Wealth only becomes a true legacy when it’s rooted in duty, family, and place, not just a big number on a balance sheet.
The conversation with historian Johann Kurtz explores why Western societies have become unable to build, preserve, and pass on multigenerational wealth, and how this failure stems from a deeper cultural collapse around duty, locality, virtue, and time horizons. Kurtz argues that despite unprecedented material abundance, modern elites lack the philosophical and religious frameworks that once anchored wealth to responsibility, stewardship, and the cultivation of families capable of bearing it. He traces how the shift from dominion (wealth as a burden of rule) to private property (wealth as personal indulgence) created a culture of impermanence in which fortunes evaporate, families atomize, and institutions decay. This detachment shows up everywhere: tech billionaires giving their wealth to abstract global causes instead of strengthening their own communities; elites pursuing ephemeral experiences rather than intergenerational projects; charitable foundations morphing into unaccountable political power centers; architecture becoming disposable rather than enduring; younger generations delaying marriage and children because the social infrastructure that once formed families has collapsed. Kurtz insists that real legacy requires raising children with virtue, ritual, danger, faith, and heroic lineage; anchoring wealth to place; and rejecting the philanthropic fantasy that one can engineer humanity from afar. He and Marty connect this to Bitcoin: wealth preservation is essential for legacy, but money alone is not enough, wealth must be used to build, steward, and love one’s actual dominion. The episode ultimately argues for a civilizational course correction rooted in family, locality, duty, and long time horizons.
“Why are we so bad at constructing permanent things?”
“We occupy a culture of impermanence when it comes to wealth.”
“It was actually not possible to defend dynasty without a framework to pass on stability, virtue, and ambition for greatness.”
“Dominion carries with it the burden of rule.”
“Charity is derived from agape, love, and love requires proximity.”
“We’ve lost the transcendent beliefs that once made wealth sustainable across generations.”
“Family businesses outperform because they plan for one hundred years, not one quarter.”
“Most people want children, yet most will never have them.”
“If you want to solve the problem, you must be close to the problem.”
“Money is not a moral quality, it is a temptation, unless directed toward real-world goods.”
This episode argues that the West’s unraveling, its inability to sustain wealth, build beauty, form families, or cultivate responsibility, flows from a spiritual and philosophical break with the traditions that once gave wealth a purpose. Through examples ranging from aristocratic family practices to Detroit’s collapse to the missteps of modern philanthropy, Kurtz shows how duty, locality, ritual, and love of neighbor have been replaced by abstraction, transience, and indulgence. The path forward, he suggests, is not technocratic but human: rebuild the family, root wealth in place, raise children worthy of inheritance, and pursue long-term projects that bind generations together. Bitcoin enters the picture not as an end but as a tool, something that can preserve wealth so families can once again think in centuries rather than quarters. Ultimately, the episode calls listeners to reclaim a legacy mindset in their own dominions and reinvigorate the long-term, transgenerational horizon that built the West.
0:00 - Intro
0:33 - Culture of impermanence
4:58 - King Edward
9:03 - Dechristianization
14:53 - Bitkey & Unchained
16:55 - Loving thy neighbor
25:01 - Architecture
30:56 - SLNT & CrowdHealth
32:31 - Ford family
41:56 - Nepotism
56:28 - Extended family
59:52 - Modern dating
1:09:33 - How to climb back
(00:00) If you take the wealthiest cohort at the beginning of the 20th century [music] and you project how that wealth should have grown, the thousand wealthiest families then should have turned into 16,000 [music] billionaire families today. But there are only sort of 700. It was actually not possible to defend that proposition if people did not have a framework to pass on stability, [music] virtue and ambition for greatness in the context of wealth.
(00:22) How can we achieve a level of stability in the midst of all this [music] chaos? And they basically fall into three categories. Johan Curts, welcome to the show. >> Thank you so much for having me. Excited to talk. >> I am as well. Uh for those of you who are unaware of Johan's work, uh Substack best seller, Being Noble.
(00:47) You just came out with a book leaving Leaving a Legacy uh which I've been reading through over the last week. opened it on Thanksgiving morning, read a few chapters while my children were uh were playing watching the Thanksgiving Day parade and I think it was very uh very apt to be reading this book on that morning particular surrounded by my family on a holiday.
(01:11) Um, beyond like I was saying before we hit record, I'm very excited to be speaking with you today because I feel like this conversation will be a continuation of a [snorts] longunning thread on this show throughout this year particularly about this clash of the generations uh that we're seeing in the West particularly uh baby boomers millennials, Gen Z.
(01:38) It's not even verse, but I think it's become very clear that there has been a shift in society philosophically in terms of how the wealthy older generations view their their duty, particularly as it pertains to their kids and how they would pass down wealth. And I think the work that you're you're doing and what you have been doing is really highlighting that there is something's off in terms of the societal norms that are beginning to flourish today that are very contra to what built western society over the course of of millennia. So I think maybe starting
(02:23) there um is what how would you describe the state of this sort of positioning between the generations right now? >> Yeah, I think I think we're at a very interesting point and we were discussing before the show that I'm not an expert on Bitcoin but perhaps an area of shared interest is this question of time horizons when it comes to wealth when it comes to projects when it comes to vision.
(02:50) And when I started pulling at this thread that became the subject of the book and and the sort of central question of the book is why is it wrong to give your wealth to children upon your death? Sorry, why is it wrong to give your wealth to charity upon your death rather than your own children? And this is in response to a sort of a wide range of celebrity announcements that this is what they plan to do and also sort of mega rich billionaire announcements that this is what they intended to do.
(03:17) But really as I started pulling on this thread, I I realized that in many ways we occupy this culture of impermanence now when it comes to wealth. So it's not just the billionaires or the ultra wealthy celebrities who announce that they're planning to give their wealth away who lose this intergenerational continuity. In fact, even ones that try to hold on to their wealth actually perform very poorly at that.
(03:41) Uh so there's this very interesting book by Haganian White the missing billionaires who look at the maths across the 20th century and if you take the wealthiest cohort at the beginning of the 20th century and you project how that wealth should have grown if they invested and achieved normal returns if they reproduced at the normal rate and spent at a sensible rate for someone in that wealth bracket.
(04:01) The thousand wealthiest families then should have turned into 16,000 billionaire families today. But there are only sort of 700. And this speaks to this wider question of why are we so bad at constructing permanent things? Why uh and and and what is the root at the heart of all these weird manifestations of this now impulse where one of the causes of intergenerational resentment that you mentioned I think is older generations choosing to spend their wealth down at the end of their life indulging in very wealthy very expensive
(04:34) you know cruises and things like that. Why do some choose to disinherit their children? How do some lose it in other ways? And really there is this this culture of impermanence that I think both you and I from different perspectives are trying to begin to resolve. Um and I have my theories as to how this arose.
(04:53) Um but I think I think there's a a rich discussion to be had there. >> Well, having read the book, I think the the story of King Edward is particularly interesting uh in the 1930s. fell in love with an American woman while he was king and decided to resign as king and go live a life with his lover. And the way you describe in the book, he basically had an abdication of duty.
(05:22) And it wasn't until after he stepped down from the throne that he really realized what he was missing out on and the disappointment he brought the country of England specifically because he just completely abandoned his duty. And I think that's indicative of what's happening at a at a wider scale here in the west right now. not only a king sort of releasing himself from his duty and not recognizing the profoundity of that, but we're being beginning to see see that seep into the culture more widely.
(05:56) >> Yeah. No, exactly. Well, I think there are these behaviors which we sort of assume must come naturally to man and must be inevitable. But it turns out that a lot of those behaviors, a lot of those healthy expressions of societal cohesion are intimately tied to our beliefs, our sort of foundational convictions about reality.
(06:18) And as those beliefs shift, actually a lot of the things that we assumed would live forever just start falling apart. um you know in the case of Edward VII who is one of the figures in the book who serves as this cautionary tale about divorcing the notion of wealth, privilege, power from this notion of duty essentially.
(06:40) Um it's it all starts very early. So so there's this notion that a king should never get divorced, marry a divorcee. They're subject to these actually incredible impositions on their personal freedom which is the other side of the coin to being such wealthy influential figures in society. You know to whom to he whom much has been given much will be demanded.
(07:02) And as they lost faith in their own belief system they started to undermine their own position their own credibility in society. So, you know, Edward VIII was committing adultery with uh the woman who he went on to to marry um uh an American, but we won't blame you for that. Um and uh and as such, you know, wanting then to remain in his position as king when he wanted to marry her, a twice divorced woman who was in fact still married at that point, it just became a very messy situation in which the structures that kept society together. And in that case, the the
(07:33) institution of the monarchy were clearly at odds with the lived values of of the people who inhabited them. And uh and I think something like that has has happened more broadly to to all of us. And I think you know say what you like about about Christianity and I am a Christian but at least Christianity gave um the wealthy men of the west an entire integrated framework of duty a way of understanding their place in the world.
(08:01) Why they had what their what they had morally um responsible for their children and uh you know charity and so forth. It was uh it was a time-t tested framework and now that uh an entire class of people has ascended to a position of great wealth essentially the boomer generation and some of those who came after them um outside the context of that moral superructure of of Christendom uh if not Christianity and you know I'm a bit partial here but if not Christianity we do need to form this entire uh coherent philosophy of duty as
(08:41) to the the nature of the affluence we've built. Like what is its purpose? It can't just be creating more and then indulging more because there's this this sort of very unattractive culture of the hedonism of the aged that I think strikes us all as a sort of beneath our elders um that is doing great damage to to society.
(09:03) No, it really is and it's perplexing as a Christian myself. Uh it trying not to get out of the phrase this because I was actually reading something this morning. Uh I maybe we'll just lean into it is um do you think a lot of what we're seeing in terms of this this hedenism uh this sort of we're going to spend our wealth before we die and if we have more left over we're going to give it to charity because we don't want to spoil you you kids you need to work hard.
(09:43) is the root problem of this issue seeped to the fact that we've fallen away from Christ as a society broadly in the west because that's one thing I loved about the book is all the biblical passages you have throughout it that really anchor um these sort of core building blocks of of a flourishing society um that are being completely thrown to the wayside these days.
(10:12) >> Yeah. Well, I mean it's there's there's this phenomenon that takes place in in really all areas of society. You can see some reflection of this which is the enlightenment comes and it challenges as it the sort of enlightenment tenants become popular amongst different areas of society.
(10:30) They challenge the the sort of foundations of belief, long-held convictions, traditions and so forth. And in some ways that has incredibly positive effects. um you know the the separation of science from kind of natural science where there's all kinds of like dubious philosophical prior um that that are actually inhibiting the evolution of science.
(10:50) In some ways there are benefits there. In other ways it has I think fairly detrimental effects on society but that is not immediately obvious but because people just have ways of doing things. They have certain assumptions. They grow up in a cultural malure that still basically inherits all its traditions and all its assumptions from from what came before.
(11:08) And so the kind of [snorts] the kind of instability at the very base of society at the very base of existence is not immediately apparent. And I think something like that has happened with with property with private property which is that when when John comes in and sort of establishes this this very formalized notion of private property um to to oversimplify a complex transition.
(11:33) Um and you know he says this is mine that is yours. To intermix those two things we have to enter into a consensual contract together. you know, my private property is mine to do what I like with. Nevertheless, people still used their property and assumed they had to use their property as as as westerners always had.
(11:55) Uh but interestingly actually if you look at the philosophy of John Lock as it regards to children and the sovereignty of the individual, he has a lot of trouble uh integrating this unchosen bond of like children's deference to their parents and parents irrevocable duty to their children into his into his framework of um of sort of what becomes liberalism.
(12:15) But um but yeah, I mean I I think one's relationship to property is is really part of this that the kind of older notion that I refer to in the book is not private property as we now understand it. It's this concept of dominion which I think is a rather wonderful one which is yes it is listenit it is justifiable for some people to have this tremendous wealth and power in society.
(12:37) But dominion as as the theologian Andrew Willard Jones uh put it carries with it the burden of rule. It's much closer to this notion of of kingship than merely being rich as in you have your wealth for a purpose. It comes with demands upon you. Um and and you know dominion the root word there, this is the biblical term that sort of transforms into our contemporary notion of property through the enlightenment.
(13:00) The root word there is is doas. It's house. Like it's a living relationship with what you have. And it implies the necessity to nurture the inhabitants of that house, be they children or servants or you know even animals. It is this living relationship of mutual dependence that that the king has with his subjects.
(13:20) And as we transition into private property and it becomes more about well I earned that thing and therefore it is mine to use as I please and the way that it pleases me to use it is is indulgence and we sort of lose all natural restraints on the extent to which you know people feel ashamed about indulging in themselves.
(13:38) You end up with with very strange things like there's this book that that I really don't like although I think you know um well it's it's called Die with Zero. I imagine it's a very popular book. I imagine many of your listeners have read it. It's by a guy called Bill Perkins who's a who's a energy trader, hedge fun guy.
(13:57) And in a way, he's trying to grapple with this same root issue, which is like we have all this abundance. We only have a limited time on this earth. What are we trying to do with it? What what do we want to accomplish before our days are through? And I think that provocation is actually very good. Like the the instinct at the heart of the book is is the right one.
(14:12) But he just like without this deep anchoring in philosophy and history and theology and the kind of very foundations of of reality, he can't come up with good answers. So he starts talking about these amazing birthday parties he had on a beach in the Caribbean which gave him memories which will last forever. Which is like it's great you had a birthday party and it's great that you had your favorite band come and play with you, but that is not the calling.
(14:35) That is that cannot be the central message of existence of life. like we have to get back to to something more profound. If we're to to to come up with a notion that is compelling enough to get the wealthy older generation to start using their wealth in in, you know, a more righteous fashion. So, freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey.
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(16:48) com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin multiig vault. That's TFTCT10 at unchain.com. It seems like the the older wealthy of today, they like these ephemeral experiences. It's it's you'll have those memories forever, but you'll have them. and they're ephemeral for not only you for zooming out and putting your your life on a longer time scale but for society at large.
(17:19) And you you talk about the concept of dominion in beginning of the book too which I think is important to dive into. You really dissect what the Bible meant by the concept of neighbor too and talk about the the story of the good Samaritan. And I think that's another thing that's been lost. And if you look at the new Val rich of of today, particularly in the tech sector, um really trying to give all their wealth to these international charities as possible.
(17:48) They're really losing sight of what's most important, which is having a dominion and loving your neighbor, which is somebody living within that dominion. And there's just this whole trend of thinking that you can save the world by giving all your money to charities that are completely disconnected from your local dominion.
(18:10) Yeah. And when you refuse to recognize this, so so the core question here is is what's called partiality in philosophy. It's can it ever be defensible to to preference those to give especially to those who are close to me either relationally or geographically just because they're close. In other words, if I have £5, can I ever defend giving it to my son as opposed to giving it to someone who's starving in Africa? And I'm convinced the answer is yes.
(18:35) And it's funny when you start, and I can explain that, but when you start ignoring that principle, you very quickly run into these crazy paradoxes, which I think are at the heart of why America is suffering, Britain is suffering right now. You know, there's this famous example in effect of altruism.
(18:50) I think it was Peter Singer that put this forward, but uh it might have been another philosopher. But the the essential question is the provocation is if I'm walking by a river and I'm wearing a very expensive coat and I notice a child drowning in that river and if I climb into the river, I will ruin that jacket and therefore destroy its resale value.
(19:14) Uh but I do manage to sell the one child, save the one child. Is that preferable to going to the nearest shop, selling the jacket, sending the money via an effective altruist charity to Africa uh where it could save 10 children? And some of the people in the effective altruism movement because they've lost this moral foundation of partiality, their answer to that question is actually yes.
(19:37) And they they present this as some kind of like uh checkmate against anyone who wants to who thinks of themselves as like a patriot or thinks of themselves as someone who is rooted in a particular community which is they try to expose hypocrisy using this example like it's it's essentially always preferable to earn as much money as possible to send that money to Africa.
(19:58) I think actually when you start dissolving the we can we can go into the the richer theological and and uh philosophical version of this if if you're interested if you like. Um but the core question here is one of love. Like if you walk past a child and you don't save them and you instead turn to this cold rational calculation about you know effect maximalization.
(20:19) You've lost love. And it's it's really love for those around us, love for those in our family, love for those in our community and our nation. That is the fundamental animating principle in the very bonds of society and of of selflessness at all. And if you yes, it is true that in this instance, if you sold your coat, you might save 10 children's lives.
(20:41) And who knows what circumstances they're going to be raised in. You have nothing to do with them. You'll never meet them. But as soon as you sever that that sort of animating principle of love, it is only a matter of time before everything falls apart. And I think that's what you're seeing now, which is like this trend of of the kind of oligarchs distancing themselves from actual rooted communities living in societies as as the kind of kings that they should be like actually personally responsible for networks of of less well-off people
(21:08) around them, you know, talking to them about their problems and so forth. Instead, living in these slightly uh atomized bubbles with increasingly weird ideas about the right thing to do with their wealth. like that question of love and the philosophy, [snorts] theology and and and history there is is a very interesting and important one to to explore.
(21:26) >> Yeah. Well, let's dive into it because I believe if I recall correctly like the biblical etmology of of neighbor, the the Greek word agape, right? Like that's really what it seeps in. This is and there's three types of of love in Christianity. Gape being one of them. Um, but this is I think it's an important topic to dive into like what are the different types of love and particularly why should you love your neighbor and what what does that do to help build not only a legacy but a functioning society in the long run?
(22:04) >> Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, it's it's kind of this every so often you come across an assumption that deserves to be challenged and as soon as someone questions it, you sort of smack your head and you'll be like, "Oh, yeah, of course." Like that's that's an assumption built on a really shaky foundation.
(22:23) And everyone the kind of core um there are a few, but one of the most important biblical passages on charity is is the parable of the good Samaritan, which most people are familiar with. And that parable tells us to love our neighbor. And in common parliament, everyone says, everyone uses it as if that phrase says something different, which is you have to love everyone everywhere the same all the time.
(22:49) And that is actually not the same thing at all. Like we we at least should question that. The parable of the good Samaritan um the word it uses for neighbor is derived from the coin Greek pleasion which is is akin to proximity. It's akin to uh it means basically it's a spatial component.
(23:08) It means who you're who you're close to and um the parable of of the good Samaritan it's that's actually that theme is integral to the entire parable. It is someone who meets someone else who has an encounter with someone else and as a result uh inherits these diverse responsibilities for their well-being because of that personal encounter.
(23:29) So it's not about a financial transaction. Money is a small element of it later on when he pays the inkeeper to look after him before returning to the destitute man. But you know he pours oil and wine on the man's injuries. He puts him on his own donkey. He personally takes him to the inkeeper. In other words, it's again it's there's this relational component and that of course is integral not just to the word neighbor but to the word charity.
(23:51) Charity is derived from the Latin karas which is in turn exactly as you say derive derived from the biblical Greek agape which is this higher expression of love. And so again, you sort of discover when you start probing into these terms that are at the very root of our thought, people people operate on these very shaky foundations to justify these uh these these grand projects, these philanthropic projects of foundations which they present as obviously moral good and and everyone you I mean I probably you and many of your listeners
(24:23) look at some of these foundations and you think like you have this instinctive negative reaction like there is something that is really off about what they're doing. But because of the confu the confused term of the the language and therefore that kind of poisons the philosophy that that builds off language, you're kind of robbed of any moral language to to question or or or criticize those activities short of like obvious conspiracy theories or just like obvious misdoing.
(24:53) Some some of which exist of course and I go into some of that in the book. But more than that, the the like actual foundations of the project is is pretty questionable. >> Well, this whole concept of locality, I mean, it's applicable to a number of things, not only your duty to your neighbor, another human being, but in the context of this neglect of of duty to build legacy over your dominion within a dominion, uh I think another place in which it manifests is the physical architecture, right? Something we've we've covered over the years here
(25:26) is is urbanism and how the physical environment sort of affects your mentality. And I think pulling on this thread of loving your neighbor. Like I think it highlights the importance of really focusing on a locality for your neighbor. It's like, hey, you have to live with this person and these people and you should make sure that they're taken care of and living good lives and and aspire to be something greater.
(25:53) And that manifests in the architecture as as well to an extent where um if you basically abdicate yourself of any duty to build longlasting be a aesthetically beautiful and sound architecture that's inspiring and makes people feel good to live in a certain place. It's it's not um going to be conducive for a productive society either.
(26:19) >> Yeah. architecture is this wonderful sort of canary in the coal mine that something is really wrong, really sick at the heart of our society, which is just that like most cities now uh are so spiritually innovating. Like you walk around and you're just confronted with a sense of ugliness, of cheapness that you are in some sense being treated like a completely dispensable cog in a machine that can just inhabit any old thing that's as cheap as possible to erect.
(26:47) Um, and it's it's getting to the heart of why that has happened is so interesting and so important. And I think it pulls in a lot of related themes here. I think my my most basic observation is anyone that builds in that way does not have a conviction that their family will be inhabiting the same spot next to that building for generations to come.
(27:12) In other words, the most beautiful buildings in the UK tend to be the great aris aristocratic estates which Britain is famous for that the lovely country houses precisely because they were constructed as a recognition of the dignity of the estate that was handed to the builders and the fact that the builders future generations would inhabit the same spot.
(27:35) But why, if you're not tied to the land in some way, if you're just a floating entity that could live anywhere in the country or internationally, why would you bother to invest in something heavy and beautiful and lasting, something that sort of speaks of the timelessness of values, which I think is is this other thing I' I've written about this elsewhere.
(27:55) If you look at the great architectural marvels of the west to give an example uh the the uh Clooney Abbey which is very very famous and influential uh abbey in France that that influenced a lot of cathedral design monastic design across Europe in uh in the 10th century uh and and was really one of the reasons that Europe looks like it like it looks that the land the Duke of Aquitane who commissioned that he spoke of wanting to transform his temporal goods into something lasting.
(28:29) Like he had this notion that his beliefs connected him with eternity, but not just looking forwards in time. It wasn't a sort of progressive vision of the world. It was an eternal vision of the world in both directions. Like that which has always been beautiful and that which always will be beautiful. It was this kind of um this statement of values interwoven into the physical world through this commission and this sense of the permanence of morality and the human condition and man's struggles and the need for beauty is this kind of this
(28:58) kind of breakthrough into something into something transcendent. And without those values, without you know the kind of like tension between the solidity of existence and place and rootedness and belief in the higher world that you can manifest uh through the creation of beautiful things, the kind of ethics of aesthetics and and and value belief.
(29:20) It's very difficult to build beautiful things. And even like if you think about the way most people build companies now, they build them to sell them. So there's no conviction that like a a corporate building will be in your family's possession 30 years from now. So again, why invest in it as something beautiful? The best thing to do is to build it as cheaply as possible so that your company has the you know the best uh uh you know balance sheet possible can therefore be sold for the maximal sales number and
(29:49) then your family can move somewhere else. And who cares about the people who have to inhabit that building because you have no personal connection? Sorry I keep knocking the microphone. You have no personal connection to them, no moral responsibility to them over and above providing jobs precisely because you've lost this agape, the sense of love for neighbor.
(30:07) So I think it's I think it's all deeply interlin here. But I I like you. I just lament the built environment that we live in now. I think I think it's one of the great sadnesses of our time. >> It really is. That's why I feel fortunate. I've recently moved back to the Philadelphia area which certainly has. It's uh areas where it's lacking in in beautiful aesthetics, but we're we're spoiled with quality builds throughout the city.
(30:34) Um particularly in the part that I'm living in right now. It is. And it's truly inspiring driving driving around. I was driving uh back from dropping [snorts] the the boys off at school today. And I always take the scenic route on the way home cuz there's beautiful stone homes. And it is inspiring.
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(32:01) You don't have to live this way. You can opt out. I opted out four years ago and joined Crowd Health. I've been a Crowd Health member, very happy Crowd Health member for four years. I've had two children, a couple of health events in that time period, and Crowd Health has been there. You pay a monthly fee, you contribute to the crowd.
(32:16) We were paying $1,800 on Cobra as a family of three. Now we're paying around $900 a month as a family of five. And that's with Crowd Health and Direct Primary Care. You can opt out of health insurance. Go to joincrowalth.com/tc. You're going to get $99 a month for the first 3 months if you use the code TFTC. Join crowdhealth.com/TFTC. I mean, on the point of business building, too, there's I think there's a great example of the book of an uh dynastic American family that made a very poor decision.
(32:46) Maybe we can jump into this topic of the importance of [snorts] an individual family, particularly leaders of a family, controlling the wealth and controlling what happens with your money as you pass it on. and you tell the horror story of the Ford family and the the Henry Ford Foundation that um they were sort of forced to start because of a new tax policy, but over time slowly but surely gave up control at the board level and that foundation turned into something that is that would be unrecognizable to Henry Ford and his sons today.
(33:25) >> Yeah. No, exactly. One of the central contentions of the book, one of the central sort of philosophical arguments as to why dynasty is necessary is that there are certain projects, the kind of projects that built the west and our most beautiful buildings, cathedrals and so forth, which are necessarily intergenerational in nature.
(33:43) They take a long time, great resources and careful stewardship of a chain of custodians with the same transcendent values to achieve. The Ford Foundation is is a good example of what happens when you commit to a seemingly uh benign endeavor in the most massive way assuming that good effects will result but you lose that that sort of virtuous family at the heart of the whole thing.
(34:11) So the Ford Foundation essentially what happens is uh Edel Henry Ford the elder are confronted with uh the Roosevelt administration tax policy that you mentioned which demands 70% of large inheritances. They're then presented with this very difficult situation because they risk losing literally everything in that they have their fortune, yes, but they also treasure, I think quite rightly, control over the Ford Motor Company, this incredibly important institution in America at that time, which bears their name and which is really transforming
(34:42) the world and the experience of American life and they want to continue in that legacy and if they have to sell 70% of their estate, they lose the controlling factor in that. So what they decide to do is they decide to give away 70% of their estate preemptively uh as as a tax exemption and uh and and retain basically only the controlling shares the voting shares in in the Ford Motor Company and some other assets.
(35:07) But what they think is okay there is a way of doing this that allows us to sort of retain power charitable control over what we're giving away at least and that's the motivation for setting up a foundation with their name on it. So they can't spend this money on themselves anymore, but at least they can sort of control how good is done in the world.
(35:26) Henry Ford II becomes the chairman of that upon the death of of Edel and Henry Ford the Elder and he becomes quite literally one of the most powerful men in the world. Ford Foundation is the largest foundation in the world. Immensely wealthy and powerful. Uh Henry Ford II is is a very wealthy and powerful person in his own right with his personal fortune.
(35:45) And the only other people on the board of the Ford Foundation are men who are employed by Henry Ford. Essentially, the the Ford Motor Company employees. And uh and the future seems bright. But then what happens is is Henry Ford II starts doubting the importance of continual family control of this chain of custod of custodians with a family legacy with a name with values in common.
(36:11) And he he becomes persuaded that he has to democratize control of this foundation. As a result, and to cut a very long story short, what happens is the board grows. Different people with different values, many of which conflict, enter the board, and essentially Henry Ford II loses control of the Ford Foundation and and and the Ford Foundation uh becomes what Dwight McDonald, the historian, described as a great pile of money with a lot of surrounded by people who want some.
(36:36) It just becomes this kind of like totally unmed but massively powerful due to its wealth factor in society. And it just it starts funding completely contradictory things many of which I mean I and and I imagine you would just view as like morally reprehensible there's uh they they Douglas Ensminger in the 70s establishes this massive sterilization infrastructure in India elsewhere which becomes made mandatory by Indira Gandhi's regime.
(37:04) So there's a sterilization of literally millions of men a year using the infrastructure set up by the Ford Foundation. this kind of weird eugenics completely false theory about uh the so-called population bomb which gripped the world this kind of Malthusianism which gripped the world in the 70s but there's there's loads of other weird stuff they do I mean Lions who's a who's a prominent substacker um and and a very intelligent guy did this investigation a few years ago and there's this huge amount of money going to defunding the police department in
(37:34) Minneapolis going to uh building grassroots Muslim power going to building a uh ESG system with Chinese characteristics that all this just weird stuff that is totally like all of this is essentially political stuff. It's governance stuff. Uh but it's totally unaccountable to anyone. It's unelected. It's it's like they don't the Gates Foundation, for example, doesn't accept any proposals uh to them.
(38:00) They have to like handpick the people who they're going to make donations to to go on projects. So, it's like totally inscrutable, totally out of control, but massively powerful. And I think basically whatever your politics that's just such an unhealthy influence on on society. So my conviction is um that yeah I mean you need this this kind of donastic control this careful set of of uh stewardship responsibilities intergenerational values and you really need a conviction about what you're trying to achieve which I think is is
(38:29) really the key thing that's that's lacking here. Well, it's also indicative of what happens when you when you sort of neglect dominion, right? Because another consequence of this is I think at least partly consequence of this was the degradation of Detroit which obviously the Ford family helped build up and once they seized control of the board of the Ford Foundation that's when it began going out and doing these these things outside of the Dominion of of Detroit Michigan and Detroit is now completely hollowed out.
(39:08) >> Yeah, quite so. Yeah, I mean the Ford family, say what you like about Henry Ford, the Elder, and uh I'm sure people have their issues with him, uh possibly justifiably, but he was loyal to his city. I mean, he built the Henry Ford Hospital. He bought Dearborn Village. he built he he hired a huge number of of different communities including African-American communities at uh strong wages over and above what he had to pay and indeed often when he didn't have good work for them to get these communities like Inkingster through
(39:36) through the depression and uh there was that sense of of stewardship there relationship between a man and his city and I'm not going to present myself as uh an authority on on what happened to Detroit because I know it's complex um you know there's there's An interesting dimension of this that's covered in the book Strong Towns, which is very good as well, which is about the financialization of the infrastructure.
(39:59) But a lot of it has to do with this complete divorce of of people and wealth from sense of place like the globalization of the market, reduced tariffs, but also like when wealthy families stop viewing themselves as rooted in a particular community whose generations are intimately tied to the future of that community and who have to live in the center of that community, then you get these security issues.
(40:26) I mean, imagine if there was a family worth whatever the Ford family would be worth today, tens of billions of of pounds, who had to live in the center of Detroit and was responsible for the security situation there. And the security situation once that goes just means that you get tremendous flight of all kinds of productive communities, businesses and so forth.
(40:46) And it just massively accelerates the process. Um the Charles Murray has has a good book about this coming apart which is like all the kind of intractable problems that come when you move from this model where the elites are dispersed throughout the country each bringing elite competence and resources to bear against the problems of a diverse array of communities to just concentration and you know Martha's Vineyard and a few other places in in in the community and then they can get away with the most ridiculous luxury beliefs because
(41:15) they're totally insulated from all of the consequences of of those beliefs and the rest of the country is kind of left to rot. So yeah, no, I I think you're absolutely right to to to to call out that what happened to to Detroit was just this travesty. Yeah, Strong Towns, another great book.
(41:33) Make sure you read it. Chuck Maron, that that was another book that really opened my eyes. And I think if you're looking for a sort of playbook on how to build a strong town, particularly if you are somebody with a lot of wealth who would like to bring back some of these core concepts um and build a legacy, that's definitely a must readad.
(41:57) on this subject of building a legacy. I think um one concept that you touch on in the book that people uh have a natural aversion to is the concept of nepotism. And you make the case for for why it's good. Why is why is nepotism good? It's a that's a great question. Um, one thing one thing that I really encourage people to do is not to reason about claims like like to reason about the most important issues in their life using these terms that they only tenuously understand and that have this uncertain history that have
(42:37) all kinds of like hostile claims smuggled into them. uh and then without that that sort of deep reflection on what they're actually saying and believe make these very consequential decisions. So like nepotism I let's say everyone uses that term they throw it around right like oh so and so is a nepo baby and that's this incredibly personal slight but why should that be so I mean like acting has always been a family business right 100 years ago 2 3 4 500 years ago these these particular domains these cultural domains are always family
(43:10) businesses uh and and business families have this unique capacity to to to to bring forth genius in their children. Like if you go and and look at the great geniuses of history and perhaps unfortunately many of the most contemporary examples are like sporting stars. Many of them were raised in the context of a family business of being raised from a young age to achieve tremendous things and being raised amongst other people who were excellent in that domain.
(43:44) This is actually the theory of of a Hungarian figure who's interesting called Llo Pulgar who was the father of Judah Pulargar who's the by far the strongest female chess player to ever live and whose sister Zuza was the second strongest uh chess player in the world after uh her and and Judith was such a strong player she's almost a living reputation of the idea that women can't be uh as as good as as the very top men in chess which is like she's the only paradox that somewhat brings brings that that assertion into um into question which does speak to this
(44:19) conviction of llo that a young specialization has all these uh factors which bring forth excellence. So if we're going to reason about nepotism we should at least understand what it is because there there seem to be all these confounding factors like family businesses outperform publicly traded companies in uh the marketplace like this is actually a well-established financial phenomenon.
(44:40) You can look at the work of John A. Davis who's a former professor at Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management. It is pretty well reflected and well understood that family businesses have these unique advantages. Um like their ultra-ong time horizon planning, carefully uh managed and planned succession strategies uh like the fact they have an intrinsic loyalty to the institution that is not simply a mercenary one that people can count on being with the same institution in 5 10 15 20 50 100 years and so are willing to
(45:11) make sacrificial decisions in the short term that pay off in the long term. There's a variety of reasons that so in the face of this observation that like a many of the best sporting players of our age Floyd Mayweather uh you know Max Vistappen I give many examples Tiger Woods the William sisters etc etc you can really go on to like the greatest of all time in pretty much any sport and you'll find that they were raised by a family who played the sport given that this is reflected in sports and business we should really question the idea that
(45:38) like nepotism breeds incompetence and raises ineffectual people to the top so what actually is nepatism. Nepotism means something specific and it doesn't mean what the way that almost everyone uses it today. Nepotism comes from this this very interesting work called Nepotismo de Roma which is um the the nephews of Rome, but it's a reference to it's a Gregorio book in the in the 17th century.
(46:03) It's a reference to this very specific and interesting history which is this institution called the Pope's Nephews. And it's always been in the Catholic Church uh up until quite recently a tradition to bring in a family member of the pope traditionally a nephew to the papal court because it was understood as a as a place of intrigue and inherent instability that required someone of absolute loyalty close to you to help you navigate that court to bring stability in.
(46:28) at a certain point which which had radical ramifications in pretty much every domain of western life. There was a uh a string of popes who were quite clearly corrupted in their role and they bought they had illegitimate sons and they brought them into the church under the pretense that these were pope's nephews and they basically ransacked the church using this illicit connection and that was what became nepotism in the English language.
(46:52) In other words, it was a practice of deception, of infiltration of institutions that were intended to be public by private families in order for enrichment uh of the individual family under a practice of deception. In other words, it's much closer to what we would now term corruption, as in political corruption, than it is merely familial preference within a particular industry for one's own children.
(47:19) And if you stop and think about it like of course if you have a particular excellence within a particular field it is advantageous to pass on that excellence to your children. You have a unique understanding that you have that you can potentially pass on using your incredibly highfidelity high bandwidth relationship to your child.
(47:36) You have relationships that it would be a tremendous shame and it would be a universal loss if you didn't pass on. Um and uh and you have you have as I argue this particular moral responsibility to your child and done correctly that echoes outwards as this tremendous advantage to society at large. Um and so and so yeah, I mean like nepatism means something specific and there are instances in which um corrupting factors conducted under the table can undermine the integrity of a necessary institutional domain and we should be we
(48:14) should be very cognizant of that. I think quite rightly it's it's been brought up in um in uh for example deceptive practices. I think there's a family in the states. Obviously, this isn't my country uh that that has basically been uh has been applying for loans fraudulently and uh and uh I think this is in the motel industry uh has been using a whole financial infrastructure to enrich their own family under the pretense that this is an objective policy.
(48:45) Um that that is suspect. But the the the basic idea of helping your children into the industry that you are excellent in and trying to ensure that they are also excellent in the industry is is like a cornerstone of western society. Like up until about 1950 that is how literally the entire west was built. Well, this gets back to duty and dives into the topic of how do you actually pass along this knowledge? What is what should the relationship with your children look like? How do you how do you fulfill your duty of making sure that you have a legacy? Cuz it it
(49:25) it just doesn't happen. You need to actually work towards it and what are the best practices to make sure that your children understand the the gravity of of what you're passing down to them. >> Yeah, great question. So this was a dimension that I didn't anticipate being an integral part of the book when I started it.
(49:46) I thought it it would be a philosophical defense of at a conceptual level of dynasty of generational wealth of a stable upper class. But actually what I realized as I went on was that it was actually not possible to defend that proposition if people did not have a framework to pass on stability, virtue, um, an ambition for greatness in the context of wealth.
(50:13) And that's something that I think we've really lost in our society for reasons I'll go into in a second. So what I did was I went and I looked for the great families of the West who had successfully passed on wealth stably. They'd grown it over many generations. Typically, these are aristocratic families, although they're not exclusively aristocratic families.
(50:32) And who had achieved the kinds of things that I argue we need in the book. These kind of great projects, beautiful architecture, artistic patronage, cultural sophistication, concepts like fair play, manners, etiquette, taste, the upholding of the physical and spiritual health of of particular communities.
(50:49) And there really are examples of that. So I tried to distill out of them these principles for raising healthy families uh that that are capable of these things. And without that, if you if you don't have access to a framework like that, I do actually totally understand why people like uh why people feel like disinheriting their children because they're conscious that they they simply don't have a methodology to ensure the children raised in the context of wealth that experience these tremendous wealth events will be able to be virtuous, will
(51:20) find purpose, will find discipline and drive and entrepreneurship. I get it. If the only way you know how to pass those virtues on is by putting someone in this kind of dog eat dog competitive marketplace then then that's that's the only way of ensuring you have hardworking children. And I I understand why that's your instinct.
(51:39) However, the history shows that that is not necessary and indeed if that is the route that you pursue, you can never have these multigenerational great works which I which I argue is a tremendous shame. I think what basically what's happened is it used to be that society was naturally set up so that you could pass on wealth to your children without corrupting them.
(52:01) In other words, if you go back to 1819 and before in the US almost every family, 90% of families are agrarian workers typically working small personally held farms. And when a patriarch passed on his wealth to his children, what he was actually doing was passing them a farm and some other assets, perhaps a house, etc. And so, yes, you're passing on them them on wealth, but this isn't highly liquid wealth.
(52:24) This isn't wealth that it's easy to squander. This is wealth that makes demands of the children. They then have to work that land. They have to use it for its purpose. What happens is in the 20th century there are these two over overwhelming trends uh which have healthy upsides which are why they're accelerated but which also have these unforeseen downsides.
(52:44) Those two trends are a massively increased class mobility. So you get people who come from quite humble backgrounds being some of the wealthiest men in history particularly in the tech sector but elsewhere as well. And those people don't have the rooted aristocratic practices which I talk about in the in the book, the traditions, the ways of raising children in the context of wealth because they're first generation wealth.
(53:06) They have no contact with the tradition of of raising healthy wealthy uh western children. The second thing is this overwhelming trend towards the liquidity of wealth. So it used to be that yes even aristocrats were very wealthy but again their wealth was bound up in physical estates that they couldn't sell um you know productive land around the estate that had to be managed if not actively worked uh art which was particular to their family and was therefore not liquid etc etc.
(53:34) So they had some liquid wealth but they they were basically inheriting these assets that were tremendously luxurious but made again these great demands of stewardship of dominion. That all changes in the 20th century. Uh so you can now pass on wealth in entirely liquid assets as is in fact now the norm.
(53:52) You know it's expected that children will sell their parents house. If they even inherit a house they might just inherit liquid cash or stocks and shares which which are easy to to and and even during a patriarch's lifetime it's likely if they start a family business they'll sell it. So it really is essential to to actually ask at a foundational level, how can we achieve a level of stability in the midst of all this chaos? And uh and I have a few chapters on this.
(54:22) Um uh and and they basically fall into three categories. Let me sign my uh content page here so I can accurately describe. Um the first is is raising children worthy of empires. Uh that's a that's a chapter name. Um, and the the principles there are essentially how to raise children in a context where they intensely feel this sense of duty, this call to greatness from a young age.
(54:50) And that takes on a variety of forms. It takes on uh faith and and the very presence of virtues in their lives. It takes on their intensity of their contact with family heroes, the the greatest men of of the family and civilization that they're particular to who have went on before. It takes on the playing of dangerous games.
(55:10) Uh sports, you know, the aristocracy have always engaged in in in more dangerous games than the rest precisely because they need to learn to master self-discipline in the face of risk, of pain, of hardship. That's why the aristocracy have always engaged in this paradoxical relationship where they have the most to lose and yet they frivolously it seems engage in hunting bo and jousting and combat tournaments and so forth.
(55:34) Uh because it brings out this self-sacrificial um relationship with with difficulty that is necessary. the importance of ritual uh which is the assumption of these lived practices which your forefathers did before you which your your generations which follow you will will take on themselves and it's a it shifts you from this this moment into eternal time uh and I talk particularly about Christmas as this very interesting example of an institution in which all generations are sort of contemporaneous like they all return for one day a year
(56:08) to the same practices the same values is the same vision of the world. Um, and and there's there's a lot else. I mean, I'm not just going to provide you with a huge list, but um, tell me tell me where you want to go with that. And uh, but I this was the most fun series of chapters to write just because like researching all these all these strange aristocratic families that had achieved tremendous things was was very fun.
(56:30) Well, how much importance does the extended family come into this? Cuz I think of my family, I feel very fortunate. I come from a large Irish Catholic family. My mom was the youngest of eight and uh they started this tradition of bringing the whole family down to the beach every summer and we still keep that going to this day where now between myself, aunts, uncles, cousins, and now their children.
(56:58) Uh we've got a pretty big group that that returns to the beach. And I like to think this is sort of anchoring us in this ideal of like, hey, we're a strong family and this is how we do things. >> Yeah. I'm not sure. Um, and this is the first time I've thought about this, so don't take this as a canonical answer.
(57:17) I'm not sure it's it's the fact of the size of the family itself that is the important factor there. It's the two things that are implied by that. Large families tend to have a series of values and often transcendent religious beliefs which are motivating the family due to like they are they are making sacrifices for higher ideals.
(57:43) Having a large family is a difficult thing. Uh I I've got a few kids myself uh and I've had them since I was quite young and it it I mean it certainly makes your life more challenging. It's a wonderful and rewarding experience. But but in my in my case and as in the case of of many of my friends, um we although we knew it would be inconvenient to have children young before our careers were fully formed, we did feel this divine mandate to have children to sort of create new souls to worship God.
(58:14) Now that might not be your religious conviction, but nevertheless it is a common observation that these very large families are motivated by transcendent ideals which they are placing their family at the service of. And whenever you do that, whenever you have this this transcendent framework that the family is subject to, you again build this capacity for stability, for greatness of vision, um for discipline in the face of temptation.
(58:39) The other thing is that it's a very healthy behavior and it's the sign of a well functioning family when they make an effort to all get together several times a year. It shows that they value family. They value their identity as members of the family that they place uh personal investment in the the sort of uh integrity of the family, the honor of the family name, that their their self-conception, their identity integration is is is well established.
(59:07) Um, and also it's it's just like a logistic ch uh task. Like a lot of people have this inertia when it comes to family like yeah I'll call my dad a few times a year but it takes a motivated disciplined family to all get together uh several times a year especially to enact these very healthy sort of civilizationally affirming rituals.
(59:27) Like again I'm not American but I really appreciate the the the importance of something like Thanksgiving where the family gets together they inhabit these rituals that every other family in the country shares that their forefathers have before them that hopefully their children will after them and in so doing society and the family attains a solidity and an integration uh metaphysically speaking which which I think is tremendously important.
(59:51) >> Yeah, it really is. And it's it's I mean This dovetales into what I think is one of the biggest [sighs] problems in society right now, particularly in the United States and I imagine um in England as well, is this delay in family formation, which many are attributing to the economic stress that younger generations are under.
(1:00:19) And others would extend that further and attribute it to the fact that the older generations refuse to throw millennials and generation Z a bone financially to help get them on this their feet. And again, going back to duty, it seems like there's a dereliction of duty on the older generations to seed um the continuation of their families, for lack of a better phrase there.
(1:00:48) Yeah. No, I I think this question of family and uh society's very ability to to reproduce the sort of natalism birth rate question is intimately tied up across every generation in different ways to this question of wealth and duty being divorced from each other. Um so in some sense well let let me let me let me give you an example.
(1:01:15) There's a very important demographer in this in this exact space called Lyman Stone. He's the one of the common sources whenever you see a study on um you know the effects of X and Y on birth rates is often Lyman Stone or the Institute of Family Studies which is where he works that is the root of that.
(1:01:32) So he does very important work and I'd encourage people to check him out. Um it's his conviction and I don't totally share it but it's his conviction that almost all of this is reducible to the fact that fewer people are getting married now that birth rates tend to be downstream from the marriage rate and the marriage rate is but like if you isolate like married couples especially couples who married young they're still having children at a at a relatively high level uh that is broadly representative of our of our forefathers And so actually what is happening is
(1:02:05) that we're downstream of a relationship recession as it were rather than a total lack in having interest in having children in and of itself cuz actually if you poll people the majority although it is going down but the great majority of people still say that they want to have children uh and yet most of them will go on to never have children.
(1:02:25) I think that that's like there are a range of reasons for this but in my opinion a central reason for it is you know it's often lamented now that oh I wish people just had this instinct for marriage like previous generations did like weren't the novels of Jane Austin so wonderful cuz there was such a lived sense of romance and people just had this instinct for marriage and stable relationships and so forth but actually if you look at the civilizational practices of those prior generation ations the whole of society was making a
(1:02:58) huge investment in ensuring that institutions were maintained and patronized that got young people together in these stable pairings again and again until they pair bonded. So in in Georgian London which is the the context of the novels of of Jane Austin um there was this whole marriage circuit uh there was what was called the marriage season where all people from the same social class would coalesce around London for 3 months.
(1:03:27) There would be a specific calendar of events which was maintained and patronized, funded by the older generations who would expect their own children to participate. And they would make it attractive to do so by, you know, introducing an element of luxury to these balls, to the opera, to social visits, to visits to pleasure gardens and so forth.
(1:03:47) And they would, you know, there was a compact. Yes, the young would be expected to pair bond and to produce marriages and grandchildren to to make their their parents happy. But at the same time, it was understood that the parents were expected to make a tremendous financial and personal investment in maintaining this infrastructure.
(1:04:04) And uh and I think it is true that the younger generation especially, you know, they've lost their their their faith in this the the single importance of marriage taking that oath in front of a community of eternal, you know, commitment to your spouse. They've lost their faith in that. And I think that is that's a travesty in and of itself.
(1:04:22) But you know, for anyone older out there, I would really encourage you to think carefully about all the ways in which you're not helping your children getting married and having children that you could be cuz that is of civilizational importance. Yeah. And I mean this gets into the effect of tech technology on the interpersonal relationships particularly of younger people because the Jane Austin uh scenes that you just described.
(1:04:50) I mean, they don't really happen anymore. People are literally looking at their phones looking for uh a partner to potentially pair up with and meet 101. These sort of long-held traditions of I mean, here in the United States, remember when I lived in the South, I went to Catillian, you had the Debutton balls.
(1:05:12) Um you you were sort of forced to go learn etiquette, manners, and learn how to dance with a girl. Um, and you were expected to go to those classes and then eventually when you get old enough you have the Debon ball. Um, I I think that's still alive and well in parts of the south, but I think of here up north, I guess we have dances and things like that, but particularly for children or te like later teens, early early 20s, it seems like those types of events are have been completely replaced with this sort of fast moving dating scene enabled by these these apps, which
(1:05:52) I think are terrible. for men and women of this age. And again, I don't want to harp on my family too much, but I met my wife. My wife's best friends with my cousin. My mother and father-in-law were friends with my aunts and uncles. I we often joke we're as close to a an arranged marriage as you can get, but there was um and we met participating in the tradition of my family going down the shore, going to the beach in the summer.
(1:06:24) And I think we did have conditions that sort of led us to each other um which are being lost definitely. Yeah. I mean there's there's this there's this odd thing now where it's it's the upper classes who are able to weather the storm best. to in part to, you know, Rob Herson who calls this luxury beliefs.
(1:06:46) This idea that they're making very bad social and and sort of ethical decisions, but they're able to insulate themselves from the worst effects of that by sheer resources. Um, uh, and it's really the people further down the socioeconomic ladder that really feel this the worst. You know, when when poor people get divorced or are never married in the first place and and have children, whether intentional or not, it creates all kinds of stresses that you just can't escape from.
(1:07:10) And that becomes a very destructive cycle. But if you actually isolate the top elements of society, many of them are still quietly making sure that a lot of that infrastructure is there for their own children. There's a very interesting example in France. France the kind of it's it's actually unlike other countries.
(1:07:28) There's an element of the French elite who are quite radically conservative. Uh they're not necessarily outspoken about it, but unlike in England where the the the wealthy elite are very liberal. Same in Germany, same in America. largely although obviously there are geographic divides in America the French old aristocracy are still quite conservative and uh Pascal Manuel Guli who's a commentator on Twitter and Substack uh who has sort of proximity to this class he wrote he wrote this this essay that I reference in the book on his publication accelerationist about
(1:08:00) how these people act in private and it's very very interesting they have a system called le which is like a calendar of social events carefully happens under the table invite only to introduce their children to each other from quite a young age uh to do dancing, cultural activities exactly as you describe, etiquette and still quietly they they recognize the enduring necessity of these institutions.
(1:08:24) But I think you know the whole of society would just be a better place if we if everyone engaged in something like this. I mean you know you read bowling alone by Robert Putnham which is about the social fabric of 1950s America. People are going out multiple times a week to social events, to civic associations, to local, you know, performances.
(1:08:43) They're just this the the social fabric is so intense, so interconnected that it it's just this incredibly lifeaffffirming existence. And, you know, if you go back into Old England, there's this whole calendar of festivals, fates, pranks, you know, it's it's this wonderfully colorful, intensely social environment that that we've really lost.
(1:09:05) Um, so yeah, anything anything that people of means can do and again it's rooted in a community, it's rooted in love, it's rooted to personal relationships, all of these like that's how you thicken the social fabric around you. Anything you can be to to not maxim not be maximally sort of transient and ephemeral and that's very poisonous.
(1:09:25) Uh, so this this question of like rooted patron patronage becomes uh becomes essential. So what are the first steps to get back to this? How do we climb out of this morass that society seems to be stuck in right now? I you know there's there's there's there's sort of two things two two core themes to the to the book.
(1:09:54) The first is uh the first is about raising children who the book is sort of framed in raising children in the context of wealth. to go on to achieve great things. But really, it's it's universally applicable in that we all live in an incredibly material uh materially abundant culture now, even if a lot of those material abundances are in kind of cheap and disposable items like TVs and who knows what on the internet and so forth.
(1:10:20) Um and and that brings intense temptation that really it was it was only some members of the upper classes that would have had uh in in the past. I mean if you think about the temptations of lust now every young man has that in his pocket all the time and and young women whereas you know that kind of like seeming scale of choice would have been available to a very select few members of previous generations.
(1:10:43) The point there is to say that there's actually a lot we can learn all of us can learn from the great families who raised virtuous children in the face of temptation uh from from generations that went before. And some of this is incredibly basic. Like it's it's it's fun lifeaff affirming stuff. It's not grueling.
(1:11:01) It's you know having dinner with your children talking to them teaching them values and so forth which a surprising number of people don't do including in the new vo there's there's this kind of accepted thing of grinding working super long hours to make as much money as possible to you know maximize shareholder value. and uh and you know the glorification of the 6:00 a.m.
(1:11:22) to to you know 9:00 p.m. grind which is actually very destructive to raising children and you won't be able to pass that wealth on to them if they're not ready to receive it. So uh so there's that element of it. there's like raising children and then I think I think the second thing is like there's a lot of very wealthy people who I consider to be fundamentally well-intentioned but misled due to this uh slightly pathological uh culture of philanthropy that has arisen and it really does concern this rootedness of community, this love of neighbor as a as a proper understanding
(1:11:54) of charity. And the final chapter in the book is like attempting to provide inspiration on all of the ways that you can start reviving the social fabric of your particular community and family looking at examples from contemporary charity and the great families and men of the west.
(1:12:14) Um but I I think those two things like children and place are neglected in today's society to our great detriment. Yeah, that's I mean particularly the tech elite and I tweeted this out on Thanksgiving. I saw that you saw it, but that's all I could think of after reading a few chapters that morning was if you look at the tech class, the billionaire class there, it's a lot of uh ch childless men who have billions of dollars that are extremely philanthropic.
(1:12:48) no connection to any particular locality. And I didn't mention this in the tweet, but there a lot of them are transhumanists. It seems like they're trying to separate themselves from our humanity. And it is actually incredibly frightening when you think that the wealthy elite um the upcoming wealthy elite of our age think this way.
(1:13:14) >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, it's it's sort of like one step removed from being um being removed from your community is actually being removed from the very essence of the self, you know, [snorts] and attempting to transcend your your mortal existence. Um, and there's a lot I could say about that.
(1:13:35) That that's a that's a whole that's a whole other >> expand on let's expand on because I think it's important and I and I hope some of the individuals in this particular class would be introspective about this and it is like I watching like that Brian Johnson guy who's trying to live forever. He's doing all these experiments live streaming himself doing five grams of mushrooms like it's some sort of public experiment that people are going to get value out of.
(1:13:59) It's like what are you doing? um what what is the purpose of all this? >> Well, it's it's for me it's difficult to discuss this subject in a compelling way to people who don't already believe what I believe. And the reason for that is when it comes to morality and this life, fundamentally I believe what I believe and I act what I act and I argue what I argue because of the most foundational truth claims that I hold dear about the world.
(1:14:31) And those are basically theological convictions, faith. And I can nevertheless go out and I can argue on secular podcasts. I've been on some finance podcasts and so forth with non-Christians. um quite confidently because I believe in natural law. In other words, I believe that like every uh aspect of our material reality is in some way reflective of fundamental truths.
(1:14:55) Which is why even from the pre-Christian cultures you know the culture of Aristotle Aristotle had so much access to the truth to correct ideas about the good the beautiful and so forth despite not having a Christian faith because he was he was an intelligent perceptive contemplative person who looked about and he saw the sort of reflection of the divine in creation itself and was able to reason from there.
(1:15:21) Now because of the fact that existence itself sort of aligns with divine truth you can therefore make these kind of like secular practical arguments with people who don't believe about like why it's right to believe certain things. The problem is is that when you start talking about eternity itself like in some sense I believe that it is good to die and even I mean you know God willing should I should I die not in a state of mortal sin it it would be a good thing to die like you want to you want to ultimately meet your maker gaze upon the
(1:15:58) beatotific vision in eternity forever more. Um, but it's difficult to argue with someone that believes that like death is it, it's the end. Uh, there's nothing after that when it comes to life itself, you know? And so like that is not to say that there is no discussion to be had on the subject of transhumanism.
(1:16:21) It's more to say that like the discussion that needs to be had is is a really deep philosophical and theological discussion about the very substrate of existence itself which is difficult to sort of casually transition into. I mean you can of course make observations like um it's very unclear to me what good a lot of these people are actually doing in the lives of the people who surround them.
(1:16:48) Um but uh but yeah that I mean that's that's a that's a big discussion. >> Yeah. And it's well I'm sure you've seen the trend too a lot a few most famously Nicole Shanahan of the ex techwives I think they're beginning to have this realization. I mean she very publicly converted to Christianity even the last couple of years and more recently I believe last week was uh opining on how uh disappointed she was in herself for thinking that she could change the world through the world economic forum specifically and I do have optimism and
(1:17:32) hope that we are getting to such an extreme polarized part of I guess the the pendulum swing of of time where people are beginning to wake up. There's there's there's something innate and um intuitive that comes into play and things get off track too much. And I feel like we're reaching that point where people are really beginning to become more introspective and think what are we actually doing here? Is this the right path moving forward? Which is a good sign in my opinion.
(1:18:08) Definitely. Yeah. I mean the the the kind of uh devil's bargain of philanthropy is we're not going to take care of our like personal relationships first and foremost. Uh because the classic model of like community centered religious charity is essentially paliotative in that it it goes to people who are suffering in society and tries to ease their suffering.
(1:18:29) So it typically takes the form of like arms giving to the poor or donations to hospitals or like feeding the needy, sheltering, you know. So it's like taking someone who's suffering and trying to ease their suffering as an expression of love and kindness. What philanthropy does is it says actually like we're going to dispense with the theological convictions.
(1:18:46) This comes out of like Andrew Cariegi, the gospel of wealth, a whole set of interesting changes. Um and we're actually going to go to what we perceive to be the source of these problems because we believe in our fundamental power now that we have these sciences of sociology, psychology, and so forth. uh to to actually like alter the fundamental things which are giving rise to suffering in the first place.
(1:19:08) So we can actually eliminate poverty. It's like a fundamental claim of someone who's a committed philanthropist. The problem there is that once you do that, you are no longer engaging in charity. You're basically engaging in like macroeconomic management, politics, and so forth. And as soon as you make that transition in your mind, you are faced with this tremendous temptation that I think many great men of our age have fallen prey to, which is like you're like, "Oh, if only I had a bit more power, then I could really solve these
(1:19:36) root issues. If only I had a bit more power, I could really, you know what, maybe maybe my foundation's not big enough. Maybe I should convince other people to donate their billions to my foundation as well. And maybe I can partner up with the World Economic Forum. And maybe I can." And it just becomes this like it becomes this this centralization of power.
(1:19:54) This this this confluence in their minds of some misconception of charity plus bureaucracy plus very speurious scientism plus uh you know like powerful government, centralized institutions, international action that is like at a certain point you have to stand back and be like oh yeah wait there's actually more people living in abs there's there's twice as many people living in absolute poverty in Africa as there was in the '90s.
(1:20:20) Like what are we doing? Like people all over America are dying deaths of despair. What are we doing? Like clearly whatever this is is not it's not only spiritually dead, it's like materially bankrupt. Like I'm sure I'm sure you could point to victories, right? Because there's just there's so much effort and so much money going around that I'm sure there are defensible and important lines that some of these foundations have done, but fundamentally their model of the world is broken and that's leading to a lot of harm.
(1:20:44) >> Yeah. my favorite uh my favorite sort of LAR in the uh the realm of us Americans were going to go save Africa. I believe it was the actor Ashton Kutcher ran this big uh malaria net uh drive. They've raised millions of dollars to get malaria nets. uh I forget in exactly what country in Africa and they came to find that they just used the nets as as uh fishing fishing nets and and drained part of the uh the area of all all their fish.
(1:21:18) And the highlights again if you have this dislocation physically from dominion like and it goes back to central planning more broadly which is something I like to focus on a lot um particularly as it pertains to monetary economics and the effects of central planning on monetary economics have very perverse negative externalities.
(1:21:39) No one individual or small group of individuals should be able to control the most important tool arguably that we use as humans which is money which the lack of proximity to the actual problems that are hurting everyday Americans particularly in the middle of the country that cannot be solved by a bunch of people in the eles building uh making minute lever pulls on what the interest rate should be or how much money should be in the system in any given point in time And similarly with the malaria net case, it's like you do not know what's
(1:22:13) actually happening on the ground in the very nuanced variables of the problems that exist and how the introduction of another variable will be received where Ashton Kutcher thought like, oh, they're all just going to use the malaria to protect themselves from from mosquitoes. And it turned out to be a laughable sort of example of the uh the hubris of somebody to think that they could actually know what is needed to solve the problems in that exact locality.
(1:22:47) Thousands of miles. >> Yeah. >> My my conviction is like it's not that we should be ignoring Africa. It's just that like if if you feel that's your calling then move there. And I'm like completely serious about that. I mean there there's there's someone um there's someone who's quoted in the book a guy called Robert Lupton and Robert Lupton is a career charity guy and I think he's a real hero and he he runs this uh organization called FCS focused community strategies and he wrote this expose called toxic charity which
(1:23:15) actually looks at the real world effects of these very large philanthropic endeavors and often they cause like complete chaos. I mean like the the classic model that they all follow is something like uh you know people in uh Sudan, South Sudan need clothes so we're going to ship uh you know 500 tons of clothes into South Sudan and you just wipe out the entire textile industry of South Sudan and they never recover from that.
(1:23:40) It's it's just like these silly blunders like that. And what Robert Lton does is he he actually just moves to whatever community. He lives in the middle of whatever community he wants to improve and he commits like 10 years. He yes he solicits uh donations. Yes, he deploys financial resources but never without having a deep and intimate relationship with everyone who is interacting with those resources and their downstream effects. And it's a gradual process.
(1:24:08) It's a layered nuanced complex process. It's a it's a process which never divorces cause from effect or shies away from complexity. It's iterative and uh and yeah it's just like where's the spirit of adventure? I mean there's always been eccentric westerners who have moved to like remote places in the world and and tried to achieve great things and I think you know the age of adventure is upon us again.
(1:24:34) So uh so yeah I mean people should do that. Yeah, if you want to solve the problem, you got to be close to the problem. Now, I guess just to wrap up, I know you mentioned before we hit record, you're not really well verssed in Bitcoin, but I do think we both agree that um to achieve some of these legacy goals, you need to be able to store wealth and pass it on.
(1:24:57) And I think that's where we align very tightly is this idea that being wealthy is not a bad thing. It is virtuous, especially if you're bringing good things into the world and doing good things within your dominion and um following your duty, living up to your duty to do good in the world and love your neighbor.
(1:25:21) And I think one of the ways in which that's been corrupted is the fact that it has actually been harder for people to build and more importantly preserve wealth to lower their time preference to think about legacy and improving their dominion. And that's one thing I truly believe and have witnessed just within my own life and [snorts] um observing others who've been in Bitcoin for a while.
(1:25:50) I think it is possible to um use Bitcoin to build wealth and then focus on these legacy questions and really be intentful about it. And I I think it's actually one of the biggest parts of the equation is how do you actually preserve that wealth? Like what are the mechanisms to your point earlier? the the wealth that's passed down these days is in completely ill or liquid assets that are certainly liquid, but they're being continuously debased because we're just printing money and debasing the the unit by which we measure wealth uh more broadly. And so I think there is a a
(1:26:32) very important role for Bitcoin to play in all of this. >> Yeah, I buy that. I mean um I think two things are intention. The first is like to the extent that Bitcoin can protect you from inflationary pressures where a centralized institution is essentially devaluing your money in order to pursue their own agenda that could be a very good thing for the empowerment of specific communities because you actually have sovereignty over your wealth.
(1:26:59) On the other hand, there is a tension that [clears throat] I see in Bitcoin, which is the one's relationship with money can become pathological when one loses sight of the fact that it is ultimately intended to bring about real world goods. In and of itself, money is not a moral quality. It's not a moral good. In fact, it's a source of temptation.
(1:27:21) but lived as a tool to achieve real world effects that do good for the people around you to whom you have a moral responsibility and and whom you can uplift and love. It's a very powerful tool. So, um I think like Bitcoin is a is a fascinating endeavor and potentially one that can do a lot of good but but like conviction in Bitcoin alone is is is possibly not enough.
(1:27:44) It has to be accompanied with a vision of how to transform uh that that asset into real world goods and and what those goods should be and why they should exist and so forth. So so avoid the sin of I mean this is turning into a sermon. I don't mean it to be a sermon but if if you know avoid the sin of avarice which is like obsession with money quam money and like have I think greatness of vision a very invigorating thing is to to imagine the things you can actually do in the world as it were.
(1:28:12) No, I'm very happy you said that. I think it's very important because there are many within Bitcoin who view it as like um I mean Michael Sailor most famously, I'm going to buy as much Bitcoin as possible and then I'm burning my keys when I die. Um another childless billionaire. Um and I and and I completely disagree with that um that view of Bitcoin or that perspective on what Bitcoin is and what it's meant to achieve.
(1:28:41) I think uh I think it's incredibly important to use it as a tool to do good in the world. And so I'm very very happy that you brought that up and uh for our audience particularly which is filled with a lot of Bitcoiners to think about that because it is important. Um there's many people too focused on the end state of Bitcoin's full monetization.
(1:29:02) It's like, well, you can use it as this as this tool to do good along the way because who knows how long it will actually take to reach the the full potential that you believe it will. Yeah, absolutely. Leaving a legacy, inheritance, charity, and thousand-year families. We didn't get on the thousand-year families, but maybe we can do that another time.
(1:29:24) Johan, this was an incredible joy for me. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for all the work that you do um with your Substack becoming noble. Uh it's incredibly important work. I truly believe that I think we need a a shift in in the mentality particularly in western society in terms of what are we doing here? How are we building for the long term? And what is our legacy going to be um for our generation particularly as millennials, Gen Z, boomers? It's not too late to start thinking
(1:29:58) about it either. Um, I think uh there's a lot of uh boomer hate out there, but I know there are many good good uh boomers out there that are they're thinking about this stuff as well, but we just need I think these ideas to become more popular and uh people need to think more intently about these things. >> Well, it's uh it's been a complete pleasure and I'm I'm really really grateful for the invitation.
(1:30:24) So, thank you. >> Well, you enjoy your night and uh that's all we have today. Peace of love, freaks. Okay, thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family.
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