Hey Radicals, as we begin today's podcast, today is January 4, 2024. On January 22, my forthcoming Panama Investment Tour begins. Now last week I was talking with Mikkel Thorup, who is the primary host of this event. I am co-hosting it along with Gabriel Custodiat and Mikkel, and we were going over the numbers and everything like that.

And I said, Mikkel, I think we're done. And Mikkel said, no, Joshua, most people sign up for this event, usually a couple of weeks before. It used to be that people sign up six months in advance, etc., like you expected. But in reality, in today's world, people sign up for stuff just a couple of weeks before the event.

No one wants to commit very much in addition. So I was ready to stop doing ads and close things down. And he said, no, you need to do ads. So here I am doing an ad. If you have ever thought about internationalization broadly, meaning you're interested in getting a second passport, having a residency elsewhere, banking in another country, anything like that, if you're interested in international investment, in investing in real estate in other countries for higher gains, greater opportunities, privacy, etc., or if you're interested in Panama specifically and you've wondered, hey, what is it about that little country?

Why do so many people go there? Why do so many business oriented people go there? Then I would love for you to come to this event. It's going to be a week long event together with me, Mikkel and Gabriel. We have a bunch of events planned. We have a bunch of tours planned.

I'll be speaking. We'll all be speaking. It's going to be a great time. We're going to be hanging out. Very intimate group of people able to hang out continually. So if you just want to see me and spend basically a week with me and with my friends, I'll be making myself completely available.

It's a great time for us to get together. You can come. We can talk about anything that you want to talk about. And again, I'm going to make myself completely available to you. So if that's you and you are available during January 22 to January 28, please today go and sign up.

Sign up today. Go to expatmoney.com/radical link in the show notes. expatmoney.com/radical sign up today for the event. Just a couple of weeks left. expatmoney.com/radical. Let's suppose you are a very wealthy man, no longer content with merely business success, you have aspirations of being something of a statesman. You want to have a large impact on society.

And as you are a long-term thinker, you want your particular values to outlive you far into the future. Let us furthermore assume that your opinions are heterodox compared to prevailing sentiments. You are, after all, a contrarian. You made your fortune by making large bets on ideas that were discounted or even unimaginable by the rest of the market.

You know that if you want to propagate your different ideas, you are going to have to find a completely unprecedented vehicle to express them. In this essay, we'll examine a new kind of institution that can help you achieve your goals. We present this in the form of a thought experiment.

You begin by thinking about the existing things or institutions that could a) embody your values and b) survive for a very long time. You consider the following and discard each. A business. You have already founded and sold or IPO'd several of these. Businesses are good for making money, but not so good for transmitting worldviews because they are subject to so much government oversight.

You must hire from the general public according to the law and must therefore admit general public type ideas. You have indirect or no influence in choosing leadership for your public companies after you are gone, especially not after you are dead. A school. You could found a university, but in order for it to be accredited, you will also be subject to government oversight.

You also have very little way of ensuring the school remains true to your vision after you are dead. A charitable foundation. You could leave all your money to a foundation dedicated to a cause you like. But once again, you have very little way of ensuring the fund administrators don't subvert your wishes after your death.

You also don't like the idea of putting your descendants in charge of just doling out money for the next few generations. You have an aversion to professional philanthropists. A book. You could write a book about your ideas, but you have no way of guaranteeing that it will ever be or continue to remain popular after your death.

The odds of having a book in circulation for more than 100 years is vanishingly small. A monument. Massive stone structures have longevity on the order of tens of thousands of years. Now we're getting somewhere. You could build a great stone pyramid inscribed with your ideas in several different languages, or even a clock, depending on how large and grand your monument was, people would come from all over the world to see it long into the future.

However, you discard this idea. You realize that while this is actually a pretty good way to get your ideas read, there is no way to guarantee they would be interpreted the way you want them to. Politics. You could pour your money into a political campaign, either for yourself or a favored candidate.

If you win, you get to use the power of state to express your values in the world at broad scale. And you might even cultivate a following who would revere you after your death. But you discard this plan as well. While it has some very attractive benefits, you tend to avoid competition.

And you know that politics is the most competitive domain on earth, besides naked warfare. You decide you need something else entirely. You need an institution that A, will faithfully embody your ideals, freedom to set initial conditions and create new systems as you see fit with no compromise. B, will grow over time.

Institution augments and becomes stronger with age, preferably at a compounding rate. C, indivestible, cannot be taken away from you, is hard for other actors, including governments, to interfere with. You decide on the following, which you call the great house plan. One, you will choose 150 men with families who are aligned with your ideals and of the best quality you can possibly find.

Two, you will give them monthly cash payments for the rest of their lives in the form of a gift, conditional on their loyalty, agreement to embody and propagate your ideals and commitment to having six children. Three, you will support these families and see to their growth and the education and development of their children.

Four, these men will generally be working, studying, and pursuing their interests and the interests of the network out in the world, but will come work for you when called into service. They should expect to work for you about 33% of the time over the course of their careers. While they work for you, they will receive salary in addition to their gift payments.

Five, these men will also be loyal to the other men in your network and will work to advance each other's interests. Six, this offer will extend to each man's male offspring upon reaching majority. Seven, this arrangement can be terminated at any time by either party. In short, you are going to play the part of the godfather.

You are going to translate your money directly into social capital by jump-starting a high-growth-rate network of families who regard you and your descendants as their benefactor. You will not need to invent a new technology to do this. You will only need to broaden your time horizon. While there is nothing like this in the modern world, there is a historical precedent for this institution.

Roman patronage. You are going to be a patron, and your beneficiaries are going to be your clients. You are going to start small so you can set initial conditions exactly how you like, but the network will grow at a compounding rate. You will provide the capital to bring the network together, and once it reaches self-sufficiency, it will continue on without you.

Beginning with just 150 couples after a surprisingly short amount of time, 30 years, you will have a community of over 1,000 people who are elite, aligned to your ideals, and personally loyal to you. Your money has provided the catalyst necessary for family growth, which is compounding network growth. It's also a selection gate.

Only you get to choose who you give your money to, so you get to be as selective as you want. Lack of demand for your money will not be an issue. You can select from among your closest associates, choose exclusively from your church or favorite geography, use an IQ test, or make any kind of criteria you want.

No one can tell you how to give your money away for free, not even the government. Lastly, your money is the primary, not ultimate, glue that holds everything together. Your offer is for life and is even open to descendants, but can also be terminated at any time, ensuring maximum possible long-term alignment and long-term leverage.

Let's have a look at how this network grows over time, assuming lifetime fertility of six children per woman and cash payments of $5,000 a month to each head of household, I'm now going to summarize a chart. If you'd like to see the whole chart, check the link for this essay in the show notes.

But the summary of the chart shows that in year zero, there is a total population of 300 persons out of 150 families. The voting age population is 300. There are 150 able-bodied men and the cost per year is 9 million US dollars per year with a cumulative cost of $9 million.

After 10 years, the total population has grown to 900 out of 150 families. The voting age population continues to be 300 able-bodied men, 150, costing $9 million per year for a cumulative cost of $99 million over 10 years. After 30 years, the total population has increased to 1,365 persons, 289 total families, 1,005 voting age persons, 360 able-bodied men, an annual cost of $17.3 million and a total cumulative cost of $302 million.

After 50 years, the total population has increased to 3,812, 547 total families are represented with a voting age population of 1,448 and 618 able-bodied men with an annual cost of $32.8 million and total cumulative cost of $905 million. Dropping down after 100 years, the total population is 20,918 persons, which are representing 4,235 families, voting age population of 11,150 persons and 4,203 able-bodied men.

The chart continues and shows that at the very end, after 300 years with this kind of growth, the total population would be 27.9 million persons, representing 4.9 million families, a total voting age population of 13.4 million persons of voting age and able-bodied men of 5,208,000. As we can see, after 30 years, your population has more than quadrupled.

Your first generation of children has matured to adulthood and you have a working and voting population of about 1,000 highly elite people who regard you as their benefactor. You can now begin placing them in your companies, your political campaigns, or your cultural projects, and they will see to your interests.

Your children, meanwhile, are well into their careers as full-time developers of human capital, because you have plans to make this whole operation self-sufficient by year 60. Therefore, your descendants will not be trust fund kids. You are going to give away 100% of your money. If this project is to outlive you, they are going to be the guardians, spiritual and material leaders, and benefactors of a new people.

By year 60, the first children from generation three have started to be born. Your great house can sway elections in small towns. Your network is also now self-sufficient. By this point, assuming your people are at least as entrepreneurial as Stanford B school grads, about a 30% founder rate, your network has founded more than 260 ventures, 10% of which will have been successful if you apply common startup rules of thumb.

It will be up to you to work out exactly how individuals who have graduated out of your network continue to contribute, but with ties of gratitude and loyalty, you should be able to work something out that includes a combination of options on in-network businesses, as well as donations, and your people will donate back.

People have extraordinary loyalty to schools they paid for the privilege to attend. Imagine how loyal they would be to a school that paid them. Incidentally, this will be a full-time job for many of your children. They will work to ensure your people are healthy, happy, educated, and fulfilled. They will settle disputes, represent their interests, provide services, be a social nexus, and lead large-scale projects.

By year 120, the whole thing is being administered by your great grandchildren. Your people number 50,000, and they could field about two U.S. Army Combat Brigades of manpower if they needed to. If they keep founding ventures at their historic rate, they will have founded more than 200 successful companies.

They now comprise an elite minority of the kind that tends to rule majorities. By year 200, your voting-age population can easily sway elections in any city, the current size of Chicago and below. By year 300, your people are a national constituency, numbering at 27 million. They are a large elite who would have a major say in setting the agenda in any country in the world.

If you started in the United States, their interests have international implications. It is unlikely that they remain as tightly coordinated as they were when you first gathered them together, but they are bound by affection for each other as a distinct people, and regard you as the historic figure who brought them together.

They revere your founding ideals like we revere America's founding ideals today, and maybe even more so, because you've explicitly designed your system to use the power of descendants, which is very effective for transmitting beliefs across long time periods. Early Americans were suspicious of hereditary institutions, but your descendants will have a role designated for them – they are to be your people's shepherds, they are to provide spiritual leadership, they will live from securing voluntary donations that are invested back into furthering your people's interests.

If they become avaricious, ineffective, or inattentive, the people fire them by ceasing to donate. In this way, your descendants will always have a role in propagating your ideals, with a favorable population to receive them so long as they are good. Among your people will be many successes. Depending on what you prioritize in early years, their paths even far into the future will reflect your tastes, whether for arts or science or letters.

Some will have gone into politics, their careers launched by their base of support. Hundreds of others are business owners. They will cooperate to offer each other favorable access to labor, expertise, and goods, and they will have created trillions of dollars worth of value. Yes, trillions. To put things in perspective, the population of New York City is about 8 million, with a GDP of $2 trillion.

Imagine a city like New York City that is three times the size, much younger, and entirely descended from hand-picked, elite founding stock. If you can keep your community on track, you will have achieved your goals. You started small and made a clean break with current paradigms using a novel institution.

You got to select for alignment with your beliefs. You used human nature to your advantage, to help you pass on your beliefs to subsequent generations. Every year, your community grows, modeled as a network. Their capability increases geometrically for each new member. Compared to others, it is an extraordinarily connected and valuable network.

They are uncommonly generous with each other, a reflection of your example. They are of above-average intelligence, and they will have even gotten the benefit of a 60-year period of subsidy to get them jump-started. Once they number above a few hundred thousand, as long as they hold a cooperation and high fertility, it is unlikely that they could ever be eradicated.

Your monument to the future will never die. In exchange, you've spent a little more than $1 billion in today's dollars over the course of 60 years. You have a resource in the form of a human network and their goodwill that can't be taxed and can't be taken away from you.

If your children are involved and maintain your level of care and investment in your people's well-being, you will be able to name them as your successors and pass this enormous good to them, also tax-free. You and your descendants could have all your wealth confiscated, your companies nationalized, you could even be thrown in prison, and you would still have your people's loyalty.

In short, you would have made yourself and your descendants into beloved princes with the power to lead, using nothing but the last act of sovereignty, which can never be taken away, which is to give. This great act of generosity will be responded to with great loyalty. Standing at the head of your people, coordinating their efforts and representing their interests, your successors will compete on the national and international stage.

You and they will be remembered forever. Further discussion of specific considerations. Loyalty. It seems simplistic to suggest that direct cash payments can inspire loyalty. After all, salaries are cash payments, and with very large salaries, most people would leave for even larger salaries if given the chance. The difference here lies in the nature of the transaction.

The cash payment comes in the form of a gift, and so it has an entirely different character. Yes, there is the condition that your clients be pro-natal and the option on their labor, but you are a successful man. You are selecting for people who presumably want to work for you anyways.

The situation is akin to a parent paying their children to do something that's good for them, and that they do regularly anyways, like brushing their teeth, in which case the gift is really an unnecessary act of generosity that functions as a reinforcement. Furthermore, this arrangement is freely chosen. By taking the deal, your clients agree to its specific terms.

Loyalty in exchange for long-term support, and people do tend to feel gratitude towards benefactors. Clan relationships are built precisely on this dynamic. You will be able to select for agreement to these terms. Lastly, the arrangement lasts for life, even to subsequent generations, and loyalty compounds over time. The longer the history of the relationship, the deeper the trust.

Imagine multi-generational relationships between families, how deep the trust and loyalty could be. Indeed, these kinds of bonds were once the basis for all political order. As your network matures, you will also put it to use to affect change in the world. As your people do hard things together and achieve victories, they will also tend to grow in loyalty to you and to each other.

They will also intermarry. In this way, the artificial bonds which you induce in the early stages of the project will gradually be replaced by deeper and more organic ties. Cost. We have assumed cash payments of $5,000 per month. I have done some Twitter polling that suggested that people would accept $7,170 per month on average in exchange for their lifetime loyalty, but I tend to think this estimate was influenced too much by the poll choices, so I adjusted downwards.

People also do not tend to know that taxes are not required on cash gifts. I think that if you are able to present an inspiring vision, you could adjust this figure downward even further, but it should not be zero. The point of the exercise is to give your followers resources they can directly invest into having more children.

An interesting exercise would be to execute the plan at smaller scale, starting with 15 families and a modest $12,000 per year subsidy, a miniature great house would number about 450 people after 60 years, at a total cost, $27 million, an outlay achievable for even moderately wealthy families. Legibility. This institution has historical precedent, but is unknown in our day and age, which gives an enormous advantage.

The great house plan is illegible to the government in many ways. While the systems of oversight developed by governments for large companies, schools, and even political campaigns are highly developed, there is no corresponding infrastructure that mandates to whom you are allowed to give your money. As long as you are careful to make your filings and avoid any illegal activity within your network, in this you must be scrupulous, you will be free to build your following as you see fit.

Because you are growing your own population, you don't have to go out and get converts from the public square. You will not be out antagonizing anyone. Also, the novelty of the program presents an advantage to the first mover. Men and women and babies. The strength of the plan relies on the continued growth of the group.

Because human growth is exponential, even small differences in the birth rate account for large differences in population over long periods of time. For example, a fertility rate of 5 children per woman rather than 6 would result in a population of 12,000 at 100 years rather than 21,000, a difference of almost 100%.

For this reason, the plan assumes a culture that is optimized for having large families. In this case, we would emphasize stable and early marriages, high degrees of cooperation between families, and division of labor between men and women according to historic roles. Most important of all would be to cultivate a sense of optimism about the future within the group, where couples feel themselves embedded in a larger community that has a sense of purpose and optimism about the future.

The long-term plan presented here, as well as the material help offered by the patron, gives powerful tools for the cultivation of this optimism. It should be noted that because child rearing is so expensive, the patron's subsidy will be unlikely to compensate completely for the costs of having a large family.

Rather, the subsidy is an expensive signal that the patron is concerned for the family's well-being and will contribute to the family's growth in other ways, jobs, introductions for marriages, admittance to the network, spiritual leadership, and personal care, etc. The patron's long-term care is a strong inspiration for each family.

It feels good to be personally cared for. A patron should make every effort to select the founding group for their pre-existing intrinsic natal motivation. This motivation should only have to be encouraged, not induced. Polygamy. System maximizers will immediately ask why we do not assume polygamy. The reason for this is that polygamy does not scale after the first few generations.

In a system where a minority of men pair with the majority of women, too many young men remain unpaired, which is a problem associated with instability unless they can be induced to leave. It is a poor use of human capital to raise young men only to push them out of the community.

Besides, polygamy is just weird, and if you practice it, your community will be labeled a cult. Conclusion. Because this form of institution is unprecedented, there are many outstanding questions about how exactly it would function and how feasible it could be. In subsequent articles, I will explore some of these questions, including underlying theoretical frameworks, historical comparisons, and how a great house would fit into a larger network of institutions and society at large.

I invite readers to ask questions and make suggestions. This is a thought experiment designed to get people thinking about highly independent institutions that could be directly focused on cultivating humans in a way that works with human nature. It is vital that we find these forms because so many of our institutions are dedicated to human elimination.

Elements of the plan could always be reconfigured. Ultimately, I am inspired by the image of the great house, an edifice of noble men and women decorated with their arts who are deeply capable of affecting their aims. This is a romantic and stirring vision worth working for. It will not be machines or corporations or democratic governments that cultivate the family and our associated human potential, but great families themselves, families like enormous oak trees who make shelter for a thousand seedlings in their shade.

This is how a mighty forest grows. It is more possible today than ever in history to plant a seed and make a fresh start. California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play a Yamaha resort and casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more. The essay you have just heard is titled how to found a great house and become a prince by an internet avatar named Paulus, and I will link to it. The it's posted on a sub stack, which is now defunct.

I will link to it in the show notes. You can follow the links forward and you can read some of the responses to this. And you can read part two of his essay, which is for the great house plan, part two, further discussions on personal institutions, but I think you get the point, uh, in listening to part one.

And that is sufficient for today's discussion. The reason I want to raise it for you is because one of my great burdens at this point in time is the astounding lack of vision that is presented by financial consultants and pundits and authors about how to actually improve the world and to use money to do so.

You may notice a hint of bitterness in my mind or in my voice, a note of bitterness in my voice, and that's because I am quite bitter because what has happened is the professional financial planning industry has somehow effectively persuaded most of us that our primary aim and ambition in life should be to accumulate money, invest that money into publicly traded funds of various kinds, and then sit back and live fat and happy on the, on the beach, instead of actually doing something with the money, doing something that matters.

And yet throughout history, prior to the formation of the modern financial instruments that we all are quite accustomed to, wealthy men and women have known that they had to invest their money into people and because of the requirement to invest their money into people, they had to actually develop a worldview and a system for so doing.

Were we better off before or better off now? I think probably now, but we are right now in one of the greatest wealth transfers of human history. The baby boomers have millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars accumulated and they have nothing to do with it that actually is going to matter, nothing to do with it.

That's actually going to change their town, their city, their family, their country in any meaningful way. And they go for meeting after meeting with financial advisor after financial advisor, and all the financial advisor can do is push, look at them across the table and say, Hey, guess what? Joe, you're rich and you're going to keep on being rich.

And Joe says, what do I do with the money? Well, just, you know, maybe give it to your kids. Well, I got two of them. Great. Now your kids are going to be rich. And what are they going to do? Cause there's no vision and friends without a vision, the people perish.

And so I believe that we must be the generation, those of us who actually care about the future to start to create and formulate a vision, a vision for our own lives, a vision for our communities, for our families, for our country, whatever level you feel capable of creating a vision, we have to do it.

And one important component of that vision is always going to involve money. Money is not sufficient, but it is necessary. And a man with vision as to how he can use his money is going to be much more capable of accumulating the money and then wisely using it than one for whom the money happens accidentally, or who spends his life thinking that the accumulation of the money is primarily about his own interests and his own enjoyment, we need friends.

If you're, if you're a baby boomer generation, if you're a retiree and you're listening to my voice, I beg of you. Do not waste your life exclusively sauntering down beaches, rather accept that your role in society should be that of a wise elder, that of a wise patron. You have a duty to me, to my generation, to your children, to your grandchildren, to your neighbors.

You have a duty to be the kind of man who founds a great house, to be the kind of man who goes through the difficult, diligent effort of creating a vision for the world, of articulating your ideals, articulating your philosophy, and then seeing to it that that your ideals and your philosophy is expanded throughout society.

That is your responsibility at this stage of life, not to ride away into the sunset and purely amuse yourself with endless steak and lobster, but to get down to the serious work of being a leader, being a statesman, being a patron in the community. That is your responsibility. You have reached a stage in life at which we expect you to serve as a wise elder.

And I'm ashamed of many of your generation, because instead of accepting your role in life of that of a wise elder and mentoring your children and your grandchildren and your neighbors and investing your money in their community and transforming your neighborhood and transforming your industry and transforming your country, many of you are content to sit around and fripper away your days.

I don't get it. You have an opportunity to do something that's truly remarkable and money can and should be, and will be part of it. Now, for those of us who are younger, I believe that this is not something that can be easily just shown up to. If somebody has arrived at the age of 65 and all a man can dream about is sit back and let me just go ahead and retire so I can go fishing every day.

Yeah, that's great. Ride my motorcycle. If that's the height of his dreams and ambitions for his life, he's unlikely to change. However, you and I can arrive at 65 in a very different place. You and I can arrive at 65 with an ambition as to what our elder statesman years might look like, with an ambition of some of the work that we may be able to do, and if we're going to do that effectively, we're going to need to give careful time and preparation to being prepared for that moment in history.

What are some of the things that we could possibly do? Well, number one, as I think this essay would assume, is that we have to have some sense of our ideas. We have to have some sense of a vision of the world, something that is coherent, something that is compelling, some sense of what we want the future of this world to look like.

And we have to develop a clarity of vision that is sufficient to allow us to articulate that vision to other people in a way that would also allow them to clearly see the vision that we see and want to align with us in that work. There's an enormously wide degree of latitude available to you here, but what is not optional is the development of a vision, the development of something that you want to change, something that you want to impact.

You choose. You choose anything, but if you are arriving at your elder statesman years of life and you have not done the hard work of clearly formulating a vision of something that you would like to see different in the world and some kind of practical, practicable plan that could result in the successful achievement of that vision, you're not taking life seriously, and you want to.

You ought to do the hard work to develop a vision of some improvement in the world, some way that you think things should be bettered and improved, and then clarify that vision so that you can communicate it to others. That's the first thing that's necessary. And for those of us who are younger, at least I have found as I have attempted and keep on attempting to do this, this is not a decade project.

This is a multi-decade project. This is not a one-year project. This is a 20-year project. I'm working hard to develop mine. I think over the last probably 10 to 15 years, it's gotten clearer, but I don't think I could articulate it as robustly as I would like today. My hope, my ambition, is that by the time I arrive at, say, 50, that not only will I be able to articulate it clearly, but that I will have begun the process of articulating it clearly, and that I will have spoken that vision so consistently that it will be something that I've successfully passed along to my children, that I have successfully influenced my community with, etc., that it is something that I have done the hard work to do.

And that vision, by the way, needs to not just be castles in the sky. There needs to be a robust background that ties the vision to something that is practical, something that has proven results in the past. If your vision is to green the deserts and to turn the Sahara back into a tropical paradise, then you will want to be able to tie that to some of the specific techniques that have been used to green a small portion of a desert in another area.

If your vision is to create a society that is filled with liberty and freedom and justice for all, then you will need to be able to tie those ideas and your plans for how that is going to be accomplished to something that has been successful in at least some period of history and at least some corner of the world.

And that means you're going to have to do some work. If your vision is to cure diabetes on the face of the planet, then you need to begin by curing diabetes in somebody and then work on to somebodies and then go out from there. And so there needs to be some serious work into actually implementing a vision.

And that's also something that cannot be done overnight, but it's something that should be done consistently while you're young enough to actually form the vision and form a plan that might work so that when you arrive at your elder statesman role, when, God willing, you have more time, more freedom, more resources, etc., that you're not arriving woefully unprepared.

On the contrary, you're arriving with 20 years of experiments under your belt, 20 years of arguments, of debates, of careful research, etc. And so when you arrive at 65, you're arriving at 65 with an idea of some things that might work. And you've got 30 or 40 years ahead of you and a fortune behind you that you can use to see those ideas tested on a bigger scale with the plan of passing them on generationally.

So in order for you to – I hope that this inspires somebody. Maybe it doesn't inspire anybody but me. But one of the components that is necessary if you're going to found a great house is that you have to have a vision of the world, a vision of the future, and be able to articulate that vision in a way that is compelling to other people.

The second thing that is necessary is you must accumulate resources. You have to accumulate resources. And the steady, consistent accumulation of resources should be an ongoing ambition for men of virtue. There is no virtue. In being a pauper, there is no virtue in being someone who just systematically avoids the acceptance of responsibility.

But there is virtue in being someone who systematically accumulates resources. Think about how you feel. Let's use a physical example, because none of us had anything to do with the basic physical substance that we were given in terms of our body, our physical body that we control. All of us were gifted it, and all of us acknowledge it.

Some of us were given large bodies, some of us small bodies, some of us strong bodies, some of us weak bodies, some of us properly functioning bodies, some of us not properly functioning bodies. We were all given these things. Now, do you respect a man who was given a strong, properly functioning, healthy body, and then who proceeds to ignore it, to abuse it, to not use it, to not develop it to its proper level?

Do you respect that man? I don't. I don't. And sometimes I look in the mirror at him and I say, "I don't respect you if you don't use this strength that you've been given." Now, do you respect a man who was given a weak, stunted body? Perhaps his legs are non-existent or doesn't work, and he uses every feature that he has in his body to make it stronger, to make it better, to make it more powerful, to make it more useful, regardless of the actual long-term outcome.

Do you respect that man? We all naturally respect him. My favorite bodybuilding videos to watch is the dude in the wheelchair doing flips on a pull-up bar. My favorite, every day there's a guy, I can't remember his name, but there's a guy who has no legs. He's a really fast runner, and he holds the record for the fastest running on his hands thing.

Every day when I go through my daily goals and visioning exercise, I watch the video of this guy running across the track on his hands with no legs, and it's just a reminder to me. And the dude's jacked, his shoulders and arms are amazing. He's a really smart guy.

I need to look up his name. Forgive me for not knowing his name. He's a hero of mine, and I should know his name. It's just a short video that I watch, that's all. So anyway, he's a really, really amazingly talented guy who has just sculpted and used his body to become incredibly fast, though he runs on his hands every day.

And I respect that guy so much, not for his ultimate outcome, but for the process of his using what he has been given. Now, let's pivot from a physical body, and let's go to other resources that you and I have, resources such as our intellect, resources such as our character, resources such as the 24 hours of time that we have today, resources such as the finances that we have, the money that we control, the tools that we operate, et cetera.

Friend, to whom much is given, much is required, and you and I have been given much, and therefore much is required of us. And what is required of us is that we maximize these things, that we use them, that we develop them, et cetera. And so the acquisition and accumulation of wealth and capital is our responsibility.

It's a responsibility to our forebears who have come before us and have created the incredible world in which we live. And it's a responsibility to our progeny, to those who will come after us, to give them a better world than the one that we inherited, to give them a world of greater resources, of greater tools, so that we can improve the human condition in the coming generations.

That is our responsibility. And we need to grasp that responsibility as full-hearted and as heartily as we have capability. Now, this doesn't have to be grandiose pie-in-the-sky stuff. I'm intentionally not making these things precise because they'll be so different for you and for me. But you have a responsibility to build a secure home around yourself.

You have a responsibility to provide for your children's education. You have a responsibility to provide for your family's eating needs. But you also have a responsibility to accumulate capital for the future. And as I tried to illustrate in a recent podcast, the accumulation of capital is primarily an emotional thing followed by decision rather than any external circumstance.

The man who must accumulate capital will accumulate capital. He will find a way to do it. Financial capital is one form of capital. We should not disregard or ignore other forms of capital. We are the inheritors of the capital that has been passed down to us. As I grow older, I'm distinctly conscious of how much capital I inherited from directly my own parents.

A few examples to try to make it precise. First of all, I was never given a significant financial inheritance by my parents. I was given enormous love, support, a roof over my head. Etc. And I'm grateful for those things. My parents were not wealthy and did not give me a significant amount of money to get started in life.

They have supported me in all kinds of ways. I think that parents who have capital should give their children capital. But that is not my point here today. My point is to say that even if you have not yet accumulated financial capital, you can give your children capital. My wife and I have a very smooth and comfortable relationship.

I think a significant portion of it, at least on my part, can just be due to the fact that I watched my parents have a healthy and smooth marriage relationship. And in so many ways, regardless of what I was explicitly instructed or taught with regard to marriage, you can't live with parents who have a healthy relationship and not automatically adopt those components that led them to a healthy relationship.

Now, obviously, we have to adapt to our wives because our wives are not our mothers. They are different, unique persons, and we have to adapt to them. But for me, being a husband feels very natural and comfortable and normal because I observed my father be a father and, excuse me, be a husband.

Being a father feels fairly natural and normal to me because I observed my father being a father. Having a simple cultural capital of the way that a home should feel is something that is an important component of the world that your children will grow up in. This is forms of capital.

Intellectual capital, being taught to study, being taught how to study, being expected to study. These are things that accumulate over generations. A family that passes on a high regard for excellent academic work through one generation is likely to pass it on to the third. By the third, that inheritance will be enormous.

You see this all the time. When you see a child who, my mom was a doctor and my dad is a lawyer and guess what, you know, granddad was an army general and grandma was a doctor and here I am and I'm a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, and it just passes on.

And the gap is widening on all these things. These multigenerational trends are causing our society to be more and more fractured where the haves get more and the have-nots are getting worse. It's happening all across our society. But regardless of where you are today, the change can begin with you.

And then finally, the third thing that is obvious from this particular essay is you got to have children. You got to have children. If you want to found a great house and you want your children to continue the tradition that you are establishing, you have to actually have children first and foremost.

The future belongs to those who show up for it. And statistically speaking, if you don't have more than a couple of children, there's a very low chance that your personal genes will ever continue into the future. I forget the exact number, but I've watched some demographers and demography interested people kind of try to figure this out from historical data.

And the only number I remember was, I think it was a study of perhaps Dutch family records. The Dutch have great family records. And basically, if you want to be sure that your family line will continue, that sureness on a statistical basis arrives at about five children. Prior to five children, there is a relatively low confidence that you can have that your own children and your own lineage will continue.

But once you reach five children, then you can have a very high confidence that your genetic offspring will continue. So I felt successful because I now have five children. So if I can get them all to adulthood and keep them as good, healthy persons, then then we'll be in pretty good shape to continue my genetic impact on the world.

And most of us don't. Nobody ever sat me down as a young man and taught me about that. No one told me, like I think they should have, about how hard I should be working when I'm 20 and 22 in order to support a family with five children. Now, I had it modeled by my parents.

I had it modeled by people around me. I wish they'd been more explicit about it. I don't know whether I would have listened or not, but I try to be explicit about it now because, friends, we've got to give young men a vision of the work that they need to do, of who they need to become in order to be prepared for the future.

So you've got to have children. And having children is going to require you to have a vision that, again, you can pass along to them. And this is where we come full circle, where the whole thing continues, where it all comes together. You have to have a vision for the future.

You have to have resources that you accumulate, and you're going to have to go big. If you want to have significant resources, you're going to have to swing for the fences on something in order to found a great house, to have money to give away. You're going to have to invest faithfully over a very long period of time to grow your resources to be sufficient to actually do something in the world.

And you're going to have to have children. And then having children requires you to have a vision that you can pass along to them. Having children requires you to have resources to support your children and encourage them, et cetera. And then it goes on and on and on. But we should be those who change.

We should be those who embrace the vision. And this should be a consistent component of our life. When I think about people that I admire in the world, I find that they have most of these things. I find that generally the men that I admire in the world are men who have a vision of something that they're working to change.

It can be an issue. It can be an ideology. It can be an institution. It can be just something that they want to do. There's a motivation to what they're doing. They're trying to bring goodness and beauty and truth into the world in some corner of the world over which they have influence.

They're generally men who are faithful to that vision over a significant period of time. They don't bounce from here to there to the other thing. They labor at it for years, for years, for years, and they continue to labor at it. And it's often, just like any exponential curve, it's often only in the latter part of their work that they start to see really, really fruitful results from it.

And you look back and you say, "What kept you laboring for 10 years, for 20 years, for 50 years, what kept you doing that work?" Well, it was the vision. They had a vision of something they would change, and they said, "Here's a place that I can do some good in the world, and so let me just focus on this and work at it." And they're generally men who accumulate capital.

They accumulate financial capital, but also importantly, they communicate cultural capital. They acquire power. They acquire influence. They acquire prestige. Their reputation grows. Their influence grows over time. And those are forms of capital that have to be very, very carefully managed, very, very carefully protected in order for them to endure.

And then they're men who have children. They're men who pass along their values generation to generation. You can know a lot about a man by looking at his children to see how well do his children model and carry out his vision for the world. Finally, I want to pivot and just say, I hope that while you are listening to that essay, which I found thought-provoking, thank you to the listener who sent it to me.

I wish I could remember. I think I know who it was. I think it was a friend of mine who was also a listener of the show. But I hope what you found was thought-provoking, but I hope you realized that you probably are also aware of some institutions that are already something like what was described.

I think to me, the obvious ones that I have found, or the obvious ones to me, is simply the enduring nature of some churches and other religious bodies. Because at their core, that is what distinguishes a religious organization is its values, vision, etc. And so if there is an ability from leaders in that organization to articulate a vision, that vision often winds up being a religious expression of some kind.

And then if you combine other things about that organization, you combine financial growth, you combine pro-natalism, etc., then you can clearly see how religious organizations become incredibly powerful and strong, and they become in essence a form of fraternal organization. I'm a great admirer of the LDS Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons.

And some of the things that I admire very distinctly about their organization is how they model so many of the values of what even this author discussed. Of course, the Mormon Church is a fairly recent church, but if you look at the growth of the church organization since Joseph Smith's being here, over the last century and three quarters now, it's remarkable to look at.

And what you see that's so interesting is you see these values and these things expressed consistently across the organization, across the entire church. And you watch Mormons are massively over-represented in organizations, massively over-represented in business, massively over-represented in various successful capacities, etc., and part of that has to do with their religious work ethic.

Mormons are very, very effective at building a fraternal community, of looking out for one another, of supporting one another, etc., and they're very, very effective at having children and promoting a pro-natal organization. If you look at the growth of the Mormon Church over the last century and a half, it's astounding to see its growth compared with even just the ideas outlined in this particular essay.

To me, that's one of the most obvious examples that we should look at and study. Now, I myself am not a Mormon nor an adherent to their ideology, but I am inspired by them, and what I have tried to do is take any aspect that I think is helpful and try to see it expanded within my own circles, and I think that's one of the things that we should do, is find an organization that is working where this has been effective and then try to model it and try to look for organizations that have these basic features that are described.

This essay, I don't know anything about the guy who is writing it. He's a fairly anonymous writer that seems to have some interest in classicism, etc. I didn't dig deeply into his blog. I just thought it was interesting. It was an effective articulation of it. And what is remarkable to me is that here I sit after decades of work in the modern world, and I find a random internet essay that inspires me and gives me kind of a vision for the future that is so, in a sense, so elementary, so simple, so elementary.

I'm not critical. I think the greatest ideas are often simply expressed. But what I'm saying is that this is something that should be common. This is something, or whatever elements of this you agree with or disagree with, this is something that every grandparent should pass along to a grandchild, that every parent should pass along to our children.

And this is where I want to end, is that we have a duty to pass along a vision to those we impact, to those we interact with, to our children, to our grandchildren, etc. And what's interesting is that in general, while I can't prove this statement to you, in general, I think our children will largely wind up fulfilling the vision that we give them.

I've seen this enough with my own children and some of the experiments that I've run of where I tried to give them a vision, and then I watched them in the fullness of time step into it, and they do it. And obviously, children can be manipulated and controlled, and so we have a great responsibility to make sure the vision that we give to them is a positive vision, is something that leads them places.

But we should be giving multi-hundred-year visions to our children of what their dynasty is likely to look like. We should be imparting a vision that came from our great-grandfather down to our children's great-great-grandchildren. That should be the level in which we are thinking. And that long-term vision has a great way of aligning so many things in life in a proper and productive and contented and happy way.

So, if your vision for your children that you pass along to them is, "You've definitely got to go to college," your children will probably go to college. But what about after that? Why not more? Why not give them more and more of a vision? You and I are adults.

You and I have experience in the world. You and I have experience in our own lives. We understand what leads to human happiness, what leads to human flourishing. I'm astounded right now that so many people who haven't seemed to figure it out, what are the solutions to human happiness and flourishing?

We know a lot about this. It's pretty simple. And while I prefer not to call them "sciences," the social sciences can inform this pretty well. We can look at the data. Now, you may not want to accept it, but we can look at the data and we can find the things that lead to human happiness and human flourishing.

We should not be trying to make our children figure it out. This is one of the enormous sociological problems that we have, is that in current generations, we're not teaching children what will lead to their happiness and to their flourishing, we are telling them that they are responsible to figure it out.

In some cases, they do figure it out, but there's a lot, oftentimes a lot of decades of wasted effort trying to figure it out for themselves. And our responsibility as an older generation is to pass along the wisdom that works for the younger generation. And we want to do that continually.

In conclusion, I hope that you enjoyed that little essay. I find it inspiring. I don't know whether I will ever actually be able to put it into fruition with my own wealth. I don't know whether it's even the smartest thing to do with wealth, but one of my great passions that I'm going to be leaning deeply into in the next year, the next years, so this is a multi-year project for me, is to try to figure out what are some ways of investing wealth effectively.

And by investment, I mean investing it into people, because I am shocked and appalled at the dismal state of coherent advice, coherent frameworks that exist for wealthy people who have reached the stage of financial abundance and have more money than they'll ever personally be able to consume, than their children will ever personally be able to consume.

And there's no compelling frameworks to teach someone how to systematically make an impact with it. And so basically, as best I can tell, way more wealthy people than should wind up writing relatively random checks to not-for-profit organizations, which in some cases do a significant amount of good in the world.

After all, the donors are looking for that. But in many cases, the wealthy people wind up never investing their money at an appropriate level of scale to see the impact of it. And so they go to their graves with their ambitions for impact unrequited. And I consider that a great tragedy.

Although we can't ever control that, we should try to see the fruitfulness, we should try to see the fruit of our own faithfulness come to fruition in our lifetime where we can still control it. And I'm going to intentionally avoid the rant about how institutions change over time, etc.

So this is a great passion of mine, and I'm looking for resources and things on that, which is a good place for me to close. If you yourself have ever come across great frameworks, great books, interesting essays, interesting people, interesting teachers, the wisdom of the sages, in the same way that a listener is the one who originally sent me this email, please pass those along to me.

Best way is always email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com is a great way to reach out to me. I'm also pretty active on Twitter, @joshuasheets is a great way to bring things to my attention as well. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you enjoy this, and I hope that it's been impactful for you.