Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - “Nuclear Family Is The Cancer, Not The Cure.” - With Jefferson Bethke

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Christian conservatives made the mistake of idealizing the nuclear family, when they should be idealizing multigenerational living. Author Jefferson Bethke shares counter-cultural advice on parenting, communication styles, and family structure that will change how you “do” family forever. Visit Jefferson's Website to learn more and to purchase his book "Take Back Your Family." Register Now for AmericaFest, Turning Point USA’s largest multi-day conservative gathering in the country, ...

The love of my life, Taylor Swift. No, well, yes. She is my girl crush, but my man crush every day is Tucker Carlson. And he is going to be in Phoenix, Arizona, December 16th through 19th at America Fest. It is the biggest conference in the conservative movement, music festival in the conservative movement that takes place every December put on by Turning Point USA, featuring the biggest speakers in the conservative movement like Tucker. And you can get there with a discount. for me, AMFest.com with code real Alex Clark.

AMFest.com with code real Alex Clark. Find out more in the description. Did you read the title of this episode correctly? Was the nuclear family a mistake? Well, how could that be? I hope you're sitting down because this is one of my favorite episodes I've done all year. Let me ask you, have you noticed an explosion of narcissism in today's culture? You wouldn't be alone if you have.

There is observed evidence that individuals, Individualistic values can lead to narcissism and that individuals from the United States in particular, which does have a more individualistic culture, have higher grandiose narcissism scores compared with individuals from Asian countries in the Middle East. And you know what narcissism leads to? Depression, relationship difficulties, problems at work, and other anxiety and personality disorders. So where should someone even start when it comes to reversing a problem so widespread and rooted? in our everyday way of living. My guest believes he has an answer, and it all has to do with rethinking the way we do family. Now you say, do family, you mean have a family?

No, how we do it. The framework of the typical American family model isn't working, and many don't realize it, especially conservatives. The isolated nuclear family is actually a very new phenomenon. That means mom, dad, and kids, moving away from parents or extended family to start a life somewhere else completely on their own. It wasn't always this way.

We used to live multi-generational with our family, yes, but other families too, which is great news for those who aren't close with their actual blood families or don't have extended family. Because really, this whole concept is about creating a family, whether or not you're related by blood. Today we'll also discuss how home is where you're supposed to recharge. Our spouses and our kids should want to be home more than anywhere else because it's fun. It brings peace and energizes them. But if it hasn't been that way for so long, how can you get there?

Don't worry. If you care about your family legacy and your home being a beacon of light for your kids in a dark world, please don't skip this episode. And speaking of families, if you're new to the conservative family, may not know this yet, but I'm a huge reader, and I get asked all the time what my favorite parenting books are. And every time I say, hands down, it's take back your family from the tyrants of burnout, busyness, individualism, and the nuclear ideal. This book totally changed me. I actually think it's the perfect pairing to Becca Merkel's even exile, if you've ever read that. I've really only

heard conservatives talk about how great the nuclear family is, you know, just being mom, dad, and the kids. how this is the ideal, this is the standard we should all be going for. But this book challenges the notion that a nuclear family should be the ideal blueprint for Christians. In fact, my guest says nuclear family is the cancer, not the cure. For the last two years, I've been begging the author to come on the spillover and give us all his practical tips and encouragement on how to do family the right way. He finally said yes and actually flew in all the way from his home in Hawaii to have this

conversation in person. You can watch this conversation by subscribing to Real Alex Clark on YouTube and make sure you pause the show right now. Leave a five-star review. Make your New Year's resolution to completely rethink how you do family. Please welcome New York Times bestselling author Jefferson Bethke to the spillover. So I get asked a lot like what my favorite parenting books are and since Take Back your family came out, yours has been number one. My biggest recommendation, I was just enthralled by the first page and I really felt like I had a soul transformation after reading it.

And I think it's just because you were talking about something that I honestly have not heard anybody talking about whether in the parenting space or especially amongst conservative Christians. Like I just haven't heard anybody talk about the nuclear family being a negative. Yeah. From a conservative Christian viewpoint.

Yes. And so why do you think that our idea of what a family is today is really just a cheap, Western knockoff of what it was intended to be. Man, that's a huge first question. I would probably say a great question, by the way. Where would I want to start? I would say, so the way I like to think about it is,

you have to think about is, is family just a collection of individuals? And what I mean by that, that individuals, their purpose, their identity, what they want to do in life, their direction, their vision, is the highest good? Not that it's not a good, but it's the highest good. Does that define the family? or would the family be the defining identity for the individuals,

meaning like does it kind of go upstream or downstream, if that makes sense, from individuals to a team or team to an individual? The Western mindset certainly post-industrial revolution, and we can get into some other reasons why and what that looks like and where it came from is 100%. Like, we are one of the most individualistic societies ever in all time of all history. And what's interesting about that is it has really, really serious ramifications for the family because there's nothing, there's no glue is basically another way you can think about it.

There's nothing holding the family together. There's no mission. There's no shared values. There's no shared team. Imagine if, and again, we think that's a good thing, right? We think it's a good thing. And there is. Of course, it's like, it's a good thing that got kind of like cancerous.

Like it overgrew itself, right? Obviously, you have the Declaration of Independence. You have the founding fathers. You have all these ideals around human autonomy, individualism, self-fulfillment, great things. But as they keep going more and more and more, you kind of lose the web-connective tissue of a team. And we say it's a good thing. but imagine if that spirit was ever in any other team-oriented dynamic. Imagine if that spirit was in, we're at the workplace.

Well, it is, and that's actually where you get a lot of toxic workplaces. Imagine if it was on like the Golden State Warriors. That's just one of my favorite teams, so I had to reference them. It's like, you know, they wouldn't be winning championships. So there's something about, and we can talk about what that looks like and why. But I think that's why what I would say, it doesn't even matter if you're religious or secular. The mindset of the individual being the most important thing for the family is just as bad regardless. And that's where I get some flack from kind of the right or from some conservative people,

even though like I'm a very conservative Christian because I kind of say, hey, you're just slapping on different language, but your actual philosophical bedrock of what you believe a family is is still the same thing, just the flourishing of individuals, if that makes sense. Okay, so it's a mistake for Christian conservatives to champion the idea of a nuclear family. Great question. So no, but it's bigger than that, not less than that. here's what I mean by that. So here's a thought experiment that I kind of give people when I'm

thinking about this as you as you study history. Because a lot of this comes from, you know, here's maybe another way to put it. I think a lot of us date the ideal family to 1950 when I think we should date the ideal family to like 3,500 BC. And those are two very different things. Yeah. Why is that? So like here, another way I try to give a thought experiment to people is like, okay, imagine you're sitting around the dining table, dining table with like a family or your family or whatever and you kind of and you're like around there's a fireplace next to the table and above the fireplace is that huge uh like a family picture okay most people today if you were to say describe that family picture how many people are on it what does it look like most people would name three to seven

people on that picture yeah mom dad two kids exactly the nuclear family great great thing um in in essence but then if you were to in 1900 and 1850 and 1750 if you were to ask that exact same a thought experiment, hey, up above the mantle, like how many people are in that picture? They would say like 27. They would say like 63. They would say like 78. And it wouldn't just because they had a lot more kids. It's because they would actually see anyone with the last name as a, as almost like David,

I love David Brooks. Some people don't like him. And of course, there's some stuff I disagree with them on. He calls it the, I think he calls it the enterprise family. And it's basically these families that were just like generational legacy oriented enterprises, where it's like it wasn't so that those 70 people above the mantle weren't just the nuclear family. There was like, there was like 10 of those. There was like a mom and dad and the kids. Then there was the aunt and uncle. They're married and they got kids. Then it was

another and then, you know, they had eight siblings and they all had kids. Then there was the patriarchs and the matriarchs. And then honestly, a lot of those pictures, they had like even the employees. Like like the home before the industrial revolution, the home was actually seen as whoever was on this property as part of this team, this enterprise, we're productive. We're not just consumer oriented, which a lot of Western individualistic families are. We have a mission. We have a legacy and we have a last name and maybe even half the people on that picture are dead because we actually see our family line going way farther back than what most people see it today. So does that make sense? So it's like the nuclear family is embedded in that picture,

but we've got in our picture, we've made our picture too small. Right. So we need to be looking as conservative Christians multi-generational when it comes to building our families instead of just mom, dad, and kids. And really you think this entire idea should just be declared bankrupt. Yeah, because what it does, and again, Brooks has an amazing article he wrote in the Atlantic, I think, five years ago called the end of the nuclear family. That's actually where I got kind of the stick. Not the philosophical idea I was writing about, but the, but that the nuclear family, like let's pinpoint that is actually something we need to mess with. He goes at the end of the nuclear family, so go read it if you can, an amazing article. And one of his really good points,

one of his good points is we need to declare it bankrupt because it's a fragile asset. Like it's almost, and you can see that today. It's too fragile, meaning like if anyone commits adultery, If anyone dies, if anyone loses their job, because it's, you know, in the like, if it's a dad, the breadmaker and the mom just stays at home, then like your family just pretty much implodes. Like, you just implode. Like, it's just when we see that. And it wasn't, and it wasn't imploding before. Because there was a web and a net that could catch them of 70 people. Does that make sense?

For support. Yes. And so, and so it's the nuclear family needs to be embedded in a larger vision. And I actually really agree with that. Like, you can see that anecdotally everywhere that you, that everyone's trying to achieve that goal, which is a necessary. D. And we can talk about Carl Zimmerman. I write about him in the book in the early 1940s. He has the family civilization book, which is a landmark book on family. But what's interesting is, yeah, it's just, it's too fragile, meaning like that can't be the end goal. That actually should be

the starting goal. It's like, hey, let's have a healthy family. What about people listening that are already like, well, great, well, I've already failed because I'm a single parent home or, you know, we're a family of divorce or whatever. And they're listening to this interview like, well, I guess I should just shut it off now because there's no way. I was raised by a single mom, by the way, so I have that environment. Here's what I'm arguing for. I'm arguing for what I think the Bible argues for, which would be called this phrase we use.

It's a little long-winded, but it's a multi-generational family team on mission. That's the point, I think, of actually every human. Now, is to be a part of and be engaged with a multigenerational family team on mission. You see that in Genesis, right? When God wants to, this is so fascinating to me, and we never talk about it,

that when God, like God could have just made everything in the world beautiful and amazing incredible. He didn't. He made a pocket of that called Eden and the rest of the world was untamed. It was desertous. It looked a lot like Arizona. There's a lot of tumbleweeds and all, you know what I mean? Like it was it was untamed is what the rabbis would say. It was unordered. It wasn't it wasn't cultivated yet. It wasn't Shalom yet. But the Garden of Eden was. So he puts these, so he so he has this job now, God, of making the rest of the world look like Eden. Like like, you know, and of course he could have snapped his fingers. He could have done it in his wisdom and his grace, he decided to not do that and actually create some

some helpers. Like he said he wanted to create some people that would help them. Now again, if that's God's job, if God's job is to make the rest of the world look like Eden, just because it's in his nature to make order out of chaos. And it's a weird thing to put yourself in God's seat. But if we were God, what would we do? We would probably do a tech startup to maybe do that. We would probably make an app. We would probably raise a bunch of venture capital. We'd maybe start a nonprofit. You know, but you know what? We would probably never do. Say, you know what we should do?

We should make a male and a female. They should, you know, co-create and then make many image bears of themselves so that then they have a bunch of helpers and then they will be able to do the job. That's just like such a weird answer, in my opinion. But he shows that as, but that's his answer. He could have done so many other things, but he chose this multi-generational family team on mission to accomplish that job, meaning he made a family, male plus female. then he made um but then he said the job's too big you can't just do it in one generation so like have a bunch

of babies is basically what he said create multiply um and then he gave them the mission of like go create order out of chaos go create beauty go create goodness go kind of like reflect me that's what it means to be an image bear okay so that's that's from page one god reaffirms that this is an interesting trivia too you know all those classic stories Noah Abraham whatever god almost always reaffirms the exact garden mandate right after he blesses them or creates a covenant with them so he'll you know, to Noah after the flood, they come off the boat and what does what does God say, he says, be fruitful and multiply.

Well, that sounds like a quote from Genesis. You get down to Abraham, same thing, right when he pulls him out of, you know, his kind of paganist father and he brings him west. He basically tells Abraham, now that you're here, be fruitful and multiply. And he just keeps reaffirming that. Be fruitful and multiply. Be fruitful and multiply. I'm also being reminded in Genesis how there's like 100 pages of just names.

Yeah, that's the reason. Because they're one family. And again, if you were to go to a Jewish person today, and you were to say, hey, who's your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great. Great, great, great, great, great, great, great. And you can say great long more than that. They would say Abraham. That's fascinating to me that they would all say that. They would all, like, have this embedded identity and vision around that. Now, to use that as what I mean to make sure we say that to then go to your question about, okay, what do you do now, though. But here's the thing, though, is I actually think that vision is bigger, not smaller than the nuclear family. How so. And because what I mean by that is there's a place for everyone. So, so. So, When you feel like the nuclear family is the ideal, then what will happen is what you just said. Someone will feel like they, you know, messed up or they, you know, got their spouse died or someone cheated or whatever. Or they had a kid out of wedlock and they'll feel like, man, I meant I sucked it up. I missed.

I didn't, you know, go to the standard. But when you're believing in a multigenerational family team on mission, the only thing you need to be a part of that is a last name. Meaning like literally every human's a part of one. So I think that's actually again, even why we've gotten into a lot of trouble. in the church is because we've idealized the nuclear family, then we have these like, then we pet single people against that. And it's like, no, no, literally if you have, if you're breathing, you're part of that web somewhere, somehow, right? And again, that might not mean that you might not need to separate from someone upstream. You might need to create a new line, just like

Abraham did, you know, but Isaac didn't. Obviously, Isaac was a part of Abraham's line. And also just creating a multi-generational family also not necessarily only mean blood, like linking up with other families. Because I think that's what changes in the New Testament. in my opinion. I think you can argue that you, that certainly God still keeps it true that, you know, a multi-generational family team on mission is the play. But what I think I see in, in the kind of the big bomb that Jesus drops is that the church is that. At the, like the capital C church is the capital F family. So everything is actually pointing up towards that. So then you'll have, so now the church, the ecclesia is the family of God that God is actually ultimately creating

to as one entity to bring his goodness and beauty into the world. And to have a healthy version of that, you need a bunch of healthy smaller ones, right? That most of them are bloodline oriented. But no, I mean, and I think I put stories in the book. There's plenty of people I know that, you know, can't have kids. And so maybe they adopt, maybe they foster. But I know people that didn't do any of that.

They couldn't have kids and they just are like some of the, they almost have like a 70, like spiritual children. That they just, their full-time mentors and their full-time leaders. You know what I mean? And then they pass on things and they pass on wisdom and lineage and legacy and they cast vision. Yeah. So I talk about this a lot is that so I'm not married with kids yet, but I feel like depending on the season of your life or if you can have kids, whatever, we're all called to kind of mentor others or be there for other people in our community. So I think that's important.

We're all sons and daughters and we're all mothers and fathers. And I think that's really important. I think that's really important. We're all sons and daughters and we're all mothers and daughters. And that does, has nothing to do with biology. Perfect. You know what I mean? And so I think you have to live into that identity.

And then maybe if it's biological, then that's an added bonus that God certainly works through. Okay. So here's something else that's interesting in the book. You brought up, speaking of identity, where are we going to find our identities, our missions, our purpose? But where should we be going? Yeah. I think, and again, you have to have a healthy family in some of these cases.

But again, we're shooting for ideals here because why not? That's what everyone lives. I think sometimes people always shoot this down of like, oh, that's so idealistic. We're all living towards an ideal. Everyone, that's like, that's life. You literally are pointing towards an ideal and trying to be something.

You know, and so the question is, is that a bad one or a good one? But yeah, I would say the reason the individualized experiment, I think, has failed is because the container can't hold enough meaning. Meaning an individual trying to have

all of his meaning on his own. It's too small of a cup. Does that make sense? And so I feel like, and I think we've seen that. We've seen that. That people just like kind of that, that self-actualization, that classic, like, you know, what's the phrase when they're 18? Go find yourself.

And the reason they all then just go party and get drunk and have sex and waste their life. The phrase, go find yourself. It's terrible. It's just the biggest cultural lie. I think we've been told. Well, and you know what? Jewish kids never hear that. Jewish kids aren't told that.

There's a fascinating. I don't want to go on a crazy tangent, but this is a very fascinating thing. I talk about, I don't think it's in the book, but I talk about this in a lot of my keynotes and stuff. The Jewish community is. about 15 million people in the world. What are we at now? 8 billion humans.

So I think that's 0.002% of the population. I mean, statistically, absolutely insignificant, statistically, right? I mean, they should have zero impact on the world. When any measure of success in the world, though, like take anything. You could take Olympics. You could take, like, Pulitzer Prizes,

you could take Nobel Prizes, whatever. Like, let's take some of this. I think Nobel Prizes, I think 30% of those have been given to Jewish people of all Nobel Prizes ever given. Pulitzer Prizes is 50%. So our best wordsmiths, almost one out of every two is Jewish. I think 45% of all patents in the modern era from 1850 on have been given to Jewish people.

Or, you know, like just what I'm saying is they're statistically insignificant, but they're insanely impactful on our world, insanely impactful, okay, on finance, religion, obviously, science, all these different measures. So then my question I ask in this keynote is why, why? and a lot of sociologists have actually studied that because they're shocked too. They're like, that is wild statistics, right? What I just said right there. And so a lot of people have studied it.

And what most people come back to is their home environment. Their formational, their formational identity is one of the strongest you can find in all cultures. And then two, what I just, what we're alluding to is, there's no, there's no, most Jewish families never tell a 13-year-old boy or for a 13-year-old girl, okay, now that you're getting into a teenage years, go find yourself. They literally just say like, here's our story.

that we've had for 4,000 years, you're in this, now just like move on. And like, you know what it does? What it does to answer what I just said is they just are like 10 years ahead of everyone because they're not spending, they're not wasting 15 years of their life trying to go find themselves. They're 17 and already working on patents because they're just like they've moved on. Does that make sense? And I find that very interesting.

I do too. You say that you've come to this conclusion that most American families are really just drowning, that this was. never what God had in mind for us. How did we go from multi-generational living, you know, being the norm in America with dad and grandpa, grandma, aunts, uncles, cousins to just mom, dad, and kids on their own? Yeah, there's a lot of reasons. I think one I'll probably pinpoint.

I'm trying to think of the economist's name where he makes this argument. I can't remember his name. But the economist argues that because of basically, what's the word I'm looking for? We just got so rich and happy. like in like the in like the post post world war two post world war two we got so um not lucrative but what's the word just like so uh everything was everything was going so well the mill convenience yeah conveniences um but also just everyone had a lot of money like quality of life quality life just boom shot through the roof okay incomes shot through the roof um post war post

industrialized uh and world war two compared to europe we were one of the most just uh kind of flourishing people and societies. And so what's interesting about that is that then made people or allowed people, excuse me, to make a lot of leaps and a lot of jumps for freedom's sake. Meaning, they're like, oh, I don't need my family anymore. That's literally what it was. I don't need to be around grandma because we are, we got money. We got money.

We got time. We got energy. We got a strong middle. We're part of the strong middle class. So then what happened is you actually have like a huge kind of reshuffling of where people live and moving. And so basically from 45 to 80, he argues that we had one of the largest gaps of people moving away from their... Like 1945 to 1980.

Yeah, basically from people moving away from their most extended, their family, their family. And then like, like, new... Think about it. Nuclear families moving away from their big, like, web family, right? And again, there's reasons to do that. You know, there's reasons to do that. That's great. But what that did is then what he says.

And then we start getting into the 90s, early 2000s. The job market starts lagging. Economy starts going down. And now basically, I think his phrases, he says, Now everyone's stuck out in the cold. Like they made, they, they, they placed themselves in all these places. And now, like, they have no, now things aren't going as well. And they have no safety net, which should be the family, not the government.

And so that's one of the reasons. There's a lot of other reasons. But that's one of them for sure. And so, yeah. And so people are drowning now. And, like, you can't, I mean, you look at educational costs and how they've gone crazy. But, you know, wages have not grown that much. Most people need to have, like, both working parents now.

But then you get into a weird part of that, too. This is what was like. Like, ooh, this is a big life bulb for me in the book. The wider, fluffier, and more scented your toilet paper is the more chemicals it's likely to contain, like chlorine, which can cause skin irritation, particularly around the vulva. If you struggle with yeast infections a lot, you may be reacting to the chemicals in your toilet paper and not know it because no one talks about it. I know it's awkward and it's embarrassing.

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how moving away from, you know, being a multi-generational family, parents moving to some other state with just them and their kids, Like all of these decisions have led to this feeling of we have to be a two-parent working home. And therefore we have to pay for child care outside of the home. We can't survive without it. And like it has created this huge negative domino effect that's negatively affecting families.

100%. Yeah. And to me that feels like the end of the domino, what you just said. But most people put that as the front, meaning like that's where they think they need to make the decision. And it's like, no, the decision needs to be traced back to as anything happened previously. And so yeah, I think what I always find fascinating is people will move in two seconds for a job, two seconds. They'll be like, oh, I got a job in Atlanta. I guess I got to go.

Like it's whatever. And it's like they like, they have to, the world has to cave in for them to move for family. I feel like that should be reverse. I feel like that should be, why shouldn't you move for family, right? For your family, meaning like if your family's drowning or to be closer to family. And we just have seen, you know, we have a ministry called family teams that we've, you know, thousands of people have come through in conferences and curriculums and retreats and all these things. And it's like, of course, it's not for everyone. It's not for everyone. But we've seen too much of the

pattern be successful of people being like, yeah, I may, we made a sacrifice. We either got a lower paying job or lived in a less expensive place or moved closer to family and it's gone well for us. And it's like, well, man, how many of those need to be true before we more of us start paying attention to that, you know? They don't have to do that. You can grind it out and do some of these things. But then you start doing that weird trade with child care. for a second person working, but then it's like, well, that trade doesn't even make sense because why not just not work and not pay for child care?

You know what I mean? That's been a huge subject that I've brought up with my audience this year. And it's amazing because so... Have they enjoyed that? Meaning like, it's controversial. At first it was controversial and at first everyone was resistant. Then what happened was a few months went by and then everybody started really thinking about it

and then putting pen to paper and being like, wait, could I stay home? Could I stay home? If we weren't paying for childcare, then couldn't we afford to stay home? Yes. A lot of them found out yes. Then they were messaging me. oh guess what Alex we decided to downsize our house I decided to go from full time to part time

none of them that have made those choices have said they regretted it all of them said it has most like they got their life back most feel like it brought crazy amount of joy and flourishing now the only caveat I'll say with that whenever I get into that conversation is we need to be careful that that the mom is not always the one taking the hit on that so it's not necessarily meaning like the mom needs to work and the dad needs come home that could also maybe be true in certain circumstances but what I mean by that is just it needs to be a team discussion. Whatever, however you want to solve the problem needs to be a team-oriented discussion. Meaning, and this usually is the one that works out most for people, is okay, the mom, yeah, don't pay for child care, stay home, and is this the best for everyone? And yes,

it is. But there's some circumstances where I feel like sometimes the guy is just like, doesn't bud, doesn't adjust, doesn't, like everyone needs to adjust something. Everyone needs to be sacrificing for the team. But yeah, I absolutely think it's, same thing, we've seen what you said. Like so many people have said, yeah, I wish I would have done this three years ago. Yeah, so let's talk about the family team that lives in your house. So who all lives in your house? We do have a little bit of a compound. I think some people think we're Jehovah's Witnesses, everyone's small for that reason.

So it's, let's see here. So we have a two acre property in Maui up in the mountains. We actually moved up in the mountains because it's way cheaper. You try to live down by the water and it's like you can't do this. So we lived in so we live up in the mountains, two acre property. I think we got four dwellings on it. We have the main house. We have, which is me and my wife Alyssa and our three kids.

Then we have Alyssa's parents who live on the property, which is really fun. They're incredible. They're both retired and they kind of, Alyssa's an only child, so they followed us, which is kind of awesome and amazing, and they help out with the kids. Yeah, so like is your family from Hawaii or you decided together, we're all moving. We're all from Seattle. So everybody moved to Hawaii. Yeah, about 10 years ago, we moved. And then we also have like a barn that we run a women's clothing company out of, my offices out there. And then also we have a guest house that like we try to bring families into like disciple and meet with us and stay with us for a certain amount of time and stuff. So, so any given day, there's usually like 20 to 25 people on our property.

Do you think also if we started living multi-generational like that, like bringing grandparents in and stuff like that, we could afford nicer properties, more land? Exactly, because you're sharing in which we did. You're sharing resources and you're sharing all these things. And I think that's the built in, you know, having babysitters for date nights and things. Exactly. And it's just the word that I use all the time. And again, everyone has to do what's best for them with their spreadsheets and with their visions and all these things. But I think what we should be pushing for is most of the Western world is trying to disiniscan,

the family order and the family rhythm and the family kind of like cadence. I'm always looking to say, how can I integrate family? Meaning how can I integrate my kids with work? How can I integrate my in-laws on our property or in our family? How can I, like in it? So if you just want to, if people are like, man, what do I start doing practically? How does that word serve you? How can you integrate?

Think about what does integration means? It kind of means this like pulling together of things that have been kind of fractured or splintered and trying your best to put them together in a way that dances. You're not forcing it and you're not making things go that don't go. Integration is like a really healthy kind of like orbiting back together and dancing together. Okay, so what does the Bible specifically say about what a family unit should look like and ideally be like? That's a good question. I think, I kind of alluded it to it earlier. I think we sometimes impose a 1950s worldview on the Bible when I think it's so much more team-oriented.

I mean, you have kings and queens, and you have ruler, men and women are both ruling in certain contexts. And of course, we can get into the weeds of the actual theological kind of vision of a marriage, you know, and whether it's egalitarian and complementarian, I love that conversation as well. But I think in general, we see men and women both being powerhouses. Even the Proverbs 31 women, like, you know, there's so many parts in there that are obviously quoted the most about, you know, homemaking and all stuff,

but she's like a freaking boss business woman if you just read the text for two seconds. And so I think, yeah, I think we need to reclaim that a little bit, but it's all around. But even then, it's not as an individual. It's not just like,

you know, it's not just so that she can go be a girl boss. The family is still helping her. The family or it's all for the family. It's all for the family. It's all for the last name. It's all for the legacy. And back then,

I don't think people realize this. If you didn't do that, if you did not steward your generational assets, meaning you, your spouse, and your kids, if you didn't steward yourself and take the football a tiny bit farther down the field, you all die. Literally, you all die. It's just like you go backwards. I don't think people realize how affluent we are where it doesn't, it doesn't cost us anything to not. When back then, if they didn't do that, they lose the farm, they lose the cattle, they lose the agriculture, they lose their family, they all die. Like, I don't think people realize

that. And that's just so interesting to me. But I thought the Bible said that we are supposed to leave and cleave. Yes, which is probably one of the most misabused versus in the Western world. Absolutely leave and cleave. So every time, here's a really good analogy I'll give. Every time a new generation forms, there is an autonomy in that generation. Okay. And so every time a husband and wife get married, they are starting, I don't want to say a new family, but they are starting, they're putting a new link in the chain. And all of those links do have some level of their own autonomy. They're like their own self-governing whatever,

but they're a link in the chain. So I think what we see is leave and cleave is get the wire cutters and breaking the chain. And again, if there's toxicity and boundary issues, of course that's what you need to do. I think that's 5% of people, not 95% of people. Yeah. And I think so many times,

I don't know if you found this, but specifically in millennial culture and definitely in Gen Z, we like way over crank the, my parents are toxic. Toxic, emotional abuse. Yeah, it's like, no. Oh, it's so annoying.

And by the way, you don't realize you're actually sitting yourself up for failure when you have kids because that's the precedent you're setting for them of like, oh, my parents like swore at me once. And so like I'm going to never talk to them again or whatever, something ridiculous. Now again, that's not to negate real trauma, really unhealthy parents, really toxic parents. We mentor and Shepard tons of couples. We're like, yeah, you need to get out of that situation. You need to leave them. Don't talk to them. Break, break legacy, break bonds.

But I just think, yeah, we over crank that. So don't break the chain, but you're starting a new link in the chain. And of course, we also know where that does go bad. We're like, you know, a mother or a mother-in-law who's like hasn't allowed that new chain to form. And so they're trying to be an authoritative force on the next thing. I have friends who have parents who are just very uninvolved grandparents. It's like they're not even interested in being grandparents. They really want nothing to do with their grandchildren.

So how do you deal with that also? That's a real thing. I think there's two sides there. I think one, it's a bummer if that is something that they've like lived in and believed. Do you think that's a modern phenomenon? 100%. 100%. There's a couple reasons.

One are, oh, there's so many reasons here. A couple big ones. I'll give maybe one on the grandparents side and one up, like meaning one thing I think the grandparents have done wrong and then one, or parents as you're saying, sorry. And one that like we have done wrong, meaning the married couple has done wrong. Okay. So the parents side, one thing they've done wrong is again, the American dream, basically. The American dream sets us up for failure because what it says is, you know,

works super, super hard your entire life. And then you will reach a point where you have about 12 years at the end of your life where you can just go golf and drink my ties and go like live your best life. Move to Florida. Yeah, just like the retirement dream. It's like that's not the biblical dream for retirement. The biblical dream, what is it? Psalm 91, Psalm 90 something.

It's in Psalm somewhere. You could probably Google in two seconds. But it literally says that the vision, the vision of grandparents is that they would have all of like so many children that their legacy. that they would have so many children and so many grandchildren that they would have basically it's like all of shoots just sprouting up all around a dinner table and I love that vision that like that's the that's the vision of an end of a man's life in psalm not golfing but it's actually a full dinner table of people okay so this is a conversation I'm fascinated by because this is

a discourse that's popped up a lot on Twitter recently which is that the boomer generation they have they struggle a lot it seems to me with greediness and selfishness when it comes to money And so what they feel like is we have worked our tail off our entire life. We deserve to blow all of our money at the end of our life on ourselves. We're either not giving our kids any money because we're going to blow it on ourselves or if they have money, they're like, we're going to give it to charity. And you specifically call this out in the book of how this doesn't make any sense. Well, yeah, I do really struggle with the like, I think there's like everyone thinks that's a good

idea now of like, oh yeah, just give away all your money so your children have to earn it on their own. Of course, like we're not looking for trust fund kids. no one wants that. But again, use the analogy of a team or a company. Imagine if the minute Steve Jobs died, Apple had to start back at zero. That would be the dumbest thing in the world, right? They'd have to just get rid of whatever they have, like, 100 billion or one trillion now of market cap they just crossed. That would just be ridiculous.

But that's literally like why? Because we know, we know that that money is not just to be consumed. That money is to be leveraged and used for the mission of the business. And invested. Exactly. It's basically producing instead of consuming. And so, of course, if you feel like you've raised kids in a certain way that giving them money will hurt them and will not help them and they won't invest it or produce with it, then of course don't. But I feel like, yeah, I feel like, you know, I'm hoping that here's another way I think about it. I think about that I'm trying to build all these resource and assets in our family so much so that literally like basically here's no way to put it. Who's going to to be better with our mine and Alyssa's assets and money and finances than someone I've trained 50 years for it. Yeah. Who's going to be better with it? And that's the thing. I think a lot of, it's like with the boomer generation, they didn't train Gen X and millennials. And or, you know,

or Gen X didn't train millennials. So then, but then whose fault is that? Everyone's, I don't know, probably the older generation. But I would say, yeah. So that's one's problem on the, on the, on their side is I think they, they, the vision of the American dream, the vision of retirement, rather than, no, these are my best years for my family. Think about how incredible those last 20 years are of your life. You're one of the only people alive in your family that can span six or seven generations of your family, right? Because you're about to die, maybe you're 80,

maybe you're 70, maybe you're 90, and you can still remember three generations above you because when you were a kid, you can remember your parents, your parents, parents, and maybe even your great-grandparents, okay? So that's three generations up. And now that you're 80 or 90, you can probably see three generations down.

You can see your kids and your kids' kids' kids and maybe your kids' kids' kids. That is in what a, what a special role you should play in the family if that is what you have available to you. But again, we don't do that. So that's on the, that's on the grandparents side. The one quick problem, I'll say on our side, the millennial side or the parents side of the married couple side with the parents or the grandparents above you is we don't invite them to the seat of honor. We don't like, we discard. Like our society is in all societies really right now, Japan, South Korea, obviously. West, we just discard old people.

They have no value. Yeah. We don't care about them. We think they're past their... Because, again, an ideal person in the West, an ideal person is usually like a 25-year-old ripped white male. An ideal person in the scriptures is like an 85-year-old, really wise person who's lived a lot of life.

That's fascinating archetypal difference. When you read the scriptures, that is the ideal person. Is the person at the end of the finish line? We usually put the ideal person at like 20-something, again, ripped, you know, takes native greens, you know, does all these things. You know what I mean? Like all these things, 2% body fat, tan is on Dancing with the Stars.

I don't know. Great show. Not anymore, but it used to be. So, but what that does, though, is then mean once you get past that, then all you're doing is actually getting less and less valuable. When in the scriptural view, you're getting more and more valuable. Does that make sense? And so I think that's a problem is you need to invite older people to the seat of honor.

Give them a seat at your table physically, but also metaphorically. Ask them to share wisdom. Ask them to share life experiences. And it's crazy. They come alive. Is it a problem that we're putting our parents and grandparents in, like, nursing homes as opposed to taking them in and taking care of them ourselves at the end of their lives? 100%. 100%. Now, there's even a weird thing, too, I've noticed with older people where they, like, are begging for that because they feel so weird about people taking care of them. They're like, no, just, you know, don't take care of me.

It's like, no, that's literally what any other cultures outside of the West, that's like how it is. You take care of me as a baby and I take care of you as an old person, right? And of course, resources and all these things are, you know, but I don't know. if you've seen this, but there's a massive, massive crisis happening, certainly in parts of Asia, South Korea, Japan as well. And it's going to happen in the West, probably about 25 years of the birth rate decline too. Significant. And this, I read the stat three weeks ago, the stat, I've already known about the, and I've written about it my book for years, the birth rate decline and it's a crisis because we're below the replacement rate. So it's always a huge crisis.

But this stat blew my mind. In South Korea right now, I think the stat is it takes 100 grandparent, to have six grandchildren, which is, that number should be bigger than the grandparents. But it takes 100 to have six grandchildren because they're so, like, they're just, the replacement rate is so low. Well, part of the problem, China is at fault for this a little bit.

Because part of the time, the problem was, they were doing the one child policy for most of my life. And the replacement rate is like two point something. But yeah. So that was a huge thing, is that you could only have one kid per family and then the other ones were taken to the woods and killed. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's insane.

So Asia's kind of experience. experimented China, Japan, South Korea, all with their own different reasons, but they've all experimented with it lately. And I think what's interesting is they've seen that like, yeah, it's failing. It's absolutely failing. China's, they're all taking those away. They all know it's actually bad for their society. Because what happens is now, because what it does is it puts the bill on the government. So now because there's no one to take care of the old people, because the old people didn't have any kids and kids, kids, kids, right? So it literally, so it puts such a massive burden on the government. They like are like, oh, this was terrible. We can't.

We're going to go bankrupt because we can't take care of this much of a generation when their kids should be doing it. You say that the thing that we need to all be doing is creating a mission, figuring out what our mission is within our family. And so you sat down with your wife, Alyssa, and you were like, okay, what do you think our family's mission is? What conclusion did you both come to? And why is this question so important for parents to ask themselves? Well, it's so important because, again, when you believe that your family is just a kind of nest and a collection of a bunch of individuals, then you won't have any guiding mission, right? Another way, again, I always use business and sports examples

because those are really the only two places that we really believe in team anymore. But you go to, again, let's see, you go to the Golden State Warriors, you go to Apple, you go to, you know, Tesla, whatever, and you go to the person in charge and you go like, why are we all here? Like, what's the whole point of me being here?

And they go, I don't know. And you go, okay, well, what should I do today at work? I don't know. You know, like you could just, you know, okay. That's true. I mean, I work in an office, and I'm thinking about that. You're focused.

You're disciplined. You got a mission. You know what our mission is. I mean, we work for a turning point. You say we work for a nonprofit. We all have a mission on the reason that we're producing this content. 100%. Like you know why you're there and you're pushing towards that.

And that's healthy. Without that, you perish. You die. You have no vision. So what at first did you in Alyssa kind of brainstorm? So I think, yeah, I think a really healthy way to do it is just it's not like you're setting anything in stone. But what you want to do is first you want to get out a piece of paper.

We tell people. And then you want to kind of like look at your team. So like that would be again, maybe it's maybe your single parents. Maybe it's just you. Maybe it's you and your spouse, but then look at your kids and whatever. And just kind of like start jotting down. Like we even have this on family teams.com. I think we call it a family scouting report where we have columns and questions to ask.

But it's like, what do they like? You know, so for one kid, there's a whole column or it's like, you know, let's say that kid's name's John. It's like, what does John like to do? How is John Wired? What is John's greatest weakness? What is John's greatest strength? Where do I think he'll be in 10 years? How is he an asset to our family?

How does he most need this family? for him and like his weak spots and his blind spots and how can we shore that up in him blah blah blah you do it again next kid next kid next kid next or whatever and then once you have that all on paper you then kind of start looking at it and you'll just see patterns be like oh we seem to like again so ours one of our biggest ones is hospitality so the way we did is we wrote like a fun little sentence about just like on

Maui on earth as it is in heaven is kind of you know taking that phrase but saying on Maui as it is in heaven easy to do when it's Maui and not Des Moines it's already heaven it's already heaven but then what we did is we got really clear then and this took us like a year to write, by the way. So this isn't something you do in like two seconds. And then we got clear with what we call pillars. And these are like our eight kind of like, these are our identity markers as a family, things that like we believe in, things that we feel like define us and our identity. But yeah, so one of those huge ones is hospitality. And that came up when by doing that. It's like,

oh man, I really all, like we host more than anyone else I know. We have people over at dinner more than anyone else I know. We have people stay at our house more than anyone else I know. And so like, we just realized like this is actually like part of our family. So then instead of just me and Alyssa doing it, we then said, okay, well, how do we integrate the kids? So like the kids are writing little notes when people come over. They're putting stuff in their bedroom. They're doing all these things. Like, it's just all these. And again, because we have little kids, so you're doing all these things to just foster the spirit that hopefully turns into really serious work as you get older. Okay. So can I ask you something? When you and Alyssa were dating or in the engagement stage

and stuff, was this a decision that you guys made of like, hey, we want to be the family that's always hosting people and stuff or do that come naturally or how did that develop for you? That's a good question. I would say, yeah, it came naturally. which is a really good smoke signal on what your mission is. Okay. Oh, that's kind of like, I just like doing that. We like doing that. It's who we are.

You know what I mean? Like, kind of the introverted, extroverted thing. Like, you just, you know who you are and you know kind of what you lean towards. You, maybe you're super entrepreneurial, your whole family. So you guys are just going to start a bunch of businesses in the next 50 years. You know, whatever. Maybe you're, I know people that are really, like, there's a family. We know that's super like a special needs oriented.

And so that's their whole, their whole family's mission is just to like, help and serve in all these contexts and all these nonprofits and all these events in that context. And, you know, they have a special needs kid as well. So obviously it's part of their identity. So you just kind of like, yeah, you just ask those questions. Definitely came natural to us. But also like, yeah, you kind of just, yeah, it's still, everything that comes natural to you is still a skill. You have to hone and craft. But yeah, so like I would say look for those in your family. What, what is that in your family that you guys are wired towards? And it's really important to include the kids because a lot of people will do that without the kids. And then what happens is sometimes, I think if you haven't included your kids in the mission you're doing, then or you at least can't find one that everyone fits into, then I think you'll actually will burn them out or it might be a misplaced mission because it's like, no, that's actually just dad's mission and he's just dragging the whole family along with them. And none of no one else wants to do that, you know?

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Part of the process of figuring out your mission for your family is also deciding who you're collectively fighting. Explain that. Yeah, so this is something I came across when I was researching that just kind of hit me where you can't have a team without an enemy. Like it's just not possible. Now again, the enemy can be something like not super enemy oriented.

Again, Apple could just be like Microsoft, but it really is though. Like they're in a capitalistic society, it's like, man, they are trying to beat and demolish the other competitors in the market. The Golden State Warriors, right? It would obviously be their opponents.

You know, if you're Christians, it should obviously be evil. It should be Satan. It should be the forces of darkness, the kingdom of darkness. Does it need to be more specific than that? Or can it be broad like that? I think it could be all of it.

I think it can be You just need to be aware of it. And so, yeah, I would say if it's a, I would say the more, just to practically help, the more cranked up you are on a ministry-oriented answer, the more that I think the enemy would feel like a more ministry-oriented enemy, if that makes sense. So what would you all say your family is fighting against? Not only would it be like King of Darkness and say whatever, but we would say loneliness is a big one. We would say like, I feel like the enemy of hospitality is loneliness.

Yes. Is isolation is individualism. some of these things. So we're constantly looking to try to, so how that plays out then is, man, who's lonely that needs to sit at this table? Who's lonely that needs to be here?

Who needs refreshment? Who needs, you know, encouragement? And so yeah, so it's just ways of thinking about it like that, if that makes sense. I know people where they would probably even say like,

what's the opposite of order? Like chaos is their enemy, like families because it's like, they're just such type A family. You know what I mean? But that's a real thing, though. Like those families that can come in

and just bring such order anytime they're in the room or around or leave. or leadership. You're like, man, that's you guys are on earth for that. I love that. All right. So I want you to tell us, this is crazy. Tell us about the family who let their 12 year olds do a trial run of adulthood. They got to live on their own for a period of time. And what it was about this family and their parenting style that changed you forever. That's hilarious. That's our mentors, Jeremy and April. They'll probably listen to this podcast. So Jeremy, what's up? Good to April. Good to see you guys.

So they're an incredible family. A lot of these ideas came from basically them, you know, and kind of discipling us. And that's who we run our family team. Wait, let me pause on the story. How do you find a couple that will mentor you like that? Just relationship. And of course, we got lucky. I'm definitely the personality that just constantly like kind of like pursues and like pushes in.

But and kind of like says yes to opportunities. But yeah, I just met them through, you know, kind of some friends and some things. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting. I would say one thing I think I've done semi well is I never ask anyone. to mentor me. I just like try to like get around them and give them value so that I'm just around them. Yeah. Yeah. I think too many times we ask people to mentor us and it's like everyone's like, I don't got time. The really successful people you want to mentor you don't have time for that. But if you can just go help them or be around them or go serve them or go, hey, can I just come to

dinner tonight or whatever? Something that's just like integrative and easy, then it's usually easier. But okay, so that's a good tip. So you meet this couple. They're incredible. They've mentored us for like 10, 12 years now. They're amazing. But yeah, I remember and their kids are like in their 20s now. I think some are married. Well, one's married and yeah, they're mostly young adults now. But yeah, so when we first met them, they were just, you know, living and they'd been living in this philosophy forever. And yeah, that was one of the really cool things is they just are constantly looking for, I think what's, when you really get captured about this philosophy, what's really cool is it really actually feels really freeing. It feels like, oh, we can like,

we can try stuff. We can experiment stuff. And so one cool thing they did that they were telling us about is, yeah, they're like, you know, I think the basically way, this was like a 10-year-old conversation, so I'm trying to remember it. But I think he was basically saying like, you know, most kids, we don't train them for the real world. We just throw them to the real world. And once they get to the real world, then they have a bunch of real life consequences that hit them that train them really well. Does that make sense?

And so he's like, why he's like, I was trying to think of ways that I could kind of like short circuit that and give them that early. And so one of them was what you just said. Like he's like, yeah, most kids will move out at 18 or 21 or 22 after college or whatever. And then all of a sudden just some real life consequences start hitting them of like, oh man, I got to pay bills. oh man i can't just go spend all my money on ice cream or shoes or whatever oh man i got you know all these like just real life thing like adulthood like you know or the classic adulting and so he was like

man like let's just like have 12 year olds do that so they can learn those lessons when they're way cheaper and so yeah i think uh you know it was a duplex for so it was it wasn't it was technically only next door but it was full blown autonomy i think for like a week of just like that it was i think it was the older two which is a brother and a sister and they were like 12 and 11 and it's just like i think they gave them like 100 bucks or something or 30 50 bucks and they had to like just figure it out Like just go grocery shopping, figure it out. And they had to pay rent. Yeah, they had to pay rent.

They had to pay bills. And it was just all these little micro lessons. And I remember one of them, I remember talking to one of the kids, Jackson, the son, when he was like probably 15, maybe at the time. Now he's getting 20 something. And I remember asking like, dude, how was that? That sounds so interesting and fascinating. He's like, well, he basically was like, well, you just learn real life lessons.

He's like, I spent all my money on Snickers, the first like, you know, and like candy bars. And then he's like, and then I'm sick. And then I'm hungry. and then I have no more food the next day. And so it's like, man, what an amazing idea to just, like, facilitate these experiments. And that's why we even try to do that with our kids in some way, where we, I try to get them,

we're really interesting with how we do money stuff with the kids because I'm constantly trying to give them opportunities to fail with money because I would prefer them to blow it on it. I would prefer them to blow $30 on a toy that then they regret a day later because it's a piece of plastic and it's junk and it breaks. Then $200,000 that they regret spending on university.

You know what I mean? Like that's a way cost of your mistake. Now they might want to go to use for different. I'm just saying like there's a lot of people that spend that and then they are, they're 23 and they're like, did I just take out 180 grand on loans? I did. Why did I do that? Why did I do that?

Well, I don't know. Man, I should have given that more thought. Also, let me say this. Are you guys homeschool family? Kind of were like a blend. We've homeschooled our whole life. They're in a little tiny private Christian school this year. Okay.

But that school also lets us travel as much as we want, which is awesome and we might probably homeschooling getting next year. Okay, let me just say this. Don't you think if we did a lot more with our kids of like what your friends did with their, their 12 year olds. Yeah, that's what we did at homeschool. It's like just teaching life. But when they learn these life lessons and they get to have these types of experience, don't you think a lot of kids would grow up and be like, you know what? Maybe I don't need to go to college. Like I'm more sure.

Don't get me started. But I'm on a team. I'm on team no college. No, I am too. No, let's no. I think it's terrible. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. I get terrible investment. I have arguments with my friends all the time.

Now, again, there's, I will start with the biggest. have you out in the world. Because if they're, because what we're talking about is if you don't, if you stop telling your kids, you need to have your 20s to go find yourself and you help your kids find themselves or their purpose or whatever younger, they're probably less likely to take out all this debt, go to school for something that they don't even need or will ever use. You know what I mean? Especially a liberal arts degree and like some of these things that just like, so for, there's so many buckets we can talk it in. The actual macro economic level, it's a terrible investment, meaning it has grown, college cost has grown 20x when wages have grown

like 2x. So that alone is already, okay, the ROI is getting really bad. Makes no sense. Yeah, the ROI is getting really bad on what it takes, what it costs versus what it's going to give me. Two, is it possible for whatever you can name that's valuable about college? Maybe, oh, friends, mentorship, maybe some like, again, there is some discovery there of like, oh, you just have some time to think. Can we spend way less money and find that anywhere else? Can it be through mentors? Can it be through jobs? Can it be through internships? Can it be through whatever? Okay. And then also like, yeah, I just think it's, there's reasons to go to college and certainly I think in the hard sciences you still have to mean if you want to be a doctor you

want to be a nurse you want to be a lawyer you have to great that's amazing but the like the classic like humanitarian humanitarian humanities degree excuse me political science that was my degree communication communications like it's just we go because we my personality is I will never do anything in my life just because I have to understand why it's a good reason and you have to convince me it's a good reason and I think college should be like that meaning it's a default yes I think it should be a default no meaning it's a we treat it as a default yes, talk me out of it. I think college would be a default no, talk me into it. And of course, you can be talked into it. There's reasons to go. But so yeah, I mean, and again, if our kids want to get, so my thing with our kids is, if you want to go to college, let's

talk about it. Argue me into it. Why do you want to go? Are you going to say if you want to go, you're paying for it on your own too? No, we probably, I think it would depend. I think it depend on what and why and how and we're putting obviously money. We actually are putting money aside right now. It's not a college fund. It's not the 529 fund, but it can be used for that. My dream would be, because again, even the financials of it, like my dream would be to give a kid a house. Wait, it's, you know. And that sounds, and I are on the same way.

This is why I love this book. This is why I love this book. We were reading it and I was like, I agree with everything you're saying. So my thing that I'm obsessed with right now is thinking of this idea of like, what if when you're a kid, what if you're a kid when they were, you know,

18 to 22, you said, all right, here's this amount of money. Go find a plot of land. Yeah. Or, yeah, put it towards a house or whatever. The money that you would give them to college, what if you gave it to that? towards a business or land.

It sounds bougie, but it's the same cost. Yes. It's actually less to put a down payment on a house. If you want to pay cash for it, you could probably, it'd probably be the cost of what a full private university is, especially in 10 years because that's going up like, you know,

the private universities are like 60 grand a year now. So yeah, so it's like invest. So how much more of a leg up does a kid have when they have an asset that is appreciating and maybe giving them a massive step up if they get married and their family and all that versus, okay, now you have to pay $180,000 in debt or whatever. Now again,

So I think I'm for all the options the kids want to do, but it needs to be a serious, logical, rational argument and discussion. And then obviously I'm also for like, yeah, also get some scholarships, get some, you know what I mean? So if they get a free ride somewhere, it's like, oh, yeah, again, that seems like a great ROI. If someone's giving you a $200,000 thing for free, then you should go there. You know what I mean? So there's all these different and get a house as well. I don't know. So there's like, I just think, yeah, I really struggle with the like, you just do it because you need to do it.

Your book taught me that according to statistics, America is one of the worst places to raise a family. Yeah, isn't that crazy? I think we were last. But I thought we were the land of opportunity. So how could that be? Yeah, that's a fascinating study. And it was so, it was my favorite part about that study. It's a very, very large study.

It's not some flimsy, you know, study two countries. I think it's like 100 countries were in it. And it was on quality of life. So I think it was happiness, mental health, education. There was like five prongs she measured, maybe seven. My favorite part about the study, though, is when she first did it and she added up all the math and added up all the data, America scored last. And she was like, that can't be right. So she did it again.

And she was like, they were last. So I just find that hilarious that she so couldn't believe it. She did it again because she wasn't trying to make America last. She wasn't like out on a mission. What did she find out? Basically that, yeah, we just measure. We measure towards the bottom on almost all those prongs. I just said, mental health, education.

At least again, in modernized Western country. I'm not Western, modernized countries. So again, a Finland, Switzerland, a Japan, a South Korea, all these different places. I think it was like 70 to 100 countries. And, and wages, wages to, like, wage growth, meaning to, like, what you'll earn out once you're later. I'd have to look in the sources to remember that one from years ago,

but it was, what a fascinating study. I mean, like, that seems so opposite of what we would think. We would think it'd be the place to raise a family. Now, it's a really good place to be an individual. It's not, we'd probably rank maybe first on that. It's a terrible place to raise a family. That's fascinating. What are the two universal laws that the Western family ideal operates on and why are they important?

I think it's basically, I think what I said there is the hyper individualism and not needing each other. And so one thing that we haven't talked about a lot here is you almost have to, one thing we don't wrestle with is that second operating principle, which is we actually see it as a badge of honor to not need anyone. that's really damaging in a family because if you don't ever need anyone then why do you need the family? Why do you have a family? Why are you in a family? And so yeah, it's the hyper individualism

and then the needing of each other and are not needing of each other are kind of the basic. And again, as like we actually, the reason I said those are the two rules is because we think those are like ideals. Like just be your best self, be the be an individual,

be distinct from everyone like the kind of the American individualism, rugged individualism as they would say. And then we also see it as a bad job honor of like to not need anything. Yeah, we think we're a burden to ask for help after having a baby. Like, can you please come over with me with me? I'm struggling with postpartum or bring a meal or whatever. We're going through, you know, the loss of a job or we're grieving something. And we need you. And you're right. We see that as a burden. And so we're like, we're better off

and we don't bother anybody. I think a lot of it is because we see the needs as transactional, not relational. We're so transactional in our world that we think it has to be measured or paid back when that's just not how relationships work. Relationships aren't measured or have to be paid back. You know, of course, they need to be reciprocal. But yeah, it's like, so it's like, no, it doesn't need to be, you know, paid back. It's just, it's okay to just absorb in your grief, help and need and support and prayer and encouragement. And so yeah, I wish more families would would do that. What is the vicious cycle that most Americans find themselves in after graduating from college? Kind of what we've talked about already a little bit, but it's, it's, yeah, it's not only the

debt thing and all the stuff we've talked about. with there. But what happens is what most people do, and this is from the parents' perspective, we call, they hit what we call the reset button. So it's like, instead of adding a link to the chain, they think it's the ideal thing to say, okay, boom, reset the family, kind of like that Steve Jobs example I gave of like, start back at zero. And it's like, no, you just worked 22 years to get that kid to the end of his college career or maybe start a new job, add a link to the chain. The metaphor I would kind of use that I think is really helpful for generational difference and distinction, but unity is, you know, we don't, we're not like this anymore,

but I think it was probably, I'm trying to remember that. I think like 1500s, 1600s, when there was kings and queens in Europe and all that stuff, right? Now, what people don't realize is the more you dig into that, it was very, I don't want to call it incestuous, but it was kind of weird, meaning like people would like, you know, they would purposely, a lot of range marriages with other countries for power dynamics, right? Like, oh, I want my daughter to marry that guy, the prince over there, because that means then we'll have an alliance with these two, whatever. But if you actually think of that as a healthy metaphor, not all the weirdness, but it's like, oh, okay, so a king and queen operate this country, that would be like the family, meaning, and countries have their own

borders, they have their own autonomy, they have their own sovereignty, but there is such thing as like alliances when, what are alliances important for when you go to war, right? And I find that so fascinating. Like, what if families like, so there's generational differences, there's these little mini teams that are all part of this huge team, but they link arms, not only an identity, but specifically when they need to fight. And they need to. because it's not a question, it's not if your family is going to have to go to war, it's when. Exactly.

And that could look like anything. It could be war for your marriage. It could be your marriage is under spiritual attack, whatever. Could be ideology. It could be exactly. And so it's like, or another, what's the system in the UK that used to have it too? You obviously had, you know, Buckingham and the king and queen there, but they called, oh, Dukes.

It's like similar to the Duke system. Dukes were basically almost reservists, meaning like there was all these little outposts all across the UK of kind of dukes, which are still, they're royal, but they're not quite kings and queens. And then they basically just get activated during wartime. And I'm like, man, there's something there. Like, that's such a healthy metaphor to think of kind of the web of what a family team should look like. I was really freaked out by this connection in the book. You said that modern families are like factories we are built to consume to have more. What did you mean by that? Yeah. So modern families, we, it's this versus what I call, um,

I think biblical families or ancient families, legacy families, is factories create like the desire for consumption. We're just, it's, and so we just are so addicted in the West with our families of just consuming. And so I always ask people this, you need to think about your family of, is your family primarily there to consume? The two biggest ideals most Western families are resting on

is consumption and safety, meaning if they can actually, they actually think if I could just give enough of those two things, we'll have a very, very happy, successful family. If I can just give them everything they want, you know, all the kind of little blessings of life, the conveniences, the comforts, maybe comfort's a better word for it. If I could just give my family comfort,

just like, I don't want them to be in pain, I don't want them to stress, and I want us to have a good life. And the second one is safety. You know, if they can never be in any situation that would stretch them. emotionally or physically. It doesn't, yeah.

It's not just physical. It's literally like we always make it emotional whether we realize it or not. I don't want them to be, I don't want them to be in like an argument. I don't want them to think deeply. I don't want them to be triggered or by whatever. It's kind of the helicopter snow.

Well, that's why we're like, I mean, every kid is pumped up on pharmaceuticals. We've taught this youngest generation that like every emotion is bad. Like any amount of being uncomfortable is bad. In reality, we need that to grow and be successful. That's what's interesting is, again, take the sports analysis.

no coach in their right mind would ever say that's the two purposes of the team. We are only here, Steph Curry and Clay Thompson and Draymond Green so that, you know, are Tom Brady and Grong. Travis Kelsey. Yeah, Travis Kelsey. That's right. That's right. And Patrick Mahomes.

Like, we're only here just so that you guys can be comfortable and be safe. Now, of course, is comfort and safety always included in a coach's job? Yes. But it's so low on the list. It's just like a byproduct. I guess, of course, if we're winning championships and grinding and hustling, and of course, I'll keep them safe. make sure no one hurts someone, whatever.

But yeah, it's like those are just such low bars for parenting. When in some cases a coach usually stretches and pushes the limits on those, it's kind of like, have you read or heard about the book, Anti-Fragile? It's an amazing book. And he's a social scientist and psychologist. And he basically, the whole premise, it's a little dry and because it's really thick and dense with a lot of stats and data in psychology.

But that's the whole premise is like we're basically making fragile people in the West when successful people are anti-fragile. They're actually building up their muscles to a place of being anti-fragile. And he uses a really cool metaphor if he goes basically like with a flame. He's like, he's like, you know, a flame can, you know, when a wind hits a match, what does it do? It puts out the match. When wind hits a tree on fire, what happens? It starts a forest fire.

So he's like the wind is not the problem. The problem is, are you a tree or are you a match? Like, is the wind going to put you out or is the wind actually going to make you stronger? And I just think, yeah, families, we need so much more resilience in our families. Why is it important to step back and ask ourselves what is actually necessary when it comes to the way our current family culture is set up? Because if we don't, then we'll just swim downstream. Like, and so what I mean by that is like, you know, I always tell people this. It's, this is really hard.

What I'm talking about this whole episode is a really hard vision for family. It's hard to implement in 2023 because it got left behind in 1850. So we're like 200 years downstream, 200 years of momentum, of energy, of macroeconomics, of industrialization. of philosophy of ideology, all these different times. We're so downstream. So the reason you have to stop and think about it is if you're in a river, usually rivers are always going one way. And if you're not stopping and thinking about it, what happens?

You just go. You just get shifted downstream. You don't have to, you can fall asleep. You can fall asleep and you're going to be way downstream. To actually go the opposite way, you have to stop and think about it. You have to like get out. And that might mean looking at your finances and being like, could one of us stay home? Yeah.

could be looking at everything. Are we working? Is one of us working too many hours outside the home? Yeah, I think dads, I think dads, that's a great, and it's not just the, does mom need to home? I think dads need to reassess so much of their job. I think so many, it's like, you know, do you want, like that, we always say build assets over careers, which is hard to do, but you can start small when, when you are just starting

out, because assets allow for freedom that allow for dad to be home more, right? And again, you get into like the, you know, the industrialization and industrial revolution and how that pulled dads out of work and all these things. But yeah, dad should reassess their work too because, man, like your kids got to see you in the prime years. Yeah, so you in the book, you say, dads, you need to be, yes, you need to be a provider, but then you also have to be a provider. Look at that little double entendre.

But it's true because we provide it. I think dads abdicate a lot of their responsibility once they provide money. They think providing money allows them to not have to be emotionally present to their kids, the coach of their team, you know, proactive. I think the dad, you know, you don't want to make moms a lot. happier and moms be able to do because there is absolutely in culture so much burden on moms they got to work they got to stay home

they got to do this they got to do everything I don't think dad's faces many pressures of like being all things to all people as much as women do right now in our society but one thing that would really help alleviate the female in the marriage for a traditional you know where it's not no one's divorce or anything like that where it's a mom and a dad in the home is um is the dad like taking over ownership of the home I think we've done this I hate the split of like

work as dad's domain the home is the mom's domain. I hate that. I think that's anti-biblical. I think it's wrong. I think it's toxic to a family. But most people believe that. Most people think like mom, mom makes the rules at home. Mom picks out all the pillows, which that's fine. But you know what I mean? Like she does all the cooking. She does all like, and what happens? What I mean by that is dad comes home and what does he do. He just sits and watches TV after work. Right. Like he's like, this is not my domain. And that's what resentment builds with the woman. This is not my domain. So there's a couple things. Sure, the woman needs to create a more fostering atmosphere for the man at home. And, um, and he's, and, and, and, and, and, and, and,

and make sure she's not being tribal about. Creating peace. Yeah, creating peace in Shalom, but also like letting him speak into the home. Maybe it needs to look in a way that not just you want it to look. Maybe it needs to feel a way. And we and Alyssa have a ton of, I've had a ton of arguments about this.

And we're totally unified in this now. But yeah, like she, we struggle with that at the beginning of our marriage. So like what did you contribute to what the home needs to feel like or look like? Like when I, I don't know if I could think of things specifically right now, but just like,

just, uh, ways I wanted furniture to look. Like I just, she was shocked I had opinions. Okay. At home. At home.

Does that make sense? And maybe a lot of husbands do, you're saying, but wives never ask. Yes, yes. Or what happens is dads will kind of get captured by this philosophy and get really excited. And that's one of the first roadblocks they'll run into is it's like, oh, this is my domain. And what happens is if you can get a man excited about, if you can convert him and get him excited to the home is also his domain as a shared team leadership, oh man, that home will flourish, right? With how much he'll show up, how much he'll be there, how much he'll like be, you know, chasing. after the kids and playing with them and doing stuff,

but then also like setting the table for guests. Like it just, you want home to feel like, home should feel like the hub of your family, not work, not sports, not school. Home should feel like the, not the consumption hub. It should feel like the productive,

ministry, missional oriented hub of your family. And it also shouldn't just be, oh, this is the place where I sleep and eat. It's like, you should be the missional hub of your family. And you want to be there. Your spouse wants to go home. Your kids look forward to being home.

And even saying no to other things. things sometimes like, oh, no, I really, really want to spend this weekend with my parents. Yeah. Which I think for parents of teens, that can be really hard. Yeah. To get them to want to do that. And again, we know families that, like, that's actually, they've created that culture. And it's crazy how magical it looks when the 17-year-old is like, oh, yeah, I could go to the football game tonight.

But I just like, this place is awesome. Yeah. I want to be here. I want to hang. And I'm like, man, we all are like, that's the family we want, you know? But it takes, what it takes, though, is creating over 17 years where it feels like that, where home just feels like that. where home just feels like it's just their identity is there, their meaning is there, their purpose is there,

their mission is there. Because again, if it's just consumption, that's not good enough. If it's just giving them a bunch of stuff and making it a really cool place, they will leave that. No one wants that. That's too small of a container for purpose and meaning. It needs to be like missional identity in the home. Most people truly do not understand that glyphosate isn't just a food problem.

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it's just a mom or a dad and then kids? Yeah, so the interesting thing about this philosophy with singles is, again, I think it's actually a bigger border where they have a seat at the table. Because the nuclear family maybe, you know, it's just, yes, single people. One crisis we have in our culture right now is, the loneliness of singles. And I think that's actually, again, that's a psalm. I swear that's a line in the psalm where it says the, it's either the, it's either says, I don't think it says single, but I think it says the lonely and, but it's in first, it's in, in the singular form. So it's like the single lonely like

belongs in the home, which is such an interesting verse. That's in Psalms, my translation, but that's basically what it says. And I think that's true that single people, I don't think belong. Like, here's another way to put it. I think of married couples and single people as almost like the double helix of DNA. They should be always and constantly wrapped together and integrated together. So single people should constantly be hanging out with married people and married people's in married people's... And you mean even single

people that don't have kids? Oh yeah, sorry, that's not that we were talking about. Is that what we're talking about? Oh, well, we're talking. Yes, we can. No, I like where you're going, but I was in my mind picturing a single mother or single father with kids. Okay, so let's talk about both. I was talking about just complete like a 24 year old, not married. Let's hit them both. Yeah. So for that one, I would say yeah, it's like that it's like singles. When you look at the New Testament, is absolutely two very clear identities. There's family units and there are single people. Most of the

disciples were single. Most of the ministry-oriented people on the kind of the front page news of the New Testament were single. And so they have different, I think you need to take it, what I would say is take advantage of those roles. So I think actually for the kingdom of God, it's a really strategic play in the war that we're in. When married people and single people take advantage of the DNA of what they are in the scriptures, they're not created equal. And so what I mean by that is it seems when you read the New Testament, it certainly acts as a lot of these examples of both, that the married families are a little bit more rooted.

They're almost like beacons in a town. They're like, they're not going anywhere. They're going to be there for nine generations, 15 generations, whatever. And then what Jesus actually commands in the Gospels is what does he tell in Luke 10? I think what does he tell his disciples? He says this phrase, he goes,

go find the people or the person of peace, which is basically, if you really read into that text and know what he's talking about, it's the patriarch of basically of that town. So it's basically like he and the disciples are single. So he's actually taking these single people, which are more nimble. They're more, they can kind of like just sell out more, if that makes sense. I can just go all in.

But he says, hey, you're going to need a, you're going to need like a place to restore and you're going to need a place to gain resources. So he says go, in Luke 10, he goes, says, go find that person in every town before you go do the work in that town. That's fascinating to me, right? Yeah. So it's basically almost like go to the war chest, go to that, which is the married families, okay, store up and then go do the work.

And so it's like, man, what if, I don't think that's exactly one to one of how married couples and single people need to be. But what if that is kind of how we saw it of like married people are these hubs and towns, not the single people need to travel, but that single people are a little bit more nimble, a little more free. They have no mortgage. They have no debt. They have no kids. They have no whatever, all these things. And they can kind of be integrated into a place for refreshment, but also for resources. And that married couple can kind of like, um, like empower them. I don't, I just don't see that a lot where like married couples are empowering singles of like, hey, And we've done that and we've done that in our marriage. There's, you know, even a girl I'm thinking of right now. She's going to come live with us in like a week, I think. She's single. And we've told her, we've given her a blank check.

We basically said, and we don't do this with everyone. You got to like, you know, we have to like kind of see, you know, but we basically said like, what do you want to do? All of our resources are yours now. Wow. What do you want to do? What business do you want to start? We can just, we can see that there's something special about her and what she's doing

in her life. And so we feel like it's actually our duty as a married couple to be that kind of that, that place. almost like in a like an outpost versus the the um what's the other one in an army it's the outpost and what it's like the place there's places you go to fight and there's places you go to like rest up and get more weapons does that make sense yeah exactly so it's like and so like that's how i think about married and single people and so they need to be intertwined they need to be working together rather than kind of like they're not enemies by any means but our culture does kind of like push them apart which is really frustrating and then yeah

and then it can be a really refreshing place for a single person too in a married home of just like you know, I, I lived that season where I was single 1920, 21, 22, 23, and I was embedded in so many amazing married families that like, man, just the joy, the richness, the non-lonliness and all that stuff. So that's what I would say for that one, for a single parent, kind of what I would said earlier is you hear all this, the good news about the team analogy is every team is just the team it is. Like it doesn't mean, like, so you look, if you're a single parent with like maybe a kid or four kids or whatever, that's your team. So then you just say like, oh, okay, well, what is our team special at then?

Maybe it's, maybe it is ministry oriented towards other single parents or whatever, or maybe just with the resources. Like, you can only be on mission with the resources you have. And so I don't think, I don't think that that biblical call to a family team on mission can only happen when you have like a healthy two parent like household. I think it's just look at your team, look at the bench,

who's on the bench, who's in the locker room, and be like, what do you have, what do you have, what do you have? How can we put all these together and go do the mission that the Lord has us to do. And that can be, that can just fit anyone. That can fit anyone. Is it true that our societies are at their peak, creativity and power, when domestic families are also strong?

Oh, great reference. So, yeah, so I need to break this one down. So this is Carl Zimmerman. I mentioned him earlier. This is like, if you, if anyone are listening to this has time, go read his book. Family and Civilization. It's considered a landmark book on family psychology and sociology in the 1900s. He was a Harvard social science.

scientist who was uber well respected. He was the guy. He was no one was smarter than him, no one produced more than him. But what was interesting is he also was, there's not many people that agreed with him, but he was one of those guys where he was in, you couldn't not at least respect what he said

or argue with what he said. But so he wrote a book called Family and Civilization where he basically traced, I don't know, you'd have to read the book, like let's say 15 to 20 different civilizations over the last 2,000 years. And he basically just traced like family in those civilizations. Like what did it, what did it look like how did it change why did they fall whatever and he found some really compelling

findings the one major one is that he found that every civilization fell when families fell first which is interesting that's like basically the breakdown of the family is usually the first sign of the breakdown of a society yep um that and that kind of seems obvious depending on what camp you're in but it is interesting that he like proved it um with a lot i mean it's a freaking academic 900 page book it's crazy but so he has these three buckets that he traces for society which is really interesting. Let me see if I can remember him. It's a trustee family. That's the first one. Domestic family, which is the family you just referenced. And then atomistic family, like an atom. Okay. Now those go in order of like family identity. Okay. And so he says every, he goes, every culture goes

through these phases. You either start the he goes, no culture, basically every culture that comes in and dominates. So take like, and meaning just like is just thriving. Take early founding fathers, kind of that like America we would be it that would be a version of it's like they're all based on trustee families just they are just and what a trustee family is is the the family identity is he would actually say it's overcranked it's too much but it's just like what the word trustee means meaning like you your identity and the family is not just you and it's not even your living members you're a trustee of a last name that goes back 5,000 years or whatever okay and there's some cons to to that vision of family and the it's kind of like the Romeo and Juliet what is like the

Capulets and whatever. Those are trustee families. It's just like, like legacy-oriented, long-living families. But like we can see in Romeo and Juliet, the big con of the trustee families is it's way too overcranked where the individual is, there's no sensitivity to individuals. Zero. Zero. You just like, it doesn't like suck it up or you die, basically. You know, terrible. It's not ideal. But it's very, those are very powerful families that can move societies, okay? That's first phase of a family. Second phase is domestic, which he would consider the most correct. And domestic is for time's sake, basically everything we're talking about

in this talk. Family, like strong family teams, you're like trustee families, but just you're more sensitive to the individual, and you have some help from the government. It's not, trustee families is basically like we run the country, there's no government. It's almost like mafia, okay? And then atomistic family is what we, what I would call the nuclear family. They didn't have that word until

after he died, nuclear family. But that's what he's atomistic, like little atoms, like it's splintered, it's fractured, it's kind of tiny, it's really microscopic version of family. They're not, they're not, they're not legacy oriented. Now, he would say animistic family's bad. So trusty family is good, but like has some cons. Domestic family is the ideal family.

Atomistic family is bad. Now he says every civilization, this is a long explanation, but it's very, when you get this, you're just like, whoa, every civilization goes in that order. You start with a trustee family to build a country. You're really strong and really successful. Domestic families use your sweet spot of flourishing as a country. And then the minute you turn atomistic, which is again, very splintered, very micro, the individuals, the most important thing he actually says that in his work.

Oh my gosh. This is crazy. Yeah. He says basically like you're on your way out. Okay. So see now this is all, yeah. And he's totally right because look at our own history. This is like 1930.

Yeah. Isn't that interesting? But look at our own culture. So we glorified the nuclear family like splintering off from from previous generations in the 50s. Then, you know, we legalize no fault divorce. Yeah, it just gets worse and worse and worse. And then now highest depression rates, highest anxiety, kids having, kids having. identity crises.

When I don't even believe in marriage. They're like it's evil, it's wrong. It's red pill. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, so I find, man, that work is so interesting to me that a book could have came out. We're almost 100 years away from that book. And it basically just predicted our last 100 years.

That's fascinating to me. Well, it's scary. Like if we don't change course, the American family, as we know it, is just, we've basically been drinking poison and what we think is right. Right. Yeah. And you know what's interesting, too, my favorite part. I talk about this in the book. I think actually in like chapter two or three of take back your family, a lot of Carl Zimmerman's opponents disagreed with them. And they actually said no. And this is so fascinating because again, we've seen them be wrong. They called, they basically said because of industrialization. They actually said it's best. It's best. And we will actually, it will lead to the most flourishing if both parents start working because we have the abilities now too. We have labor saving devices. We have jobs available for men and women. And they called the family that they said this. They said the family. Family should only be all production and all everything should be out of the home and out in culture and out in the marketplace. Family should just be the parking place, which is the exact quote of his opponent, his research of the family, meaning the home is just a place for them to park. It's just like, go to bed, be comforted, get some consumption, but there's nothing else that should happen there.

And he's actually arguing back then that like that'll go well for us. That'll be the best version of society. We have done that experiment now for like 80 years. Yeah, it's like no one's looking at it me like, yeah, that was a good idea. It's like we're seeing that like it just kind of eroded the family. it made it worse. And yeah, I mean, just Carl Zimmerman, look him up, Harvard social scientists. The book is Family and Civilization.

You brought up that American culture. It's very normal for adults and kids to never really interact. Oh, yeah. And that that's really detrimental. Yeah, this is one of my probably closest passions of my heart. So there's a book called Hold on to Your Kids by Cabor. I never know how to pronounce his name, Cabor Mate or something. He's pretty left progressive trauma specialist, but the book is in.

insane and amazing. By the way, that's a total side note, but he was on, he was on a podcast, he was on the Goethe Paltrow's podcast. Oh, do I know? Everyone knows I'm obsessed with her.

So go listen to that podcast. He was on the podcast like probably like four years ago talking about this. And it wasn't, Gwyneth wasn't the one interviewing of some other lady. But there's a very awkward moment in the podcast where, because he just reads the data and he was and she was kind of doing the classic like mom working and having a baby and like basically like, you know,

I'm home for two days. but then I go back to my job because I and she was like arguing for it like I want blah blah blah and he just like very sensitively as a true psychologist with like an amazing he has amazing radio voice just was like just called her out and it was just such an interesting five minutes of a podcast that I've ever heard what's his name Gabor Matteh I don't know GABO R okay and the last name's M-A-T-E so go look him up on the Goop podcast oh I am and he does he's like he's like he's basically like in his amazing voice he's like tell me anywhere else in the animal kingdom where you wouldn't call that heinous and evil for the for the mother to just like leave leave leave the baby two days after it's born. And what did she say? It just got, it got really high tension. Because again, he's like, he's like a very progressive, but he's, but like with family stuff, it would almost, I feel like he's almost like, I don't know how to put him in a box, but it's like, I agree with this family stuff. Yeah. So, um, so it was just a interesting house. Maybe I'll have to find him and interview him. Yeah, he's, he's brilliant. He's one of the foremost experts on trauma, child, child trauma.

Yeah. So we separate. We, we have it where adults and kids never interact. Yeah. So all that to say, he wrote a book called Hold On to Your Kids. And the whole book is what is, is, is on this ideology called peer attachment syndrome. And he basically argues and shows with data with a co-author that we're the most peer attached society that's ever lived. And basically what that means is we have created a society where our kids are around more kids their age for a longer amount of time with less adult supervision than any other time in human history.

That's crazy. Right? He's like, maybe there's one adult in that room, maybe. But he's like, it's just kids with kids like is basically their life. and he goes and he just says that's terrible for them their development their brain there whatever and so peer attachment syndrome is basically this this moment that because of that this moment that happens to 90 something percent of kids when they're you know 12 to 14 that we all know which is where they basically detach from because everyone has one attachment right like you know from a psychological standpoint

you attach to the person that's your comforter you're you know and it's a parent right it's just basically psychology of attachment you can look that look that up but but he says 12 to 15 12 to 14 this happens to like nine out of ten kids where basically they and this is the thing you do not want. This is detrimental to your family. They detach their centering orbit from their parents and they attach to peers as their centering force of identity and meaning and purpose, which we all know that, right? We all see that with like, you know, in high school. It's like, that's my friends.

They'll die for them. They start saying, you know, F you to the parents and middle finger to the parents or whatever. That's what's happening. But what's interesting is he says, I love this little thought experiment. He says in the book, he goes, we call that normal. when a kid does that just because it's so prevalent but it's not normal. He goes, what if he goes, if you have a spouse

and the spouse comes, you know, all of a sudden kind of just starts acting kind of cold to you, you know, starts slamming the door on you. Anytime you try to like look at their phone, they just like pull it away. They said, don't look at that. They start kind of just being really short.

Anytime you touch them, they kind of retract. You can go on and on and on. He goes, what would you probably think that spouse is doing? Cheating. 100%. 100%. He goes, that's an obvious telltale size. that they have now, they have detached from you

and attached to someone else and for their intimacy and their, you know, attachment and identity and they're cheating on you and it's adultery. He goes, he goes, why do we not think that when kids do the exact same thing? Emotionally cheating. Yeah, he's exactly what he says. So 100% they have emotionally cheated on you and they're gone.

As a family unit. They're gone. They're gone. That's insanely fascinating to me and interesting. And again, he backs it up with a ton of research. But so you want to fight against that. You do not want your kids to, attached to peers. Now, that's not to say that they can't. But how do you do that? How do you make sure they don't? Doesn't mean not be in school.

It doesn't mean all that things. There's a lot of different things he says in the book of how to do it. You just have to have a strong family unit. You have to be having a mission they can attach you. Because again, what happens is our family's so hollowed out. There's nothing to attach to. Now, how do you create? Let's say somebody listening to this, it's like, oh, man, I have teenage kids that don't talk to me

or my family is really struggling. We haven't had a mission for years and years and years. Now all of a sudden I want to change course, but it's like, is it ever too late? Never too late because here's why again. In the American imagination where the family resets every 20, 25 years, yes, it's too late. In the biblical imagination where the family play that you're trying to step into as a thousand years, then what's 20 years to that? That doesn't matter. That doesn't matter, right? I love that. That's like, the vision is way bigger and longer. So

there's so much, that should be so freeing of like, oh, you know, we're playing a thousand year game here, not a 20 year game. So maybe I'm a little late. Maybe it's going to be a little harder. It's going to more difficult. So I would say that should encourage you. And then too, I would just say start from here, meaning like wherever you're at, start from there. Like you can't, what are you going to do just like not just because. you feel like you're a little late, just not help the next 10 years of your life. Just start from wherever you're at. And, you know, if they're, what the one practical I would say is if the kids are older,

teenager or above, be very invitational, not forceful. Invite them to a vision that, because it will capture them. Sooner or later, it will capture them. When a family is just thriving and it's just, you can see a father's heart that's changed and he's just like in and intentional and casting a vision or whatever, and man, like kids want to be a part of that, but it has to be invitational. meaning you can't just be like, we're doing this now. You know what I mean?

At that age, I think you certainly have to be inviting them into that vision. One thing I would say that's really practical, helpful is with teenagers is they're at the age where they should have a lot of opinions now. So like get their opinions on the family. Like what if you were a teenager? I would imagine this would be insanely epic for me. I would love this. If like if I'm a teenager and maybe we're not thriving as a family and all these things, okay?

And then all of a sudden dad or mom have a turnaround and they just seem to be like, oh, we're going a different direction. We're doing something. And they've never asked me for my opinion. on their money. They've never asked me for my opinion on like what dad does for work. They know, oh, blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden they came to me and they said, hey, here's X amount in the bank account. We just really believe that you need to be a more integral part of our family. Like, what should we do with this? I think that is going to be extremely

shocking for parents today to wrap their head around. You're saying that we should be telling our kids how much money we have and ask them how we should spend. Our kids know, yeah. Not saying that they have the decision making power, but they're a seat at the table of the team. Why not? I don't even remember growing up my parents ever. talking to me very directly about like how much money my parents made or anything. So here's a good example again with sports. So like again, you know, just again, just because I have the Warriors, I always think of Steph Curry.

But like he's not the general manager and he's not the owner of the Warriors. So at the end of the day, does he get to have this, does he get to be the one that like makes the call on who gets traded? No. But you better believe on that team they ask him. I know they do. He talks about it in interviews that like, oh yeah, should we bring in Kevin Durant? You know?

Oh, okay. He says yes. okay Steph instead of me going and flying you know again this is getting into like you know insider baseball but like Steph Curry got on a plane to go like court Kevin Durant to get on the team does that make sense yeah but he's a teammate people would say your kids that's letting your kids have to be the parent you tell your kids hey we have to move or I have to take this job no you have all the power but like get their opinion you're a team so like again so step curry like you're not saying Steph Curry has too much power by going and getting Kevin Durant on the

Warriors right he doesn't have all he doesn't have any power He has a lot of leverage and influence and they really care about him. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, what's the guy's name? It's Bob Myers decision. It's the owner of the warriors who makes that decision. But that's not to say that they didn't all work with all of their resources towards one goal and leverage it how they can. But again, how much would that call up a teenager that I think that would be an insanely

exciting as a teenager if like my parents were like, and not just even money, but just like, man, what do you think about how much I work? Like, do you feel like that's conducive to like our relationship? I can't probably change it maybe right now. I can't do it overnight, but let's talk about it. Okay, what about where we, like just, I think if you really put everything on the table, that would be so fascinating.

You said in the book that you and your wife will look at, okay, like, so you speak for living and stuff. Yeah, we do the note card exercise, I call it. Yeah, so you sit down and you're like, okay, here's how many things dad has been invited to speak at, how much travel. What should we say yes to? What should we say no to?

And our kids are getting old enough now where we are inviting them into those conversations. not 100% I think a teen when they're teenagers they'll be way more invited in but but it's like I want there because again it's all about meaning and purpose if a 13 year old or a 15 year old is getting that much meaning and purpose at home do you really think they're going to care that much about like what their friends think about fortnight or whatever like you know what I mean like this total side note but I literally have like a small group of like five fathers that we play with across the nation with headsets we talk about our marriages we talk about our hearts oh my god it's like yeah it's like super

healthy and amazing and we just are blown up 12-year-olds in the game. It's amazing. So, like, let me ask you something. When we, when we invited you to come do the spillover, did you sit at the kitchen table with your kids and say, I was invited to this? Should I say yes? Yeah, and I was like, should we go to Arizona? Like, this whole thing is just like up for debate. And there's plenty of times where they'll say maybe no. And I'm like, well, okay, me and mom talked about it, we're going to do it. But like, thanks for your input. So it's just totally like, the best way to think about it is I'm not, it's not democratic. It's not democratic. But it's, but it's a team. And so it's like, it's more of like a me and Alyssa or

the board of directors and like the kids are the company. So it's like, of course I'm going to listen to an employee's opinion to lead a healthy vision and a healthy, healthy family towards our mission and I'm going to do a 360 review and I'm going to get feedback, but ultimately we have the power. And again, as kids, because what is, it's training also. Because how can I expect my 27 year old kid to maybe run a company for me? And I'm going to talk about me specifically, like run a company for me or run a nonprofit for me or, you know, get the inheritance. If I didn't train them when they were 13, 15, 17, 19, 20 to make those decisions. Like, if that's just all of a sudden showing up out of the blue when they're 30, that's not going to work. Do that make sense? You have to

train them. What is the difference between a coach and a babysitter? Oh, yeah, I love that. I think I put like seven differences in the book. I can't pull them all up from my mind, but the best way I say is a babysitter, and we've alluded to a lot of them already, is a coach includes almost everything a a babysitter is, but a babysitter never includes anything a coach does. And so what's a what's a babysitter's main goal. A babysitter's main goal is what we've alluded to earlier on the first one, is comfort and safety. A babysitter is actually seen as successful. Like if you come home and your kid is what, still alive, still alive. And they ate their food and they were like, maybe watched a movie and they were comfortable. You're like, 10 out of 10. Here's your money. You're amazing. Maybe I'll have enough

throw on a tip. You would never like say a coach is successful with those two things. A coach would be successful by winning a championship by like defeating the enemy by like growing the kids, like developing the teams so significantly that they're different this year than they were last year. And so like I give a bunch of examples in there. I think it's a really, I can't pull them off the time of my head, but it is fun to look at them in the book of like, yeah, I think I go through a column of comfort, a column of safety, a column of identity, I think I also say, a column of mission. Like what's the mission of a baby's say? What's the mission of a coach? So it's fun to think about that because most of us without realizing, after I do that in the book, I say most of us without realizing are just, we're going to.

Yeah, as parents were just doing all of the same things that babysitter would, just a little heightened level. Let me tell you about the time that I loved a product so much. I beg them to let me read ads for them. That is the true story with Olivia, an organic prebiotic body wash that feeds the skin's microbiome. It's just soap. What is so special, Alex? No, it's not just soap. This is the Rolls-Royce of body wash.

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sizes. Go to Alevia.com. Use code Alex 15 for 15% off. That's Olivia, A-L-E-A-V-I-A-O-C-com with code Alex 15 for 15% off or find the link in the description. How can parents foster strong sibling relationships and why is that so important? Super important because Dan Coyle in his book, Culture Code, he looks at some really, really interesting research of teams. And again, sports teams, businesses, but also like call centers, boardrooms. He looks at everything. And one of the most fascinating things from his research is there's this guy that has, I can't, I forget what they're called, but there's this super high-tech company at MIT or research lab that would do a bunch of human research. And one way they would do it

is they would have these badges that you would wear. And the badges like could just record nine bajillion different data points. Like they had a microphone in it. They, no video or anything like that, but they would just somehow be recording like tonation of people talking. They'd be recording their heartbeat, like all these different things. Okay. And what they found is some crazy stuff with that, that one of the, that, they put all these badges in like, experiments, you know, teams and call centers and sports teams and whatever. And, and

it would spit out all these data points of like, how frequently the people talked, how loud they talked, how many words they said, like all these things, right? And what they found was crazy, crazy. One of the biggest things that they found is they could predict what teams were successful based on what they think, I think they called

interpersonal connection outside of leadership. Meaning how much employees talk to each other, not to the boss, dictated whether that company was successful, which is really interesting to me. Wow. And it's like, and they even drew it out, which is cool.

If you look it up online, it's like a map of like all these lines. Like basically like, you know, a lot of, a lot of families, they run top down. It's just parent to a kid, parent to a kid, parent to a kid. And it's very much like kind of isolated silo chamber-esque communication. But what it should look more like, like as a spider web, with communication. There should be just everyone should be talking to everyone,

side, up, down, left, right? right for a healthy communication. There was also another really crazy. They used those badges to do like a shark tank thing. So they actually, now that I'm talking about it, they didn't have voice recorders. Like you couldn't replay like someone's conversation. It was just measuring all these crazy things with some computer chip. There was a shark tank like thing they did with teams where they would have to go pitch a group

of investors to get invested in. And the night before they did a cocktail party and they made everyone at the cocktail party where the badges, they guessed. to a 100% accuracy. They didn't miss one. Based on that data of just how they talked at a cocktail party with their co-workers who would get an investment and who would like not get an investment. Who would like say no to at the shark tank to 100% accuracy based on just the badges of like data points that have no audio and video.

That's crazy to me. That's insane. That feels like cheating, but it was right. Okay. So you're saying. It's all that's say long story. Siblings should like you need to foster the sideways relationships. But like how we say we need to have a couple.

days a month where like parents, you know, have guaranteed date nights that we schedule out. You should honestly be creating sibling one-on-one-one time. Totally. Totally. Yeah. And again, I've stole that idea from another family friend where they do that. I think it's on Sundays or something. And they're a big family. And so they like, it's hard to have everyone connect with everyone. So they do an hour block, I think, on Sundays where it's like on the fridge of like you're paired up with this kid, you're paired up with this kid, it's like a rotation. What if it's like a huge age gap between the kids? Like what if you have a two-year-old and a nine-year-old? Is that amazing? if a 17 year old is like taking care of a baby?

How much would that connect that 17 year old, right? And how much would that make that 17 year old gentle and kind? And you know what I mean? And so you want that. You actually want all the differences. And it's like, and of course you can put some frameworks on it and help them and encourage them.

But yeah, it's like encouraging sibling relationships is huge. Okay. So this is important when we're talking about creating a family mission is that you say the first five to seven years is where it's important to be in training season and not running on mission. What does that mean?

Well, I think a lot of times people, you know, I'll just use a church example. I know everyone's probably Christian listening to this. But in church, it's very common for like volunteer culture of just like the mom and dad feel like they need to serve at church. And so then they just are like, you know, bringing the kids. Like it's just, it just burns everyone out. Like, you know, you got like a baby and you're just trying to like, you know, do all this serving and do all these things.

And it's like and because mainly from a philosophical idealism of like, oh, I need to be in a good way. I need to be giving. I need to be serving. I need to be volunteering. I need to be helping. But on any proper team, there's training seasons and then there's deploying seasons,

just like the military, just like sports, just like training camp, just like businesses. And so you need to see your family as that. Until your kids are five or seven, you shouldn't just be burning out trying to be on mission

and do all these things and be really impactful. You should be training them for the mission. So it's like you should be discovering their personalities. So if you're all's mission as a family we've established is hospitality. I'll give you a great example. Yeah,

Five to seven years, what are you doing? It was just like sitting at the table and making sure you don't leave in five seconds. Because our family is at the table more than most families. We're with a bunch of other families at the table, more than most families. We're having a lot of conversations we need to have at the table with a lot of most families. Super, over practical one, right? Now, again, if that wasn't a high mission for us, I don't think we'd be, I don't think we would have trained them as hard on that.

But it was really critical in those first couple years of our family just like, you know how to sit and be quiet. You know how to like be at the table with us. You know how to listen. Now, of course, those are generally good. but I think especially with our orientation of our family, we're around people so much. We travel a ton. We have people in our home all the time.

Would one of those little training, would one of the training things also be, if that's your family mission? I'm just thinking, did you teach your kids about like how to ask good questions for guests? Yes, 100%. Or like create little things for them. Yeah, we're huge on question asking. So one thing we do is every Friday night, Alyssa's parents come over for what we call a Shabbat dinner. You know, we just, we do Sabbath dinner and a big Sabbath rest day. it's a fun family rhythm of ours.

But the most important thing of that dinner is the kids every single week have to come with a question to ask the grandparents about something in their childhood. And that's like, we're like years into that now. So I've gotten like the most insane stories and amazing stuff that I, you know what it does for me and Alyssa? I'm like, there's like a million things that I'm like, I never would have heard that in any other context from people that I'm like related to, you know, or, you know, in-laws.

And so yeah. So like, and that's such a good skill for them to have that they now have cultivated over years of like you got to come with a good question and their questions are hilarious and amazing and insightful and well think about how many of us like in our 20s were dating whatever and we're like uh I don't even know what do I ask you know what I mean like yeah and they just asked the best stuff of like what was it like when you got married uh what was the first toy you can remember getting I think the question we just asked this last week was what was your favorite cookie as a kid a question we asked previously when my group when my wife's grandparents were

there before they passed a couple years ago uh so the kids great grandparents was hilarious is in the most sincere voice, my son asked my grandpa in law, whose name was, we called him Freddie Bear. He said, Freddie Bear, were there dinosaurs when you were like alive?

And it was the most sincere. Like he was really like, please tell me there were. What were they like? And he was like, and of course he was like a really funny, amazing grandpa. So he like,

it's like, oh yeah, of course. There was a few. There was hilarious. Some of them were domesticated. Yeah, exactly. And sometimes the kids bring really serious.

questions or I'll ask them that, I'll tell them that morning, like, hey, it's got to be a serious question. So they'll be like, you know, hey, what's the biggest, what was the hardest thing about being a kid? Or what do you remember about the biggest fight you had with like a friend or, you know, or something like that? And it's like, dude, so many amazing questions. What is the language experiment? Why is it important to start talking like a team out loud? Because sometimes that's all you need to do, which should be encouraging. Meaning like you don't sometimes have to change so many things. So the example I give in the book is, you know, I would travel and speak a lot. And I still do and sometimes by myself, sometimes with the family.

But when I first started traveling and speaking, because we weren't using team language and it was very much just like, I'm going to do my thing. This is my job, my mission, my life. You guys aren't really a part of it. You don't really care and you're not really involved. Then I noticed when I would leave, they would just all just start, it would just go to crap. You know what I mean? Like Alyssa starts crying. The kids start crying.

Why is daddy leaving? Blah, blah, blah. You know? And I'm just like, dude, this feels terrible. I do not want to leave in this environment. But I have to for work. And again, so when I started kind of thinking about this praying, we started implementing a lot of this,

I noticed you got to do more than this, but I noticed how I was shocked at how much there was in a difference in their attitudes with that exact same scenario, just when we had a team culture. So it's like instead of daddy going and doing his thing, it was like, hey guys, dad's going to do the thing that like we're all a part of.

You're not coming, but like our family is sending dad out as like a missionary, as like a ambassador for our team to go tell them about Jesus or to go do this or this or this or whatever. And man, it's like what it does again, it called them up into mission and purpose. So a little six-year-old is like praying for me because it's like, oh, I, you know, like go do it on behalf of us rather than like, oh, you go do your thing that none of us are involved with. And I was like, man, I'm actually doing the same thing. I haven't even changed anything. Also, think about how many kids have no, they don't understand.

Nobody's ever taken the time to talk to them about what it is that you do for a living. Totally. They don't even get what their parents' jobs are. And I think that's a big part of it. Iron John makes that argument, amazing book. early, I think 19, something it was written, 1980s, maybe, 1970s. But he talks about that.

He goes, the problem with most, he just says father's sons. I think it's applicable to everyone. He goes, most thing, the most problem with most fathers and sons now is sons don't know what their dad does for work. They can't, they don't understand it. They're like, I don't know.

You type on a keyboard. I don't understand what's going on there. And he's just like, that disconnect is real of like what it actually, why, how it actually affects the family team culture. And so it doesn't mean change your job. It just means like, talk about it. Explain more.

Bring them in. Sit them on the lap. Let them read. emails. What does this look like? What does Daddy do? Blah, blah, blah. And can you pray for me? Can you think about that? Can you, you know, it's helpful. Will a vacation once a year save your family? No, but they're great. Vacation once a year is great. Don't look to vacations to save your family. I would say look for vacations to be like a fun, like sprinkle or cherry on top of a hopefully a good year you already had. And what I mean about is, yeah, we look, we look for, we look to vacations for

things that we should be doing. throughout our week all the time. Like connecting time, relaxing time. Exactly. So because again, I think that's actually what we're built for. I think we're actually built for seven-day calendars and rhythms, more than yearly calendars and rhythms. Yeah, what does it mean to live in a weekly rhythm?

It just means that you see the week is actually an asset for your family. So I get into the weeds on this in the book of like, I actually think the week is actually a God-given tool for the family. Makes sense. Yes. Seven days. Yes. And here's what's crazy too.

I love this little trivia. But why do, like people have. tried to buck the seven-day rhythm, you know, communist Russia tried to do, I think, a five-day rhythm, a five-day week, excuse me, French Revolution tried to do 10. And anyone who's ever experimented just fails horribly. Everyone always comes back to the seven-day rhythm, which is like, man, is that like, is it like wired in the universe? I think it is. But here's what's interesting. Every other rhythm we have, there is an external reality for why it's true. How do we measure a day? 24 hours. Yes, but like what sun up and sundown? That's a day. Okay. So like there's an external

reality. We know that's a day. Month. That one's the month is the hardest one, but lunar cycle, the moon. How do we measure a year? Oh, seasons? Trip around the sun. Okay. Trip around the sun, okay? Trip around the seasons would be a great one too. Seasons trip around the sun, okay? How do we measure a week? There's no answer.

There's no answer. There's no external reason why we honor a seven-day calendar. But there is for the day, there is for the month, and there is for the year. That's so fascinating to me. So you would think that we could just like not do it. But I think it's actually like the reason we honor a 70 calendar is because God said, though. Like he literally actually said like the seven days is a holy tool for the family of work and rest. If you work every single day during the week, you will go crazy. If you rest every single day during the week or you do something different every single day of the week, you'll go crazy. We're meant to have this dance of work and rest, work and rest. And that's a really, really helpful tool, I think, for a family. We all have different gifts and talents that we're blessed with. But we're outsourcing those to people that are not even in our families. So could you elaborate on that concept?

Yeah, I think how would I talk about this one? I think what we don't I just, a word I try to use for parents is you need to take more ownership of your family. I think we should, maybe outsource is the wrong word, I think we should use our community and we should use all these amazing tools.

Like a parent should not have to do it all. A parent should not have to be the cook and the cleaner and the youth pastor and the blah, blah, blah, and all these things, right? Like you have a community. You have a community of people that should constantly be able to help each other serve each other, mentor each other, et cetera.

But I think we've gotten too far where it's like, we don't care about, I've met a lot of parents where they actually feel awkward and nervous about even talking to their kids about the Bible because they feel like it should be the youth pastor's job or it should be the, you know, like meaning like they've so outsourced it that they've lost the ability to do it themselves. Does that make sense? And so I think the youth pastor one is a good one, like spiritual formation for kids at teaching education, again, not saying that we don't need teachers and that we shouldn't be at school and do your thing and public school, private school, home school, whatever. Well, I think public school is

getting a little dark these days. But that's not to say that you have to, you should be sending them to those places and those people as with ownership as a, for a very specific reason, not, oh, they can all do it so I don't need to do anything. That's where it gets really, I think, detrimental to the family, if that makes sense. Why shouldn't we be celebrating being an empty nester. Because it's fine for the kids to move out of the house, obviously. They got to go, you know, do their own thing and kind of live into their, this is like rapid fire. I like this. You're just like, wow, bam, bam, bam. I would say that, but I don't like using the language of the empty nest or the nest because, again, I think a nest is a very good Western picture we have made up

of exactly the problems I've talked about with the family. So a nest is literally raised the little birdies feed the little worms in their mouth, give them everything they need, comfort them, clothe them, give them a bunch of safety, and then once they're old enough, you never literally see them again.

They fly out of the nest, and they're gone. That's a horrible picture of family, not only both when they're in the nest, of like what birds are just feeding and comfort and safety, and then also out. So again,

I think that's a nest is not the right picture. And again, I think it also, by the way, I think what dad wants to like, that's like just a crap vision for men. No, dad's like, oh, I want to be a father of a nest.

No, no. You're like, you're like, I want to be a father of an empire. I want to be a father of a team. I want to be a father of an enterprise. And so I just think like, that's a better picture again of like, man, you're trying to build a team that will impact the world and have a legacy. All right. So as we wrap up here, if we want to start looking ahead and making every decision with

future generations of our family in mind, where do we start today? With that question. That's a really healthy question to affect your days day today. I think I put in the book, I think it's a Native American tribe. That's actually like in their like lexicon. of they say every decision you should make in your life. And even to the point of like, what do I have for breakfast?

Now, of course, that's a little ridiculous. But like they're saying just how important it is. Every decision I make in my life, I need to ask with every single decision, how does this affect seven generations from me? That's such a like, I mean,

like how will seven generations online be affected by what I do right now? And am I thinking about them? Am I caring about them? Am I setting them up for failure or for success with my decisions? And so that's a really helpful start. of like just vision.

Like think that far down the line because you never have. No one has. No one has in their family, right? And so think that far down the line. And then I would say start small because when you have a thousand year vision, you don't need to change it all in one day. You have 50 years to sow some seeds and make some deposits. So let's say like we're winding the year down now.

Yeah. We're getting ready to start a new year. What will be a good thing to be like, all right, this is, let's change this. I would do a lot of the things we talked about earlier of like get out a piece of paper, like assess your family team. try to put some, try to put some family mission and stuff together. Again, if you go to family teams.com somewhere on that site, I know we have some, some mission help guides and stuff like that.

So I would say download those, look at those. Not in Take Back Your Family, but in Take Back Your Family Handbook, I think it's called. At the end of that, it's a 52 week, kind of like almost like weekly little, here's a little family thought and then here's like a little thing to some homework. But at the end of the book, we have what we call a Family Summit document. That's a really robust like five to 10 page. like very good exercise to go through at the end of the year. Oh, perfect.

I'm like measuring the year, measuring the future years. What do you want to do? Where do you want to grow? So I would say maybe like try to find that or get that. Tell everybody name of your book, what all they're going to learn from it, etc. Take back your family. I will say to whether you guys,

you guys don't care about this, but this is one of my favorite covers I've ever done. I love the cover. Yeah, I love the cover. We tried to kind of do the chaotic Western family. Oh, so you know what? Yeah. So I have a huge floor to ceiling bookshelf from my living room.

My listeners know this. Like I'm such a reader. and I have it all color-coded. There is a lack of bright green books. That's why we did it. And it stood out to me. Yellow is really popular. Red's really popular.

Yeah, we did green. No one does green. I know. Also, I don't know if you're a Texas girl or have been Texas, but we tried to give an allusion to Waterburger right there. That's a little bit of Waterburger design. It's a great, great chain. But yeah, I love it.

Take back your family. It's on Amazon. You can find it anywhere else also as well. But yeah, I love it. I would say I've written a lot of books. I'm most proud of this one. I love this book. I'm proud of it.

And it kind of feels like, kind of not my magnum opus, but it feels like the core of what I care about and think about most. Well, it's my favorite book that I've ever read in terms of parenting. I'll take that. And really thinking about like a legacy that I want to leave behind. And you just said so much that I've never heard anybody touch on. So yeah, definitely get, take back your family. Do you have any new exciting books or projects coming out soon?

Yes. So April 2024, depending on when you're listening to this, a book, I'm writing a book with a really good friend and kind of a ministry partner. So we have some, I do a lot of stuff for men now. So forming men.com, fathers and sons and families. But we have a book on men coming out, April 2024. And I'm very excited about that. It'll be similar, but way different in the sense of it's called fighting shadows.

And I'm really excited. We go through the seven main kind of shadows that we feel like are lurking and kind of hovering over men's heart in the Western world right now. And I'm really excited about that. Okay. And don't you and your wife host like retreats or you do different things? or people like it together. Yes.

So, yeah, we do. So I do a ton of men's retreats with forming men. I do a bookwriting retreat. Alyssa does some stuff with women. That's kind of one of our main things. We do a lot of retreats. So those are fun because we really like environments where there's 30 people, 50 people, 70 people. And where can people find out about those if they want to do it?

Probably the hub for all of them because there's a lot of different websites. I bet jeff and elissa.com will point you in all the right directions. And then Alyssa's a L-Y-S-S-A.com. Okay, perfect. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the spillover. This is fun. If you did not love this episode as much as I did, then you're wrong and you've been banished to the pit. Just kidding.

Well, I'm not. But I think the nuclear family versus multi-generational family debate is really intriguing. So I'd love to see you carry this conversation over to the cute servitous Facebook group. I bet some of you have happy but also horrific stories of living multi-generational. I am dying to see them. Make sure you answer all the security questions correctly to be able to join. join the Cutservatives group. If you liked this episode, then go back, listen to my interview with Becca Merkel, author of Eve in exile that I talked about in the beginning, which was an episode

where we talked about the need for restoration of femininity in this country. It gives encouragement on being not only a godly mom and wife, but a bold entrepreneur too, as long as family is always the first priority, which is exactly how the Proverbs 31 wife is described, by the way. That is season four, episode 20, and it came out in May of this year. Please leave a five-star review for this week's episode. Let me tell you about next week, though. The spillover is back next Thursday at 9 p.m. Pacific, midnight Eastern, anywhere you get your podcast. And next week, I'm talking to a psychologist who specializes in relationships, all about how to know if we're the problem or our partner is, and also all things narcissism. Subscribe here and to Real Alex Clark on YouTube to watch every

episode. I'm Alex Clark, and this is The Spillover. Love you, mean it. Bye. We both talk so fast, too, so it's like a three-hour podcast. No, I feel like I've done cocaine listening to you, which is funny. That's very ironic because I'm known. The first person that said that. I am known for speaking so fast people can't keep up. I was thinking, are you Italian? I know.

I had like an identity crisis in my early 20s when like everyone told me I talked fast. And I was like, I swear, I swear in my brain, this just feels like so normal. Like I'm on a beach, just drinking a margarita and talking slow. No, it's great. Because people, I'm my mom and everybody's always like, slow down. You know what I always tell people now that we're in the internet age? I'm saying everything you're watching with me talking fast is something that you can rewind or put on slower speed. You take care of it.

I'm not changing me. That's right. That's right because you can make it go slower. Maybe back in the day, sure, but we got tools now. You can slow me down. Hey, nice work. That was a fun conversation. I feel like that was definitely a conversation on cocaine.

I love that.