2024-01-04_A_Great_House
00:00:00.000 | Hey Radicals, as we begin today's podcast, today is January 4, 2024.
00:00:05.320 | On January 22, my forthcoming Panama Investment Tour begins.
00:00:12.240 | Now last week I was talking with Mikkel Thorup, who is the primary host of this
00:00:17.020 | event. I am co-hosting it along with Gabriel Custodiat and Mikkel, and we were
00:00:21.880 | going over the numbers and everything like that.
00:00:23.600 | And I said, Mikkel, I think we're done.
00:00:25.040 | And Mikkel said, no, Joshua, most people sign up for this event, usually a couple
00:00:29.760 | of weeks before. It used to be that people sign up six months in advance, etc., like
00:00:33.240 | you expected. But in reality, in today's world, people sign up for stuff just a
00:00:37.480 | couple of weeks before the event.
00:00:38.760 | No one wants to commit very much in addition.
00:00:40.640 | So I was ready to stop doing ads and close things down.
00:00:44.000 | And he said, no, you need to do ads.
00:00:45.640 | So here I am doing an ad.
00:00:47.280 | If you have ever thought about internationalization broadly, meaning you're
00:00:52.320 | interested in getting a second passport, having a residency elsewhere, banking in
00:00:56.480 | another country, anything like that, if you're interested in international
00:01:00.440 | investment, in investing in real estate in other countries for higher gains, greater
00:01:05.480 | opportunities, privacy, etc., or if you're interested in Panama specifically and
00:01:10.320 | you've wondered, hey, what is it about that little country?
00:01:13.320 | Why do so many people go there?
00:01:15.080 | Why do so many business oriented people go there?
00:01:17.520 | Then I would love for you to come to this event.
00:01:21.760 | It's going to be a week long event together with me, Mikkel and Gabriel.
00:01:26.160 | We have a bunch of events planned.
00:01:28.920 | We have a bunch of tours planned.
00:01:30.200 | I'll be speaking.
00:01:31.000 | We'll all be speaking.
00:01:31.760 | It's going to be a great time.
00:01:32.720 | We're going to be hanging out.
00:01:33.880 | Very intimate group of people able to hang out continually.
00:01:37.000 | So if you just want to see me and spend basically a week with me and with my
00:01:41.480 | friends, I'll be making myself completely available.
00:01:43.920 | It's a great time for us to get together.
00:01:46.280 | You can come.
00:01:46.960 | We can talk about anything that you want to talk about.
00:01:48.920 | And again, I'm going to make myself completely available to you.
00:01:51.880 | So if that's you and you are available during January 22 to January 28,
00:01:56.800 | please today go and sign up.
00:01:58.360 | Sign up today.
00:01:59.320 | Go to expatmoney.com/radical link in the show notes.
00:02:03.480 | expatmoney.com/radical sign up today for the event.
00:02:07.440 | Just a couple of weeks left.
00:02:08.440 | expatmoney.com/radical.
00:02:11.160 | Let's suppose you are a very wealthy man, no longer content with merely business
00:02:19.040 | success, you have aspirations of being something of a statesman.
00:02:23.600 | You want to have a large impact on society.
00:02:26.600 | And as you are a long-term thinker, you want your particular values to
00:02:32.400 | outlive you far into the future.
00:02:34.440 | Let us furthermore assume that your opinions are heterodox compared
00:02:39.960 | to prevailing sentiments.
00:02:41.400 | You are, after all, a contrarian.
00:02:43.920 | You made your fortune by making large bets on ideas that were discounted
00:02:48.360 | or even unimaginable by the rest of the market.
00:02:51.000 | You know that if you want to propagate your different ideas, you are going to
00:02:55.640 | have to find a completely unprecedented vehicle to express them.
00:03:00.400 | In this essay, we'll examine a new kind of institution that
00:03:05.000 | can help you achieve your goals.
00:03:07.080 | We present this in the form of a thought experiment.
00:03:10.960 | You begin by thinking about the existing things or institutions that
00:03:16.440 | could a) embody your values and b) survive for a very long time.
00:03:20.760 | You consider the following and discard each.
00:03:23.760 | A business.
00:03:25.160 | You have already founded and sold or IPO'd several of these.
00:03:30.120 | Businesses are good for making money, but not so good for transmitting
00:03:34.480 | worldviews because they are subject to so much government oversight.
00:03:38.560 | You must hire from the general public according to the law and must therefore
00:03:43.080 | admit general public type ideas.
00:03:46.280 | You have indirect or no influence in choosing leadership for your public
00:03:50.680 | companies after you are gone, especially not after you are dead.
00:03:54.400 | A school.
00:03:56.440 | You could found a university, but in order for it to be accredited, you will
00:04:01.720 | also be subject to government oversight.
00:04:04.360 | You also have very little way of ensuring the school remains true
00:04:08.680 | to your vision after you are dead.
00:04:11.480 | A charitable foundation.
00:04:14.840 | You could leave all your money to a foundation dedicated to a cause you like.
00:04:18.800 | But once again, you have very little way of ensuring the fund administrators
00:04:23.480 | don't subvert your wishes after your death.
00:04:26.480 | You also don't like the idea of putting your descendants in charge of just doling
00:04:31.760 | out money for the next few generations.
00:04:34.000 | You have an aversion to professional philanthropists.
00:04:37.200 | A book.
00:04:38.880 | You could write a book about your ideas, but you have no way of guaranteeing
00:04:43.320 | that it will ever be or continue to remain popular after your death.
00:04:49.040 | The odds of having a book in circulation for more than
00:04:51.800 | 100 years is vanishingly small.
00:04:54.120 | A monument.
00:04:56.160 | Massive stone structures have longevity on the order of tens of thousands of years.
00:05:01.320 | Now we're getting somewhere.
00:05:02.840 | You could build a great stone pyramid inscribed with your ideas in several
00:05:07.160 | different languages, or even a clock, depending on how large and grand your
00:05:12.600 | monument was, people would come from all over the world to see it long into the future.
00:05:17.280 | However, you discard this idea.
00:05:20.240 | You realize that while this is actually a pretty good way to get your ideas read,
00:05:25.400 | there is no way to guarantee they would be interpreted the way you want them to.
00:05:30.240 | Politics.
00:05:32.320 | You could pour your money into a political campaign, either for
00:05:36.160 | yourself or a favored candidate.
00:05:38.880 | If you win, you get to use the power of state to express your
00:05:42.240 | values in the world at broad scale.
00:05:44.480 | And you might even cultivate a following who would revere you after your death.
00:05:48.680 | But you discard this plan as well.
00:05:51.640 | While it has some very attractive benefits, you tend to avoid competition.
00:05:56.080 | And you know that politics is the most competitive domain on
00:05:59.200 | earth, besides naked warfare.
00:06:01.480 | You decide you need something else entirely.
00:06:05.480 | You need an institution that A, will faithfully embody your ideals, freedom
00:06:10.680 | to set initial conditions and create new systems as you see fit with no compromise.
00:06:15.040 | B, will grow over time.
00:06:17.160 | Institution augments and becomes stronger with age, preferably at a compounding rate.
00:06:22.680 | C, indivestible, cannot be taken away from you, is hard for other actors,
00:06:28.320 | including governments, to interfere with.
00:06:31.480 | You decide on the following, which you call the great house plan.
00:06:35.840 | One, you will choose 150 men with families who are aligned with your ideals and of
00:06:43.760 | the best quality you can possibly find.
00:06:46.000 | Two, you will give them monthly cash payments for the rest of their lives in
00:06:50.960 | the form of a gift, conditional on their loyalty, agreement to embody and propagate
00:06:57.840 | your ideals and commitment to having six children.
00:07:02.120 | Three, you will support these families and see to their growth and the education
00:07:07.720 | and development of their children.
00:07:09.560 | Four, these men will generally be working, studying, and pursuing their
00:07:15.400 | interests and the interests of the network out in the world, but will come
00:07:20.840 | work for you when called into service.
00:07:23.800 | They should expect to work for you about 33% of the time over
00:07:27.520 | the course of their careers.
00:07:28.800 | While they work for you, they will receive salary in addition to their gift payments.
00:07:34.080 | Five, these men will also be loyal to the other men in your network and will
00:07:40.280 | work to advance each other's interests.
00:07:42.440 | Six, this offer will extend to each man's male offspring upon reaching majority.
00:07:49.960 | Seven, this arrangement can be terminated at any time by either party.
00:07:54.640 | In short, you are going to play the part of the godfather.
00:08:00.200 | You are going to translate your money directly into social capital by
00:08:06.160 | jump-starting a high-growth-rate network of families who regard you and
00:08:10.360 | your descendants as their benefactor.
00:08:13.000 | You will not need to invent a new technology to do this.
00:08:16.240 | You will only need to broaden your time horizon.
00:08:19.120 | While there is nothing like this in the modern world, there is a historical
00:08:23.840 | precedent for this institution.
00:08:26.040 | Roman patronage.
00:08:27.880 | You are going to be a patron, and your beneficiaries are going to be your clients.
00:08:34.680 | You are going to start small so you can set initial conditions exactly how you like,
00:08:39.960 | but the network will grow at a compounding rate.
00:08:43.760 | You will provide the capital to bring the network together, and once it
00:08:48.240 | reaches self-sufficiency, it will continue on without you.
00:08:52.040 | Beginning with just 150 couples after a surprisingly short amount of time, 30
00:08:57.680 | years, you will have a community of over 1,000 people who are elite, aligned to
00:09:04.520 | your ideals, and personally loyal to you.
00:09:08.000 | Your money has provided the catalyst necessary for family growth,
00:09:12.800 | which is compounding network growth.
00:09:17.000 | It's also a selection gate.
00:09:18.280 | Only you get to choose who you give your money to, so you get
00:09:24.440 | to be as selective as you want.
00:09:26.080 | Lack of demand for your money will not be an issue.
00:09:28.880 | You can select from among your closest associates, choose exclusively from your
00:09:33.840 | church or favorite geography, use an IQ test, or make any kind of criteria you want.
00:09:40.000 | No one can tell you how to give your money away for free, not even the government.
00:09:44.520 | Lastly, your money is the primary, not ultimate, glue that
00:09:49.920 | holds everything together.
00:09:51.160 | Your offer is for life and is even open to descendants, but can also be terminated
00:09:57.280 | at any time, ensuring maximum possible long-term alignment and long-term leverage.
00:10:03.040 | Let's have a look at how this network grows over time, assuming lifetime
00:10:07.520 | fertility of six children per woman and cash payments of $5,000 a month to each
00:10:13.640 | head of household, I'm now going to summarize a chart.
00:10:17.800 | If you'd like to see the whole chart, check the link for this essay in the show notes.
00:10:21.600 | But the summary of the chart shows that in year zero, there is a total population
00:10:26.000 | of 300 persons out of 150 families.
00:10:29.680 | The voting age population is 300.
00:10:32.800 | There are 150 able-bodied men and the cost per year is 9 million US dollars per year
00:10:39.000 | with a cumulative cost of $9 million.
00:10:41.920 | After 10 years, the total population has grown to 900 out of 150 families.
00:10:47.240 | The voting age population continues to be 300 able-bodied men, 150, costing
00:10:52.960 | $9 million per year for a cumulative cost of $99 million over 10 years.
00:10:58.120 | After 30 years, the total population has increased to 1,365 persons, 289 total
00:11:06.320 | families, 1,005 voting age persons, 360 able-bodied men, an annual cost of $17.3
00:11:14.960 | million and a total cumulative cost of $302 million.
00:11:19.280 | After 50 years, the total population has increased to 3,812, 547 total families
00:11:27.320 | are represented with a voting age population of 1,448 and 618 able-bodied
00:11:33.840 | men with an annual cost of $32.8 million and total cumulative cost of $905 million.
00:11:40.560 | Dropping down after 100 years, the total population is 20,918 persons, which
00:11:48.240 | are representing 4,235 families, voting age population of 11,150 persons
00:11:54.720 | and 4,203 able-bodied men.
00:11:57.880 | The chart continues and shows that at the very end, after 300 years with this
00:12:03.120 | kind of growth, the total population would be 27.9 million persons, representing
00:12:09.560 | 4.9 million families, a total voting age population of 13.4 million persons of
00:12:17.400 | voting age and able-bodied men of 5,208,000.
00:12:22.280 | As we can see, after 30 years, your population has more than quadrupled.
00:12:27.800 | Your first generation of children has matured to adulthood and you have a
00:12:31.800 | working and voting population of about 1,000 highly elite people who
00:12:36.800 | regard you as their benefactor.
00:12:38.800 | You can now begin placing them in your companies, your political campaigns,
00:12:42.600 | or your cultural projects, and they will see to your interests.
00:12:45.840 | Your children, meanwhile, are well into their careers as full-time
00:12:49.720 | developers of human capital, because you have plans to make this whole
00:12:53.640 | operation self-sufficient by year 60.
00:12:56.320 | Therefore, your descendants will not be trust fund kids.
00:13:00.280 | You are going to give away 100% of your money.
00:13:02.800 | If this project is to outlive you, they are going to be the guardians,
00:13:06.720 | spiritual and material leaders, and benefactors of a new people.
00:13:10.360 | By year 60, the first children from generation three have started to be born.
00:13:15.840 | Your great house can sway elections in small towns.
00:13:19.840 | Your network is also now self-sufficient.
00:13:22.680 | By this point, assuming your people are at least as entrepreneurial as
00:13:27.240 | Stanford B school grads, about a 30% founder rate, your network has
00:13:31.760 | founded more than 260 ventures, 10% of which will have been successful if
00:13:36.800 | you apply common startup rules of thumb.
00:13:39.080 | It will be up to you to work out exactly how individuals who have graduated out
00:13:43.440 | of your network continue to contribute, but with ties of gratitude and loyalty,
00:13:47.560 | you should be able to work something out that includes a combination of options
00:13:51.160 | on in-network businesses, as well as donations, and your people will donate back.
00:13:57.200 | People have extraordinary loyalty to schools they paid
00:14:00.080 | for the privilege to attend.
00:14:01.320 | Imagine how loyal they would be to a school that paid them.
00:14:04.400 | Incidentally, this will be a full-time job for many of your children.
00:14:08.760 | They will work to ensure your people are healthy, happy, educated, and fulfilled.
00:14:12.520 | They will settle disputes, represent their interests, provide services,
00:14:16.720 | be a social nexus, and lead large-scale projects.
00:14:20.320 | By year 120, the whole thing is being administered by your great grandchildren.
00:14:26.640 | Your people number 50,000, and they could field about two U.S.
00:14:30.400 | Army Combat Brigades of manpower if they needed to.
00:14:33.120 | If they keep founding ventures at their historic rate, they will have
00:14:37.040 | founded more than 200 successful companies.
00:14:39.520 | They now comprise an elite minority of the kind that tends to rule majorities.
00:14:46.160 | By year 200, your voting-age population can easily sway elections in any city,
00:14:51.560 | the current size of Chicago and below.
00:14:54.960 | By year 300, your people are a national constituency, numbering at 27 million.
00:15:00.480 | They are a large elite who would have a major say in setting the
00:15:04.400 | agenda in any country in the world.
00:15:06.120 | If you started in the United States, their interests
00:15:08.760 | have international implications.
00:15:10.640 | It is unlikely that they remain as tightly coordinated as they were
00:15:14.240 | when you first gathered them together, but they are bound by affection
00:15:17.760 | for each other as a distinct people, and regard you as the historic
00:15:21.520 | figure who brought them together.
00:15:23.400 | They revere your founding ideals like we revere America's founding
00:15:27.240 | ideals today, and maybe even more so, because you've explicitly designed
00:15:32.320 | your system to use the power of descendants, which is very effective
00:15:36.480 | for transmitting beliefs across long time periods.
00:15:39.400 | Early Americans were suspicious of hereditary institutions, but your
00:15:44.640 | descendants will have a role designated for them – they are to be your
00:15:48.520 | people's shepherds, they are to provide spiritual leadership, they will
00:15:53.360 | live from securing voluntary donations that are invested back into
00:15:57.440 | furthering your people's interests.
00:15:59.040 | If they become avaricious, ineffective, or inattentive, the people
00:16:03.840 | fire them by ceasing to donate.
00:16:05.600 | In this way, your descendants will always have a role in propagating
00:16:09.080 | your ideals, with a favorable population to receive them so long as they are good.
00:16:13.960 | Among your people will be many successes.
00:16:17.200 | Depending on what you prioritize in early years, their paths even far
00:16:21.280 | into the future will reflect your tastes, whether for arts or science or letters.
00:16:26.760 | Some will have gone into politics, their careers launched
00:16:29.920 | by their base of support.
00:16:31.120 | Hundreds of others are business owners.
00:16:33.360 | They will cooperate to offer each other favorable access to labor, expertise,
00:16:37.640 | and goods, and they will have created trillions of dollars worth of value.
00:16:41.480 | Yes, trillions.
00:16:43.720 | To put things in perspective, the population of New York City is about
00:16:47.720 | 8 million, with a GDP of $2 trillion.
00:16:51.560 | Imagine a city like New York City that is three times the size, much
00:16:56.560 | younger, and entirely descended from hand-picked, elite founding stock.
00:17:01.680 | If you can keep your community on track, you will have achieved your goals.
00:17:06.400 | You started small and made a clean break with current paradigms
00:17:10.400 | using a novel institution.
00:17:12.000 | You got to select for alignment with your beliefs.
00:17:16.080 | You used human nature to your advantage, to help you pass on your
00:17:19.080 | beliefs to subsequent generations.
00:17:20.880 | Every year, your community grows, modeled as a network.
00:17:25.120 | Their capability increases geometrically for each new member.
00:17:28.280 | Compared to others, it is an extraordinarily connected and valuable network.
00:17:32.600 | They are uncommonly generous with each other, a reflection of your example.
00:17:37.440 | They are of above-average intelligence, and they will have even gotten the
00:17:41.600 | benefit of a 60-year period of subsidy to get them jump-started.
00:17:45.480 | Once they number above a few hundred thousand, as long as they hold
00:17:48.440 | a cooperation and high fertility, it is unlikely that they could ever be eradicated.
00:17:53.400 | Your monument to the future will never die.
00:17:56.280 | In exchange, you've spent a little more than $1 billion in today's
00:18:00.760 | dollars over the course of 60 years.
00:18:02.680 | You have a resource in the form of a human network and their goodwill
00:18:06.920 | that can't be taxed and can't be taken away from you.
00:18:09.440 | If your children are involved and maintain your level of care and
00:18:13.800 | investment in your people's well-being, you will be able to name them as
00:18:17.840 | your successors and pass this enormous good to them, also tax-free.
00:18:22.400 | You and your descendants could have all your wealth confiscated,
00:18:26.920 | your companies nationalized, you could even be thrown in prison, and you
00:18:30.800 | would still have your people's loyalty.
00:18:33.320 | In short, you would have made yourself and your descendants into beloved
00:18:38.080 | princes with the power to lead, using nothing but the last act of sovereignty,
00:18:44.200 | which can never be taken away, which is to give.
00:18:48.240 | This great act of generosity will be responded to with great loyalty.
00:18:53.160 | Standing at the head of your people, coordinating their efforts and
00:18:55.920 | representing their interests, your successors will compete on the
00:18:59.440 | national and international stage.
00:19:02.000 | You and they will be remembered forever.
00:19:06.920 | Further discussion of specific considerations.
00:19:09.400 | Loyalty.
00:19:10.880 | It seems simplistic to suggest that direct cash payments can inspire loyalty.
00:19:16.480 | After all, salaries are cash payments, and with very large salaries, most
00:19:21.880 | people would leave for even larger salaries if given the chance.
00:19:25.480 | The difference here lies in the nature of the transaction.
00:19:28.880 | The cash payment comes in the form of a gift, and so it has
00:19:33.960 | an entirely different character.
00:19:36.320 | Yes, there is the condition that your clients be pro-natal and the option on
00:19:41.200 | their labor, but you are a successful man.
00:19:44.440 | You are selecting for people who presumably want to work for you anyways.
00:19:48.400 | The situation is akin to a parent paying their children to do something that's
00:19:52.400 | good for them, and that they do regularly anyways, like brushing their teeth, in
00:19:56.560 | which case the gift is really an unnecessary act of generosity that
00:20:00.320 | functions as a reinforcement.
00:20:02.280 | Furthermore, this arrangement is freely chosen.
00:20:05.240 | By taking the deal, your clients agree to its specific terms.
00:20:09.120 | Loyalty in exchange for long-term support, and people do tend to feel
00:20:13.800 | gratitude towards benefactors.
00:20:16.000 | Clan relationships are built precisely on this dynamic.
00:20:19.600 | You will be able to select for agreement to these terms.
00:20:23.160 | Lastly, the arrangement lasts for life, even to subsequent generations,
00:20:29.040 | and loyalty compounds over time.
00:20:32.000 | The longer the history of the relationship, the deeper the trust.
00:20:34.720 | Imagine multi-generational relationships between families, how
00:20:39.160 | deep the trust and loyalty could be.
00:20:40.960 | Indeed, these kinds of bonds were once the basis for all political order.
00:20:45.800 | As your network matures, you will also put it to use to
00:20:49.040 | affect change in the world.
00:20:50.560 | As your people do hard things together and achieve victories, they will also
00:20:54.800 | tend to grow in loyalty to you and to each other.
00:20:57.720 | They will also intermarry.
00:20:59.920 | In this way, the artificial bonds which you induce in the early stages
00:21:03.760 | of the project will gradually be replaced by deeper and more organic ties.
00:21:09.080 | Cost.
00:21:11.320 | We have assumed cash payments of $5,000 per month.
00:21:14.840 | I have done some Twitter polling that suggested that people would accept $7,170
00:21:20.520 | per month on average in exchange for their lifetime loyalty, but I tend to
00:21:25.040 | think this estimate was influenced too much by the poll choices, so I adjusted
00:21:29.400 | downwards. People also do not tend to know that taxes are not required on cash gifts.
00:21:34.760 | I think that if you are able to present an inspiring vision, you could adjust
00:21:39.000 | this figure downward even further, but it should not be zero.
00:21:42.680 | The point of the exercise is to give your followers resources they can directly
00:21:47.240 | invest into having more children.
00:21:49.040 | An interesting exercise would be to execute the plan at smaller scale, starting
00:21:54.240 | with 15 families and a modest $12,000 per year subsidy, a miniature great house
00:22:00.080 | would number about 450 people after 60 years, at a total cost, $27 million, an
00:22:07.120 | outlay achievable for even moderately wealthy families.
00:22:10.560 | Legibility.
00:22:12.360 | This institution has historical precedent, but is unknown in our day and age, which
00:22:18.480 | gives an enormous advantage.
00:22:20.760 | The great house plan is illegible to the government in many ways.
00:22:24.320 | While the systems of oversight developed by governments for large companies,
00:22:28.200 | schools, and even political campaigns are highly developed, there is no
00:22:32.040 | corresponding infrastructure that mandates to whom you are allowed to give
00:22:35.960 | your money.
00:22:36.440 | As long as you are careful to make your filings and avoid any illegal activity
00:22:41.040 | within your network, in this you must be scrupulous, you will be free to build
00:22:45.120 | your following as you see fit.
00:22:46.640 | Because you are growing your own population, you don't have to go out and
00:22:50.320 | get converts from the public square.
00:22:52.240 | You will not be out antagonizing anyone.
00:22:54.960 | Also, the novelty of the program presents an advantage to the first mover.
00:22:59.880 | Men and women and babies.
00:23:02.920 | The strength of the plan relies on the continued growth of the group.
00:23:07.120 | Because human growth is exponential, even small differences in the birth rate
00:23:11.960 | account for large differences in population over long periods of time.
00:23:15.880 | For example, a fertility rate of 5 children per woman rather than 6 would
00:23:20.880 | result in a population of 12,000 at 100 years rather than 21,000, a
00:23:26.840 | difference of almost 100%.
00:23:28.760 | For this reason, the plan assumes a culture that is optimized for
00:23:32.960 | having large families.
00:23:34.200 | In this case, we would emphasize stable and early marriages, high degrees of
00:23:39.160 | cooperation between families, and division of labor between men and
00:23:43.120 | women according to historic roles.
00:23:45.640 | Most important of all would be to cultivate a sense of optimism about the
00:23:49.120 | future within the group, where couples feel themselves embedded in a larger
00:23:53.320 | community that has a sense of purpose and optimism about the future.
00:23:57.120 | The long-term plan presented here, as well as the material help offered by the
00:24:01.600 | patron, gives powerful tools for the cultivation of this optimism.
00:24:05.760 | It should be noted that because child rearing is so expensive, the patron's
00:24:10.520 | subsidy will be unlikely to compensate completely for the costs of having a
00:24:14.920 | large family.
00:24:15.760 | Rather, the subsidy is an expensive signal that the patron is concerned for
00:24:21.600 | the family's well-being and will contribute to the family's growth in
00:24:24.960 | other ways, jobs, introductions for marriages, admittance to the network,
00:24:29.120 | spiritual leadership, and personal care, etc.
00:24:32.000 | The patron's long-term care is a strong inspiration for each family.
00:24:36.840 | It feels good to be personally cared for.
00:24:39.400 | A patron should make every effort to select the founding group for their
00:24:43.560 | pre-existing intrinsic natal motivation.
00:24:46.400 | This motivation should only have to be encouraged, not induced.
00:24:51.120 | Polygamy.
00:24:53.000 | System maximizers will immediately ask why we do not assume polygamy.
00:24:57.320 | The reason for this is that polygamy does not scale after the first few
00:25:01.360 | generations.
00:25:02.160 | In a system where a minority of men pair with the majority of women, too many
00:25:07.080 | young men remain unpaired, which is a problem associated with instability
00:25:11.640 | unless they can be induced to leave.
00:25:13.600 | It is a poor use of human capital to raise young men only to push
00:25:17.720 | them out of the community.
00:25:18.720 | Besides, polygamy is just weird, and if you practice it, your
00:25:22.040 | community will be labeled a cult.
00:25:23.680 | Conclusion.
00:25:25.920 | Because this form of institution is unprecedented, there are many
00:25:29.880 | outstanding questions about how exactly it would function and how
00:25:33.240 | feasible it could be.
00:25:34.400 | In subsequent articles, I will explore some of these questions, including
00:25:38.280 | underlying theoretical frameworks, historical comparisons, and how a
00:25:41.680 | great house would fit into a larger network of institutions and society at large.
00:25:46.440 | I invite readers to ask questions and make suggestions.
00:25:49.760 | This is a thought experiment designed to get people thinking about highly
00:25:53.120 | independent institutions that could be directly focused on cultivating
00:25:57.160 | humans in a way that works with human nature.
00:26:00.120 | It is vital that we find these forms because so many of our institutions
00:26:04.320 | are dedicated to human elimination.
00:26:06.960 | Elements of the plan could always be reconfigured.
00:26:09.200 | Ultimately, I am inspired by the image of the great house, an edifice
00:26:14.320 | of noble men and women decorated with their arts who are deeply
00:26:18.200 | capable of affecting their aims.
00:26:20.440 | This is a romantic and stirring vision worth working for.
00:26:24.560 | It will not be machines or corporations or democratic governments that
00:26:28.440 | cultivate the family and our associated human potential, but great families
00:26:33.400 | themselves, families like enormous oak trees who make shelter for
00:26:37.680 | a thousand seedlings in their shade.
00:26:39.600 | This is how a mighty forest grows.
00:26:42.920 | It is more possible today than ever in history to plant a seed and make a fresh start.
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00:27:18.320 | The essay you have just heard is titled how to found a great house and become
00:27:23.560 | a prince by an internet avatar named Paulus, and I will link to it.
00:27:30.240 | The it's posted on a sub stack, which is now defunct.
00:27:33.360 | I will link to it in the show notes.
00:27:34.960 | You can follow the links forward and you can read some of the responses to this.
00:27:40.120 | And you can read part two of his essay, which is for the great house plan, part
00:27:44.000 | two, further discussions on personal institutions, but I think you get the
00:27:48.560 | point, uh, in listening to part one.
00:27:51.320 | And that is sufficient for today's discussion.
00:27:54.360 | The reason I want to raise it for you is because one of my great burdens at this
00:28:00.480 | point in time is the astounding lack of vision that is presented by financial
00:28:07.320 | consultants and pundits and authors about how to actually improve the
00:28:12.040 | world and to use money to do so.
00:28:14.480 | You may notice a hint of bitterness in my mind or in my voice, a note of bitterness
00:28:20.280 | in my voice, and that's because I am quite bitter because what has happened
00:28:23.600 | is the professional financial planning industry has somehow effectively
00:28:28.560 | persuaded most of us that our primary aim and ambition in life should be to
00:28:34.440 | accumulate money, invest that money into publicly traded funds of various kinds,
00:28:39.480 | and then sit back and live fat and happy on the, on the beach, instead of actually
00:28:43.400 | doing something with the money, doing something that matters.
00:28:46.040 | And yet throughout history, prior to the formation of the modern financial
00:28:51.120 | instruments that we all are quite accustomed to, wealthy men and women
00:28:55.680 | have known that they had to invest their money into people and because of the
00:29:00.520 | requirement to invest their money into people, they had to actually develop a
00:29:04.840 | worldview and a system for so doing.
00:29:07.360 | Were we better off before or better off now?
00:29:10.840 | I think probably now, but we are right now in one of the greatest
00:29:15.280 | wealth transfers of human history.
00:29:17.320 | The baby boomers have millions and millions and millions and millions of
00:29:20.720 | dollars accumulated and they have nothing to do with it that actually is going to
00:29:25.320 | matter, nothing to do with it.
00:29:26.680 | That's actually going to change their town, their city, their family, their
00:29:30.360 | country in any meaningful way.
00:29:32.080 | And they go for meeting after meeting with financial advisor after financial
00:29:35.880 | advisor, and all the financial advisor can do is push, look at them across the
00:29:39.120 | table and say, Hey, guess what?
00:29:40.720 | Joe, you're rich and you're going to keep on being rich.
00:29:43.320 | And Joe says, what do I do with the money?
00:29:45.160 | Well, just, you know, maybe give it to your kids.
00:29:48.280 | Well, I got two of them.
00:29:49.400 | Great.
00:29:49.960 | Now your kids are going to be rich.
00:29:51.120 | And what are they going to do?
00:29:51.800 | Cause there's no vision and friends without a vision, the people perish.
00:29:55.280 | And so I believe that we must be the generation, those of us who actually
00:29:59.320 | care about the future to start to create and formulate a vision, a vision for our
00:30:03.720 | own lives, a vision for our communities, for our families, for our country, whatever
00:30:07.840 | level you feel capable of creating a vision, we have to do it.
00:30:10.960 | And one important component of that vision is always going to involve money.
00:30:15.320 | Money is not sufficient, but it is necessary.
00:30:18.920 | And a man with vision as to how he can use his money is going to be much more
00:30:23.600 | capable of accumulating the money and then wisely using it than one for whom
00:30:27.560 | the money happens accidentally, or who spends his life thinking that the
00:30:31.000 | accumulation of the money is primarily about his own interests and his own
00:30:35.240 | enjoyment, we need friends.
00:30:38.720 | If you're, if you're a baby boomer generation, if you're a retiree and
00:30:41.640 | you're listening to my voice, I beg of you.
00:30:44.840 | Do not waste your life exclusively sauntering down beaches, rather accept
00:30:51.760 | that your role in society should be that of a wise elder, that of a wise patron.
00:30:58.800 | You have a duty to me, to my generation, to your children, to your
00:31:04.920 | grandchildren, to your neighbors.
00:31:06.600 | You have a duty to be the kind of man who founds a great house, to be the
00:31:14.080 | kind of man who goes through the difficult, diligent effort of creating
00:31:18.680 | a vision for the world, of articulating your ideals, articulating your
00:31:23.480 | philosophy, and then seeing to it that that your ideals and your philosophy
00:31:29.680 | is expanded throughout society.
00:31:31.800 | That is your responsibility at this stage of life, not to ride away into
00:31:37.440 | the sunset and purely amuse yourself with endless steak and lobster, but to
00:31:42.320 | get down to the serious work of being a leader, being a statesman, being a
00:31:47.600 | patron in the community.
00:31:49.760 | That is your responsibility.
00:31:51.280 | You have reached a stage in life at which we expect you to serve as a wise elder.
00:31:58.080 | And I'm ashamed of many of your generation, because instead of accepting
00:32:04.880 | your role in life of that of a wise elder and mentoring your children and your
00:32:09.160 | grandchildren and your neighbors and investing your money in their community
00:32:12.160 | and transforming your neighborhood and transforming your industry and
00:32:15.400 | transforming your country, many of you are content to sit around and fripper
00:32:19.880 | away your days.
00:32:22.880 | I don't get it.
00:32:24.240 | You have an opportunity to do something that's truly remarkable and money can
00:32:29.880 | and should be, and will be part of it.
00:32:32.280 | Now, for those of us who are younger, I believe that this is not something that
00:32:37.880 | can be easily just shown up to.
00:32:41.280 | If somebody has arrived at the age of 65 and all a man can dream about is sit
00:32:46.480 | back and let me just go ahead and retire so I can go fishing every day.
00:32:49.560 | Yeah, that's great.
00:32:50.560 | Ride my motorcycle.
00:32:51.560 | If that's the height of his dreams and ambitions for his life, he's unlikely to
00:32:55.040 | change.
00:32:55.680 | However, you and I can arrive at 65 in a very different place.
00:33:01.320 | You and I can arrive at 65 with an ambition as to what our elder statesman
00:33:09.360 | years might look like, with an ambition of some of the work that we may be able
00:33:14.640 | to do, and if we're going to do that effectively, we're going to need to give
00:33:21.120 | careful time and preparation to being prepared for that moment in history.
00:33:27.720 | What are some of the things that we could possibly do?
00:33:31.040 | Well, number one, as I think this essay would assume, is that we have to have
00:33:36.480 | some sense of our ideas.
00:33:39.440 | We have to have some sense of a vision of the world, something that is coherent,
00:33:43.280 | something that is compelling, some sense of what we want the future of this world
00:33:47.880 | to look like.
00:33:48.640 | And we have to develop a clarity of vision that is sufficient to allow us to
00:33:54.680 | articulate that vision to other people in a way that would also allow them to
00:33:58.840 | clearly see the vision that we see and want to align with us in that work.
00:34:05.840 | There's an enormously wide degree of latitude available to you here, but what
00:34:11.920 | is not optional is the development of a vision, the development of something that
00:34:17.280 | you want to change, something that you want to impact.
00:34:20.440 | You choose.
00:34:23.240 | You choose anything, but if you are arriving at your elder statesman years of
00:34:29.840 | life and you have not done the hard work of clearly formulating a vision of
00:34:37.640 | something that you would like to see different in the world and some kind of
00:34:41.400 | practical, practicable plan that could result in the successful achievement of
00:34:48.800 | that vision, you're not taking life seriously, and you want to.
00:34:56.080 | You ought to do the hard work to develop a vision of some improvement in the
00:35:01.600 | world, some way that you think things should be bettered and improved, and
00:35:07.520 | then clarify that vision so that you can communicate it to others.
00:35:11.920 | That's the first thing that's necessary.
00:35:15.880 | And for those of us who are younger, at least I have found as I have attempted
00:35:22.480 | and keep on attempting to do this, this is not a decade project.
00:35:27.160 | This is a multi-decade project.
00:35:29.280 | This is not a one-year project.
00:35:31.480 | This is a 20-year project.
00:35:33.920 | I'm working hard to develop mine.
00:35:39.360 | I think over the last probably 10 to 15 years, it's gotten clearer, but I don't
00:35:44.400 | think I could articulate it as robustly as I would like today.
00:35:49.400 | My hope, my ambition, is that by the time I arrive at, say, 50, that not only will
00:35:55.520 | I be able to articulate it clearly, but that I will have begun the process of
00:36:01.360 | articulating it clearly, and that I will have spoken that vision so consistently
00:36:07.920 | that it will be something that I've successfully passed along to my children,
00:36:11.520 | that I have successfully influenced my community with, etc., that it is something
00:36:17.080 | that I have done the hard work to do.
00:36:20.720 | And that vision, by the way, needs to not just be castles in the sky.
00:36:24.960 | There needs to be a robust background that ties the vision to something that is
00:36:31.280 | practical, something that has proven results in the past.
00:36:35.200 | If your vision is to green the deserts and to turn the Sahara back into a tropical
00:36:41.760 | paradise, then you will want to be able to tie that to some of the specific
00:36:46.840 | techniques that have been used to green a small portion of a desert in another area.
00:36:51.600 | If your vision is to create a society that is filled with liberty and freedom
00:36:56.640 | and justice for all, then you will need to be able to tie those ideas and your
00:37:01.400 | plans for how that is going to be accomplished to something that has been
00:37:05.200 | successful in at least some period of history and at least some corner of the
00:37:09.120 | world. And that means you're going to have to do some work.
00:37:11.880 | If your vision is to cure diabetes on the face of the planet, then you need to
00:37:17.520 | begin by curing diabetes in somebody and then work on to somebodies and then go
00:37:23.960 | out from there. And so there needs to be some serious work into actually
00:37:29.240 | implementing a vision.
00:37:30.440 | And that's also something that cannot be done overnight, but it's something that
00:37:34.800 | should be done consistently while you're young enough to actually form the vision
00:37:41.360 | and form a plan that might work so that when you arrive at your elder statesman
00:37:45.920 | role, when, God willing, you have more time, more freedom, more resources, etc.,
00:37:51.240 | that you're not arriving woefully unprepared.
00:37:53.960 | On the contrary, you're arriving with 20 years of experiments under your belt, 20
00:37:58.800 | years of arguments, of debates, of careful research, etc.
00:38:02.240 | And so when you arrive at 65, you're arriving at 65 with an idea of some things
00:38:09.080 | that might work. And you've got 30 or 40 years ahead of you and a fortune behind
00:38:13.480 | you that you can use to see those ideas tested on a bigger scale with the plan of
00:38:19.080 | passing them on generationally.
00:38:20.840 | So in order for you to – I hope that this inspires somebody.
00:38:24.720 | Maybe it doesn't inspire anybody but me.
00:38:26.720 | But one of the components that is necessary if you're going to found a great
00:38:30.920 | house is that you have to have a vision of the world, a vision of the future, and
00:38:36.720 | be able to articulate that vision in a way that is compelling to other people.
00:38:40.360 | The second thing that is necessary is you must accumulate resources.
00:38:46.520 | You have to accumulate resources.
00:38:49.760 | And the steady, consistent accumulation of resources should be an ongoing ambition
00:38:56.560 | for men of virtue.
00:38:57.680 | There is no virtue.
00:39:00.880 | In being a pauper, there is no virtue in being someone who just systematically
00:39:08.640 | avoids the acceptance of responsibility.
00:39:11.960 | But there is virtue in being someone who systematically accumulates resources.
00:39:18.200 | Think about how you feel.
00:39:20.360 | Let's use a physical example, because none of us had anything to do with the
00:39:24.760 | basic physical substance that we were given in terms of our body, our
00:39:29.560 | physical body that we control.
00:39:31.080 | All of us were gifted it, and all of us acknowledge it.
00:39:34.120 | Some of us were given large bodies, some of us small bodies, some of us strong
00:39:37.880 | bodies, some of us weak bodies, some of us properly functioning bodies, some of
00:39:41.600 | us not properly functioning bodies.
00:39:43.680 | We were all given these things.
00:39:46.240 | Now, do you respect a man who was given a strong, properly functioning, healthy
00:39:55.800 | body, and then who proceeds to ignore it, to abuse it, to not use it, to not
00:40:02.400 | develop it to its proper level?
00:40:04.680 | Do you respect that man?
00:40:06.240 | I don't.
00:40:09.440 | I don't.
00:40:11.400 | And sometimes I look in the mirror at him and I say, "I don't respect you if you
00:40:15.400 | don't use this strength that you've been given."
00:40:17.680 | Now, do you respect a man who was given a weak, stunted body?
00:40:22.920 | Perhaps his legs are non-existent or doesn't work, and he uses every feature
00:40:27.280 | that he has in his body to make it stronger, to make it better, to make it
00:40:30.880 | more powerful, to make it more useful, regardless of the actual long-term
00:40:34.800 | outcome.
00:40:35.240 | Do you respect that man?
00:40:36.440 | We all naturally respect him.
00:40:41.560 | My favorite bodybuilding videos to watch is the dude in the wheelchair doing
00:40:47.120 | flips on a pull-up bar.
00:40:48.520 | My favorite, every day there's a guy, I can't remember his name, but there's a
00:40:51.880 | guy who has no legs.
00:40:53.280 | He's a really fast runner, and he holds the record for the fastest running on
00:40:58.600 | his hands thing.
00:40:59.440 | Every day when I go through my daily goals and visioning exercise, I watch the
00:41:04.320 | video of this guy running across the track on his hands with no legs, and it's
00:41:11.320 | just a reminder to me.
00:41:12.360 | And the dude's jacked, his shoulders and arms are amazing.
00:41:15.760 | He's a really smart guy.
00:41:17.120 | I need to look up his name.
00:41:17.760 | Forgive me for not knowing his name.
00:41:20.400 | He's a hero of mine, and I should know his name.
00:41:22.400 | It's just a short video that I watch, that's all.
00:41:24.640 | So anyway, he's a really, really amazingly talented guy who has just sculpted and
00:41:31.240 | used his body to become incredibly fast, though he runs on his hands every day.
00:41:35.360 | And I respect that guy so much, not for his ultimate outcome, but for the process
00:41:42.480 | of his using what he has been given.
00:41:46.440 | Now, let's pivot from a physical body, and let's go to other resources that you
00:41:53.200 | and I have, resources such as our intellect, resources such as our
00:42:00.440 | character, resources such as the 24 hours of time that we have today, resources
00:42:06.240 | such as the finances that we have, the money that we control, the tools that we
00:42:10.520 | operate, et cetera.
00:42:11.680 | Friend, to whom much is given, much is required, and you and I have been given
00:42:15.440 | much, and therefore much is required of us.
00:42:18.400 | And what is required of us is that we maximize these things, that we use them,
00:42:22.800 | that we develop them, et cetera.
00:42:24.320 | And so the acquisition and accumulation of wealth and capital is our responsibility.
00:42:30.360 | It's a responsibility to our forebears who have come before us and have created
00:42:34.600 | the incredible world in which we live.
00:42:36.040 | And it's a responsibility to our progeny, to those who will come after us, to give
00:42:40.680 | them a better world than the one that we inherited, to give them a world of
00:42:45.120 | greater resources, of greater tools, so that we can improve the human condition
00:42:49.480 | in the coming generations.
00:42:51.320 | That is our responsibility.
00:42:54.200 | And we need to grasp that responsibility as full-hearted and as heartily as we
00:43:03.880 | have capability.
00:43:04.960 | Now, this doesn't have to be grandiose pie-in-the-sky stuff.
00:43:10.720 | I'm intentionally not making these things precise because they'll be so
00:43:15.720 | different for you and for me.
00:43:17.200 | But you have a responsibility to build a secure home around yourself.
00:43:22.160 | You have a responsibility to provide for your children's education.
00:43:26.440 | You have a responsibility to provide for your family's eating needs.
00:43:29.920 | But you also have a responsibility to accumulate capital for the future.
00:43:33.560 | And as I tried to illustrate in a recent podcast, the accumulation of capital is
00:43:39.040 | primarily an emotional thing followed by decision rather than any external
00:43:44.200 | circumstance.
00:43:45.080 | The man who must accumulate capital will accumulate capital.
00:43:50.800 | He will find a way to do it.
00:43:52.840 | Financial capital is one form of capital.
00:43:57.600 | We should not disregard or ignore other forms of capital.
00:44:02.040 | We are the inheritors of the capital that has been passed down to us.
00:44:08.520 | As I grow older, I'm distinctly conscious of how much capital I inherited from
00:44:15.840 | directly my own parents.
00:44:17.440 | A few examples to try to make it precise.
00:44:20.160 | First of all, I was never given a significant financial inheritance by my
00:44:32.480 | parents.
00:44:33.080 | I was given enormous love, support, a roof over my head.
00:44:38.240 | Etc.
00:44:38.840 | And I'm grateful for those things.
00:44:40.560 | My parents were not wealthy and did not give me a significant amount of money to
00:44:44.520 | get started in life.
00:44:45.480 | They have supported me in all kinds of ways.
00:44:47.720 | I think that parents who have capital should give their children capital.
00:44:54.840 | But that is not my point here today.
00:44:56.840 | My point is to say that even if you have not yet accumulated financial capital,
00:45:00.200 | you can give your children capital.
00:45:03.520 | My wife and I have a very smooth and comfortable relationship.
00:45:08.480 | I think a significant portion of it, at least on my part, can just be due to the
00:45:13.960 | fact that I watched my parents have a healthy and smooth marriage relationship.
00:45:17.760 | And in so many ways, regardless of what I was explicitly instructed or taught with
00:45:22.400 | regard to marriage, you can't live with parents who have a healthy relationship
00:45:28.320 | and not automatically adopt those components that led them to a healthy
00:45:33.040 | relationship.
00:45:34.120 | Now, obviously, we have to adapt to our wives because our wives are not our
00:45:38.400 | mothers.
00:45:38.800 | They are different, unique persons, and we have to adapt to them.
00:45:42.520 | But for me, being a husband feels very natural and comfortable and normal because
00:45:49.480 | I observed my father be a father and, excuse me, be a husband.
00:45:54.160 | Being a father feels fairly natural and normal to me because I observed my father
00:45:58.920 | being a father.
00:46:00.120 | Having a simple cultural capital of the way that a home should feel is something
00:46:05.480 | that is an important component of the world that your children will grow up in.
00:46:10.040 | This is forms of capital.
00:46:11.440 | Intellectual capital, being taught to study, being taught how to study, being
00:46:16.360 | expected to study.
00:46:17.760 | These are things that accumulate over generations.
00:46:20.720 | A family that passes on a high regard for excellent academic work through one
00:46:28.280 | generation is likely to pass it on to the third.
00:46:30.840 | By the third, that inheritance will be enormous.
00:46:35.440 | You see this all the time.
00:46:37.880 | When you see a child who, my mom was a doctor and my dad is a lawyer and guess
00:46:44.040 | what, you know, granddad was an army general and grandma was a doctor and here
00:46:49.320 | I am and I'm a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, and it just passes on.
00:46:52.720 | And the gap is widening on all these things.
00:46:55.840 | These multigenerational trends are causing our society to be more and more
00:47:00.480 | fractured where the haves get more and the have-nots are getting worse.
00:47:04.800 | It's happening all across our society.
00:47:06.880 | But regardless of where you are today, the change can begin with you.
00:47:10.680 | And then finally, the third thing that is obvious from this particular essay is you
00:47:15.720 | got to have children.
00:47:16.800 | You got to have children.
00:47:18.880 | If you want to found a great house and you want your children to continue the
00:47:25.240 | tradition that you are establishing, you have to actually have children first and
00:47:30.560 | foremost.
00:47:31.320 | The future belongs to those who show up for it.
00:47:34.800 | And statistically speaking, if you don't have more than a couple of children,
00:47:39.240 | there's a very low chance that your personal genes will ever continue into the
00:47:43.280 | future.
00:47:43.800 | I forget the exact number, but I've watched some demographers and demography
00:47:48.120 | interested people kind of try to figure this out from historical data.
00:47:52.120 | And the only number I remember was, I think it was a study of perhaps Dutch
00:47:56.480 | family records.
00:47:57.320 | The Dutch have great family records.
00:47:58.880 | And basically, if you want to be sure that your family line will continue, that
00:48:05.520 | sureness on a statistical basis arrives at about five children.
00:48:10.200 | Prior to five children, there is a relatively low confidence that you can have
00:48:15.920 | that your own children and your own lineage will continue.
00:48:20.440 | But once you reach five children, then you can have a very high confidence that
00:48:25.000 | your genetic offspring will continue.
00:48:27.640 | So I felt successful because I now have five children.
00:48:31.000 | So if I can get them all to adulthood and keep them as good, healthy persons, then
00:48:34.640 | then we'll be in pretty good shape to continue my genetic impact on the world.
00:48:39.720 | And most of us don't.
00:48:41.480 | Nobody ever sat me down as a young man and taught me about that.
00:48:46.120 | No one told me, like I think they should have, about how hard I should be working
00:48:51.920 | when I'm 20 and 22 in order to support a family with five children.
00:48:56.000 | Now, I had it modeled by my parents.
00:48:58.720 | I had it modeled by people around me.
00:49:00.440 | I wish they'd been more explicit about it.
00:49:02.040 | I don't know whether I would have listened or not, but I try to be explicit about it
00:49:05.960 | now because, friends, we've got to give young men a vision of the work that they
00:49:09.520 | need to do, of who they need to become in order to be prepared for the future.
00:49:14.440 | So you've got to have children.
00:49:15.840 | And having children is going to require you to have a vision that, again, you can
00:49:20.880 | pass along to them.
00:49:21.720 | And this is where we come full circle, where the whole thing continues, where it
00:49:25.400 | all comes together.
00:49:26.520 | You have to have a vision for the future.
00:49:28.440 | You have to have resources that you accumulate, and you're going to have to go
00:49:33.280 | big.
00:49:33.840 | If you want to have significant resources, you're going to have to swing for the
00:49:36.720 | fences on something in order to found a great house, to have money to give away.
00:49:41.280 | You're going to have to invest faithfully over a very long period of time to grow
00:49:45.480 | your resources to be sufficient to actually do something in the world.
00:49:48.600 | And you're going to have to have children.
00:49:50.560 | And then having children requires you to have a vision that you can pass along to
00:49:54.240 | them.
00:49:54.520 | Having children requires you to have resources to support your children and
00:49:57.840 | encourage them, et cetera.
00:49:59.000 | And then it goes on and on and on.
00:50:00.920 | But we should be those who change.
00:50:04.560 | We should be those who embrace the vision.
00:50:06.680 | And this should be a consistent component of our life.
00:50:09.880 | When I think about people that I admire in the world, I find that they have most of
00:50:13.480 | these things.
00:50:14.080 | I find that generally the men that I admire in the world are men who have a
00:50:18.800 | vision of something that they're working to change.
00:50:21.520 | It can be an issue.
00:50:23.320 | It can be an ideology.
00:50:25.200 | It can be an institution.
00:50:26.560 | It can be just something that they want to do.
00:50:29.640 | There's a motivation to what they're doing.
00:50:31.680 | They're trying to bring goodness and beauty and truth into the world in some
00:50:36.200 | corner of the world over which they have influence.
00:50:39.760 | They're generally men who are faithful to that vision over a significant period of
00:50:44.880 | time.
00:50:45.240 | They don't bounce from here to there to the other thing.
00:50:47.880 | They labor at it for years, for years, for years, and they continue to labor at it.
00:50:53.960 | And it's often, just like any exponential curve, it's often only in the latter part
00:50:59.360 | of their work that they start to see really, really fruitful results from it.
00:51:03.440 | And you look back and you say, "What kept you laboring for 10 years, for 20 years,
00:51:07.720 | for 50 years, what kept you doing that work?"
00:51:10.880 | Well, it was the vision.
00:51:12.360 | They had a vision of something they would change, and they said, "Here's a place
00:51:15.520 | that I can do some good in the world, and so let me just focus on this and work at
00:51:19.680 | it."
00:51:19.840 | And they're generally men who accumulate capital.
00:51:22.880 | They accumulate financial capital, but also importantly, they communicate
00:51:26.960 | cultural capital.
00:51:28.040 | They acquire power.
00:51:29.600 | They acquire influence.
00:51:31.240 | They acquire prestige.
00:51:33.080 | Their reputation grows.
00:51:34.520 | Their influence grows over time.
00:51:36.760 | And those are forms of capital that have to be very, very carefully managed, very,
00:51:42.560 | very carefully protected in order for them to endure.
00:51:46.560 | And then they're men who have children.
00:51:48.680 | They're men who pass along their values generation to generation.
00:51:51.800 | You can know a lot about a man by looking at his children to see how well do his
00:51:56.680 | children model and carry out his vision for the world.
00:52:02.880 | Finally, I want to pivot and just say, I hope that while you are listening to that
00:52:08.200 | essay, which I found thought-provoking, thank you to the listener who sent it to
00:52:12.360 | me.
00:52:12.520 | I wish I could remember.
00:52:13.240 | I think I know who it was.
00:52:14.600 | I think it was a friend of mine who was also a listener of the show.
00:52:17.240 | But I hope what you found was thought-provoking, but I hope you
00:52:23.600 | realized that you probably are also aware of some institutions that are already
00:52:30.960 | something like what was described.
00:52:34.040 | I think to me, the obvious ones that I have found, or the obvious ones to me, is
00:52:41.240 | simply the enduring nature of some churches and other religious bodies.
00:52:46.720 | Because at their core, that is what distinguishes a religious organization is
00:52:52.760 | its values, vision, etc.
00:52:55.240 | And so if there is an ability from leaders in that organization to articulate a
00:52:59.760 | vision, that vision often winds up being a religious expression of some kind.
00:53:06.360 | And then if you combine other things about that organization, you combine
00:53:14.680 | financial growth, you combine pro-natalism, etc., then you can clearly see how
00:53:22.400 | religious organizations become incredibly powerful and strong, and they become in
00:53:27.720 | essence a form of fraternal organization.
00:53:29.800 | I'm a great admirer of the LDS Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of
00:53:34.360 | Latter-day Saints, the Mormons.
00:53:35.640 | And some of the things that I admire very distinctly about their organization is how
00:53:42.000 | they model so many of the values of what even this author discussed.
00:53:48.720 | Of course, the Mormon Church is a fairly recent church, but if you look at the
00:53:53.360 | growth of the church organization since Joseph Smith's being here, over the last
00:53:58.200 | century and three quarters now, it's remarkable to look at.
00:54:02.200 | And what you see that's so interesting is you see these values and these things
00:54:07.080 | expressed consistently across the organization, across the entire church.
00:54:12.320 | And you watch Mormons are massively over-represented in organizations,
00:54:19.840 | massively over-represented in business, massively over-represented in various
00:54:26.480 | successful capacities, etc., and part of that has to do with their religious work
00:54:33.560 | ethic.
00:54:33.920 | Mormons are very, very effective at building a fraternal community, of looking
00:54:40.280 | out for one another, of supporting one another, etc., and they're very, very
00:54:44.000 | effective at having children and promoting a pro-natal organization.
00:54:47.320 | If you look at the growth of the Mormon Church over the last century and a half,
00:54:51.560 | it's astounding to see its growth compared with even just the ideas outlined
00:54:59.320 | in this particular essay.
00:55:02.480 | To me, that's one of the most obvious examples that we should look at and study.
00:55:06.160 | Now, I myself am not a Mormon nor an adherent to their ideology, but I am
00:55:12.080 | inspired by them, and what I have tried to do is take any aspect that I think is
00:55:16.760 | helpful and try to see it expanded within my own circles, and I think that's one of
00:55:20.760 | the things that we should do, is find an organization that is working where this
00:55:26.680 | has been effective and then try to model it and try to look for organizations that
00:55:32.840 | have these basic features that are described.
00:55:35.440 | This essay, I don't know anything about the guy who is writing it.
00:55:38.760 | He's a fairly anonymous writer that seems to have some interest in classicism, etc.
00:55:43.120 | I didn't dig deeply into his blog.
00:55:46.120 | I just thought it was interesting.
00:55:47.640 | It was an effective articulation of it.
00:55:50.040 | And what is remarkable to me is that here I sit after decades of work in the modern
00:55:56.560 | world, and I find a random internet essay that inspires me and gives me kind of a
00:56:04.480 | vision for the future that is so, in a sense, so elementary, so simple, so
00:56:13.960 | elementary.
00:56:14.600 | I'm not critical.
00:56:16.120 | I think the greatest ideas are often simply expressed.
00:56:18.960 | But what I'm saying is that this is something that should be common.
00:56:23.640 | This is something, or whatever elements of this you agree with or disagree with, this
00:56:29.040 | is something that every grandparent should pass along to a grandchild, that every
00:56:34.800 | parent should pass along to our children.
00:56:37.520 | And this is where I want to end, is that we have a duty to pass along a vision to
00:56:45.120 | those we impact, to those we interact with, to our children, to our
00:56:49.400 | grandchildren, etc.
00:56:50.560 | And what's interesting is that in general, while I can't prove this statement to
00:56:55.440 | you, in general, I think our children will largely wind up fulfilling the vision that
00:57:01.320 | we give them.
00:57:01.880 | I've seen this enough with my own children and some of the experiments that I've run
00:57:06.840 | of where I tried to give them a vision, and then I watched them in the fullness of
00:57:09.840 | time step into it, and they do it.
00:57:12.880 | And obviously, children can be manipulated and controlled, and so we have a great
00:57:17.440 | responsibility to make sure the vision that we give to them is a positive vision, is
00:57:21.760 | something that leads them places.
00:57:23.280 | But we should be giving multi-hundred-year visions to our children of what their
00:57:29.240 | dynasty is likely to look like.
00:57:31.800 | We should be imparting a vision that came from our great-grandfather down to our
00:57:37.120 | children's great-great-grandchildren.
00:57:39.160 | That should be the level in which we are thinking.
00:57:41.320 | And that long-term vision has a great way of aligning so many things in life in a
00:57:47.400 | proper and productive and contented and happy way.
00:57:50.120 | So, if your vision for your children that you pass along to them is, "You've
00:57:53.560 | definitely got to go to college," your children will probably go to college.
00:57:57.560 | But what about after that?
00:58:01.080 | Why not more?
00:58:02.000 | Why not give them more and more of a vision?
00:58:04.080 | You and I are adults.
00:58:05.640 | You and I have experience in the world.
00:58:08.440 | You and I have experience in our own lives.
00:58:11.200 | We understand what leads to human happiness, what leads to human flourishing.
00:58:15.440 | I'm astounded right now that so many people who haven't seemed to figure it
00:58:20.920 | out, what are the solutions to human happiness and flourishing?
00:58:24.320 | We know a lot about this.
00:58:25.640 | It's pretty simple.
00:58:27.480 | And while I prefer not to call them "sciences," the social sciences
00:58:31.400 | can inform this pretty well.
00:58:32.760 | We can look at the data.
00:58:33.960 | Now, you may not want to accept it, but we can look at the data and we can find
00:58:36.840 | the things that lead to human happiness and human flourishing.
00:58:39.320 | We should not be trying to make our children figure it out.
00:58:43.880 | This is one of the enormous sociological problems that we have, is that in current
00:58:50.520 | generations, we're not teaching children what will lead to their happiness and to
00:58:56.080 | their flourishing, we are telling them that they are responsible to figure it out.
00:59:00.640 | In some cases, they do figure it out, but there's a lot, oftentimes a lot of
00:59:06.720 | decades of wasted effort trying to figure it out for themselves.
00:59:12.960 | And our responsibility as an older generation is to pass along the wisdom
00:59:17.240 | that works for the younger generation.
00:59:19.640 | And we want to do that continually.
00:59:21.400 | In conclusion, I hope that you enjoyed that little essay.
00:59:25.000 | I find it inspiring.
00:59:26.240 | I don't know whether I will ever actually be able to put it
00:59:31.160 | into fruition with my own wealth.
00:59:33.080 | I don't know whether it's even the smartest thing to do with wealth, but one
00:59:39.240 | of my great passions that I'm going to be leaning deeply into in the next year,
00:59:43.560 | the next years, so this is a multi-year project for me, is to try to figure out
00:59:48.200 | what are some ways of investing wealth effectively.
00:59:52.440 | And by investment, I mean investing it into people, because I am shocked and
00:59:57.320 | appalled at the dismal state of coherent advice, coherent frameworks that exist
01:00:06.680 | for wealthy people who have reached the stage of financial abundance and have
01:00:12.360 | more money than they'll ever personally be able to consume, than their children
01:00:15.480 | will ever personally be able to consume.
01:00:18.440 | And there's no compelling frameworks to teach someone how to systematically
01:00:23.080 | make an impact with it.
01:00:24.120 | And so basically, as best I can tell, way more wealthy people than should wind
01:00:31.240 | up writing relatively random checks to not-for-profit organizations, which in
01:00:37.720 | some cases do a significant amount of good in the world.
01:00:40.280 | After all, the donors are looking for that.
01:00:41.960 | But in many cases, the wealthy people wind up never investing their money
01:00:48.040 | at an appropriate level of scale to see the impact of it.
01:00:51.640 | And so they go to their graves with their ambitions for impact unrequited.
01:00:57.560 | And I consider that a great tragedy.
01:01:00.120 | Although we can't ever control that, we should try to see the fruitfulness,
01:01:07.000 | we should try to see the fruit of our own faithfulness come to fruition in our
01:01:12.920 | lifetime where we can still control it.
01:01:14.920 | And I'm going to intentionally avoid the rant about how institutions change over
01:01:20.280 | time, etc.
01:01:21.160 | So this is a great passion of mine, and I'm looking for resources and things on
01:01:26.680 | that, which is a good place for me to close.
01:01:28.200 | If you yourself have ever come across great frameworks, great books,
01:01:32.360 | interesting essays, interesting people, interesting teachers, the wisdom of the
01:01:35.480 | sages, in the same way that a listener is the one who originally sent me this
01:01:39.160 | email, please pass those along to me.
01:01:41.800 | Best way is always email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.
01:01:45.240 | joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com is a great way to reach out to me.
01:01:49.800 | I'm also pretty active on Twitter, @joshuasheets is a great way to bring things
01:01:53.480 | to my attention as well.
01:01:55.640 | Thank you so much for listening.
01:01:56.680 | I hope that you enjoy this, and I hope that it's been impactful for you.