Transcript: Johann Kurtz: Why Billionaires Shouldn't Give It All Away

Johann Kurtz [0:01] Johann Kurtz, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to talk. I am as well. Freaks for those of you who are unaware of Johan's work, his sub-stack bestseller Being Noble, he just came out with a book, Leaving a Legacy, which I've been reading through over the last week, opened it on Thanksgiving morning, read a few chapters while my children were playing, watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and I think it was very apt to be reading this book. on that morning, particularly surrounded by my family on a holiday. 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 long running thread on this show throughout this year, particularly about this clash of the generations we're seeing in the West, particularly baby boomers.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ verse Millennials Gen Z. 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 duty, particularly as it pertains to their kids and how they would pass down wealth. 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 a millennia. I think maybe starting there is what, how would you describe the state of this sort of positioning between the generations right now.

Johann Kurtz [2:03] 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. And when I started pulling at this thread that became the subject of the book 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ But really as I started pulling on this thread 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. So there's this very interesting book by Higarney and 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 rates and spent at a sensible rate for someone in that wealth bracket, the thousand wealthiest families then should have turned into 16,000 billionaire families today, but there are only sort of 700.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And this speaks to this wider question of why are we so bad at constructing permanent things? Why? 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 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 culture of impermanence that I think both you and I, from different perspectives, are trying to begin to resolve.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And I have my theories as to how this arose, but I think there's

Johann Kurtz [4:22] a rich discussion to be had there. Well, having read the book, I think the story of King Edward is particularly interesting. 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 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 was completely abandoned his duty. And I think that's indicative of what's happening at a wider scale here in the West right now. It's not only a king sort of releasing himself from his duty and not recognizing the profundity of that, but we're beginning to see that seep into the culture more widely.

Johann Kurtz [5:25] 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. And as those beliefs shift, actually a lot of the things that we assumed would live forever just start falling apart. You know, in the case of Edward VIII, 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ It all starts very early. 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. And as they lost faith in their own belief system, they started to undermine their own. position or credibility in society. know, Edward the eighth was committing adultery with the woman who he went on to marry an American, but we won't blame you for that. And as such, wanting them 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 institution of the monarchy, were clearly at odds with the lived values of the people who inhabited them.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And I think something like that has happened more broadly to all of us. And I think, you know,

Johann Kurtz [7:15] So you like about about Christianity and I am a Christian, but at least Christianity gave the wealthy men of the West an entire integrated framework of duty, a way of understanding their place in the world, why they had what they had, how they were morally. responsible for their children and charity and so forth. It was a time-tested framework. And now that 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, outside the context of that moral superstructure of Christendom, If not Christianity, and you know, I'm a partial here, but if not Christianity, we do need to form this entire coherent philosophy of duty as to the nature of the affluence we've built, like what is its purpose?

Johann Kurtz ⋮ It can't just be creating more and then indulging more because there's 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 that is doing great damage to society.

Johann Kurtz [8:32] No, really is, and it's perplexing as a Christian myself. it... I'm trying to think of all the phrases because I was actually reading something this morning. Maybe we'll just lean into it. Do you think a lot of what we're seeing in terms of this hedonism, 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 kids you need to work hard. 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 passages you have throughout it that really anchor these sort of core building blocks of a flourishing society that are being completely thrown to the wayside these days.

Johann Kurtz [9:41] Yeah, well, I mean, it's there's this phenomenon that takes place in really all areas of society. You can see some reflection of this, which is the enlightenment comes and it challenges as it does sort of enlightenment tenants become popular amongst different areas of society. They challenge the sort of foundations of belief, long held convictions, traditions and so forth. And in some ways that has incredibly positive effects. You know, the separation of science from kind of natural science. where there's all kinds of like dubious philosophical priors that are actually inhibiting the evolution of science. In some ways there are benefits there. In other ways it has, I think, detrimental effects on society, but that is not immediately obvious, because people just have ways of doing things, they have certain assumptions, they grow up in a cultural milieu that still basically inherits all its traditions and all its assumptions from what came before.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And so the kind of... the kind of instability at the very base of society, at very base of existence is not immediately apparent. And I think something like that has happened with property, with private property, which is that when Jong-ok comes in and sort of establishes this very formalized notion of private property to oversimplify a complex transition. 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 Westerners always had.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ But interestingly, actually, if you look at the philosophy of John Locke as it regards to children and the sovereignty of the individual, he has a lot of trouble 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 of sort of what becomes liberalism. But

Johann Kurtz [11:45] But yeah, I mean, I think one's relationship to property is really part of this. 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 licit. It is justifiable for some people to have this tremendous wealth and power in society. But dominion, as the theologian Andrew Willard Jones put it, carries with it the burden of rule. It's much closer to this notion of kingship than merely being rich. As in you have your wealth for a purpose. It comes with demands upon you 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 The root word there is is domus its 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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 indulgence. And we sort of lose all natural restraints on the extent to which people feel ashamed about indulging in themselves. You end up with very strange things. Like there's this book that I really don't like, although I think, Well, 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 an energy trader, hedge fund guy.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And in a way he's trying to grapple with the 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 do we want to accomplish before our days are through? And I think that provocation is actually very good. Like the instinct at the heart of the book is the right one. But he just like without this deep anchoring in philosophy and history and theology and the kind of very foundations 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.

Johann Kurtz [13:55] 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. That cannot be the central message of existence, of life. Like we have to get back to something more profound if we're to come up with a notion that is compelling enough to get the wealthy older generation to start using their wealth in a more righteous fashion. That's a great example. It seems like the older wealthy of today, they like these ephemeral experiences. You'll have those memories forever, but you'll have them.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And they're ephemeral for not only you, if you're zooming out and putting your life on a longer time scale, but for society at large. And you talk about the concept of dominion in beginning of the book. 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 story of the Good Samaritan. And I think that's another thing that's been lost. And if you look at the Nouveau rich of today, particularly in the tech sector, really trying to give all their wealth to these international charities as possible, they're really losing sight of what's most important.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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.

Johann Kurtz [15:40] Yeah, and when you refuse to recognize this, so the core question here is what's called partiality in philosophy. It's can it ever be defensible 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 five pounds, 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. And it's funny when you start, and I can explain that, but when you start ignoring that principle, you very quickly run into into these crazy paradoxes, which I think are at the heart of why America is suffering, Britain is suffering right now.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ You know, there's this famous example in effective altruism. I think it was Peter Singer that put this forward, but it might've been another philosopher. But 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. 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, where it could save 10 children?

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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. And they present this as some kind of like a 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 I think actually when you start dissolving that we can we can go into the richer theological and

Johann Kurtz [17:34] philosophical version of this if you're interested, if you like. 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, affect maximalization. You've lost love and 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 selflessness at all. if you, yes, it is true that in this instance, if you sold your coat, you might save 10 children's lives and who knows what circumstances they're gonna be raised in.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ You have nothing to do with them. You'll never meet them. But as soon as you sever 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 the kind of oligarchs distancing themselves from actual rooted communities living in societies as the kind of kings that they should be, like actually personally responsible for networks of less well-off people around them, know, talking to them about their problems and so forth, and instead living in these slightly atomized bubbles with increasingly weird ideas about the right thing to do with their wealth.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ Like that question of love and the philosophy, theology and history there is a very interesting and important one to explore.

Johann Kurtz [18:57] Yeah, well, let's dive into it because I believe I recall correctly, like the biblical etymology of neighbor, the Greek word agape, right? Like that's really what it seeped in this. And there's three types of love in Christianity, agape being one of them. 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 does that do to help build not only a legacy, but a functioning society in the long run? Yeah, it's a great question. mean, it's kind of this, every so often you come across an assumption that deserves to be challenged.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And as soon as someone questions it, you sort of smack your head and you'd be like, yeah, of course. Like that's an assumption built on a really shaky foundation. And everyone, the kind of core, there are a few, but one of the most important biblical passages on charity 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 parlance, everyone uses it as if that phrase says something different, which is you have to love everyone everywhere the same all the time. And that is actually not the same thing at all. Like we at least should question that.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ The parable of the good Samaritan. The word it uses for neighbor is derived from the coin Greek place on which is is akin to proximity. It's akin to It means basically it's a spatial component. It means who you're who you're close to and 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 inherits these diverse responsibilities for their well-being because of that personal encounter. So it's not about a financial transaction. Money is a small element of it later on when he pays the innkeeper to look after him before returning to the destitute man.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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 innkeeper. In other words, it's again, there's this relational component. And that of course... is integral not just to the word neighbor, but to the word charity. Charity is derived from the Latin caritas, which is in turn exactly as you say, 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 operate on these very shaky foundations to justify these.

Johann Kurtz [21:42] these grand projects, these philanthropic projects, foundations, which they present as obviously moral good. And everyone, you, I mean, I probably you and many of your listeners 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 confused term of the language and therefore that kind of poisons the philosophy that builds off language. you're kind of robbed of any moral language to question or criticize those activities, short of like obvious conspiracy theories or just like obvious misdoing, some of which exist, of course. And I go into some of that in the book. But more than that, the actual foundations of the project is pretty questionable.

Johann Kurtz [22:32] Well, this whole concept of locality, I 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 duty to build legacy over your dominion, within a dominion, I think another place in which it manifests is the physical architecture. Something we've covered over the years here is urbanism and how the physical environment. sort of affects your mentality. 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 aspire to be something greater.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And that manifests in the architecture as well, to an extent where if you... basically abdicate yourself of any duty to long-lasting, aesthetically beautiful and sound architecture that's inspiring and makes people feel good to live in a certain place. It's not going to be conducive for a productive society either.

Johann Kurtz [23:49] 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 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. And 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ I think 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. In other words, the most beautiful buildings in the UK tend to be the great aristocratic estates, which Britain is famous for, 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 that the builders future generations would inhabit the same spot. 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?

Johann Kurtz ⋮ Something that sort of speaks of the timelessness of values, which I think is this other thing. I've written about this elsewhere. If you look at the great architectural marvels of the West, To give an example, the Cluny Abbey, which is very, very famous and influential abbey in France that influenced a lot of cathedral design, monastic design across Europe in the 10th century. And was really one of the reasons that Europe looks like it looks. That the land, the Duke of Aquitaine who commissioned that.

Johann Kurtz [25:53] He spoke of wanting to transform his temporal goods into something lasting. 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, this statement of values interwoven into the physical world through this commission and the sense of the permanence of morality and the human condition and man struggles and the need for beauty is this kind of breakthrough into something transcendent.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And without those values, without the kind of like tension between the solidity of existence and place and rootedness and belief in the higher world that you can manifest through the creation of beautiful things, the kind of ethics of aesthetics and value belief, 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 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 maximum sales number.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And then your family can move somewhere else. And who cares about the people who have to inhabit that building? Cause you have no personal connection. Sorry, keep knocking the microphone. You have no personal connection to them. moral responsibility to them over and above providing jobs precisely because you've lost this agape, the sense of love for a neighbour. So I think it's all deeply interlinked here, but I like you, just lament the built environment that we live in now. I think it's one of the great sadnesses of our time.

Johann Kurtz [27:46] It really is. That's why I feel fortunate I recently moved back to the Philadelphia area, which certainly has its areas where it's lacking in beautiful aesthetics, but we're spoiled with quality builds throughout the city, particularly in the part that I'm living in right now. And it's truly inspiring driving, driving around with driving back from dropping the... the boys off at school today. And I always take the scenic route on the way home because there's beautiful stone homes and it is inspiring. It makes you really think like, wow, this is something worth preserving and something I hope I can contribute to. And I mean, on the point of business building too, there's, I think there's a great example of the book of a dynastic American family that made a very poor decision.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ Maybe we can. jump into this topic of the importance of 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 Henry Ford Foundation that 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 would be unrecognizable to Henry Ford and his sons today.

Johann Kurtz [29:21] 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. 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 a good example of what happens when you commit to a seemingly benign endeavor in the most massive way, assuming that good effects will result, but you lose that sort of virtuous family at the heart of the whole thing.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ So the Ford Foundation, essentially what happens is, Edsel Henry Ford, the elder, are confronted with 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 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ factor in that. So what they decide to do is they decide to give away 70 % of their estate preemptively as a tax exemption and retain basically only the controlling shares, the voting shares in the Ford Motor Company and some other assets. 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.

Johann Kurtz [31:16] 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. Henry Ford II becomes the chairman of that upon the death of Edsel 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. Henry Ford II is a very wealthy and powerful person in his own right with his personal fortune. And the only other people on the board of the Ford Foundation are... men who were employed by Henry Ford, essentially, the Ford Motor Company employees.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And the future seems bright. But then what happens is Henry Ford, the second, starts doubting the importance of continual family control, of this chain of custodians with a family legacy, with a name, with values in common. And he becomes persuaded that he has to democratize control of this foundation as a result. And to cut a very long story short, happens is the board grows different people with different values, many of which conflict and the board. essentially, Henry Ford, the second loses control of the Ford Foundation and the Ford Foundation becomes what Dwight MacDonald, the historian, described as a great pile of money with a lot of surrounded by people who want some.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ just becomes this kind of like totally unmoored, 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 I imagine you would just view as like morally reprehensible. There's they they Douglas Enzminger in the 70s establishes this massive sterilization infrastructure in India elsewhere, which becomes made mandatory by Indira Gandhi's regime. So there's a sterilization of literally millions of many year using the infrastructure set up by the Ford Foundation. This kind of weird eugenics completely false theory about the so-called population bomb which gripped the world this kind of Malthusianism which gripped the world in the 70s.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ But there's loads of other weird stuff they do. mean, Ennis Lyons, who's a prominent substacker 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 Minneapolis, going to building grassroots Muslim power, going

Johann Kurtz [33:35] to building a ESG system with Chinese characteristics, all this just weird stuff. that is totally like, all of this is essentially political stuff. It's governance stuff, but it's totally unaccountable to anyone. It's unelected. It's like they don't, the Gates Foundation, for example, doesn't accept any proposals to them. They have to like handpick the people who they're gonna make donations to, to go on projects. So it's like totally inscrutable, totally out of control, but massively powerful. whatever your politics, that's just such an unhealthy influence on society. So my conviction is that, I mean, you need this kind of dynastic control, this careful set of stewardship, responsibilities, intergenerational values, and you really need a conviction about what you're trying to achieve, which I think is really the key thing that's lacking here.

Johann Kurtz [34:28] Well, it's also indicative of what happens when you sort of neglect dominion, right? Because another consequence of this is, I think at least partly a consequence of this, was the degradation of Detroit, which obviously the Ford family had helped build up and one day ceased control. of the board of the Ford Foundation. That's when it began going out and doing these things outside of the dominion of Detroit, Michigan. And Detroit is now completely hollowed out. Yeah, quite so. Yeah. I mean, the Ford family say what you like about Henry Ford, the elder. And I'm sure people have their issues with him, possibly justifiably, but he was loyal to his city.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ I mean, he built the Henry Ford hospital. He bought Dearborn village. He built, he hired a huge number of different communities, including African-American communities at 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 Inkster through, the depression. And there was that sense of stewardship there, a relationship between a man and his city. And I'm not going to present myself as an authority on what happened to Detroit because I know it's complex. know, 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ But... A lot of it has to do with this complete divorce 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. mean, imagine if there was a family worth whatever the Ford family would be. worth today, tens of billions 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And it just massively accelerates the process. Charles Murray 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 Martha's Vineyard and a few other places in the community. And then they can get away with the most ridiculous luxury beliefs because they're totally insulated from all of the consequences of those beliefs. And the rest of the country is kind of left to rot. So yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right to...

Johann Kurtz [37:22] to call out that what happened to Detroit was just this travesty. Yeah. Strong towns. Another great book. Make sure you read it. Chuck Morrone. that, that was another book that really opened my eyes. And I think if you're looking for sort of playbook on how to build a strong town, particularly if you are somebody with a lot of wealth, it would like to bring back some of these core concepts, and build a legacy. That's definitely a must read, but on this subject of building a legacy, think. One concept that you touch on in the book that people have a natural aversion to is the concept of nepotism. You make the case for why it's good. Why is nepotism good?

Johann Kurtz [38:12] That's a great question. One thing that I really encourage people to do is not to reason about claims, 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 all kinds of like hostile claims smuggled into them. And then... without that sort of deep reflection on what they're actually saying and believe make these very consequential decisions. like nepotism, 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? mean, like acting has always been a family business, right?

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 100 years ago, two, three, four, 500 years ago, these particular domains, these cultural domains are always family businesses. And business families have this unique capacity to bring forth genius in their children. Like if you go and look at the great geniuses of history, 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. This is actually the theory of a Hungarian figure who's interesting called Laszlo Polgar, who was the father of Judith Polgar, who's by far the strongest female chess player to ever live and whose sister Zuzsa was the second strongest.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ chess player in the world after her and Judith was such a strong player. She's almost a living refutation of the idea that women can't be as good as the very top men in chess, which is like she's the only paradox that somewhat brings that assertion into question, which does speak to this conviction of Laszlo that a young specialization has all these.

Johann Kurtz [40:19] factors which bring forth excellence. So if we're gonna reason about nepotism, we should at least understand what it is because there seem to be all these confounding factors like family businesses outperform publicly traded companies in the marketplace. Like this is actually a well established financial phenomenon. 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 like their ultra long time horizon planning, carefully managed and planned succession strategies, 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 five, 10, 15, 20, 50, 100 years, and so are willing to make sacrificial decisions in the short term that pay off in the long term.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ There's a variety of reasons for that. So in the face of this observation that like A, many of the best sporting players of our age, Floyd Mayweather, you know, Max Verstappen, I give many examples, Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters, et cetera, et cetera. 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 like nepotism breeds incompetence and raises ineffectual people to the top. So what actually is nepotism? Nepotism means something specific and it doesn't mean the way that almost everyone uses it today.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ Nepotism comes from this very interesting work called Il nipotismo di Roma, which is the nephews of Rome. What it's a reference to, it's a Gregorio Leti book in the 17th century. It's a reference to this very specific and interesting interesting history, which is this institution called the Pope's Nephews. And it's always been in the Catholic Church 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 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ At a certain point,

Johann Kurtz [42:26] which had radical ramifications in pretty much every domain of Western life, there was a string of popes who were quite clearly corrupted in their role and 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. 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 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And if you stop and think about it, 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 high fidelity, high bandwidth relationship to your child. You have relationships that it would be a tremendous shame and it would be a universal loss if you didn't pass on. And you have, as I argue, this particular moral responsibility to your child. And, to turn correctly, that echoes outwards as this tremendous advantage to society at large. And so, and so, yeah, mean, like, nepotism means something specific and there are instances in which corrupting factors conducted under the table can undermine the integrity of a necessary institutional domain.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And we should be, we should be very cognizant of that. I think quite rightly it's, been brought up in.

Johann Kurtz [44:16] in, for example, deceptive practices. I think there's a family in the States, obviously this isn't my country, that has basically been, has been applying for loans, fortunately, and I think this is in the motel industry has been using a whole financial infrastructure to enrich their own family under the pretense that this is an objective policy That is suspect but 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 like a cornerstone of Western society like up until about 1950 that is how literally the entire West was built

Johann Kurtz [45:00] 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? Cause it just doesn't happen. You need to actually work towards it. What are the best practices to make sure that your children understand the gravity 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. I thought it would be a philosophical defensive at a conceptual level of dynasty of generational wealth of a stable upper class.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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, and ambition for greatness in the context of wealth. 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 aristocratic families, although they're not exclusively aristocratic families, 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 particular communities.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And there really are examples of that. So I tried to distill out of them these principles for raising healthy families that are capable of these things. And without that, if you don't have access to a framework like that, I do actually totally understand why people like... why people feel like disinheriting their children because they're conscious that they simply don't have a methodology to ensure that children raised in the context of wealth that experienced these tremendous wealth events will be able to be virtuous, will 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

Johann Kurtz [47:30] then that's the only way of ensuring you have hardworking children. And I understand why that's your instinct. However, history shows that that is not necessary. And indeed, if that is the route that you pursue, you can never have these multi-generational great works, which I argue is a tremendous shame. I think 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. In other words, if you go back to 1819 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, et cetera.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And so yes, you're passing on them on wealth, but this isn't highly liquid wealth. This isn't wealth that it's easy to squander. This is wealth makes demands off 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 overwhelming trends. Which have healthy upsides which are why they're accelerated but which also have these unforeseen downsides 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 their first-generation wealth they have no contact with the tradition of of raising healthy, wealthy Western children.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ The second thing is this.

Johann Kurtz [49:09] 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, know, productive land around the estate that had to be managed if not actively worked, art, which was particular to their family and was therefore not liquid, et cetera, et cetera. So they had some liquid wealth, but 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. So you can now pass on wealth in entirely liquid assets, as is in fact now the norm.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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 are easy to, 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 actually ask at a foundational level, how can we achieve a level of stability in the midst of all this chaos. I have a few chapters on this. And they basically fall into three categories. Let me find my contents page here so I can accurately describe. The first is Raising Children Worthy of Empires. That's chapter name.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And 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. And that takes on a variety of forms. It takes on faith and the very presence of virtues in their lives. It takes on the intensity of their contact with family heroes, the greatest men of the family and civilization that they're particular to who have went on before. It takes on the playing of dangerous games, sports, know, the aristocracy have always engaged in more

Johann Kurtz [51:10] dangerous games and 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 boars and jousting and combat tournaments and so forth because it brings out this self-sacrificial relationship with difficulty that is necessary. The importance of ritual, which is D. Assumption of these lived practices which your forefathers did before you which your your generations which follow you will will take on themselves and so it shifts you from this this moment into eternal time and I talked 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 to the same practices the same values the same vision of the world And and there's there's a lot else.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ mean, I'm not just going to provide you with a huge list but tell me where you want to go with that. This was the most fun series of chapters to write just because researching all these strange aristocratic families that had achieved tremendous things was very fun.

Johann Kurtz [52:25] How much importance does the extended family come into this? Because 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 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. We've got a pretty big group that never turns to the beach. And I like to think this is sort of anchoring us in this ideal of like, we're a strong family and this is how we do things.

Johann Kurtz [53:07] Yeah, I'm not sure, and this is the first time I've thought about this, so don't take this as a canonical answer. I'm not sure 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. to like that they are making sacrifices for higher ideals. Having a large family is a difficult thing. I've got a few kids myself and I've had them since I was quite young. And it certainly makes your life more challenging.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ It's a wonderful and rewarding experience. But in my case and as in the case of many of my friends, 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. Now, that might not be your religious conviction, but nevertheless, it is. 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 for discipline in the face of temptation 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ It shows that they value family, they value their identity as members of the family, that they place personal investment in the sort of integrity of the family, the honor of the family name, that their self-conception, their identity integration is well established.

Johann Kurtz [55:03] and also it's, just like a logistic chant, task. Like a lot of people have this inertia when it comes to family, like, I'll call my dad a few times a year, but it takes a motivated disciplined family to all get together, several times a year, especially to enact these very healthy sort of civilization, the affirming rituals. Like again, I'm not American, but I really appreciate 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, metaphysically speaking, which I think is tremendously important.

Johann Kurtz [55:47] Yeah, it really is. it's, I mean, this dovetails into what I think is one of the biggest problems in society right now, particularly in the United States. And I imagine in England as well is this delay in family formation, which many are attributing to the economic stress that younger generations are under 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 their feet. And again, going back to duty, seems like there's a dereliction of duty on the older generations to cede the continuation of their families, for lack of a better phrase there.

Johann Kurtz [56:44] Yeah, I think this question of family and society's variability to reproduce the sort of natalism birthrate question is intimately tied up across every generation in different ways to this question of wealth and duty being divorced from each other. So in some sense, well, let me give you an example. There's a very important demographer in this exact space called Lyman Stone. He's one of the common sources. Whenever you see a study on the effects of X and Y on birth rates, it's often Lyman Stone or the Institute of Family Studies, which is where he works that is the root of that. So he does very important work and I'd encourage people to check him out.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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. The 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 relatively high level. is broadly representative of our forefathers. And so actually what is happening is that we're downstream of a relationship recession, as it were, rather than a total lack in interest in having children in and of itself. Because 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ And yet most of them will go on to never have children. I think that that's like, there are a range of reasons for this. but in my opinion a central reason for it.

Johann Kurtz [58:29] Is you know, it's often lamented now that I wish people just had this instinct for marriage like previous generations did like weren't the novels of jane austin so wonderful because 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 generations The whole of society was making a 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 Georgian London, which is the context of the novels of Jane Austen, There was this whole marriage circuit.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ There's what was called the marriage season where all people from the same social class would coalesce around London for three months. 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 garden. and so forth. And they would, you there was a compact. Yes, the young would be expected to pair bond and to produce marriages and grandchildren to make their parents happy.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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. And I think it is true that the younger generation, especially, you know, they've lost their faith in the single importance of marriage and taking that oath in front of a community of eternal peace. 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 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 because that is of civilizational importance.

Johann Kurtz [1:00:30] Yeah, I mean, this gets into the effect of tech, technology on the interpersonal relationships, particularly of younger people, because of the Jane Austen scenes that you just described. mean, they don't really happen anymore. People are literally looking at their phones, looking for a partner to potentially pair up with and meet one-on-one. long held traditions of, mean here in the United States, remember when I lived in the South, I went to Cotillion, you had the debutante balls. You were sort of forced to go learn etiquette manners and learn how to dance with a girl. And you were expected to go to those classes. And then eventually when you get old enough, you have the debutante ball.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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, particularly for children or like later teens, early, early twenties, 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 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 are friends with my aunts and uncles.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ We often joke we're as close to an arranged marriage as you can get, but there was, and we met participating in the tradition of my family going down the shore, going to the beach in the summer. And I think we did have conditions that sort of led us to each other, which are being lost.

Johann Kurtz [1:02:27] Definitely, I mean, there's this odd thing now where it's the upper classes who are able to weather the storm best to impart to, know, Rob Hedison, who calls this luxury beliefs, this idea that they're making very bad social and sort of ethical decisions, but they're able to insulate themselves from the worst effects of that via shared resources. And it's really the people further down the socioeconomic ladder that really feel this the worst. know, when, when poor people get divorced or are never married in the first place and have children, whether intentional or not, creates all kinds of stresses that you just can't escape from. And that becomes a very destructive cycle.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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 actually unlike other countries. There's an element of the French elite who are quite radically conservative. They're not necessarily outspoken about it, but unlike in England where 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 Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry, who's a commentator on Twitter and Substack. who has sort of proximity to this class.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ He wrote this essay that I referenced in the book on his publication, Accelerationist, about how these people act in private. And it's very, very interesting. They have a system called Le Hale, 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 to do dancing, cultural activities, exactly as you describe etiquette. And so quietly, they recognize the enduring necessity of these institutes. 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're re bowling alone by Robert Putnam, 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, know performances They're just the the social fabric is so intense so interconnected that it's just this incredibly life-affirming existence And you know if you go back into old England, there's this

Johann Kurtz [1:04:49] whole calendar of festivals, fates, pranks, you know, it's this wonderfully colorful, intensely social environment that we've really lost. So yeah, 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 not be maximally sort of transient and ephemeral, that's very poisonous. So this question of like rooted patronage 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?

Johann Kurtz [1:05:39] I, you know, there's sort of two things, two core themes to the book. 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 universally applicable in that we all live in an incredibly material, 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. And that brings intense temptation that really it was only some members of the upper classes that would have had. in the past.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ mean, if you think about the Temptations of Lust, now every young man has that in his pocket all the time, and young women, whereas that kind of seeming scale of choice would have been available to a very select few members of previous generations. 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 from generations that went before. And some of this is incredibly basic. Like it's fun life affirming stuff. It's not grueling. It's 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 nouveau riche, there's this kind of accepted thing of grinding, working super long hours to make as much money as possible to, know.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ m. 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 there's that element of it. There's like raising children and then I think the second thing is like

Johann Kurtz [1:07:31] There's a lot of very wealthy people who I consider to be fundamentally well-intentioned, but misled due to this slightly pathological culture of philanthropy that has arisen. And it really does concern this rootedness of community, this love of neighbor as a proper understanding 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. But I think those two things, like children and place, are neglected in today's society to our great detriment.

Johann Kurtz [1:08:19] Yeah, that's, mean, particularly the tech elite. I tweeted this out on Thanksgiving. 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, childless men who have billions of dollars that are extremely philanthropic, no connection to any particular locality. Didn't mention this in the tweet, but 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, the upcoming wealthy elite of our age think this way.

Johann Kurtz [1:09:10] Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, it's sort of like one step removed from being removed from your community is actually being removed from the very essence of the self, you know, and attempting to transcend your mortal existence. There's a lot I could say about that. That's a whole other ram-hole. expand on, let's expand on because I think it's important. And I hope some of the individuals in this particular class would be introspective about this. And it is, like I watch it, like that Brian Johnson guy is 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. It's like, what are you doing? What is the purpose of all this?

Johann Kurtz [1:10:01] Well, 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. And those are basically theological convictions, faith. And I can then nevertheless go out and I can argue on secular podcasts I've been on some finance podcasts and so forth with non-christians Quite confidently because I believe in natural law. In other words, I believe that like every aspect of our material reality is in some way reflective of Fundamental truths, 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 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 that.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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, mean, you know. God willing, I die not in a state of mortal sin? It would be a good thing to die. You wanna ultimately meet your maker, gaze upon the beatific vision in eternity forevermore. But it's difficult to argue with someone that believes that death is it, it's the end.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ There's nothing after that.

Johann Kurtz [1:12:08] 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. It's more to say that like the discussion that needs to be had 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. 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. But yeah, I mean, that's a big discussion. Yeah. And so, well, I'm sure you've seen the trend too.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ A lot, a few, most famously Nicole Shanahan of the ex-tech wives, I think they're beginning to have this realization. I mean, she very publicly converted to Christianity in the last couple of years. And more recently, I believe last week was opining on how disappointed she was in herself for thinking that. could change the world through the world economic forum specifically and I do have optimism and hope that we are getting to such an extreme polarized part of I guess the pendulum swing of of time where people are beginning to wake up there's there's there's something innate and intuitive that comes into play when 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?

Johann Kurtz ⋮ Is this the right path moving forward? Which is a good sign in my opinion.

Johann Kurtz [1:14:04] Definitely. Yeah, I mean, the kind of devil's bargain of philanthropy is we're not going to take care of our personal relationships first and foremost, because the classic model of community-centered religious charity is essentially palliative in that it goes to people who are suffering in society and tries to ease their suffering. So it typically takes the form of arms giving to the poor or donations to hospitals or feeding the needy, sheltering. 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ This comes out of like Andrew Carnegie, the gospel of wealth, a whole set of interesting changes. And we're actually gonna 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, to actually alter the fundamental things which are giving rise to suffering in the first place. So we can actually eliminate poverty as 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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, if only had a bit more power, then I could really solve these root issues. If only had a bit more power, I could really, you know what, maybe, maybe my foundation is not big enough. Maybe I should convince other people to donate their billions to my foundation as well. And maybe I can partner up.

Johann Kurtz [1:15:42] with the World Economic Forum and maybe I can and it just becomes this like it becomes this this centralization of power this this this confluence in their minds of some misconception of charity plus bureaucracy plus very spurious scientism plus you know like powerful government centralized institutions international action that is like At a certain point, you have to stand back and be like, yeah, wait, there's actually more people living in absolute. There's, twice as many people living in absolute poverty in Africa as there was in the nineties. Like, what are we doing? Like people all over America are dying deaths of despair. What are we doing?

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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 these foundations have done. But fundamentally their model of the world is broken and that's leading to a lot of harm.

Johann Kurtz [1:16:40] Yeah, my favorite sort of LARP in the realm of us Americans are going to go save Africa, I believe it was the actor Ashton Kutcher ran this big malaria net drive. They've raised millions of dollars to get malaria nets. I forget in exactly what country in Africa and they came to find that they just use the nets as fishing. fishing nets and drained part of the area of all their fish. the highlights, again, if you have this dislocation physically from dominion, and it goes back to central planning more broadly, which is something I like to focus on a lot, particularly as it pertains to monetary economics and the effects of central planning on monetary economics have very perverse negative externalities.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ No one individual or small group of individuals should be able to control. most important tool, arguably, that we use as humans, which is money, is 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 Eccles building making minute lever pulls on what the interest rate should be or how much money should be in the system at any given point in time. And similarly with the Malaria in that case. It's like you do not know what's actually happening on the ground and the very nuanced variables of the problems that exist and how the introduction of another variable will be received where Ashton Kutcher thought like they're all just gonna Use the malaria nuts protect themselves from from mosquitoes and it turned out to be a laughable sort of example of the the hubris of somebody to think that they could actually know what is needed to solve the problems in that exact locality.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ Thousands of miles away.

Johann Kurtz [1:18:43] Yeah, I mean... My conviction is like, it's not that we should be ignoring Africans. That's just like, if you feel that's your calling, then move there. And I'm like completely serious about that. I mean, there's someone who's quoted in the book, called Robert Lupton, and Robert Lupton is a career charity guy, and I think he's a real hero. And he runs this organization called FCS, Focus Community Strategies, and he wrote this expose called Toxic Charity, which actually looks at the real world effects of these very large philanthropic endeavors and often they cause like complete chaos. mean like the classic model that they all follow is something like, you know, people in Sudan, South Sudan need clothes.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ So we're going to ship, 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. It's just like these silly blunders like that. And what Robert Lupton does is 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. Yes, he solicits 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. It's a layered, nuanced, complex process.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ It's a process which never causes cause from effect or shies away from complexity. It's iterative. yeah, it's just like, where's the spirit of adventure? mean, there's always been eccentric Westerners who have moved to like remote places in the world and try to achieve great things. And I think, you know, the age of adventure is upon us again. So yeah, I people should do that.

Johann Kurtz [1:20:32] Yeah, if you want to solve the problem, you got to be close to the problem. Now, I guess just to wrap up, I you mentioned before we hit record, you're not really well versed in Bitcoin, but I do think we both agree that to achieve some of these legacy goals, you need to be able to store wealth and pass it on. 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 following your duty, living up to your duty to do good in the world and love your neighbor.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ 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, is within my own life and observing others who've been in Bitcoin for a while. think it is possible to use Bitcoin to build wealth and then focus on these legacy questions and really be intentful about it. And I think it's actually one of the biggest parts of the equation is How do you actually preserve that wealth?

Johann Kurtz ⋮ What are the mechanisms to your point? Earlier, the wealth that's passed down these days is in completely illiquid assets that are certainly liquid, but they're being continuously debased because we're just printing money debasing the unit by which we measure wealth more broadly. And so I think there is a... a very important role for Bitcoin to play in all of this.

Johann Kurtz [1:22:32] Yeah, I buy that. I I think two things are in tension. 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 can be a very good thing for the empowerment of specific communities because you actually have sovereignty over your wealth. On the other hand, there is a tension that I see in Bitcoin, is once 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.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ It's not a moral good. In fact, it's a source of temptation, 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 whom you can uplift and love. It's a very powerful tool. I think like Bitcoin is a fascinating endeavor and potentially one that can do a lot of good, but But like conviction in Bitcoin alone is possibly not enough. It has to be accompanied with a vision of how to transform. that that asset into real world goods and what those goods should be and why they should exist and so forth.

Johann Kurtz ⋮ so avoid the sin of, mean, this is turning into a sermon. I don't mean it to be a sermon, but if, if, know, avoid the sin of avarice, which is like obsession with money, qua money and like have, I think greatness of vision, a very invigorating thing is that to imagine the things you can actually do in the world as it were.

Johann Kurtz [1:24:08] I'm very happy you said that. think it's very important because there are many within Bitcoin who view it as like, I mean, Michael Saylor, most famously, I'm going to buy as much Bitcoin as possible and then I'm burning my keys when I die. Another childless billionaire. And I completely disagree with that view of Bitcoin or that perspective on what Bitcoin is and what it's meant to achieve. think I 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 for our audience, particularly, which is filled with a lot of Bitcoiners to think about that because it is important. There's many people too focused on the end state of Bitcoin's full monetization. It's like, well, you can use it 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.

Johann Kurtz [1:25:09] Yeah, absolutely. Leaving a legacy in heritage charity and thousand year families. We can get on the thousand year families, but maybe we can do that another time. 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 with your sub stack, becoming noble. It's incredibly important work. I truly believe that. I think we need a shift 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 for our generation, particularly as Millennials, Gen Z, Boomers? It's not too late to start thinking about it either. think there's a lot of a boomer hate out there, but I know there are many good boomers out there that are thinking about this stuff as well. But we just need, I think, these ideas to become more popular and people need to think more intently. about these things.

Johann Kurtz [1:26:15] Well, it's been a complete pleasure and I'm really, really grateful for the invitation. So thank you. Enjoy your night and that's all we have today. Peace and love freaks.