that, I was like, that perfectly describes, you know, what you're saying, Sean. And that is that there, because we've made building everything around our individual preferences, basically our God, then when you get more power, more freedom and more wealth, you move your, your, your, you move your lifestyle increasingly into greater and greater isolation. Now, it's not hard to understand why that collides with family life. Family life is all about compromise. It is all about choosing to exist within preexisting roles that allow for the flourishing of children and a flourishing of your spouse as well as yourself.

And so cultures that embrace these ideas, they tend to have thriving families. but the idea of the functional family in our culture is almost a punchline. It's like it's so rare that people are opting out of family and out of marriage in general left and right because they're saying it's just a bad bet. The percentage of times this breaks down, even if you somehow get past the 50% divorce rate, the other 50% of people who are staying married, what percentage of them are actually flourishing? And so you just get into a smaller and smaller and smaller subset of people who are functioning. And I think that one of the things we have to do is take a giant step back and say, okay, it's important to admit that we've experimented with this thing called the family in so many major ways.

And some of these experiments have gone terribly wrong. But because they all tend to be in the trajectory of greater individual freedom, we refuse to question these experiments. And so I don't think that the family is inherently dysfunctional. I think it's an incredibly beautiful design. I think it's center on love. The idea of a father and mother, son, and daughter, these are incredibly beautiful identities and they're designed to create flourishing for ourselves and our families.

But they do at times collide with our individual self-expression. And in our culture, we're taught that when that collision occurs, always go with the individual and that that will kill any family so connect uh well-defined family roles to family flourishing not and and not freedom and also differentiate freedom from flourishing for me yeah yeah yeah those are those are difficult again in our in our context today to really um to really embrace. But so I would start here just talking about myself personally. So there are things as an individual that I know are true about myself, preferences I have or ways of thinking or temperaments or things. And so I have all of those elements of my personality and my preferences. And then I look at

this role called fatherhood. All the roles and responsibilities of fatherhood, what it means to you know, provide for my family, what it means to protect my daughters, what it means to love my wife, what it means to build a flourishing family. And there is not actually a ton of overlap between those two things in my life personally. Like I could describe for you who I would be in my personality and my preferences. Like I really, I'm the guy who I would love to be totally independent. Like I love to think. I would probably be playing like lots of video games. I mean, I'd look at who I was when I was single. The kinds of things that I would into. I mean, the idea that I could live in a virtual world. And, you know, I'm a very abstract

thinker. I'm super into sci-fi and fantasy. I mean, the world in which I would have, I could have existed in or even attempted to exist in as a single person is not very compatible with the responsibilities of fatherhood. And so I looked at these two realities and said, okay, this is, this is what I really want in my personality, my preferences. And this is what this role really entails. Now, one of the problems that I had was this role of father has been really deeply corrupted culturally. So, you know, I looked at a lot of, you know, of popular depictions of fatherhood. And they were sort of like a punchline or a joke or whatever. It took me a long time to actually distill and try to understand what does the Bible say about fatherhood.

What are really healthy good depictions of fatherhood. And so what I had to choose to do was say, okay, I decided to invest in this thing called the family. I'm going to begin to say no to a lot of my personal preferences and try to inhabit this role of father for the sake of my wife and my children and my future grandchildren. I will try to do a good job. And that doesn't mean repressing every element of my personality. It doesn't mean repressing every part of my preferences. It does mean that I need to become aware of the collision between these two worlds.

And I need to do a lot of choosing this fathering role when, when they, when they collide. And so there's certainly a negotiation there. And there's elements where, I don't lose myself, but I have sacrificed a lot of elements of my own preferences to this role of being a father. So that's, I always say that's, that's at the micro level. Why is it, why is it worth it?

What's the payoff? I'm trying to get, I'm trying to get very finite intangible here because. Yes. I mean, it's actually background on us. I am just kind of coming to the realization that how incredible my family, not just nuclear family growing up, but like my cousins, my grandpa,

we used to have these family unions and second cousins and we're talking about family history. You know, it's one of those things that it's like, whatever, you're 12, you think everybody does it. And then we lost my father. there almost two years ago and it's like it was this real step back moment of oh this doesn't just get handed to you all these things that he did you know we'd go home for the holidays even to like

up to two years ago he would have a whole list of activities conversation topics what are we going to sit down and talk about as a family at the dinner table very intentional and so it was like it was in that process that I really kind of like saw the light and then also you you people talk about legacy being so much more than like financial and you're like okay well what does that look like and to like I've been working on this project for the last two years of trying to like okay if if if I do plan on giving our kids some sort of resources financials being one of them which I think can be really powerful you look at like the Medici family, the Rockefeller family, even like the Kennedys, it's like, what is it, or like the

mannings? It's like, what is it about a family that these are like these icons in different areas? Like, clearly there's something there. How can I give them, how can I equip them with the values, the history, the knowledge that I had instilled in me? Just like, you know, it's almost like a slow drip each and every day for, days, weeks, and months, and years growing up. Anyway, I've put together this, like, family culture, I call it the family culture starter pack, which it's like all of these things of the songs we sing, like our kids, when we go to school every day, we'll sing, we are the east, the mighty mighty east. And all their cousins do it too, so they get together and they all kind of know it.

And it's like, that's like a small piece of it. What are our daily affirmations we're talking about, the family tree and everything in it is certainly part of it. But even like from a health and well this standpoint, I'm into CrossFit, and they have this, like, assault bike. And I realized, I kind of thought I was this new novel gift to the earth. And it's like, there's never been an Andrew and there never will be again. And I have all these interests. And it's like, come to find out my grandpa, who was born in 1920, whatever, used to ride the old Schwinn bike back every day for 15 minutes, which is pretty much CrossFit. Pretty much is the old version of what I'm doing now. It's like, no, this is just, I'm a different, I'm a different vintage of pretty

much what's been around. But what are like the, all my mom's family has this like classic little like hip problem. And they all have the same little limp. And it's like, oh, man, okay, so that gets carried through, obviously. But what about, you know, what are the good things that get carried through? What are the professions that, that have been in our lineage so that, you know, when our kids are exploring, it's like, man, here's a trend. in line, 80% of our people were teachers or, uh, you know, we have a high percentage of entrepreneurs. Maybe, maybe, um, I have what it takes to like, whatever it is. It's like a launching pad of all this information. I'm trying to just like document this. I have this, I think it's 90 pages

right now with table of content and all this stuff. But it's like, um, I guess I'm trying to fight back personally this, this impulse I have to be a roga individualist. And it's like, I kind of view, I kind of view myself as like the guy who goes off into the woods and comes back three years later with a beard and like an elk on his shoulder and like that's kind of that's kind of like how I yeah yeah but then and that's why I'm trying to ask all these like really yes tangible questions because it does not really come naturally to me nor to many of my peers and I think as I've dug into some biblical concepts even like the Trinity it's like community is at the very core of that concept where you have like this trio that is supportive and complimentary. And then it's like even the parallel to we're made in God's image. And like the closest thing we have to that is having kids that are in our image. And it's like, okay, wow, this is super. So community is at the core of us too. How can we unlock that? And whatever. We're in a space too where it's like all these entrepreneurial gurus are like,

like, yo, go make a million bucks, go get, you know, six-pack abs and sell your business, whatever, whatever it looks like. And I'm like, no, that is uncomfortable. That's difficult. But try to raise a family and have kids screaming. Like, that's uncomfortable. That's worse than your 4 a.m. ice bath, you know? It's like, this is the, this is the penultimate self-improvement. Like, whatever you're looking at, my wife is this daily mirror to my imperfections. God bless your soul. I'm ranting right now. Sean gets all weird when I go on a rant like this.

So anyway, why is it worth it to you to make the sacrifice of those personal preferences for this family? Yeah, man. Well, there's certainly layers to the reason. I think one of them is we were, we were not designed to live alone. We were not designed to live a single player game. This isn't a single player game. Like we were born into families. We live our life through family and we're going to die surrounded by our family, God willing.

And that's the way God designed it. But I think that we have a loneliness epidemic that's erupting in society because we have lied to so many young men and women about the way this works. You have to actually sacrifice part of your individual self in order for you to have the most deep and meaningful relationships. relationships. And so we're really presenting a pathway to to loneliness. And the scriptures actually say, God places the lonely in families. That's a verse from the Psalms. And so we already have the solution to that. People are talking about, oh, we need community and we need to live in the city and we need more friendships, friends, friends, friends, friends, because everybody's so star for relationship, because we've already shot in the head, the one structure that was designed to actually provide the most

meaningful relationships in our lives. We don't know how it works. We're not willing to make the kind of compromises. How are you ever going to be the kind of person who could have a meaningful business partnership or friendship if you can't even be a husband, a wife, a son or a daughter? So that's the first layer is that we're just designed for this thing. Like you said, even God himself exists in the community. I think the second reason that for me really, really gets me is meaning. So if life is about happiness or the pursuit of happiness, and by that we just sort of mean the ability to indulge our individual preferences or impulsive pleasure, then of course there's nothing that's going to disrupt

that more than family. But if we're really designed for meaning and that happiness is really a byproduct of experiences of meaning, you're not going to find a pathway that's more reliably going to create more moments of meaning than investing in your family relationships. You're describing

Andrew about your dad. I mean, it's like those memories and that connection, there's nothing like that. And if you decide to sacrifice that or not build that or not participate in that because it's going to interfere with your individual preferences. That's going to be a really smart, short-term decision for your individual and maybe immediate happiness, and it's going to come at an enormous long-term cost. And this is where we're going to have this epidemic of people just dying alone that has never

been seen historically before. But this is the fruit of that. And one of the examples in our family is we do this multi-generational family kind of Sabbath dinner every week. And so there's about 15 to 20 people and our different extended family members come to this meal every week. And my wife's father, my father-in-law, he was able to come to this meal. We had started inviting them about two or three years before he passed.

And I remember, you know, he would come. He loved that so much. And he would come every Friday night to this meal. and there was a predictable moment in every one of these dinners where he would be talking and then just would tear up and couldn't talk anymore. He was just so moved. And I remember watching this pattern happen week after week. And I was just like, you know, I think I understand what he's feeling. I think he can't get over the fact, you know, now that he's in his 70s, just being surrounded by his children and grandchildren. He gets overwhelmed by the meaning of his life.

hearing their stories and understanding that his life is persisting in this way and that he is an integral part of that. He just like, he looked like the happiest, most fulfilled person on the planet, you know, getting to just sit and experience this. And that experience of, of grandfather around the table happiness is not the same as cotton candy happiness. And we have, we've not told people the difference. And, you know, there's a, there's a Psalm, Psalm 128, that actually describes the good life. And he says, he kind of begins this song by asking, what does it look like for the man who is blessed by the Lord? And then he starts to describing what this life looks like. He says, may you, may your sons be like olive shoots around your table. May your wife be like

a fruitful vine. It's really describing a grandfather. It says, may you live to see your children's children. And ancient cultures knew this. And this is why the Bible describes this as the good life. But when I was graduate from high school at my graduation party, somebody actually pulled me aside and said, hey, you're about to go to college. Jeremy, I need you to know something. These are going to be the best years of your life. Like we've actually told young people that in their years where they have the least amount of responsibility, where they have the most freedom, quote unquote, to indulge their personal preferences, that's the good life. That's the pinnacle of life. And all the rest of their life after that is less valuable, is going to be less important. And that's because we're charting the life around this sort of individual. impulsive happiness and not about not around meaning because that's that's that's not a time in your life where you're experiencing peak meaning like a grandfather does uh with his children around the table so you're saying the peak is not when you go to the peak of life is not when you go to college at age 18 it's not when you maybe you know make it to whatever point in your career at age 40 or 50

it is it is something that continues to increase yes and grow each and every year it's up into the right that's the way god designed it now tragedies can happen there's always challenges to that but the basic um experience of life was designed to basically exponentially increase the meaning of your life the older you got as you you're seeing more and more of your descendants um more and more of your children and more of what you've invested your life in just become more fruitful uh more meaningful um more relationally connected. Like to see and live, to see and experience that is so powerful. And so that was sort of the trajectory that every father and mother was aiming at.

And every father and mother would train their children, their sons and daughters, at a very young age, to aim at that. Today, we don't, kids have nothing to aim at. Like, they're aiming at their own individual happiness. And they're just all crying out because life's getting worse as the responsibilities mount up. as a relationships fragment because they're obsessed with their own individual happiness. They don't know why life is getting worse. They look at the future and they see that it's going to get exponentially harder as their bodies start to break down and more

their relationships end and the impermanence of life. They're just like, what is, where do I get meaning? And they're beginning to wake up to the reality that they were told a lie and they were told a lie. And so part of what we have to do is really begin to warn people, young people that have their whole lives ahead of them that this is the way life works if for the vast majority of people and i do think there are exceptions to everything i'm describing but for the vast majority of people 90% plus this is going to be the best path for them to to create a meaningful life find a spouse you know get married for life have children raise your children to want to have children you know become a father or mother embrace those roles and then train your sons and daughters to be

fathers and mothers and embrace those roles and become a grandmother or grandfather like that trajectory that the vast majority of the world understands as being kind of the normal life cycle is still the best shot that most people have at living a meaningful life wow it's such an unnatural trust exercise for the human brain though to say hey I'm like you want to be that 70 year old guy at the table and it's and it's like if that's the if that is the peak of happiness than if there's anything I've learned in my 33 years of life so far, that also means it's probably the peak most difficult thing to like make happens. And I think, I mean, I guess it's difficult in the sense that you pretty much just have to trust,

like, okay, I'm going to, like, just work towards this. And it does feel unnatural for me when I'm in college as an 18-year-old to have that as my aiming point as opposed to whatever other smorgasbord of options I have in front of me at that age. that's just kind of tough, you know? I will say, though, I mean, again, I feel like, unfortunately, a lot of people will rarely feel this or experience it because we live in a world

that is broken and people are vying for independence rather than the family life and people are going the single route and say, I don't want to get married, I don't want to have kids, I want to be estranged from my parents. I want to find friends

that are my family and get rid of everything else. But we have seen glimpses of it with our family specifically, but also I always tell people we had the privilege and opportunity to go to Europe this past summer. And one of my favorite experiences was being able to go to Italy with our children and see how the culture as a whole celebrated our family so much. And I've had people say, well, what do you mean? mean. And I said, it feels like here in America, taking your kids to a restaurant or including them in every daily habit is almost frowned upon. There is a place for children and there is a place

for a family and there is a place for individuals. But seeing these other cultures around the world who are so seamlessly allowing families to be the normal experience in life everywhere, I don't know how to explain it other than it just felt right. It felt so beautiful to see people smile at that and encourage that to be just how we operated. And in moving forward in America and the Western world, how do you foresee like reversing this? Right. It is an epidemic. Yeah.

What's really tricky is I think that in some of those ancient cultures, and I share that experience, we've traveled a lot with our five kids overseas. sees and saw that a lot. And I think that the unambiguous joy and excitement that people have when they see children, one of the things that that represents is a culture that honors its parents. So we don't understand the connection between these two things in our culture anymore. So in the Ten Commandments, we're told to honor our father and mother. And then it's the first commandment with the promise that it will go well for you on the earth. And it's a very strange thing for us. Like, why does the Bible so obsessed with how we treat our parents? And what occurs when you have a culture that honors the father and the mother is what it does, it doesn't, it's not just

about them. It's about, so let's say that's, that's the oldest generation. What it does is it, it tells everyone in the previous generations, it causes them to want to become fathers and mothers. It causes them to look forward to this role. Wow, someday, like when you're in a sport and you see somebody like a hero that is really honored and is just crushing it and you're like, oh, man, someday I'm going to be like them. It gives you so much clarity, so much passion. Well, imagine being in a culture in which everyone has grandfathers and grandmothers that they're just like, oh, my goodness, I can't wait to someday be like them. But we're taught to do the opposite today. We're taught to rebuke and denigrate our parents. We're the first generations in history that have been raised with

like an understanding of modern psychology. And one of the things you learn when you're taking your psych 101 class in college is that your parents screwed you up. And it's true. Our parents screwed us up. Like all the good things came from our parents and a lot of the bad things came from our parents. And so how do you respond to that? How do you respond to the fact that? And obviously there's a spectrum. Some people have been abused in terrible ways by their parents. I don't think that the answer is for them to honor their parents. But by and large, most of us have just gotten a mixed bag from our parents, some great things, some challenging things. but one of the things that we're taught culturally is to blame them for the negative things and to sort of like not we don't we weren't really conscious of a lot of the original sacrifices a lot of our parents made and so there's there's a sense that so many people today have that their parents just owe them a unpayable debt and that all the honor and all of the um goes one direction goes towards the children and it's it's just the opposite in the bible there are more verses in the Torah of

about caring for parents and caring for children. And I think it creates a certain kind of culture. And when you honor your father and mother. And so that's why, you know, in our culture, in our family's culture, as we've been trying to recover this, I want my kids to be around my parents, my wife's parents. You know, we all had challenges with our families growing up. But, you know, we live right now in a four-generation house. My parents live with us.

and then I have a grandson and a granddaughter that live with us. My daughter and son-in-law living with us while they rehab the house across the street. So we have four generations living in one house, and we do all kinds of rhythms as a family across these generations. And man, I think it's been fun to watch my kids grow up with such close relationship with their grandparents and now the great-grandparents, that all this integration is occurring across the generations. And we have five kids. And if you're, you know, I really invest a lot in each of my kids' individual pursuits. I did want them to understand the things that they really liked.

And we did invest in them. But we invested in a lot of things as a family as well. But because we were constantly finding new ways to honor their grandparents, all five of my kids want to be, you know, parents more than anything. else, my son and my four daughters, they cannot wait to have children. And to them, the idea of like getting married and having kids right away sounds like the best idea ever, because they were raised in a culture in which, again, if you're in a sport and you see that person, you know, winning the Super Bowl or whatever you're aiming at, it's not hard for you to get excited about

the pathway it would take to get to that. But we've sort of inverted that, right? And so when people look upstream, they see, you know, brokenness, they see, you know, maybe their parents just divorced or struggling relationally. And so if they opt out at that point and say, I don't know if this works, I don't know if this is worth it. That has a huge ripple effect culturally. And so I think step one is some generation has got to decide to begin to honor their father and mother and begin to present a new way. And so if you can't do that upstream, then you got to do it downstream you have to like train your kids to honor the father and mother because part of what you're doing is you're training them to honor the the the essence of fatherhood and

motherhood not just you as an individual a lot of people think this is just self-serving like like that's just dumb like you're just doing that because you as an individual want more honor no no no I want my kids to lift up the idea of motherhood and fatherhood as incredibly beautiful to lift up the idea of being a husband or a wife like these are sons and daughters we also honor every one of our family members as their family role like they they don't earn their their honor their belonging or their position in our family that position was given to them because of who they are and and we want to find ways to constantly do that for each other but when you do that not just as an individual and say well okay you you you're amazing you did this you know I can't believe how good you're working on your

instrument, you know, we just constantly are promoting their, their, whatever makes them most unique as an individual, as opposed to their role in the family as being itself worthy of being honored. And your belonging is rooted in that. So that if you, yeah, if you decide to, you know, change and you don't want to, you know, play that sport or you don't want to, you know, participate in that individual activity doesn't change your value, because your value is cemented in who you are. And we already know that that's rooted in one of your identities, and that is your family identity. And so I think that's part of what really causes a generation to get so excited to participate and root their identity and their family identity instead of just as an individual. I'm just thinking of the positive mental health effects that that would have if your belonging is not because of X, Y, or Z, but merely if you are born.

into an environment that you feel belonged in, and that's what you're raised in in those crucial developmental years, the effect that that would have. It's pretty wild to think about. But I do want to talk about family has unique challenges because of the proximity. There's obviously unique benefits as well because of that. But, you know, there are, there are, there can be such intense differences in perspectives or approaches or even, you know, the kind of stereotype of a crazy aunt. Like when family does get messy, what do you do? Like we're talking about the most utopian idealized family here. There's a lot of people that might want to strive to build that at some point, but currently are not in that situation. So what do you do with that mess? Yeah.

Yeah, every family I've ever seen is broken at lots of levels. And part of that is because of the way we've talked about family and culturally. But part of that is just because we're humans. And humans, you have the perfect design of family. And humans are sinful and they will make mistakes and they will persist in doing wrong things. And that will cause a lot of pain and suffering for the people around them. And so that's what I think. think has created the isolation that I don't want to be implicated by somebody else's sin or

somebody else's brokenness. And so I think, I think that you have to have a lot of grace for a family. If you, going this, this path is not going to be easy. You're going to have to choose to forgive each other. You're going to have to learn how to resolve conflict. You're going to have to talk about difficult things. And there will be times where you'll have members of your family that are abusive and that just need to be cut off. Like that, that's a reality. Like there's there's no question that there's a level of abuse that's just absolutely intolerable and you you need to separate yourself entirely from from that so I think I think that but it's it's the wisdom to understand like how how do we hang in there in relationships you know assuming that

they're not that bad we do need to learn and like I said I think part of what gives you a lot of hope is you're modeling a kind of relational health to your children when they see you try to repair that relationship with that difficult aunt or try to invite that cousin who's you know who otherwise is not that easy to be around try to forgive your your mother for some of the difficult things that she did in your past those are all really difficult things to work out interrelationally, and you need to have a reason that is strong enough. Now, the absolute grounding of my reason for how I treat my family members is because of the gospel.

You know, Jesus famously in the, in the Lord's Prayer, says, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. The word trespass is basically a related, it's the fancy, biblical word for like a relational sin and part of the reason why jesus wants us to pray that every day is because every day we're going to struggle to forgive people that have committed relational sins against us and i think that jesus was he is working to create the kind of community that could somehow survive the the uh repeated relational sins that we commit against each other you know one of his disciples asked jesus like what's exactly the limit to this like if my brother

sins against me, you know, seven times. Do I have to forgive him? There's got to be a limit to this, you know? Jesus, you know, his response was 70 times seven. And so, yeah, this is, this is tough. And, of course, there's a lot of details to that. There's no easy, there's something easy about it. But the way that Jesus taught us to do this was to first meditate on how much we've been forgiven, and then to only feel obligated to extend forgiveness to the extent that we've been forgiven. But of course, that's an incredibly great extent, given the fact that our sin actually killed the Son of God. And so I think that people, family members, who are saturated in the gospel, have an unusual advantage to stay united through the challenges

that we're going to present to each other. And so I always want to start there. Like to whatever extent you can root your family in the gospel, I think that that's where we get the primary way to keep these relationships strong across generations and over the decades of time that are going to challenge those relationships. I heard someone say, you know,

there's the idea of the sins of the father or the sin to the son. And then they said, if generational curses are a thing, so are generational blessings. I just love that. Like, how can I run this relay race and hand the baton off to my kids in a way that's hopefully more blessings than curse? Yes. But you're saying the people that are in a messy situation now, it's almost like

it's difficult, but an opportunity to become the type of person that can be mature enough to deal with that type of thing. And like almost the more messy the situation, the more opportunity there is for like that display of maturity or the pathway to spiritual growth is really through how do you resolve relationships that are that are really challenging.

There is no other way. The only other way is isolation. But we can make it a lot worse if we ignore these roles. I think that part of what's really difficult is that forgiveness is one thing. We talked earlier about the importance of roles. The reason why I'm into roles

and think that we need to stop making that a dirty word if we really want to see families flourish is because there's just too big of a gap. Family life is very logistically challenging. There's a lot that has to happen. You've got to provide a lot of money. You've got to provide a lot of care. You've got to constantly think about these different individuals in the family and all the health challenges. I mean, just they come at you one after another, educational challenges.

They're so immense and the challenges that parents face when they're trying to raise a family in a healthy way. the spiritual challenges. And so it's really important to, if you're always negotiating against your spouse to try to get as much as you can from the family as an individual while giving the least you can, that's not going to work. But that's really the alternative to roles. People don't understand what the alternative is. And this is where a gap widens in these kinds of families. And by a gap, I mean, what the father is willing to do is maybe they want to do this 20%, the mother is willing to do this 20% well that leaves 60% left unspoken for and that's how kids fall through the cracks there's just way too much going on you have to figure out how much can

i absorb and part of that means you've got to work through those those preferences and actually learn the role and so in the same way that you when you go to you know at a sport and you're going out for different positions and you have a coach who's like okay you know you have been doing this but I think you're, you know, what we really need from you on the team is this role and you go into a process of training to know how to live that and play that role. You can't just constantly be fighting your coach and say, I just, but that's not how I want to do it. I learn this. No, first you have to understand the role. But one of the things you guys have to understand is that we've destroyed the role of father and mother. Most people don't even know what that role is anymore. I mean, mother's a little bit more biologically clear. but a big part of what I've been writing about the last two or three years is the kind of historic

understanding of fatherhood is almost gone. Most people actually think that the modern father is actually more like the traditional mother than the father. There are elements of fatherhood that have almost entirely disappeared from any kind of cultural description. You have to basically read books that are 100 plus years old, read biographies that are old, to get a picture of what that fatherhood was like. I'm just using that as an example that because family's not easy, there's a brokenness, there's sin, there's the need to forgive, we can't add to that endless confusion about the nature of these roles because that's just, that sort of breaks so many families

because it's just one too many things to try to like recover. And so I think one of the things that the church needs to do and that we as a culture need to try to protect is to describe what father. is and motherhood is in a way that is accurate, accurate to the way that they were designed originally by God and accurate to what those roles in the family really require from the man or the woman in the family. Well, describe what the traditional father is. Yeah. The traditional father was a visionary leader. So he was constantly thinking about where he was going to take the family. And the reason why the father was outside the home, oftentimes learning a trade,

or trying to figure out how to expand the resources of the family is because his job was to take the family and sort of is an expansion role. And so the visionary leader, what you see is, and I think probably the best example I've ever seen of a modern depiction of fatherhood is the sports coach. Like all the things that I see a coach doing, like just watching guy like Dion Sanders, it's like a clinic for fatherhood.

for me. It's so healing to my soul to watch these men and how they, all the things they have to do in planning for the team, bringing the team together, like pitching the vision, we're going to win this championship. This is what it's going to look like, making the very difficult decisions that you have to make as a head coach about, like, I think that that was almost identical to the way that ancient fathers used to live. They would have all these players, which were their children and their employees that worked in the in the family business and and the father was the was the coach and he was constantly coaching each member of the family helping them work together as a team but he was ultimately responsible for what happened if they lost the game it was his

fault like he had to take that that hit personally and he was given it a lot of authority because of that and so every father would act this way overnight if if there was real survival at stake and their families were being destroyed because of a constant wave of tragedies. But this is the way most people used to live in ancient times. Famines, you know, wars, so many, like pandemics, there were so many unpredictable waves of attack that were going to hit their family. And they all knew that they were coming, that every father had to really steal himself

to lead the family properly. And so, again, because we live in this weird age that sociologists call the assumption of stability, we live in. this time period in which people don't feel like they need a father like that. That's just patriarchal. Like that guy is just, he's just trying to grab power because he just wants his personal preferences to rule the family.

And that actually is accurate for so many modern dads who think this way because they don't actually feel those threats coming. They don't, they're not actually trying to lead their family towards these great opportunities in this amazing future. They really are just trying to live a lifestyle of personal preference. pandering. And so it's not inappropriate for a father that actually only cares about his personal preferences to take that kind of leadership in a family. Because that's not what it's for.

It's for what I described. It's to take the family into through really difficult situations and into amazing opportunities. And so we need that we need that kind of father to reemerge. We need to be training fathers to be like those head coaches. But they have to understand that, yeah, they've got a team and their job is to coach their team. into victory and that's that requires them to dig deep into everything god's made a man to be and it's not just you know give your family a decent life and think about your own individual preferences that that is not a kind of compelling vision that's going to cohere a family around around a vision it does seem like a subtle difference that makes all all the difference the

the contrast between like a businessman who comes home to his family and all the responsibilities at home are a threat to his kind of personal goals versus the family man who goes out to business and the responsibilities at home actually equip him and prepare him for and it's like the the motivation is is so much greater yes with the family man going out to do business and do that well and to excel there yes than it is for the first case um i'm curious though because Sean and I have this conversation all the time. How do you balance the personal versus the familial, specifically, I guess, the friends versus the family?

It's like, oh, I feel like we have been so well equipped by our parents to go do amazing things. Sean's done amazing things. We have these incredible opportunities, and like we try to weigh them well and and approach them with discernment, but it's like, but we're also, you know, four hours away from our family,

and we have been, and there is, there's this tension there. Fortunately, Sean's parents live literally two minutes away from a shoot, grew up an only child. I'm the middle of five.

Everyone's in Indianapolis, and it's like, oh, we, you know, in some ways, in some, I want to use this term lightly. I'm actually curious to get your, your perspective it's like it's almost like our calling to be down here it feels like

because there's like yeah it just feels like this is a good spot for us to be i just don't know what the tension is dude it's like this weird it's this weird line to walk on yeah it is i think it's important to always start from where you are you know one of the things that paul actually says in first christian seven is everyone should remain in the situation in which he was called like don't assume that the answer is to upheaval but i do you think that as your values start to shift, if that itself really causes you to decide to make certain shifts, then that, that's, I would pay attention to that. But I, I, but you're saying, you're saying, I've, I've entertained my personal preference since so long. Now my values have

changed from what I grew up on and now I'm making totally different decisions. Well, you get to pay attention to, to what your values are, what values are you cultivating? And if you are cultivating really good values around, hey, I really want to serve the kingdom of God. I really, you know, I want to build a really strong family. Then, and, and that causes you to continue to feel like where you're at is the right place to reflect those values, then, then I would continue to do that. But, but there's been a lot of cases in which somebody, let's say they have decided, I really want to go after my individual values and they end up on the other side of the country and then all of a sudden they begin to develop a really strong sense of I like valuing family

and wanting to do more and more things integrated with their family as their values start to shift now all of a sudden their desires start to shift now they're like I didn't want to live in the Midwest but all of a sudden I want to move back you know that that's when I would pay attention when the value shift but if your values are being well served from where you are and those are always going to be intention. There's not just one value. There's like lots of, lots of values that are being held intention. Then, you know, on a regular basis, where your values begin to create desires. And if your desires shift, that's when I oftentimes think, oh, let's entertain this possibility. In our case, what one of things that kind of happened to us was, you know, I grew up in the Seattle area

and we ended up moving, you know, to the Cincinnati area. And over the next 15 years of us living here, and we were very isolated when we first moved here from family. And we saw many, I think most of our family members on both sides ended up moving here. And a lot of it was just their value started to shift over time. And so it created kind of this vortex, which was very surprising to us. We did not expect them to move. But yeah, that was, I believe, a result of just different seasons of life create and begin to accentuate new value.

those values give birth to desires that then cause the family to come closer together. So I would pay attention to those if that starts to happen. Yeah, I mean, because you also have the concept of like leaving cleave or like John Eldridge talks about the like being fathered by God and one of the phases like cowboy and another is warrior and it's like there is this like coming into your own. It's just it's so interesting to try to keep it all together through. the same lens. Yeah, definitely, I would, I think one of things is challenging is the, so the leave and cleave, that's from Genesis 2. And one of the things that's really, I think, confusing

for modern people about that is that in that context, there were, there was very little leaving that happened for, that's a very, like, modern idea. And so what, if you actually read that in context. What is describing there, it says, in this way, a man shall leave his father and mother and shall unite to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. And then Jesus added to that in the Gospels, they're no longer two but one. What he's talking about there, and the way that was lived out in ancient cultures was that when a couple would get married, they would actually move into a different house or in different part of the house. Usually it was actually a different part of the house. And the thing that's being emphasized in that passage is the

sexual oneness between and that was actual big problem for the last you know for those millennia was the the fact that oftentimes the family multi-generational would live in the same tent or the same house and the bible actually you saw this in the like story of isaac you know Isaac when he grew up he didn't leave his father and mother and become like moved to another city um he moved into another tent and actually describes that when rebecca came he then left the tent of his father and mother and moved into his own tent so that he could experience that sexual union with his wife. Now, that doesn't mean that we need to have this enmeshed relationship between the generations.

It does mean, I think, that we're really confused about what that actually looks like in a healthy way. And I think that we've gone way too far on the individual side, but I think that there is an overreaction where people start to, you know, where you have maybe grandfathers and grandmothers that think they have a bunch of authority over their adult children and try to control their lives, which I agree. I don't think that's biblical. I think the primary way to envision the relationship between adults in a family is one of honor. It's a culture of honor, not a culture of obedience. And that's what the Bible really emphasizes. But I don't think we've seen that. We don't

live in a culture of honor anymore. And so there's a complete confusion now. It's either obedience or it's nothing. And we don't know. And that's why I think like in Italy, when you go to these ancient cultures like you were describing, Sean, that's one of the things I love to go and just experience, especially honor-based cultures that have a memory of what it's like to experience honor between adults and a family, because that's really missing. And without that honor, the relationships get way to wound up and confusing. I, yeah, I feel like I could just sit here and like take it all in for hours. We love this.

It's something that our family has been talking about and working on for, like, intensely. And it's a conversation we talk about almost every day. So I just appreciate it. I appreciate your perspective. I really hope the, you know, the brokenness of our culture starts to swing back because family is the greatest. And I've gotten to experience it firsthand from my family and yours. And being able to, like, share that with people, I think, is, is. important yeah i'd like to i'd like to sit down with you again jeremy uh in person and we'll probably

block off like three hours because it's so fascinating i i'm just thinking um i've benefited so much uh from the side effects of family like being the middle of five kids we're out in dc or whatever and i get approached i'm like hey i went to i went to wheaten with your brother and then it's like there's so many more relationship touch points or connections that you have when you're you have this strong sense of family or you know at my dad's funeral it's like an 80 year old guy approaches me and is like hey i i taught your dad and your your grandpa and like there are they're like generational relationships too that just hit differently than than like you know a new budding friendship which is also beautiful but it's like the um the amount of community that that family

can be a vehicle for i think is like really really powerful so anyway um i know we're over time i appreciate you giving us time today i'm excited to talk more about this um excited to get the feedback from our listeners and if you are listening you want to learn more about jeremy and his work he's written several really fascinating books that have kind of inspired sean and i to like dig into this and we are trying to spend as much time being strategic with family as we are with our own personal goals or business goals and it's as honestly it's more of like a loose ambiguous um intangible project but it's so fun and sean and i have i think benefited and grown closer together so anyway thank you for all that you've done in this field jeremy awesome yeah thanks guys