Johan Kurtz is an author who has been doing great work on the topic of generational legacy, and now has written a great book about it. In this episode, Oren talks with author Johan Kurtz about what it means to leave a legacy.
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00:01:11.640Should we be raging at each other all the time?
00:01:13.740Is that the way society is supposed to work?
00:01:15.440The different generations attacking each other, tearing each other apart?
00:01:18.320Or should we be thinking about a generational legacy, a continuity of tradition that passes down from one to the next, what we're about?
00:01:27.180Joining me today to talk about this is an author who has been doing great work on this on his sub stack and now has written a great book about it.
00:01:34.980Johan Kurtz, thank you so much for coming on.
00:01:54.380All these critical things that seem to have fallen out of fashion as people are trying to find their way in this world and they don't understand where they fit in society, what their roles should be, how they should be interacting with the opposite sex or their elders or children.
00:02:08.240It's been great to just see someone go back to the basics and ask fundamental questions of why aren't we forming families?
00:03:25.340All right, Johan, we'll start with, I think, what is probably the easiest part of this discussion, something that frames your book ultimately.
00:03:35.300But you feel like it shouldn't have to be discussed.
00:03:38.420This is something that was kind of automatic throughout history.
00:03:40.620But the question has come up, and the easiest thing to point to is, of course, the boomer on the cruise meme or going to the casino and just hitting the slot machines.
00:03:51.280A lot of people look at kind of the elderly generation in not just the United States but the UK where you live and all across the West.
00:04:00.260And they see a generation that was blessed by a lot of material abundance, especially in the United States, and yet feels like they don't need to pass that down to their children.
00:04:12.740In fact, in many ways, we often hear, oh, well, if I hand money down to my children, if I leave something for my children, I'm spoiling them.
00:04:21.880I'm not making them fight for themselves, America especially.
00:04:24.680But the West in general is about cutting your own place in the world and proving yourself.
00:04:29.800And if I just hand money over to my children, am I not hamstringing their development?
00:04:35.480So the easy straw man is, of course, the cruises and the casino trips.
00:04:41.540But the more valid core is what if handing money off to or other things off to my children is ultimately something that cripples their personal development
00:04:51.420and their ability to be an independent, productive person.
00:04:55.760So I guess the most basic question first, again, what should we be doing with our legacy?
00:05:01.660Why would an older generation want to pass down that wealth instead of doing something noble with it,
00:05:07.200like handing it to a charity who's going to do good work with that money as well?
00:05:14.980As you say, in a sense, it shouldn't be.
00:05:17.220But I think what has happened is that a lot of the terminology that we use, charity, philanthropy, meritocracy, nepotism, having earned something, birthright,
00:05:29.020these terms have gone through a revolution as we've moved from an agrarian society to an urbanized one.
00:05:35.500People now work entirely new professions.
00:05:38.080From a society in which generational wealth was the norm, to which the ultra-wealthy are now first-generation wealth, typically.
00:05:44.520And from a Christian society underpinned by a rigorous theological tradition to a post-Christian society,
00:05:51.720where a lot of these words have subtly different meaning.
00:05:54.740And I think what's happening now is a healthy thing to assume is goodwill on the part of all the participants.
00:06:00.000I think that's probably not universally true.
00:06:02.000But nevertheless, I think what is fundamentally happening is that the people operating, the people trying to find their way through this entirely new world,
00:06:11.220they're new to wealth themselves, are operating with confused terminology without access to this rigorous theological, historical, philosophical foundation,
00:06:21.240which is actually a continuation of an ancient tradition in the West and one that some families successfully persist to this day.
00:06:28.100So that's what I'm trying to recapture in the book is for those families who do want to leave a legacy,
00:06:33.520to leave a family behind which is strong, loving, in which any wealth you do pass on to your children leaves them stronger,
00:06:40.540leaves them more empowered to start families of their own,
00:06:43.660leaves them more empowered to continue the charitable work that's important to you,
00:06:46.840to continue the strength of the family business.
00:06:49.280I want to give you the concepts to reason about that.
00:06:52.800I want to point you to the examples, the historic families in both the UK, in European history,
00:06:58.380and indeed in American history, some of the great heroes of the book of the American Protestant tradition
00:07:03.220so that you can decide what the right path is for you.
00:07:06.780And ultimately, the concluding of the chapter really dives into this question of what legacy is,
00:07:11.700because I think that that central question is also one that has been crippled by an impoverished discourse.
00:07:18.060So it's really about going back to fundamentals, anchoring it in the Christian tradition, in Christendom,
00:07:23.180in our mutual history, and allowing family leaders who are looking at what to do with their legacy
00:07:29.180and how to involve their children in it, the reasoning skills to do that in a way that makes sense to them.
00:07:33.940Yeah, I appreciate that, because it really does have to go back to fundamentals.
00:07:38.200As we both pointed out, throughout history, the core purpose for existence in most societies
00:07:46.060was having a lot of children and being able to pass things down to them.
00:07:50.760That's kind of the whole reason you did what you did that was a motivating factor.
00:07:55.280Now, some of this is rhythm of life stuff, right?
00:07:57.680Like you had to kind of have children if you were married, if you were being intimate.
00:08:38.740And so therefore, we will live that way.
00:08:40.760And in so many ways, you know, opportunity and options are the enemy of, you know, wisdom and tradition because they give you the possibility of kind of blowing those things up for a while without really feeling the consequences.
00:08:55.540But maybe we should lay out first why that ultimately fell away.
00:09:00.720Why did we go from societies that were deeply grounded in this idea that we needed to pass it on?
00:09:07.620Of course, we need to be as Christians.
00:09:09.540We definitely want to ground it in that theology.
00:09:11.800But obviously, we can see this trend across many different societies, those which are not Christian as well.
00:09:16.720This is just the way humans live throughout most of history.
00:09:19.680So what is it about this transition into modernity that has broken that chain of being, that chain of tradition between the old to the young, where we all felt that duty to each other and would have, you know, kind of gone through the tasks that you're discussing in a very natural way most of the time?
00:09:38.140I think the two main things that have changed in response to that question are charity and how we conceive of charity and people's estates.
00:09:49.420So what they would be leaving to their children to take the second one first, people's estates used to be very illiquid objects that brought with them duties as well as responsibilities.
00:10:00.220So they were the family business, you know, in 1890, something like 90% of Americans were either small agrarian farmers themselves or were employed by a family member on a family farm.
00:10:13.500And so when you pass that on, when that is the wealth that you pass on to your children, you are indeed making them richer in some abstract sense.
00:10:20.580You're handing them something of tremendous value, but it is necessarily something that isn't going to corrupt them because it demands work of them.
00:10:29.100So you're giving them duties, responsibilities, seniority, stewardship, as well as wealth.
00:10:34.540Now we live in a highly financialized economy where a lot of people ultimately are able to pass on wealth in a form that brings none of those obligations.
00:10:43.580So if you look at the aristocracy equally of history, it's true that they didn't have to work in the same sense, but they were passing on estates which required management, which brought duties of the provision of security, the flourishing of the families and the communities that lived on their estates.
00:10:58.220They had obligations to host, to care for elderly relatives, to sustain the artistic and spiritual flourishing of the community more broadly.
00:11:05.860So again, even in this elite, you know, sort of ultra high net worth aristocratic tradition, there is a version of this as well.
00:11:14.340Now I don't think that a lot of people are in a situation where it is quite normal to accrue wealth through starting a business or rising up in a business and then liquidating your business, selling it, going to IPO, selling it to venture capital.
00:11:27.820And then ending up in a situation where at the end of your life or at a certain point in your life, when you're thinking about what to leave to your children, basically everything you have is quite liquid, it doesn't bring obligations.
00:11:38.740And so you are confronted with this question of, well, if I just dump a lot of cash in the lap of my 35-year-old son, is that not the equivalent of making a sort of lottery winner of him?
00:11:50.380And lottery winners tend to have very poor life outcomes because that liquid cash injection immediately robs them of purpose.
00:11:55.720It provides this huge wave of temptation towards idleness.
00:12:00.740It gives them these great questions because it suddenly shifts them in the trajectory of their life from one path in which they had a vision of where they were going to one in which they need to rethink everything from fundamentals.
00:12:10.680So it's quite a dislocating experience.
00:12:12.320And I think people rightly intuit that that is a path that brings significant risks.
00:12:18.420So then they think, well, you know, I'll leave enough for my child to go to college or whatever it is.
00:12:24.280But really, I should be doing something that I can have more confidence will have positive effects.
00:12:29.160And that's where I think we come to the other thing, which is charity.
00:12:32.900Now, charity in Christendom, you know, prior to the 19th and prior to the 20th century, charity in really every major Christian tradition was conceived of as a virtue.
00:12:43.620So it was much broader than just charity as giving money or giving resources to an institution.
00:12:49.180It was a diverse expression of this fundamental capacity of love.
00:12:54.460So charity is from the Latin caritas, which is the translation of the biblical Greek agape.
00:13:00.560And both of these are different characterizations, expressions of love.
00:13:04.480And so how charity is instantiated in sort of classic Christianity takes on multiple forms.
00:13:10.020It is true that it takes on almsgiving, so that's the giving of wealth to people in need and the giving of material goods.
00:13:16.140But it also has these diverse expressions, anything really that can be encapsulated by wanting what is best for your brother as a result of recognizing him as an aspect of God's creation due to your fundamental love of God.
00:13:28.060So an equally valid expression of charity can be sort of chastisement, it can be fraternal correction, you know, going to a man who's living in sin and challenging him and saying this isn't, that's every bit as charitable as a financial donation.
00:13:41.080What I think happened and where these two trends intersect is you see with the rise of philanthropy in the States, this kind of competing movement.
00:13:48.460And there are various things that underpin this.
00:13:51.940One was the rise of the sort of Gilded Age magnates, men like Andrew Carnegie, who had this tremendous amount of wealth, but whose Christian sureness was on increasingly tenuous footing.
00:14:01.600He didn't go to church much, you know, there was a slight commitment, but he was definitely not a Christian first and foremost.
00:14:07.700And they had this question of what to do with their wealth.
00:14:12.480They didn't have these solid estates to pass on.
00:14:14.800They were sort of looking for what to do.
00:14:16.440And you had the rise of and the increasing dominance of these enlightenment trends.
00:14:21.460So sociology, psychology, which offered the possibility of a more scientific approach to charity, right?
00:14:28.800So the idea that we don't just alleviate people's suffering, we use governance to discover the root causes of societal ills like poverty, which we can solve with this tremendous wealth.
00:14:39.460And then the two final factors I'd note are there was a huge amount of societal upheaval in America at the time.
00:14:46.540This was the time when there was a transition from the agrarian society I mentioned to an urban, industrial and professional one.
00:14:53.460There were huge waves of immigration into the United States by Ellis Island at the time.
00:14:57.360So you had this radical churn that uprooted this community-driven aspect of local love of brother to seeing these sort of great movements of people that did necessitate some kind of governance-like response.
00:15:11.940And that's really how charity got increasingly replaced by philanthropy.
00:15:16.320I think, unfortunately, what has happened now is that any distinction between those two conceptually in people's minds has been replaced.
00:15:23.740And people now think of philanthropy as the canonical expression of charity.
00:15:28.060And, you know, if you at least recognize that that's what you're doing and you do it intentionally and with the requisite knowledge, fair enough.
00:15:35.100But if you're a Christian and you believe that you're fulfilling your Christian duty by giving to the Gates Foundation in your will after your death, you're not.
00:15:43.340In fact, St. Basil the Great says explicitly that leaving riches to other parties after your death is not charity because you're not giving away your money.
00:16:23.820You know, I've made this joke several times, but it certainly works here.
00:16:27.040America is in many ways haunted by kind of the shambling zombie animated figure of the fortunes accumulated by its venture capitalists, you know, Carnegie and Ford and Vanderbilt.
00:16:41.600These all have foundations that are now radically progressive, undermining everything that these men believed in and worked for and fought for.
00:16:51.980And so these kind of disembodied fortunes have kind of turned like a golem on their master and have come for every one of these people eventually.
00:17:01.740And we can kind of see ultimately this attitude in charity being very deleterious, as you're talking about.
00:17:08.460So, you know, it wouldn't be an episode of my show if I didn't get into bureaucracy and the effects of mass and scale.
00:17:14.980But obviously, once we shift charity out of being something an individual does, and as you very well point out, something that they suffer for, they personally sacrifice for.
00:17:24.560Instead, we make it something that you ship off to a disembodied institution somewhere.
00:17:30.520Some grand organization does everything on your behalf.
00:17:33.580Then that money just goes into the black cube, right?
00:17:35.840And this is why so many people are frustrated, for instance, with religious charities in America right now.
00:17:40.440We have, you know, Catholic charities and Lutheran charities that are actively looking to bring in as many immigrants as they can under the guise of being this Christian institution.
00:17:50.080And many churches who just kind of put money into a black box don't realize that they are funding this illegal activity.
00:17:56.960And so, obviously, once you have that disconnect from the giver and the gift, you also lose accountability.
00:18:03.340And just like in any unaccountable large organization, it starts to go rogue.
00:18:08.680Also, just the fact that, you know, one of the things that you talked about with aristocracy was handing off that responsibility.
00:18:26.540You could do this or do nothing at all.
00:18:29.180And that means that if you're going to assume that generational benefit, you're also going to have to assume a certain way of life, a certain set of responsibilities, duties.
00:18:37.840This is going to shape you into someone.
00:18:39.500So when you're giving to your progeny, when you're giving to your children, you are not just handing them stuff.
00:18:49.300You're handing them things that will build their character along with receiving that gift, which I think is so critical.
00:18:55.940And really, the liquidity part is beautiful, too, because you have to understand that, yeah, you can you weren't able to just turn whatever your parents gave you at 35 into like a serious heroin addiction.
00:19:08.720You know, that wasn't an option when you couldn't just everything couldn't be liquid.
00:19:14.800And so that's a very difficult thing, I think, for a lot of people to handle, because, you know, a lot of people were pointing to the current Ben Shapiro appearance where he I don't know if you saw this, where he was talking about you don't have the right to live where you grew up.
00:19:28.160You should just move and and go somewhere else.
00:19:30.300And that just kind of throws all of that in the face.
00:19:33.560Right. I think about Klonge in the ancient city where he talks about the reason that they develop traditions, they develop the values is literally because the religion believes that the ancestors are buried in the ground and you have to meet them there.
00:19:50.500And that's why you have property rights.
00:19:52.400It's not because you could go sell your farm.
00:19:55.080It's because literally that's where your family is buried.
00:19:58.740And if you don't have property rights, you can't do the religious rituals properly.
00:20:02.900And so the idea of selling the family farm was literally the idea of selling your ancestors, not not just in a abstract sense, but in a very real sense.
00:20:11.400You are selling the plot of land where you were supposed to care for ancestors.
00:20:14.600So it was a it was a very strange development in Roman law when they eventually allowed for the contractual selling of these family farms, because originally that kind of right was founded on your ability to take care there.
00:20:27.520So I guess all that's a long rant to say, how do we reestablish this connection in a world where all these things have become liquid, where people like Ben Shapiro are saying, well, this is the tradition that you move and you leave and you go somewhere else where you're we find rootedness.
00:20:44.060Right. Being in your the town you grew up in, that's that's for losers.
00:20:47.700That's a townie. That's a that's a failure. You didn't move away to the big city.
00:20:54.840I'll I'll give you two lines of thought.
00:20:57.760The first is property, which I'll discuss.
00:21:00.120But I do recognize that in a fundamentally meritocratic, mobile, changing society, people do have these pressures to move.
00:21:08.620And sometimes it is necessary to succumb to them.
00:21:10.780So I'll give some some secondary thoughts about family businesses and other categories of asset as well.
00:21:15.640But I do think you have to start with land.
00:21:18.060There's a very interesting study I reference in the book called Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth by Dr. Julian Bond and one of his colleagues.
00:21:26.120Right. And what they what they show using the legal records of Britain's court system.
00:21:31.500Is that you're actually able to track very carefully how the fortunes of the great aristocratic British families change over hundreds of years.
00:21:39.780Anytime they go to probate, which is the inheritance legal apportion process in the UK.
00:21:44.860What they discover is that the oldest families have the greatest continuity of wealth growth over hundreds of years, whereas occasionally you get these ultra wealthy new industrial families or new business families that are awarded peerages as part of their honors is that due to their service or donations to their country.
00:22:03.940And they tend to flame out very quickly.
00:22:05.900So there is something about the landed gentry, which is special.
00:22:10.680And I go into the book, you know, I sort of give examples of why that might be.
00:22:14.120But this very much applies to America as well.
00:22:15.640I thought if it's OK, I'll read a very short passage from Alexis de Tocqueville, which I think applies very closely to what you were saying.
00:22:51.280So it's this kind of wonderful Burkean expression of the Fustel de Colange notion of Pietas, of like ongoing duty to the locality of family.
00:23:02.800The idea is, is that an estate is this wonderfully illiquid asset, especially if you fill it with these kind of living embodiments of your family history.
00:23:11.360What the great men of your family have done with portraits and their artifacts, their hand-me-downs.
00:23:17.080Stephen Wolf, the Protestant theologian, has this wonderful passage in his essay on Edmund Burke, in which he sort of says that a chair made by your grandfather is, as it were, a continuation of the presence of the maker.
00:23:31.260The world takes on this phenomenological adornment when your place is saturated with these expressions of the men who made you.
00:23:39.560And you sort of sense your place in this eternal rather than temporal moment, all generations as it were contemporaneous.
00:23:46.920So there is something special about land and the form of the estate.
00:23:51.960And I do think, you know, this is something that I think that the current ultra-rich are doing very wrong is they're not commissioning art.
00:23:58.140They're not, they fail to have the ideals that is necessary to express through the intentional cultivation of artistic objects.
00:24:04.640They're not patronizing great artists because they don't have ideas and they don't have a tradition which has initiated them into the artistic world.
00:24:11.660So I think they're quite intimidated by it.
00:24:23.660Sometimes you have a, you know, successful, profitable family business and multiple generations are initiated into it and they continue with it
00:24:33.540because their families are good stewards of it.
00:24:36.540Ironically, the sort of mold buggy and example of the New York Times is a good one here.
00:24:40.680They actually do a very good job of preserving the lineage of management of that institution.
00:24:45.240But there are quietly many, many, very, very profitable, very large companies that I draw upon in the book that do this quite well.
00:24:52.140This episode is brought to you by Peloton.
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00:25:30.960And one of the great drivers of liquidity and churn in the economy is this phenomenon of basically boomers having built small medium enterprises coming to the end of their lives and having to put them on the open market to random bidders because their children don't want them.
00:25:45.520And that's something interesting that I think is necessary to tackle.
00:25:48.580And I sort of explore how to initiate your children into a lifestyle of family business from a very young age, which is what aristocratic families do.
00:25:58.900I talk about everything from the strategic utility of the birthday party, which is fundamentally an aristocratic tradition in which a child is presented to the community, expected to thank them and speak in front of them and so forth.
00:26:11.120So there's this initiation and life path for the young person starting from a very young age.
00:26:16.560It's not, okay, go off to college, study whatever subject you like, then go work for 10 years in a random different industry and gain some quote-unquote experience.
00:26:25.600And then, by the way, you've got to come home and take over the electrical utilities business, at which point you discover, well, I have no affinity for this.
00:26:33.420There are other people in the industry that know way more than me.
00:26:39.460So it's this very intentional process.
00:26:42.080The third category, I would say, is some people have businesses which I think they intuit correctly are not well-suited for any kind of dynastic structure.
00:26:49.900So if you've built a wildly profitable chat GPT wrapper that is able to, by which I mean wrapper W-R-A-P-P-E-R.
00:27:07.160Anyway, a kind of disposable software function that is able to generate outsized profits for a short amount of time, but is ultimately some kind of ephemeral resource.
00:27:16.100You know, a lot of people in tech recognize that the things they're building are best sold at their peak, cashed in for liquid wealth, because they won't last regardless.
00:27:25.160I offer some reflections based on the great families and how they manage portfolios, and they tend to invest lasting institutions in specific businesses, which are natural monopolies, they're stable, they're of eternal relevance.
00:27:42.240I think resource extraction, other kinds of ultra long time horizon industries, forestry, land, commercial, residential and agricultural, these kind of things.
00:27:52.660So if you intentionally transition your portfolio such that you have a portfolio of holdings, which is well suited for the deep future, you can begin to lay those foundations.
00:28:06.740Now, I should say at this point, I do recognize that not every family is in a position to do this.
00:28:11.080I know your audience, as with my audience, skews young.
00:28:14.280A lot of these things aren't necessarily aspirational.
00:28:16.240I think to a degree that they're very much aspirational for myself as well.
00:28:19.580But by looking at how the great families have done this in depth, in a sort of diversity of angles, I think all of us can find some expression of how we can introduce more solidity and more togetherness into our own families to start building, to lay the foundations of that thousand year view.
00:28:39.540It answers a little bit of the next question I was going to ask, but I'll ask anyway, because there's there's more to it.
00:28:43.500I want to drill down on the family business thing, particularly because, you know, I I grew up in what you could call the American Kulak class.
00:28:51.860Right. Like it's the it's the class that is not going to be upper echelon wealthy, but came from a middle class or lower middle class working class structure and then moved, moved up and made a good amount of money, built businesses.
00:29:07.560It's a lot of construction. It's a lot of these kind of water management things that are quasi blue collar.
00:29:15.640They are there are physical labor, but they end up producing quite a bit of money, you know, plumbing, another one that the roofing reliably making a good amount of money, even though it's not coded as wealthy.
00:29:27.040There's a there's a strange disconnect, too, because I know in the UK, you guys have a a more classic class structure.
00:29:33.940People know that class is not just tied to the amount of money you make in the United States.
00:29:39.020It very much is people think, oh, well, you hit a number of income and then you move to a different class.
00:29:46.800That's why, you know, college professors making a third of what some guy who owns it or, you know, a tenth of what some guy who owns a car dealership, they still have a higher class.
00:29:58.820They're understood as being a higher class, even though that car dealership owner is going to make way, way, way more money over time.
00:30:05.340But that is difficult, I think, for a lot of Americans, because there are, I think, a lot of people who move into that culott class, who build the plumbing business, build the water management business, and then their kids don't want to move into it because it's considered low class, right?
00:30:22.140It's considered to not be something that builds you status, even though you're going to make way more money than you are with your psychology degree, right?
00:30:30.540Like that you're just going to be in a far better place and you'd be part of that tradition.
00:30:34.800And what happens is because of the lower level of interest, a lot of times, you know, parents will just hire on people from outside.
00:30:44.820They'll bring in, you know, sometimes illegal immigrants because those those jobs tend to be very manually taxing.
00:30:52.880And in other scenarios, they just want to scale quicker, right?
00:30:56.280So they'll start a small business and then it'll take off.
00:30:59.320And the goal isn't to build that business, to generationally hand it down to your children.
00:31:03.740The goal is to scale that business up as big as possible so then you can sell it for the highest price, you know, and that kind of thing.
00:31:11.340So they immediately hand off duties to consultants or professional managers, these kind of things, you know, the meritocracy, as it were, as opposed to that familial patronage that you would expect in previous generations.
00:31:25.900And so I guess, you know, again, you touched on a little bit, but the, the, the, just the sheer way that business is done now, the way people view business, it's all transitory.
00:31:36.100Again, it's all liquid, like we were talking about.
00:31:37.860The goals have radically shifted and it can, so it can be very difficult to hand over those positions in the way that you used to.
00:31:46.320Is there any way that we can kind of reinvigorate that tradition?
00:31:51.320Is there any way we can raise the status of handing down a business that is very profitable and ripe for generational wealth, but isn't considered a high status position?
00:32:04.060Is there anything we can do to encourage people to tie their businesses into their family, as opposed to just trying to scale them up and sell them as soon as possible?
00:32:12.820I know you, you said that for instance, you know, at some tech firms, it's just better to scale it up and send it out the door because it's, it's not going to be worth anything in 10 years.
00:32:21.060But there are plenty of examples you can think of, you know, retail chains and, and other things that people build a blow up in 10 years and they've sold them off to investors and their kids are never involved in any of this.
00:32:34.720Or is that just a condition of modernity?
00:32:37.000It's just the way our society is set up right now.
00:32:41.340I'm going to make a few observations at the outset of attempting to answer this question.
00:32:45.280I'll try and tie them all together in a, in a second, because it's a, it's a very rich question.
00:32:49.840Um, the first observation is that I think fundamentally the thrust of your question is correct, which is that you are, if you embark on this journey, fighting against macro societal forces, meritocracy, mobility, immigration, there, there are many different functional systems at play in society, which are undermining the efforts that we're discussing.
00:33:10.920I still think you can, I still think you can succeed.
00:33:13.360The second observation I would make is that it is not inevitable that a family business, which lies outside the remit of a sort of hot popular area within a country cannot nevertheless be high status.
00:33:29.120If you think about the old aristocracy of the land, this was an aristocracy, which was highly geographically dispersed.
00:33:35.380Typically there was a Lord of the manor or whatever that had a large holding estate.
00:33:39.800And he was the only person in his social class, uh, within that area.
00:33:44.580Uh, and, and the aristocracy, he considered himself a member of a distributed class that would congregate for particular events, the marriage season, the debutant balls and so forth, the Royal courts.
00:33:54.080Um, but nevertheless, it was able to maintain the stable structure despite this dispersed geographic arrangement.
00:34:01.300Another observation I'd make is that status is, is not a singular thing.
00:34:06.940So it is true that status is a very fundamental need for humans, but we have different status.
00:34:12.060status as we move about our lives with different networks of people in different contexts.
00:34:17.540So I can be very high status to my children.
00:34:19.920I can be very high status in my workplace where I'm seen as very confident, but I can then go to an art exhibition and suddenly I'm embarrassed to even be there despite all the people that look up to me elsewhere in the world, because I'm not seen as competent or a member of that particular clique.
00:34:33.760So status is this contextually integral thing.
00:34:37.880And so the question then becomes, is there a way that we could manipulate the fabric of society within a particular locality to afford status to the kinds of families that we're talking about in a way that yes, although within the kind of lip coded macro structure of society, working one of these businesses in a region might not make you prestigious to the head of Harvard.
00:34:59.640But nevertheless, in their daily lives, they are interacting with people and families they respect, who hold them in a position of esteem in a way that's very attractive.
00:35:10.360There are a lot of sort of TV shows, sort of rustic red coded TV shows that embody this kind of like local man of the town, man of the, you know, head of the, head of the region.
00:35:20.920So to tie that all together, and this is really one of the reasons that I've written the book is that I, you know, initially I was writing individual essays on parts of this, but it is so interwoven in order to arrive at a solution.
00:35:35.900Let me tie this back to charity as before.
00:35:37.720One of the arguments I make is that there are terrible downsides to exclusively engaging in the philanthropic model of charity, the sort of telescopic version or effective altruism, where you send money as far out of your own community as possible to the sort of mathematically most lives you can save.
00:35:55.740And, you know, as I show, that's, that's a very short term calculation, but nevertheless, most lives you can save in the moment, right?
00:36:01.240Malaria nets in Mozambique or whatever.
00:36:03.880One of the problems of that is that you undermine the integrity of the community immediately around you in a way that is in fact necessary to support the status and relationships and groundedness and indeed the very health of the people that are necessary to perpetuate this model.
00:36:22.700So the final chapter of the book is a look at the sort of Christian tradition of locally rooted charity.
00:36:27.760In fact, let me, let me indulge myself by reading one more St. Augustine quote, just because I like it.
00:36:32.600I pull it out at any, any chance I get.
00:36:36.060He says, since you cannot be of assistance to everyone, those are especially to be cared for who are most closely bound to you by place, time or opportunity, as if by chance, who in reality are chosen by God.
00:37:38.040So John Hancock was, was the wealthiest man in Boston of his time.
00:37:43.040So this was before the, before the American Revolution.
00:37:46.020He was the nephew of a man called Thomas Hancock, who built a mercantile empire called the House of Hancock, which involved shipping, trade, shops, general goods stores, trade with the Caribbean, the British Empire.
00:38:01.360And he inherited that and basically every aspect of his life embodies in a different way, the kinds of things I talk about in the book.
00:38:11.140So he lived this life of tremendous temptation.
00:38:12.880He was initiated into this tremendous wealth after his father died and he was taken in by his uncle.
00:38:16.920But because of the way that his uncle raised him and because John Hancock rose to the challenge, he was able to absorb that new opportunity and direct it in very virtuous directions.
00:38:27.620He was able to both embody the often misunderstood aspects of aristocracy.
00:38:33.700And he was very much an American aristocrat, as it were.
00:38:36.180He wore the finest clothes, which he imported from Britain.
00:38:38.560But nevertheless, despite he, he had this very healthy relationship with money and that he valued it tremendously, but he valued it not in and of itself, but because he recognized the changes he could, he could bring about in the real world by deploying it well.
00:38:51.880So he greatly beautified his city, his house, he built this ornate mansion.
00:38:56.460But when the time came for him to support his people, the revolution broke out.
00:39:00.020He greatly impoverished himself through these huge donations to the patriots in terms of securing for them the stocks they needed to fight their war.
00:39:08.640Again, this is probably another fault line between us.
00:39:10.660You'll notice my British accent here, but I do respect him for his loyalty to his people.
00:39:15.760And, you know, there's this famous interaction in Congress where he instructs George Washington.
00:39:21.780He was the first president of Congress.
00:39:23.580He instructs George Washington, all the wealth I hold in the world is tied up in property in Boston.
00:39:29.540But if you must destroy the city in order to retake it, I give you my full goodwill.
00:39:33.220You know, he's like he has this very healthy relationship with wealth where he's willing to hold it when he recognizes good that can be done with it.
00:39:40.000He's willing to let it go when he recognizes that there are greater ends to be achieved.
00:39:43.120But most of all, the thing that put me on to him is that one of the historians that immediately followed that period, I think it was Gordon Wood, recorded just this kind of throwaway line, which features in later biographies of other figures.
00:39:57.700John Hancock is a radically understudied figure in history.
00:40:01.480There was only a biography written of him for the first time in the 20th century.
00:40:04.960So for almost 200 years, nothing was written of him, which was that over a thousand families depended on John Hancock every day for their daily bread.
00:40:13.940And part of that was this like virtuous stewardship of his business empire.
00:40:18.020He recognized that, you know, rather than some abstract need to send money away to some, you know, theoretical cause, the first and foremost thing he could do was the virtuous stewardship of the local economy to make sure that families were paid well, that the economy was well run, that jobs were growing.
00:40:33.400And whenever gaps formed in that, he would step in unhesitatingly.
00:40:37.920When his men died, he would send their sons through school.
00:40:40.960He's recorded as buying paupers out of debtors' prison.
00:40:44.940He, you know, he made donations for new church bells, for new pews for the poor, for these embroidered Bibles to elevate his local churches.
00:40:52.920There's this hugely diverse array of very local charity and aesthetic expressions.
00:41:01.580And by the end of his life, Boston was recognized as one of the most beautiful cities in the New World as a result.
00:41:08.920So he's this very noble figure that I think had a very virtuous relationship to wealth.
00:41:16.640But to sort of tie that back to the point I was making, if no one is interested in holding status in a community which is in some very fundamental sense sick, both spiritually and physically, like no one wants to be the king of a drugged out town in rural nowhere.
00:41:36.480And I don't say that to condemn those people.
00:41:39.200I say that in order to express that we have a duty to those people and their physical and spiritual health, which is why local charity and raising up the community around you through these kind of diverse expressions of love to your neighbor is necessary because that is you are laying the foundation for status, for patronage, for mutual relationships of care, for the bonds of community, for the ultimate flourishing of where you are laying your roots.
00:42:03.500So that local vision of charity is intimately tied up with this question of dynasty and perseverance through time of the family estate.
00:42:15.600And I think it's so important, like you said, to have that understanding, that direct connection with who you're giving to and who you are helping.
00:42:23.700You know, personally, I try to, when I give charitably, I try to either give to people I know directly or to organizations that are working inside my community directly, knowing that that money is going to stay here and elevate the people around me first.
00:42:39.300And I think that is, even if you don't want to hand a giant chunk of money to your kids, remembering that they're keeping that local and making sure you're community focused with any giving that's not directly connected to your family, I think is really critical.
00:42:56.500Now, obviously, we've talked a lot about the financial aspects of leaving a legacy, which are important.
00:43:01.800And I think that's where a lot of this is focused.
00:43:04.020But before we wrap up here, I do want to touch on the spiritual and the traditional aspect of this, because it's not just that older parents aren't passing on their fortunes or passing on in their money.
00:43:18.320They're spending on something or giving it away to abstract charities.
00:43:21.260It's that they're also not passing on their traditions.
00:43:25.820They're not passing on the family tree.
00:43:28.100They're not having you learn what your great-great-grandfather did and how he lived his life and how that reflects on your life and these things.
00:43:48.640You don't have these responsibilities.
00:43:50.200But there is a lack of, I think, effort to make that central, to tell the narratives and the stories of who we are and why we do what we do and why we're tied to this church and this faith and this belief and this tradition.
00:44:05.860I was wondering if in the book you discuss this issue as well, how we as children, but then now many of us parents, can bring that sharing of legacy back, even though we've now skipped a generation and I think many ways we've kind of broken that continuity.
00:44:39.700Children must be conditioned to stretch forth their minds to do great things, to order the world around them, according to justice and charity, to take up the mantle as the spiritual and physical guardians of their people.
00:44:50.360And necessary component of this is imparting to children that this is what the great men of our family do and have always done.
00:44:59.220And the fact that they are the scions of these heroes inculcates in the young a feeling of responsibility in continuing their legacy and a sense of belief in children that they have what it takes to do it.
00:45:09.520Research and tell stories of the family members of whom you are proud.
00:45:12.940Commission portraits and statues of great members of your family and hand on their heirlooms, treating them with such reverence that it cultivates a sense of awe in your children.
00:45:21.360Find beautiful frames and boxes for these objects.
00:45:24.060Honor ancestors on their birthdays or other occasions.
00:45:27.440All of this is to say it's sort of a return to a theme that we touched on earlier, which is that it is very important to do whatever you can to thank your family.
00:45:34.460Sorry, I had my kid's birthday party earlier today.
00:45:36.640So there's like, you know, the wrapping paper all over the table.
00:45:39.620That's why I'm crinkling every time I move.
00:45:41.120It's very important wherever possible to elevate your family from mundane time into eternal time to sort of recognize the perpetual nature of the struggles and sort of like foundational God-given created nature of existence.
00:45:59.060You know, in the church, we have the liturgical calendar, which is a repeating cycle, which reinforces the eternal relevance of certain themes and figures and practices and traditions.
00:46:09.300Now, the centrality of ritual is very important here.
00:46:16.080If, you know, if I might make an observation, which I think will anchor this thought in people's minds, Christmas is very much a ritual, which is a source of this tremendous psychological and spiritual sustenance for people, even now in a post-Christian culture.
00:46:30.040And it brings with it aesthetics, meaning, expectations, music, sight, sounds, smells, practices, mass at midnight, the sense of expectation, and really all of these instantiated together into a practice, which sort of elevates your vision, both to higher things, but situates you in this eternal recurring time.
00:46:53.080You know, you know, you can, you know, you can, you can, you can, people love It's a Wonderful Life, even now when every other film of that age has been forgotten in popular culture, because it is eternally relevant.
00:47:03.620It speaks to some virtue, some feeling that recurs, and it sort of, it challenges us to be as great as these men once were.
00:47:11.480So one of the things I recommend in the book is to find opportunities in any way you can, even from the most humble beginnings, to elevate your routines where appropriate into rituals, which is to say,
00:47:22.960So you take these pragmatic tasks that everyone has to do, and you find ways to endow them
00:47:27.760with symbol, with meaning, with aesthetics.
00:47:32.700And as such, there's this line from Byung Chul Han, who's this wonderful German-Korean
00:47:37.620philosopher, houses are homes in space while rituals are homes in time.