Episode 286 (Jeremy Pryor: Part 1)Podcast Intro: [00:00:01] Being a great father takes a massive amount of courage. Instead of being an amazing leader and a decent dad, I want to be an amazing dad and a decent leader. The oldest dad in the world gave you this assignment, which means you must be ready for it. As a dad, I get on my knees and I fight for my kids. Let us be those dads who stop the generational pass down of trauma. I want encounters with God where He teaches me what to do with my kids. I know I'm going to be an awesome dad because I'm gonna give it my all.Jeremy Pryor: [00:00:38] We see the downsides of real estate in terms of the kind of active nature of that investment class as being a positive thing because it allows us a platform to do productive work as a family team. We can, we can actually rely on each other's different, diverse gifts.Jeff Zaugg: [00:00:55] Hey guys, welcome back to DadAwesome. Today, Episode 286, this is the first half of my conversation with Jeremy Pryor. We talk about this a little bit in the intro, but four years ago he was a guest on DadAwesome. I recorded that one through the Zoom line and today's conversation was in-person. I flew down to Cincinnati, Ohio to spend an afternoon with Jeremy Pryor. He's the first guest ever that I've had the opportunity to do a fly in, fly out, same day, spend, spend, I mean, we spent time recording. We spent time, kind of a tour of his house, meeting his family. We spent time at the grocery store. I went and helped him buy ingredients for making pizzas for a gathering he was hosting, and then we played pickleball together. It was the best. Podcasting and pickleball with Jeremy Pryor. I am so thankful for part one, part two. So today is part one of my conversation, next week you're going to get the second half. We go all over the place. This was one of the most fun conversations to prepare for. I had prepared ahead of time and I spent the whole flight down. I spent I literally was like every moment preparing, reading more blog posts, listening to more podcasts, reading his book again, and they're going to all be linked in the show notes. His books, his podcast, his blog. He gives, he's just like open handed with everything he's created, and it's all from a deep place of fatherhood matters, and we can learn from God's perspective on fatherhood. So guys, I'm so excited for today's conversation. Here is the first half of my conversation with Jeremy Pryor. There's a lot of new work that you and your team have said, Hey, we hope this is helpful. And you've come with deep passion and conviction and it's so helpful. My wife and I can say immediately, thank you because you've helped us step in with purpose with our family team. So I just want to start with gratitude saying thank you.Jeremy Pryor: [00:02:58] Yeah, absolutely. Praise God. That's awesome, man.Jeff Zaugg: [00:03:00] For sure. For sure. Secondly, I want to say congratulations because I believe we're within the month, two months. How old is your, is your grandson?Jeremy Pryor: [00:03:08] Yeah, about six weeks, I think.Jeff Zaugg: [00:03:09] Congrats. Because that's part of your vision and dream is third generation of like, like, man, it's not about my kids, it's about my kids kids and forward. Would you explain your heart a little bit around that idea of third generation?Jeremy Pryor: [00:03:21] Yeah, absolutely. Well, when, when you study multigenerational family, the thing that anyone who has done this says is the most, the most surprising but most consistent outcome is the is the destruction of the third generation. So and this is this has really been documented well in any kind of family business context. The first generation makes the money, the second generation spends the money, gets corrupted, the third generation starts over, but with sort of baggage, knowing that they kind of have fallen very far from from where the family had come from. And so this is actually cause a lot of people to be less interested in building a multi-generation generational family. They're like, well, what's the point? You know, if the third generation is just going to...Jeff Zaugg: [00:04:00] The cycle's going to flop.Jeff Zaugg: [00:04:00] Yeah, there's a famous, kind of old proverb that says, from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, which is their way of saying that you're kind of you go from, you know, all the way back to the working class. That was kind of a the idea of shirt sleeves there. But yeah, our heart is, why is that? Is that, is that necessary? Is that like, that doesn't seem like that's the design of family. And I have seen families that have really persisted for many generations a blessing. And so I've been trying to figure out what causes that to happen, what might create a situation in which the third generation's actually the most blessed generation, so the most curse generation of a multigenerational family. And I think, so my, one of the problems with coming up with a hypothesis, you get one shot at this. You know, like you because you know you don't you can look at the past and look at other families, but personally, you you you know, you have to you have to really decide what to do because obviously, I'm not going to be around, you know.Jeff Zaugg: [00:04:56] There's no retakes.Jeremy Pryor: [00:04:56] Yeah, exactly. Like whatever I set up, now, is you know, with whatever wisdom I have is likely what is primarily going to be what impacts. And so the, my thesis is if you as the first generation, instead of raising your children, the second generation to be happy or aiming at their happiness, if you aim at making them great parents of your grandchildren. In other words, you you both work as a team generation one and generation two to bless the third generation, what will that create? Now, i's a hypothesis, again, like I get one shot at this and we'll see what happens. But my my belief and my hope is that if if instead of trying to dump resources on my kids with the sort of vision of this is for your comfort, this is so that you don't have to go through hard things like I did. A lot of those are the things I think that corrupt the second generation. You really actually want to have a bigger vision for the second generation. And this isn't about like saying my kids aren't important and my grandkids are. It's it's much more of a strategy for how all three generations can flourish. And I think that so when we talk to our kids, it's like, how do we construct, you know, between our two generations the best possible team to really help that third generation? And then and then will this just cause the fourth generation to be corrupt? Well, then what I hope is that the second and third generation do the same thing.Jeff Zaugg: [00:06:13] They repeat. They think third generation.Jeremy Pryor: [00:06:15] Yeah, the second and third generation, then really begin to partner to create a great fourth generation. And so if, because I think that that one of the one of the intuitions that shifts when you think this way is that when you're parenting your kids, I think the default in our culture is to parent your kids for their happiness. And I think that creates a terminal generation. And it's not hard to understand why that is, because if they think, if you think that the life is about, you know, they're the center of the world, and then, of course, if they think they're the center of the world, then you know, that's going to cause, those are kind of character development within them. But if instead you say, hey, like we're both here and you're going to see us sacrifice and we're going to call you to sacrifice, we're going to call you to build the kind of character that make you great parents of your children, of our grandchildren. My hope, you know, my my expectation is that that's going to create the kind of culture within a family where the kids understand that there's bigger things than than them, that that that it's okay to sacrifice, to be a great mother or father for their children, that they saw us do that and that, yeah, there are enormous benefits that we get from that. But but, you know, it's pretty well known that happiness is not a good goal, but a great byproduct of a good goal. And so we have to really decide what that goal is. Right? And so certainly our main goals are all kingdom oriented, like we want to bless the kingdom of God. We want to sacrifice as a family team for God's kingdom, but relationally within us, it's really important that the culture of our home is is one that is excited about the future generations and that we're beginning to create the kind of platform for for the flourishing of our family, generationally, not just for our, our, you know, brief lifetime here on earth.Jeff Zaugg: [00:07:56] Right. This is fascinating. I'm thinking about your little six week old grandson and how the first like an idea for some practical, the first two years, let's say, of his life already what you hope to see as a you're actually hoping for it not only from your kids who are his parents, but also like as a family. This is the way you go about those first couple of years, the things the way you could think to raise him to be a great father one day. Any practicals around that really young phase?Jeremy Pryor: [00:08:25] Oh, man. Well, I think I think that this is where when you're inviting a child, a grandchild, into a a culture that is very robust, you know, in terms of there's his great grandparents are there like his grandparents are there.Jeff Zaugg: [00:08:40] Four generations.Jeremy Pryor: [00:08:41] Yeah, like, it's, to me, the most practical thing to build for your children is a multi-generational root structure. So they they are they are grounded in their identity from day one. They know who we are. They're not just an individual now. They are an individual. And we want to honor all of the unique ways that God has made them. But I think that what we've been experimenting with as a culture is that that is primary and that's almost entirely where identity comes from, is it's all individual. And so parents are actually, you know, are really hurting their children by providing a larger identity. And I actually think that the subtle reason for that is it allows the parents to abdicate that responsibility of passing on the family stories, of building the kind of culture like if you want parents to be able to pursue their own individual goals, then then they also need to say, well, I guess I want to give that same gift to my children. And then you create an ideology that says that's a good idea. That's never been the way that people have seen how to how to ground children. Children need to have identity coming from their family. Who are we? Where do we come from? And you can see this like when kids get adopted, there is this, you know, this weird, you know, from our cultures perspective, drive that often they have to try to figure out who they are. That's not strange. That's strange to us. But historically, everyone needed that. We, we need to know who our parents are, who our grandparents are, how did we get here? Like and I think that that the if we don't do that, the subtle message is the world does revolve around you that your story did just begin when you were born and that that your story will end when you die. And that's the story that we're telling people and it doesn't provide a lot of meaning. It really creates, I think, a lot of self-centeredness and narcissism. It's just bad for the individual and for society and the family.Jeff Zaugg: [00:10:28] And that pairs into parenting chaos, keeping chaos down and going after discipline for chaos or discipline for like just bring it back to peace. Very short term thinking versus training of children. And you've gotten into it a little bit already, But could you flesh out a little further because this is like a major forefront for me right now with my four girls, is how am I training them? How am I training them, what perspective, what culture we training with them, but also how am I seeing each of these opportunities as training these future mothers versus training these little, you know, the little four year old. Would you help help paint a picture for how we can kind of flip our perspective there?Jeremy Pryor: [00:11:08] Yeah, well, yeah, I think that probably there's never been a time where we've needed to become clearer about what the what is the training that we're trying to give our children. And, you know, I think that there's different sort of layers of that identity. There's the sort of the larger family layer, like what are the values of our family and how do we instill those distinctive values into our children? And so are there things that we celebrate this you know, this is like, do we talk about these things? Do we root these values in Scripture and tell those scriptural stories? And then do we actually sometimes just tactically train about like if we're going to be a hospitable family. Like how what do we do when people walk in the house? How do we you know, how do we think about, you know, having people over for dinner? Like what, what, so there's those are the larger cultural and then you can kind of get down into the more role based training. So like if you have a house of daughters, you know, do you want to be training them someday to be great mothers And that that is and same with sons. Do you want to be training them to be great fathers? And this is where I've gotten, you know, kind of curious about the, you know, the sort of problems that we're having as a culture and trying to even define what what, what a woman or a man is. I think that the this is really stems directly from the confusion we have about family. Like I think that that that that femininity is typified by mature motherhood and masculinity is typified by mature fatherhood. And it doesn't mean that every woman needs to be a mother or every man needs to be a father. It means that that's what defines those gender identities. And so and so and so, I would say every woman needs to champion motherhood. Every every man needs to champion fatherhood. And if God hasn't called you to be a biological mother or father, then I think He's called you, too, to replicate those identities or those those values in other ways, you know, spiritually, and there's many ways that you can do that. But but I think that that's that's sort of the true north of trying to figure out what those those are and that then that releases parents to be able to have the freedom to know how to train their kids. Otherwise the alternative to that is you do have to train your kids in essentially androgynous environments like, you know, we can't talk about gender, we can't talk about distinctions, we can't talk about roles, everyone's an individual. Everything that we do that's related to that is somehow going to be imposing some kind of restriction on your individual freedom, which is the absolute highest value in our culture right now. And, but you have to understand that that does great damage to the family and to the future of your family. So we need to have the courage to be able to train our kids, hey, this is this is this is what it looks like to be a great mother. Like we want our daughters to be around the greatest mothers in our community, in our area, Like can they be learning and gleaning from them and from their mother? And same with sons and their father.Jeff Zaugg: [00:13:59] So if the focus, if my parents would have put the focus on raising a great businessman as my primary role. Well, great, that only goes so far. If they would have put their primary focus on training a great future father, even if I'm 41 and I'm not a dad. Where, what, what harm there are the characteristics in a great father, right? Is that what you're kind of saying is?Jeremy Pryor: [00:14:20] Likely if it's a 41 year old man who doesn't have children, you are a great you are a father of something. I do think that that's why these things are integrated and woven into the fabric of our of our gender. And so, you know, Paul didn't have children. He his he he talked about himself as a father all the time. This was the way he saw his life, he says in Corinthians, you have 10,000 guardians, but not many fathers. I was a father to you. And so this is the way that that people thought, you know, throughout all of history. Jesus, his favorite word for himself was a son, you know. And so I think the movement from son to father and his relationship with the father, these are these these are not decisions that we make about about like what we choose to do. This is who we are when we're born. Like this is, and that's why I think it is rooted so deeply into our gender, into our sex, like the biological instincts that women and men have that differ, differ because of motherhood and fatherhood, all the way back to when their babies. I mean, that that difference is there for that reason, and so I think that there was an ideological decision to sever those things as a culture. And then we were shocked when those got untethered that we can't figure out what a woman or a man is anymore. That's inevitable because they were designed, all you see in Genesis 1, God created male and female, and the next thing, you know, they're a family, right? He tells them as a family, as a household, as a unit to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue and rule. And so that's that's why we have this distinction.Jeff Zaugg: [00:15:52] Yeah, it's hard, in some ways, it's hard for me to wrap my arms around this. The dad of four girls thinking about what am I raising them towards and a culture of, I feel like my 41 years, like the the idea of, well, the sons get to go rule and reign and have like like beyond the household type and the traditional roles of a mom would feel and has I feel like I've felt that before where it's less like aspired to be, that being a mom is the is the key role in the family team. As I read your, it was one of your podcast in Substack blogs about, am I raising daughters to be single and independent versus a wife and mother? As I read it, I'm like, there's wrestling at the same time. I feel like now more than ever, I could see that's amazing. Like that, truly like, I'm like, that's amazing thinking we got it wrong. Okay, I see the other side of raising daughters to be wives and mothers, but there's still tension there. I know there's there's a lot of tension. How have you, how have you gotten to that point and and how how can you help us kind of at least like dip into saying let's explore this versus just kind of do the norm what we've done in the past generation?Jeremy Pryor: [00:17:11] Yeah, well, I think, I think it starts because you kind of mentioned so men have this ability to go and expand. And I think that's where it starts. It starts with saying, why are men doing that? Well, because they're fathers and they're doing it for the family as a member or as a representative of the family team. If that is truly what's happening, then I don't think that there's any tension.Jeff Zaugg: [00:17:35] Yeah.Jeremy Pryor: [00:17:35] What really creates the tension is when men actually choose to join other teams, they inhabit other identities outside the family because of their own individual desires. They go out there and begin to pursue those things and they leave their family in the dust. But then they turn around and say to their mother, or the culture says to the mother or the Christian culture, you know, says, Hey, yeah, your husband gets to, you know, inhabit this other identity which is being celebrated by the culture. You don't get to do that. And so I think that what the alternative to that is when fathers begin to see everything they're doing in work as a as really under the umbrella of their identity as father. And so and they're they're they're in a dynamic team relationship with their wife. When the when the husband and wife are one unit that and they're building a family, and so when when dad goes off to work, he's going to get resources for the family. He's not there to to construct an alternative identity so that he can escape the family. And so as long as that that unit is tight and then you can decide in that family unit, you know, how to deploy the different resources of the family to do the expanding. You know, and I definitely think there are times where the wife is well suited for that role. But I also think that when, you know, you really love motherhood and love raising children, then then some of those roles, those traditional distinctive roles do start to make a lot of sense, especially in certain seasons. But I think there are exceptions. I think the important thing is that that both the husband and wife, but primarily I would say the husband, sees himself as this is what when I get married, I'm no longer just me as an individual. I am, I'm a father. And I think that people and I definitely experienced this when I first became a father, I it was it felt like I was putting on somebody else's clothes. I felt I felt, you know, in a very I wasn't well-prepared, culturally speaking, to embrace that. I resisted it all in all kinds of ways, very subtle in some overt ways. And I think I had to make a faith based decision that I want to inhabit the role of father, and I will see everything I do in the workplace as a as an outflow of my role as father and not as an outflow of an individual identity that I'm trying to construct apart from my family. So it was the battle I had to do in my own mind, in my own heart. I think that really starts to allow mothers and wives to be able to embrace all of the things that God's called them to do. And this this, this I think, is a beautiful, you know, sort of design. And I think that I think that, you know, part of what our culture is saying is it's ugly. And I think a lot of people are having a subtle, aesthetic, negative reaction to the idea of family. They hear family and they're like, ooh, you know, like I don't like the family. I don't feel like it's something that's beautiful. There's something ugly and and there's something destructive about the design of family. And a lot of it is just we haven't seen good ones. And I think it's for good reason that I think a lot of people have this reaction. And so part of what I had to do and it was really being in Israel and seeing beautiful families. I was shocked, when I was in the Middle East, I suddenly encountered so many examples, culture wise, I'd seen some great families growing up in Seattle, but but they seemed like the radical exception. But, you know, to see a whole culture of flourishing families, just where that was much more normal, it started to allow me to fall in love with the design again. And that's when I could embrace my fatherhood, which allowed my wife to fully embrace her motherhood. And now we're now we're off and right now we're building a family.Jeff Zaugg: [00:21:10] And I mean, as you gave me a tour around your house and the different businesses that you run, as a family, and that she's the point on several those businesses, it's not like it's a she's cooking and cleaning and you are it's it's a brilliant mix of your gifting and this portfolio businesses and, so I want to go back into that in a moment. But the the genesis, in Genesis, of this concept, Adam and Eve were tasked as man and woman with the challenge, not Adam was tasked and Eve was on the side. Right. And then there's a progression. I love that, and I know you're you've released like the first two chapters and you're working towards the it's already available, the first two chapters to all of our listeners. Can you talk about that body of work and just like the passion for this multiplying and then ruling?Jeremy Pryor: [00:21:54] Yeah, well, I think, I think what I try to wrestle with when I see a lot of I experienced this and see this, especially with young men, a confusion about what they're aiming at in life. Like, and so I think I think that God settled that for us when he created the first man and woman and said, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue and rule. In other words, the last the last part of that is that we are building a ruling household. That's that's what every single man and woman is really tasked to building. Now, if you're if you're unmarried, I think there's ways in which you are supporting that or even forming potentially single households with celibate singles. But I think that every one of us really we need to be living and existing and building these these households. And this was not, this was very well known historically, like if, I've spent a lot of time studying the first century in both the Roman and Jewish household in the first century, it was it was a it was a huge part of the whole design of all of society. Religion in both the Roman, the Greek, you know, the Jewish world, and in both of those kinds of realms was primarily in the home and their economic engine, the word, oikos, the word for household is where we get the word for economics in English. And and so even the idea of economics was primarily a household or almost entirely a household based concept. And so we've decided since the Industrial Revolution to divorce these ideas. And now many of us have grown up and we don't have a memory like our parents and grandparents don't, they don't remember a time when there was an oikos, when there was a household culture in society. And so I think this has caused a cause great confusion. We think it's just about being individuals. And and so we don't know why God made male and female. We don't know what a marriage is really designed to do. We don't know what a household or a family is designed to do. We think it's designed to create, you know, sort of a nurturing, temporary environment. And that's why the primary, you know, metaphor we use is the nest. That's a very strange idea when if the point is to rule, that's not a great that's not a great metaphor.Jeff Zaugg: [00:23:54] Yeah. The nests, the Eagles make it uncomfortable and then they're forced out of the nest.Jeremy Pryor: [00:23:58] That's right. Yes.Jeff Zaugg: [00:23:58] And that's what we're doing as families right now.Jeremy Pryor: [00:24:00] Yeah.Jeff Zaugg: [00:24:01] But you can't rule because there's never any loss of team members, right.Jeremy Pryor: [00:24:05] And the nest isn't designed to be a place from which you rule. It's, you know, and so that's why...Jeff Zaugg: [00:24:10] Incubation place.Jeremy Pryor: [00:24:11] Yeah. That's why the ultimate metaphor really is, is, is the monarchy. It's really a royal idea. That's why Abraham, when he got married, I think all of the Hebrew names, this part I want to tease out my book, when you read these stories in Hebrew, you're constantly hearing these reinforced like ideas in the names of the characters themselves. So Sarah, Sarai, Sarah means princess. She was she was a royal, you know, she she was the the princess or the queen of this household that Avram, the exalted father, was building. And then he became Abraham, you know, the father of many nations, which was really an outgrowth of of his fathering, you know, And that God looked at him and says to him in Genesis 18, you know, I chose you because I knew you would, you would train your household after you in a certain way.Jeff Zaugg: [00:24:58] Wow. Wow. That gets after the difference between the New Testament look at the fatherhood or the family model versus the Old Testament and maybe some accidental thinking that because New Testament Jesus is out traveling with the disciples and sending, Hey, we're going to go to different areas to to share and spread the gospel a leave behind mentality versus a build it together. You know, you know this, I'm coming off the road from a let's build it together, live in the RV and travel. So I'm with you on the let's not leave behind the family, but it's painful, it's messy. Why do you think some of us have a fractional and I've had multiple seasons of my career that's it's fractional it's jobs here and I travel, I do this, I do that. It's all it's all me and all here and I just try not to hurt my family versus the flourishing of it's all interwoven. Can you explain a little bit of the the two models of fatherhood? Jeremy Pryor: [00:25:57] Yeah. Well, I think that started really because of our, our shift economically. So the Industrial Revolution essentially said we're going to make factories and so what we don't we everything is a cog in a machine, not just like literally from a from the perspective of the machines themselves, but that's how we're going to treat individual people. And so everything I built around that, right, our education systems designed to create people that are obedient cogs in the, you know, these larger machines. And so this this is and this is not even debatable, I mean, this is, you know, secular sociologists are saying have said all these things and and so this is this is what we designed. And I think that what is debatable or what we are discussing is what what is the cost? Is this a good idea? Do we want to continue down this road? And for those of us who have the scriptures, we have access to the divine blueprint. And so I look at the Industrial Revolution and see the way it atomized people, in other words, took the different parts of the family and said, okay, we don't really want you, as you know, as a unit, you know, we want to atomized the family. Okay, say there's the the father is okay, him and his gifts, the mother is, you know, her gifts and and daughters and sons. And so everywhere you go, you're being atomized, right? So in sports, we don't compete as families, we compete as individuals. In school, we don't learn as families, we learn as individuals. In churches, we're often atomized into different classes and different life stage groups to do ministry as individuals. And so our and then I think the most, you know, destructive was the economic shift because that's just takes up so much of our time. 40 or 50 hours a week where children are going off to school and and husbands and wives are working all as atomized individuals in different places. They're building different things. And so that that was, that was a shift. It was a it was a shift for economic reasons, because we discovered that you can create things at scale much better if you atomized the workers in this way. And so people went from, you know, at the turn of the 20th century, from the 19th to 20th century, over 70% of America was living on small farms, and most of the rest of them were in small trades, you know, in cities that were being done in and through the family. And so we went through just enormous shift, economically. And we've never recovered from that. We've never even debriefed what happened. And one of the amazing things is today, because of the Internet and because of a lot of other trends, really a lot of the these the idea that the only way we're ever going to get a job is if I work for some giant corporation, that is being disrupted radically. So, this is the best time to have this conversation to say, okay, guys, you know, maybe, maybe you were forced, maybe your parents or your grandparents felt very much forced to choose to to live these atomized economic lives. You don't have to choose that. There are there are thousands and thousands of families who, for lifestyle reasons, are making the decision to shift to saying we're going to take back, as a family team, we're the economics of our family. We're going to create, in our household, an economic engine. And that's really what a household is, I think from today is we're not we're not really promoting nuclear families. We're not really promoting the family ideal of the 1950s, where the dad goes off to work and comes back and the mom has one or two kids and, you know, that's not we're talking about, that's never been the ideal, that was a 15 year period after the after World War Two. Really what we're looking back is, is the last 3,4, 5,000 years of history, all the way back to how God describes what He designed when He created the first human beings. Like we want to get back to that design. And so I think one of the elements of that design we have to grapple with is, is should families begin to pursue economic engines, doesn't mean that has to be your your only you know, your only source of income doesn't mean you can't have a job. But it's like it's really important to begin to consider if if, if God created this team and you you and your wife, you and your husband are designed to work together with your children, generationally, then man, let's like experience that. Let's figure out like, let's let's create something that's productive, both spiritually, like let's create ministries in and through the household and let's create, you know, let's create businesses or assets in and through the household.Jeff Zaugg: [00:30:01] It's incremental. It's not, you're not telling families quit quit all your jobs and start plowing the fields.Jeremy Pryor: [00:30:06] That's right.Jeff Zaugg: [00:30:07] It's really creative and it's really incremental of all these ideas, proven ideas. Just as an example, though, because this was fascinating as you were giving me a tour and we were talking about the real estate piece and the upside, downside and the downside of the real estate owning rental properties is exactly the upside of the perfect place to train ourselves and our kids, our families. Would you explain that?Jeremy Pryor: [00:30:29] Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, when you're trying to decide, you know, when you're building assets as a family, you're looking different asset classes. Should I invest in stocks or, you know, should we, you know, get involved in sort of partial equity in businesses or should we get involved in in real estate? And when people are looking at these different classes, oftentimes they're being steered towards more passive income classes, you know, things like stocks and bonds and and paper assets like that. And so if you go that direction, you get that, you know, the advantage of of, you know, more passivity. And when you go into real estate, the reason why a lot of people don't like real estate, even though it's got so many economic advantages, is really there's just a lot of work that you don't you know, there's tenants to deal with, there's, you know, renovations to deal with. There's you know, everyone's worried about the call for you know, about the plumbing in the middle of the night or whatever, you know. And so there there are a certain amount of, you know, realities to that. And there are seasons where, you know, family should not try to take on that kind of responsibility. But I think over time and we've discovered this for it with our family, man, it provides a lot of potential places for us to work together. So in our case, you know, Kelsey's our property manager. She does all the contract work with with with the our tenants. And then our son, Jackson, does the renovations and the repairs. April, my wife, she does the bookkeeping and the billing. I do the, you know, like the deal finding and, you know, and the purchasing. And so we all, this allows us to have meetings where we're like and this is there's a, you know, thing called a family office where, where some families that have so many resources to steward. They they literally, like, spend all their time, you know, working together and doing investments. And this is sort of like a family office in tiny microcosm, like, you know, it's a meeting, you know, maybe once a month where we can have these conversations about how do we expand this legacy business, for us, it's called Third Generation Properties. But yeah, we see the downsides of real estate in terms of the kind of active nature of that investment class is being a positive thing because it allows us a platform to do productive work as a family team. We can we can actually rely on each other's different, diverse gifts.  Jeff Zaugg: [00:32:37] I love it. To really see Dad making a decision in a team context. The real money is that like and then to actually see how your kids are playing into like they're, they're insights, they're hearing from God, they're like, I'm fascinated by by continuing to learn with you. And you've already challenged and invited me to, like, really think about it in this next chapter. Well, what does it look like to move into, well, we have one rental house right now because we live in the RV, but to look into a property being a tool for our family. We skipped over it, but let's go back for a moment, to peer oriented relationships. So part of the economic part you talked about led to an educational system that put all of the same age kids in the same room. And I really haven't thought about the downsides. I mean, there's there's some that I've thought about, but not the level that you're thinking about and explained in one of your posts. Could you take us into that topic?Jeremy Pryor: [00:33:34] Yeah. So this is sort of one of those things that I think would have seemed strange to people historically, but the opposite seem strange to us. In other words, we we, if you ask most parents, you know, if they freak out, if their kids don't have friends or don't have a good relationship with their siblings. In our culture, most of us are like, Oh, well, I need to make sure my kids have really good friends. That that that's a that's an unusual idea. Like, I guess somebody who, you know, who's a little bit older than most, you guys will see this, probably have this experience as well. I have relationships with, you know, siblings and family members. I've, not a lot of relationships with my my elementary and junior high and, you know, high school friends. So I think there's certainly some some some good things about that. But the assumption that a peer oriented childhood, in other words, where the main thing that you're worried about in terms of socialization is for your children to be able to handle and interact fluidly with with kids basically within about, you know, 12 months of their age. That's a very unusual experience. And so it doesn't mean it's bad. There's lots of good things about it. You know, it is great to have friends that you get to spend time with and learn from and learn with. But what, there is a there's a really dark side to to this trajectory that a lot of us, you know, need to be aware of. And there's a great book called Hold Onto Your Kids. A couple of Canadian secular psychologists wrote this book and they have a few things that they mentioned in there that that I think are just so clearly true but are not well known. And so one of the things that they're pointing out is that when you are, you know, immersed in a peer oriented environment like that, you begin it begins to shift the the way that you think about yourself. And, and so they they kind of walk through what happens in adolescence where we expect teenagers to get kind of cold to all of a sudden in their family to sort of, you know, get distant, to be a little bit hidden from their family. And and they said if this were to happen with a spouse, if all of a sudden you came home and your spouse was like not really looking you in the eye like, you know, running in their bedroom, like texting people, not wanting to see, like what they're texting, you know, on and on and on. You would look at that and say, oh, they're they might be cheating on me. Right. And basically what these psychologist said is that's exactly what your children are doing. They are cheating on the family and you are responsible for that. Basically, you force them to be in an environment in which they've they had to choose between survival with their peers and a flourishing relationship in the family. And any child who's immersed, you know, for 7 hours a day, five days a week in a peer oriented environment is going to have to for survival, the vast majority of them, at least, are going to have to choose their peers. And so every time the family wants to create a culture, every time the family wants to call the family together, every time you want to ask your kids to sacrifice for their siblings, all of those things are going to come at a net loss, to their identity, to their ability at creating and fighting for the identity that they need to maintain in that peer group. And so basically, the psychology, this is a very unusual, people, you know, the idea that at 13, 14, 15 kids would be suddenly very cold to their parents, that they said that's not psychologically normal. That's not historically normal. And the fact that we all sort of roll our eyes and say, oh, wait till your kids turn to teenagers, it's going to be a nightmare. You know, good luck. You know, you know that we have constructed, artificially constructed that environment and it is really destructive to to the family. And so we want to to really think about there are alternative ways to to live into that season where that is not the expected outcome.Jeff Zaugg: [00:37:18] So and then you play that forward from 15 to 25 and the eye rolls about having to spend Thanksgiving together. Right? Like the fractured, feels like there's an abundance side of just throughout the last 80 years, we have the abundance, the ability financially to go buy our own house or apartment or townhouse and and then now the family moment are you have to get through them versus this is just this is the normal weekly rhythm is we're together and we're going to press through the pain. Because there's always messiness in pain, but we've almost trained that. Jeremy Pryor: [00:37:48] We're so out of practice, yeah. If once a year you're going to get together with your your family and experience the family-ness of your family, the fact that that's going to be miserable is not because of family, that's because you did it once a year. That's because you're so relationally disconnected. That's because so many of your accounts relationally are overdrawn. But if you do do this every week and this is what we experienced in Israel, you know, you see these families that that their favorite thing to do is go to their parents house. It's crazy when you're in Jerusalem and the Sabbath is starting and it's Friday afternoon and you're basically watching everyone, including, you know, couples in their twenties and thirties with their little kids, all go to their parents houses for the Sabbath. They're not saying, oh, my gosh, eye roll, I got to go to my parents. They're like, this is they're very in practice. They love being with their parents. Their parents can't wait to see them and their grandchildren. That's normal. That that's a normal family culture, but that's because those relationships have been been really nurtured by these rhythms. And we don't have those rhythms, like we don't.Jeff Zaugg: [00:38:43] Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.Jeremy Pryor: [00:38:44] That's right. Yeah. All those reps, you know, you're you and this is one of things I tell people, Imagine if you were to create a a meal, once a week, in which your your, your kids bring your grandchildren, like in the future, and they look forward to it and they they are excited and and that's a really meaningful life giving time. You will not be able to stop a multi-generational family from emerging from that one rhythm. It's that powerful.Jeff Zaugg: [00:39:11] Thank you so much for joining us for this first half of my conversation with Jeremy Pryor. All the conversation notes, the links to his books, the links to his blog, I mean, so many other resources from Jeremy Pryor and family teams are all going to be at dadawesome.org/286. Guys, I'm thankful for each of you taking time to listen today. Thanks for leaning in and saying, Man, I'm not done learning. I'm going to be DadAwesome for my family. I'm cheering for you guys. I'm praying for you guys. Have a great week.