Why go through the massive effort of building a custom family culture from scratch? Why not just lean into religion or tradition instead of reinventing the wheel?

In our final episode of 2025, we open up the mailbag to answer your questions. We discuss the tension between inheriting a system vs. building one, and why we are trying to raise the "PayPal Mafia" of families rather than just comfortable employees.

We also break down the specific business frameworks we use to resolve parenting arguments without resentment, and how to handle the inevitable "But my friend gets to do it!" conversation.

In this episode, we cover:

• [01:14] The "Startup vs. Google" Analogy: Why we chose to build our values from first principles rather than adopting a pre-packaged playbook (like religion).
• [05:50] The PayPal Mafia Strategy: Why we want our kids to eventually leave and build their own pods, rather than staying comfortable in ours forever.
• [07:49] Family is a Team, Not a Democracy: How to balance giving kids a voice while maintaining parental leadership.
• [11:46] The "Friend's House" Dilemma: A script for explaining family values to your kids without judging other families.
• [20:18] The Disagreement Protocol: How we use Ray Dalio’s "Believability" and Amazon’s "Disagree and Commit" to solve parenting deadlocks (featuring the "Granola Business" story).
• [26:48] The 3 Types of Connection: Why every couple needs time Face-to-Face, Side-by-Side, and Belly-Button-to-Belly-Button.
• [36:00] The Anti-Martyr Mindset: Why checking all the boxes doesn't guarantee a tantrum-free life (and why that’s okay).

Resources & Episodes Mentioned:

• TMIT 28: How We Divide, Conquer, and Connect – The Shared Operating System Behind Our Marriage
• TMIT 37: Disagree & Commit
• Concept: Ray Dalio’s "Weighted Believability"
• Concept: The "PayPal Mafia" (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, etc.)

We often blame the phone for stealing childhood. But what if the issue isn't just the presence of the smartphone, but the absence of the landline?

When the landline died, we lost a major opportunity for growth. We lost the environment where kids learned to organize their own social lives and navigate awkward conversations with intermediaries (“Hi Mrs. Neufeld, is Greg home?”). Perhaps most importantly, we lost the practice of "cognitive patience": the ability to just sit and listen to a voice, with zero notifications, games, or screens to distract us.

To explore this, we sat down with Chet Kittleson, founder of Tin Can, to discuss a radical, growing trend: Bringing back the landline.

We discuss why giving children a dedicated, voice-only device like Tin Can is a master move in building family culture—not because we want to live in the past, but because we want to give our kids agency in the present.

And, along the way, we explore what it’s like for Chet as a husband, father, and son to be the founder of a fast-growing company that is deeply connected to his family values.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• The "Family Line" vs. The Personal Device: Why giving every family member a personal device killed the shared experience of the home phone, and how bringing it back helps kids learn to navigate the world.
• What is Tin Can? A look at the hardware that uses WiFi to work like a landline, but with a "whitelist" feature so kids can only call (and receive calls from) numbers parents approve.
• Cognitive Patience: The profound difference between a chaotic FaceTime call and the focus required to sit, listen, and hold an audio-only conversation.
• Founder & Father: Chet opens up about the challenges of building a high-growth startup. He shares his specific rituals for transitioning from "CEO mode" to "Dad mode"—including an e-bike commute that helps him shed the stress of the day.
• Teaching Through Struggle: How Chet uses his work to teach his kids that they too can do anything they set their minds to.
• Favorite Family Tradition: Don’t miss Chet’s unique family tradition at the end! (Hint: it involves Brussels sprouts and a baseball bat)

Resources Mentioned:

• Get your own Tin Can: www.tincan.com
• Follow Tin Can on Instagram: @tincan.kids

We did something that sounds crazy: We gave our 8-year-old an iPhone 15 Pro. But there is a strategy behind the screen.

In this episode, we are exploring a new frontier: Family AI. We believe this is a pivotal moment where parents can either fear the technology or learn to lead with it. Our goal? To shift from being a "consumer family" (passive scrolling) to a "creator family" (active building).

We break down our personal framework for using AI at home—The 3 C’s: Clarify, Coach, and Create.

In this episode, we cover:

• The iPhone Decision: Why we gave Hunter a "device" (not a phone) and how we locked it down using Apple's native settings.
• Clarify: Using tools like the Limitless Pendant to capture the "ground truth" during disagreements and using voice-to-text to save brainpower during brainstorming.
• Coach: How we use AI as a neutral third party to mediate sibling arguments (like Maverick vs. Hunter) and navigate health scares in real-time.
• Create: Moving from consumption to creation—from designing our Thanksgiving gratitude tables to making explainer videos for school using NotebookLM.

Mentioned in this episode:

• 🔗 Limitless AI: limitless.ai (Recently acquired by Meta!)
• 🔗 NotebookLM: notebooklm.google.com
• 🔗 OpenAI Whisper: openai.com/index/whisper

Watch the full video version of this episode on Spotify.

Join us as we figure this out in real-time. It’s messy, it’s new, but it’s the most important addition to our family workflows ever.

This week on The Most Important Thing, we start with a new family favorite game (Sardines 🐟) and end up somewhere much deeper: authority — what it means to claim it as adults and how to submit to it without losing ourselves.

In this episode, we explore:

• Claiming authority (“adulting”)
  • Moving out of “please the group” mode into values-aligned choices for our family
  • Boundaries 2.0: revisiting decisions we made in survival mode
  • Trusting our intuition and setting boundaries without emotional leakage
  • The messy reality of changing roles and expectations with people who’ve helped us in earlier seasons
• Submitting to legitimate authority (staying teachable)
  • Staying humble, curious, and open to wisdom beyond ourselves
  • Greg’s story about why it’s hard to trust guidance from people he knows deeply
  • Letting books, mentors, and lived experience shape us — without outsourcing our judgment
  • Connecting to something larger than ourselves so we’re neither too arrogant nor too small
• Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies and how we relate to expectations
  • Danielle as an Upholder (meets inner + outer expectations) and Greg as a Rebel (resists both)
  • How those styles shape the way we set boundaries, take advice, and hold authority in our home
  • Take the Four Tendencies Quiz: https://gretchenrubin.com/quiz/the-four-tendencies-quiz/
• A mantra for this season: “Choose guilt over resentment.”
  • Why saying no may come with guilt — but saying yes when we shouldn’t often breeds long-term resentment
  • How we’re trying to model this for our kids in how we protect our time, energy, and family culture

In this episode of The Most Important Thing, we dive into why mastering “the art of disagreeing” is essential for building a resilient family culture and why the phrase “agree to disagree” is officially off-limits in the Neufeld household.

Using insights from psychological safety research, Amazon’s “disagree and commit” philosophy, and our own experiences navigating our kids’ contrasting approaches to conflict, we explore how families can embrace disagreement without sacrificing connection or harmony.

Here’s what we break down:

• The real meaning of psychological safety is not about avoiding tension, it is about welcoming disagreement.
• Tips for keeping conflict focused on ideas rather than identity (plus better alternatives to common phrases like “you’re not listening” or “that doesn’t make sense”).
• The risks of raising overly “agreeable” kids who equate compliance with kindness, and how that can leave them vulnerable.
• A family-friendly take on Amazon’s famous “disagree and commit.”

By the end of this episode, you’ll walk away with a new understanding of disagreement and some ideas of how to help your whole family navigate disagreement with confidence while staying deeply connected.

This week, we’re exploring an unexpected (but so necessary!) aspect of family dynamics: trickster energy—a playful, inventive, and boundary-testing spirit that helps us stay adaptable when life feels too rigid.

The episode kicks off with a relatable parenting challenge:

Maverick dreams of riding the roller coasters at Legoland for his 4th birthday, but he’s an inch too short to meet the height requirements. Do you stick to the rules? Cross your fingers for leniency? Or come up with a creative workaround?

In this episode, we dive into:

• What trickster energy means (and how it’s different from dishonesty or sneakiness)
• Ways to help kids distinguish between safety rules and “rules of convenience”
• Why innovation and growth often require stepping outside the lines
• How trickster energy is most effective when guided by a moral compass
• The balance between cleverness and mischief—and how to help kids find it
• Why trickster energy works best as a family effort, not an individual pursuit

If you’re someone who’s always played by the rules (hello, D 👋) or you’re raising a child who loves testing limits, this episode offers research, stories, and tools to help your family channel rule-bending in a way that fosters growth, not chaos.

If we’re serious about building resilient family culture, we have to talk about the emotions that actually show up in real homes — and anger is a big one.

For both of us, anger has been tricky. We’ve tried to calm it, redirect it, send it to its room… but we hadn’t really named its purpose. So we started asking: What can anger teach us? And how can we work with it instead of against it?

In this episode, we explore:

• Why anger shows up so fast — especially in families with young kids
• Brené Brown’s idea of anger as an indicator emotion
• The difference between containing anger and suppressing it
• Why “go calm down” and “count to 10” don’t work when someone is activated
• Greg’s take on men, covert depression, and how “flatness” turns into irritability
• Danielle’s take on mom rage — and how many girls were never taught safe ways to express anger
• How anger can be used to fuel change (hello, Rosa Parks and Taylor’s Version 👋)

Two goals for working with anger in family culture:

1. Learn to contain anger — without suppressing it or letting it take over
2. Learn to translate anger into insight

Why this matters: When we normalize anger as part of being human, we turn it from something to fear into something to understand — and that understanding can become a family superpower.

Envy isn’t a character flaw—it’s human. Shrewdness isn’t cynicism—it’s discernment. In this episode, we explore how to normalize envy and develop the important skill of “reading the room,” so both kids and adults can stay kind while staying protected in real-world situations.

• Why it’s important to explore the more complex parts of family culture
  While joy, connection, and kindness are essential, building resilience and wisdom means being willing to take a closer look at the murkier, less comfortable emotions too.
• What shrewdness really means
  It’s the sweet spot between being overly trusting and overly skeptical—recognizing reality for what it is and responding in a way that’s both protective and constructive.
• The difference between envy and jealousy
  Envy: “I want what they have” (two people are involved).
  Jealousy: “I’m afraid of losing what I have to someone else” (a dynamic involving three people).
• The power of naming envy
  When we acknowledge envy, we take away its power. Helping kids label it—“I feel envious of ___”—invites understanding and support instead of secrecy or shame.
• Real-world examples to learn from
  Danielle’s experience of being blindsided by a committee member—and how shrewdness could have protected her.
  Hunter’s win in class that went uncelebrated—and how to interpret others’ reactions without dimming your own success.
  Greg’s upbringing with older kids and hazing moments—and how that led to practical lessons in emotional smarts and situational awareness.

We encourage you to bring these topics into the light in your own home this week.

Ask your kids: “When have you felt envious?” and “How did you read the room?”

These small, intentional conversations can help grow emotional understanding and equip us all with tools for navigating the world with kindness and wisdom.