The Auron MacIntyre Show - Leaving a Generational Legacy ｜ Guest： Johann Kurtz ｜ 11⧸19⧸25

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.800 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.180 I've got a great stream, the great guest.

00:00:34.920 I think you're really going to enjoy.

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00:01:01.080 All right, guys.

00:01:01.840 We've all heard the generational discourse online.

00:01:05.040 We hear that it's all the Gen Z kids. 0.74

00:01:08.020 It's all the millennials, the boomers. 0.99

00:01:09.920 How could they have done this to us?

00:01:11.640 Should we be raging at each other all the time?

00:01:13.740 Is that the way society is supposed to work? 0.62

00:01:15.440 The different generations attacking each other, tearing each other apart? 0.97

00:01:18.320 Or should we be thinking about a generational legacy, a continuity of tradition that passes down from one to the next, what we're about?

00:01:27.180 Joining 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.

00:01:34.980 Johan Kurtz, thank you so much for coming on.

00:01:37.900 Thank you, Oren.

00:01:38.920 It's a pleasure and I'm honored to be here.

00:01:42.020 Absolutely.

00:01:42.600 Like I said, I've really enjoyed your work.

00:01:44.280 You've been focusing a lot on how young men become leaders.

00:01:48.620 They become strong.

00:01:49.400 They become family leaders.

00:01:51.120 They become the heads of households.

00:01:53.100 They go into the church.

00:01:54.380 All 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.

00:02:08.240 It's been great to just see someone go back to the basics and ask fundamental questions of why aren't we forming families?

00:02:14.760 How can we do better at this?

00:02:16.080 So I'm really glad that you have been writing on this and it's all kind of culminated in this book.

00:02:20.860 We'll get deeper into the issue of leaving a legacy.

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00:03:25.340 All right, Johan, we'll start with, I think, what is probably the easiest part of this discussion, something that frames your book ultimately.

00:03:35.300 But you feel like it shouldn't have to be discussed.

00:03:38.420 This is something that was kind of automatic throughout history.

00:03:40.620 But 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.

00:03:51.280 A 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.

00:04:00.260 And 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.

00:04:12.740 In 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.

00:04:20.500 I'm making them weak.

00:04:21.880 I'm not making them fight for themselves, America especially.

00:04:24.680 But the West in general is about cutting your own place in the world and proving yourself.

00:04:29.800 And if I just hand money over to my children, am I not hamstringing their development?

00:04:35.480 So the easy straw man is, of course, the cruises and the casino trips.

00:04:41.540 But 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

00:04:51.420 and their ability to be an independent, productive person.

00:04:55.760 So I guess the most basic question first, again, what should we be doing with our legacy?

00:05:01.660 Why would an older generation want to pass down that wealth instead of doing something noble with it,

00:05:07.200 like handing it to a charity who's going to do good work with that money as well?

00:05:11.980 Yeah, no, fantastic question.

00:05:13.740 And I think essential.

00:05:14.980 As you say, in a sense, it shouldn't be.

00:05:17.220 But I think what has happened is that a lot of the terminology that we use, charity, philanthropy, meritocracy, nepotism, having earned something, birthright,

00:05:29.020 these terms have gone through a revolution as we've moved from an agrarian society to an urbanized one.

00:05:35.500 People now work entirely new professions.

00:05:38.080 From a society in which generational wealth was the norm, to which the ultra-wealthy are now first-generation wealth, typically.

00:05:44.520 And from a Christian society underpinned by a rigorous theological tradition to a post-Christian society,

00:05:51.720 where a lot of these words have subtly different meaning.

00:05:54.740 And I think what's happening now is a healthy thing to assume is goodwill on the part of all the participants.

00:06:00.000 I think that's probably not universally true.

00:06:02.000 But nevertheless, I think what is fundamentally happening is that the people operating, the people trying to find their way through this entirely new world,

00:06:11.220 they're new to wealth themselves, are operating with confused terminology without access to this rigorous theological, historical, philosophical foundation,

00:06:21.240 which is actually a continuation of an ancient tradition in the West and one that some families successfully persist to this day.

00:06:28.100 So that's what I'm trying to recapture in the book is for those families who do want to leave a legacy,

00:06:33.520 to leave a family behind which is strong, loving, in which any wealth you do pass on to your children leaves them stronger,

00:06:40.540 leaves them more empowered to start families of their own,

00:06:43.660 leaves them more empowered to continue the charitable work that's important to you,

00:06:46.840 to continue the strength of the family business.

00:06:49.280 I want to give you the concepts to reason about that.

00:06:52.800 I want to point you to the examples, the historic families in both the UK, in European history,

00:06:58.380 and indeed in American history, some of the great heroes of the book of the American Protestant tradition

00:07:03.220 so that you can decide what the right path is for you.

00:07:06.780 And ultimately, the concluding of the chapter really dives into this question of what legacy is,

00:07:11.700 because I think that that central question is also one that has been crippled by an impoverished discourse.

00:07:18.060 So it's really about going back to fundamentals, anchoring it in the Christian tradition, in Christendom,

00:07:23.180 in our mutual history, and allowing family leaders who are looking at what to do with their legacy

00:07:29.180 and how to involve their children in it, the reasoning skills to do that in a way that makes sense to them.

00:07:33.940 Yeah, I appreciate that, because it really does have to go back to fundamentals.

00:07:38.200 As we both pointed out, throughout history, the core purpose for existence in most societies

00:07:46.060 was having a lot of children and being able to pass things down to them.

00:07:50.760 That's kind of the whole reason you did what you did that was a motivating factor.

00:07:55.280 Now, some of this is rhythm of life stuff, right?

00:07:57.680 Like you had to kind of have children if you were married, if you were being intimate.

00:08:01.540 That was going to happen.

00:08:02.660 There weren't other options.

00:08:04.480 You know, you needed those tighter knit family units to survive.

00:08:08.000 People had a much harder time being on their own.

00:08:11.720 Multigenerational housing, neighborhoods, cares inside of clans or churches,

00:08:16.500 these kind of things were far more common and necessary for survival.

00:08:20.200 You didn't have the option of moving across the country and living on your own.

00:08:25.020 You really did need to have that support, that multigenerational support of the family.

00:08:29.380 And so I think a lot of those things came more instinctually when you don't have other options, right?

00:08:34.700 It was just this is how we live.

00:08:36.840 This is the only way we can live.

00:08:38.740 And so therefore, we will live that way.

00:08:40.760 And 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.

00:08:55.540 But maybe we should lay out first why that ultimately fell away.

00:09:00.720 Why did we go from societies that were deeply grounded in this idea that we needed to pass it on?

00:09:06.520 And I think a lot of it is Christian.

00:09:07.620 Of course, we need to be as Christians.

00:09:09.540 We definitely want to ground it in that theology.

00:09:11.800 But obviously, we can see this trend across many different societies, those which are not Christian as well.

00:09:16.720 This is just the way humans live throughout most of history.

00:09:19.680 So 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?

00:09:38.140 I 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.

00:09:49.420 So 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.

00:10:00.220 So 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.

00:10:13.500 And 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.

00:10:20.580 You'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.

00:10:26.660 It demands stewardship.

00:10:27.840 It demands cultivation.

00:10:29.100 So you're giving them duties, responsibilities, seniority, stewardship, as well as wealth.

00:10:34.540 Now 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.

00:10:43.580 So 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.

00:10:58.220 They had obligations to host, to care for elderly relatives, to sustain the artistic and spiritual flourishing of the community more broadly.

00:11:05.860 So again, even in this elite, you know, sort of ultra high net worth aristocratic tradition, there is a version of this as well.

00:11:13.340 Now I don't think that's true.

00:11:14.340 Now 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.

00:11:27.820 And 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.

00:11:38.740 And 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?

00:11:50.380 And lottery winners tend to have very poor life outcomes because that liquid cash injection immediately robs them of purpose.

00:11:55.720 It provides this huge wave of temptation towards idleness.

00:12:00.740 It 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.

00:12:10.680 So it's quite a dislocating experience.

00:12:12.320 And I think people rightly intuit that that is a path that brings significant risks.

00:12:18.420 So then they think, well, you know, I'll leave enough for my child to go to college or whatever it is.

00:12:24.280 But really, I should be doing something that I can have more confidence will have positive effects.

00:12:29.160 And that's where I think we come to the other thing, which is charity.

00:12:32.900 Now, 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.

00:12:43.620 So it was much broader than just charity as giving money or giving resources to an institution.

00:12:49.180 It was a diverse expression of this fundamental capacity of love.

00:12:54.460 So charity is from the Latin caritas, which is the translation of the biblical Greek agape.

00:13:00.560 And both of these are different characterizations, expressions of love.

00:13:04.480 And so how charity is instantiated in sort of classic Christianity takes on multiple forms.

00:13:10.020 It is true that it takes on almsgiving, so that's the giving of wealth to people in need and the giving of material goods.

00:13:16.140 But 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.

00:13:28.060 So 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.

00:13:41.080 What 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.

00:13:48.460 And there are various things that underpin this.

00:13:51.940 One 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.

00:14:01.600 He didn't go to church much, you know, there was a slight commitment, but he was definitely not a Christian first and foremost.

00:14:07.700 And they had this question of what to do with their wealth.

00:14:09.700 They were first generation wealth.

00:14:11.060 They didn't have family traditions.

00:14:12.480 They didn't have these solid estates to pass on.

00:14:14.800 They were sort of looking for what to do.

00:14:16.440 And you had the rise of and the increasing dominance of these enlightenment trends.

00:14:21.460 So sociology, psychology, which offered the possibility of a more scientific approach to charity, right?

00:14:28.800 So 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.

00:14:38.120 It's uncertain if that's happened.

00:14:39.460 And then the two final factors I'd note are there was a huge amount of societal upheaval in America at the time.

00:14:46.540 This was the time when there was a transition from the agrarian society I mentioned to an urban, industrial and professional one.

00:14:53.460 There were huge waves of immigration into the United States by Ellis Island at the time.

00:14:57.360 So 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.

00:15:11.940 And that's really how charity got increasingly replaced by philanthropy.

00:15:16.320 I think, unfortunately, what has happened now is that any distinction between those two conceptually in people's minds has been replaced.

00:15:23.740 And people now think of philanthropy as the canonical expression of charity.

00:15:28.060 And, 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.

00:15:35.100 But 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.

00:15:43.340 In 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.

00:15:52.220 Death is taking it away from you.

00:15:53.700 You're not suffering.

00:15:54.660 You're not sacrificing.

00:15:55.920 You're not getting your hands dirty.

00:15:57.240 You're not meeting your brother.

00:15:58.260 You're not knowing and loving them.

00:15:59.860 It's just a financial transaction.

00:16:01.520 And I think, unfortunately, those trends have resulted in a huge amount of confusion.

00:16:07.780 And so solving those kind of requires piecing together every aspect of the puzzle.

00:16:14.100 What is charity?

00:16:15.320 How can you pass on wealth to your children?

00:16:17.000 How can you re-solidify your estates?

00:16:18.940 And ultimately, how can you fulfill your charitable duty?

00:16:22.860 No, that's great.

00:16:23.820 You know, I've made this joke several times, but it certainly works here.

00:16:27.040 America 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.

00:16:41.600 These all have foundations that are now radically progressive, undermining everything that these men believed in and worked for and fought for.

00:16:51.980 And 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.

00:17:01.740 And we can kind of see ultimately this attitude in charity being very deleterious, as you're talking about.

00:17:08.460 So, 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.

00:17:14.980 But 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.

00:17:24.560 Instead, we make it something that you ship off to a disembodied institution somewhere.

00:17:30.520 Some grand organization does everything on your behalf.

00:17:33.580 Then that money just goes into the black cube, right?

00:17:35.840 And this is why so many people are frustrated, for instance, with religious charities in America right now.

00:17:40.440 We 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.

00:17:50.080 And many churches who just kind of put money into a black box don't realize that they are funding this illegal activity.

00:17:56.960 And so, obviously, once you have that disconnect from the giver and the gift, you also lose accountability.

00:18:03.340 And just like in any unaccountable large organization, it starts to go rogue.

00:18:08.680 Also, just the fact that, you know, one of the things that you talked about with aristocracy was handing off that responsibility.

00:18:15.560 The gift came.

00:18:17.080 You had to live a specific lifestyle.

00:18:18.640 You could inherit, but you had to live a certain way.

00:18:21.060 You couldn't inherit that and then just go become something else in some foreign land.

00:18:25.240 And the asset wasn't liquid.

00:18:26.540 You could do this or do nothing at all.

00:18:29.180 And 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.

00:18:37.840 This is going to shape you into someone.

00:18:39.500 So when you're giving to your progeny, when you're giving to your children, you are not just handing them stuff.

00:18:45.920 You're handing them a way of life.

00:18:48.340 You're handing them goals.

00:18:49.300 You're handing them things that will build their character along with receiving that gift, which I think is so critical.

00:18:55.940 And 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.

00:19:08.720 You know, that wasn't an option when you couldn't just everything couldn't be liquid.

00:19:12.620 But now it entirely could be.

00:19:14.800 And 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.

00:19:28.160 You should just move and and go somewhere else.

00:19:30.300 And that just kind of throws all of that in the face.

00:19:33.560 Right. 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.

00:19:47.300 You have to feed them.

00:19:48.400 You have to give them drink.

00:19:49.380 You have to care for them.

00:19:50.500 And that's why you have property rights.

00:19:52.400 It's not because you could go sell your farm.

00:19:55.080 It's because literally that's where your family is buried.

00:19:58.740 And if you don't have property rights, you can't do the religious rituals properly.

00:20:02.900 And 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.

00:20:11.400 You are selling the plot of land where you were supposed to care for ancestors.

00:20:14.600 So 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.

00:20:27.520 So 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.

00:20:44.060 Right. Being in your the town you grew up in, that's that's for losers. 0.92

00:20:47.700 That's a townie. That's a that's a failure. You didn't move away to the big city. 1.00

00:20:51.200 How do we change that mentality?

00:20:54.840 I'll I'll give you two lines of thought.

00:20:57.760 The first is property, which I'll discuss.

00:21:00.120 But I do recognize that in a fundamentally meritocratic, mobile, changing society, people do have these pressures to move.

00:21:08.620 And sometimes it is necessary to succumb to them.

00:21:10.780 So I'll give some some secondary thoughts about family businesses and other categories of asset as well.

00:21:15.640 But I do think you have to start with land.

00:21:18.060 There's a very interesting study I reference in the book called Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth by Dr. Julian Bond and one of his colleagues.

00:21:26.120 Right. And what they what they show using the legal records of Britain's court system.

00:21:31.500 Is that you're actually able to track very carefully how the fortunes of the great aristocratic British families change over hundreds of years.

00:21:39.780 Anytime they go to probate, which is the inheritance legal apportion process in the UK.

00:21:44.860 What 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.

00:22:03.940 And they tend to flame out very quickly.

00:22:05.900 So there is something about the landed gentry, which is special.

00:22:10.680 And I go into the book, you know, I sort of give examples of why that might be.

00:22:14.120 But this very much applies to America as well.

00:22:15.640 I 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.

00:22:21.280 He says,

00:22:51.280 So 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.

00:23:02.800 The 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.

00:23:11.360 What the great men of your family have done with portraits and their artifacts, their hand-me-downs.

00:23:17.080 Stephen 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.

00:23:31.260 The world takes on this phenomenological adornment when your place is saturated with these expressions of the men who made you.

00:23:39.560 And you sort of sense your place in this eternal rather than temporal moment, all generations as it were contemporaneous.

00:23:46.920 So there is something special about land and the form of the estate.

00:23:51.960 And 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.

00:23:58.140 They're not, they fail to have the ideals that is necessary to express through the intentional cultivation of artistic objects.

00:24:04.640 They'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.

00:24:11.660 So I think they're quite intimidated by it.

00:24:14.240 So that's one thing.

00:24:15.720 And then the second is the question of family businesses.

00:24:21.080 Sometimes this is straightforward.

00:24:23.660 Sometimes you have a, you know, successful, profitable family business and multiple generations are initiated into it and they continue with it

00:24:33.540 because their families are good stewards of it.

00:24:36.540 Ironically, the sort of mold buggy and example of the New York Times is a good one here.

00:24:40.680 They actually do a very good job of preserving the lineage of management of that institution.

00:24:45.240 But there are quietly many, many, very, very profitable, very large companies that I draw upon in the book that do this quite well.

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00:25:18.340 For other people, this is more difficult.

00:25:22.140 And it's difficult for a variety of reasons.

00:25:24.700 Sometimes children are simply uninterested in inheriting the family business.

00:25:29.800 In fact, this is a huge problem.

00:25:30.960 And 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.

00:25:45.520 And that's something interesting that I think is necessary to tackle.

00:25:48.580 And 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.

00:25:57.000 Their upbringing is intentional.

00:25:58.900 I 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.

00:26:11.120 So there's this initiation and life path for the young person starting from a very young age.

00:26:16.560 It'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.

00:26:25.600 And 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.

00:26:33.420 There are other people in the industry that know way more than me.

00:26:35.640 I feel like an imposter here.

00:26:37.160 It's not part of my life story.

00:26:38.380 I have to relocate.

00:26:39.460 So it's this very intentional process.

00:26:42.080 The 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.

00:26:49.900 So 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.

00:26:59.760 Oh, now I'm disappointed.

00:27:01.820 I was like, oh, man, are we coding in some terrible lyrics?

00:27:05.340 No, no, no.

00:27:07.160 Anyway, 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.

00:27:16.100 You 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.

00:27:25.160 I 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.

00:27:42.240 I think resource extraction, other kinds of ultra long time horizon industries, forestry, land, commercial, residential and agricultural, these kind of things.

00:27:52.660 So 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.

00:28:06.740 Now, I should say at this point, I do recognize that not every family is in a position to do this.

00:28:11.080 I know your audience, as with my audience, skews young.

00:28:14.280 A lot of these things aren't necessarily aspirational.

00:28:16.240 I think to a degree that they're very much aspirational for myself as well.

00:28:19.580 But 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.

00:28:35.540 Yeah, that's interesting.

00:28:39.540 It 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.

00:28:43.500 I 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.

00:28:51.860 Right. 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.

00:29:07.560 It's a lot of construction. It's a lot of these kind of water management things that are quasi blue collar.

00:29:15.640 They 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.

00:29:27.040 There's a there's a strange disconnect, too, because I know in the UK, you guys have a a more classic class structure.

00:29:33.940 People know that class is not just tied to the amount of money you make in the United States.

00:29:39.020 It very much is people think, oh, well, you hit a number of income and then you move to a different class.

00:29:44.340 But that that's not exactly the case.

00:29:46.800 That'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.

00:29:58.820 They're understood as being a higher class, even though that car dealership owner is going to make way, way, way more money over time.

00:30:05.340 But 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?

00:30:22.140 It'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?

00:30:30.540 Like that you're just going to be in a far better place and you'd be part of that tradition.

00:30:34.800 And what happens is because of the lower level of interest, a lot of times, you know, parents will just hire on people from outside.

00:30:44.820 They'll bring in, you know, sometimes illegal immigrants because those those jobs tend to be very manually taxing. 1.00

00:30:52.880 And in other scenarios, they just want to scale quicker, right?

00:30:56.280 So they'll start a small business and then it'll take off.

00:30:59.320 And the goal isn't to build that business, to generationally hand it down to your children.

00:31:03.740 The 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.

00:31:11.340 So 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.

00:31:25.900 And 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.

00:31:36.100 Again, it's all liquid, like we were talking about.

00:31:37.860 The 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.

00:31:46.320 Is there any way that we can kind of reinvigorate that tradition?

00:31:51.320 Is 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?

00:32:04.060 Is 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?

00:32:12.820 I 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.

00:32:21.060 But 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.

00:32:33.040 Are there any good solutions to that?

00:32:34.720 Or is that just a condition of modernity?

00:32:37.000 It's just the way our society is set up right now.

00:32:41.340 I'm going to make a few observations at the outset of attempting to answer this question.

00:32:45.280 I'll try and tie them all together in a, in a second, because it's a, it's a very rich question.

00:32:49.840 Um, 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.

00:33:10.920 I still think you can, I still think you can succeed.

00:33:13.360 The 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.

00:33:29.120 If you think about the old aristocracy of the land, this was an aristocracy, which was highly geographically dispersed.

00:33:35.380 Typically there was a Lord of the manor or whatever that had a large holding estate.

00:33:39.800 And he was the only person in his social class, uh, within that area.

00:33:44.580 Uh, 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.

00:33:54.080 Um, but nevertheless, it was able to maintain the stable structure despite this dispersed geographic arrangement.

00:34:01.300 Another observation I'd make is that status is, is not a singular thing.

00:34:06.940 So it is true that status is a very fundamental need for humans, but we have different status.

00:34:12.060 status as we move about our lives with different networks of people in different contexts.

00:34:17.540 So I can be very high status to my children.

00:34:19.920 I 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.

00:34:33.760 So status is this contextually integral thing.

00:34:37.880 And 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.

00:34:59.640 But 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.

00:35:08.940 And I think that's, that's viable.

00:35:10.360 There 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.

00:35:19.460 It is an aspirational vision.

00:35:20.920 So 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.

00:35:35.900 Let me tie this back to charity as before.

00:35:37.720 One 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.

00:35:55.740 And, 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?

00:36:01.240 Malaria nets in Mozambique or whatever.

00:36:03.880 One 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.

00:36:22.700 So the final chapter of the book is a look at the sort of Christian tradition of locally rooted charity.

00:36:27.760 In fact, let me, let me indulge myself by reading one more St. Augustine quote, just because I like it.

00:36:32.600 I pull it out at any, any chance I get.

00:36:36.060 He 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.

00:36:49.320 So there is this sense of fate.

00:36:51.520 There is this sense that you have a particular obligation.

00:36:55.160 You know, don't, don't tell J.D. J.D. Vance, but the order of Morris is, is indeed a real thing.

00:37:00.700 The sort of concentric circles of love he was, he was right about.

00:37:03.900 I think J.D. Vance was trying to tell the Pope, but yeah.

00:37:07.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:37:08.460 Kind of the other way around.

00:37:09.380 Let's not go there.

00:37:10.220 Let's not go there.

00:37:12.200 I'm a Protestant.

00:37:13.220 I don't have to worry about it.

00:37:14.360 Yeah, but go ahead.

00:37:15.180 I know, I know.

00:37:15.760 That's how this whole, this whole discussion falls off the rails really quickly.

00:37:19.320 No, no, no.

00:37:20.080 But like I said, they're big Protestant heroes.

00:37:22.200 In fact, really the hero of the book is John Hancock, the first signer of the Declaration of Independence.

00:37:27.920 And in my mind, a sort of moral icon of this vision of charity.

00:37:32.180 But anyway, if you engage in this.

00:37:35.040 Say why just for a second.

00:37:37.220 Absolutely.

00:37:37.740 Yeah.

00:37:38.040 So John Hancock was, was the wealthiest man in Boston of his time.

00:37:43.040 So this was before the, before the American Revolution.

00:37:46.020 He 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.

00:38:01.360 And 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.

00:38:11.140 So he lived this life of tremendous temptation.

00:38:12.880 He was initiated into this tremendous wealth after his father died and he was taken in by his uncle.

00:38:16.920 But 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.

00:38:27.620 He was able to both embody the often misunderstood aspects of aristocracy.

00:38:33.700 And he was very much an American aristocrat, as it were.

00:38:36.180 He wore the finest clothes, which he imported from Britain.

00:38:38.560 But 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.

00:38:51.880 So he greatly beautified his city, his house, he built this ornate mansion.

00:38:56.460 But when the time came for him to support his people, the revolution broke out.

00:39:00.020 He greatly impoverished himself through these huge donations to the patriots in terms of securing for them the stocks they needed to fight their war.

00:39:08.640 Again, this is probably another fault line between us.

00:39:10.660 You'll notice my British accent here, but I do respect him for his loyalty to his people.

00:39:15.760 And, you know, there's this famous interaction in Congress where he instructs George Washington.

00:39:21.780 He was the first president of Congress.

00:39:23.580 He instructs George Washington, all the wealth I hold in the world is tied up in property in Boston.

00:39:29.540 But if you must destroy the city in order to retake it, I give you my full goodwill.

00:39:33.220 You 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.

00:39:40.000 He's willing to let it go when he recognizes that there are greater ends to be achieved.

00:39:43.120 But 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.

00:39:57.700 John Hancock is a radically understudied figure in history.

00:40:01.480 There was only a biography written of him for the first time in the 20th century.

00:40:04.960 So 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.

00:40:13.940 And part of that was this like virtuous stewardship of his business empire.

00:40:18.020 He 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.

00:40:33.400 And whenever gaps formed in that, he would step in unhesitatingly.

00:40:37.920 When his men died, he would send their sons through school.

00:40:40.960 He's recorded as buying paupers out of debtors' prison. 0.71

00:40:44.940 He, you know, he made donations for new church bells, for new pews for the poor, for these embroidered Bibles to elevate his local churches.

00:40:52.920 There's this hugely diverse array of very local charity and aesthetic expressions.

00:40:58.840 He elevated Boston Common.

00:41:01.580 And by the end of his life, Boston was recognized as one of the most beautiful cities in the New World as a result.

00:41:08.920 So he's this very noble figure that I think had a very virtuous relationship to wealth.

00:41:16.640 But 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.

00:41:36.480 And I don't say that to condemn those people.

00:41:39.200 I 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.

00:42:03.500 So that local vision of charity is intimately tied up with this question of dynasty and perseverance through time of the family estate.

00:42:14.580 No, and that's great.

00:42:15.600 And 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.

00:42:23.700 You 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.

00:42:39.300 And 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.

00:42:56.500 Now, obviously, we've talked a lot about the financial aspects of leaving a legacy, which are important.

00:43:01.800 And I think that's where a lot of this is focused.

00:43:04.020 But 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.

00:43:18.320 They're spending on something or giving it away to abstract charities.

00:43:21.260 It's that they're also not passing on their traditions.

00:43:23.900 They're not passing on their faith.

00:43:25.820 They're not passing on the family tree.

00:43:28.100 They'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.

00:43:37.620 That chain is broken.

00:43:38.700 Now, to be fair, in a lot of ways, that's because modern society, once again, has encouraged you to basically throw all that away.

00:43:46.480 You're an individual.

00:43:47.400 You're not tied to anyone.

00:43:48.640 You don't have these responsibilities.

00:43:50.200 But 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.

00:44:05.860 I 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.

00:44:24.460 Can we reconnect those things?

00:44:25.960 Is there a way to bring that back around?

00:44:27.840 So I hope so.

00:44:30.320 And if it's okay, I'll indulge myself and read a very short passage from the book.

00:44:35.200 But let me return to the question of ritual.

00:44:37.400 Prompt me if I forget.

00:44:39.700 Children 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.

00:44:50.360 And necessary component of this is imparting to children that this is what the great men of our family do and have always done.

00:44:57.420 They must be given heroes.

00:44:59.220 And 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.

00:45:09.520 Research and tell stories of the family members of whom you are proud.

00:45:12.940 Commission 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.

00:45:21.360 Find beautiful frames and boxes for these objects.

00:45:24.060 Honor ancestors on their birthdays or other occasions.

00:45:27.440 All 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.

00:45:34.460 Sorry, I had my kid's birthday party earlier today.

00:45:36.640 So there's like, you know, the wrapping paper all over the table.

00:45:39.620 That's why I'm crinkling every time I move.

00:45:41.120 It'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.

00:45:59.060 You 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.

00:46:09.300 Now, the centrality of ritual is very important here.

00:46:16.080 If, 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.

00:46:30.040 And 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.

00:46:53.080 You 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.

00:47:03.620 It speaks to some virtue, some feeling that recurs, and it sort of, it challenges us to be as great as these men once were.

00:47:11.480 So 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,

00:47:22.960 So you take these pragmatic tasks that everyone has to do, and you find ways to endow them

00:47:27.760 with symbol, with meaning, with aesthetics.

00:47:32.700 And as such, there's this line from Byung Chul Han, who's this wonderful German-Korean

00:47:37.620 philosopher, houses are homes in space while rituals are homes in time.

00:47:42.580 And he's drawing on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry there, who's of a French aristocratic family,

00:47:46.720 drawing upon his reminiscence of his father's palace and the liturgical calendar, where

00:47:50.760 every footstep had a meaning.

00:47:52.900 It's a step back from the intensity of the moment and the flurry of everyday demands

00:48:02.720 to anchor oneself again in these eternal principles, these things that never change.

00:48:08.820 And so the combination of those two things, I think, is very powerful, the perpetual presence

00:48:14.060 of your forefathers and the participation in the acts that you know they once did themselves,

00:48:21.260 that you know if you pass on to your children, your children will continue to do after you're

00:48:25.140 gone.

00:48:26.140 It's another way of instantiating this continuity of time.

00:48:28.680 And rituals, because they're enacted out, they sort of write themselves onto your body.

00:48:32.920 It's not a vague belief because beliefs can slip.

00:48:35.800 Whereas something like Christmas, because it makes physical demands of people, because

00:48:40.200 you have to, you know, even if it's impoverished now and the religious element is often lost,

00:48:45.360 you have to buy the tree.

00:48:46.500 It's not a proper Christmas if you don't have the tree.

00:48:48.380 You have to wrap the presents.

00:48:49.380 Everyone has to sit around it.

00:48:50.380 You have to drink eggnog, whatever.

00:48:52.380 There's this full set of embodied expectations that can't be ignored.

00:48:56.320 So it's not just this kind of abstract thing.

00:48:59.540 Finding ways to tie that into your everyday reality, and I give some examples in the book,

00:49:03.160 I think is of the utmost importance.

00:49:05.980 And even in secular literature, psychologists, it's well established that families that never

00:49:11.600 do this, that never mark anything out as special as of particular importance to their

00:49:16.620 family and identity, suffer far higher rates of psychological crisis because people move through

00:49:21.400 life with a sense of impending nihilism, that nothing is special and that they're not connected

00:49:26.600 to anything.

00:49:27.700 Whereas the opposite of that is that families that are ritual protected, as I say in the

00:49:32.160 book, are quite the opposite.

00:49:36.100 There's all these striking studies of children who are able to sort of return to their comforting

00:49:40.620 rituals to move them through challenging moments.

00:49:43.980 So that kind of temperamental stability, I think, is essential in the context of ultra long

00:49:48.300 time horizon projects.

00:49:49.800 No, I agree.

00:49:51.680 And you've set me up perfectly for my yearly Thanksgiving rant.

00:49:56.640 So American Thanksgiving, guys, just want to want to say we eat turkey.

00:50:00.980 OK, I don't want to hear that it's dry.

00:50:02.980 I want to hear that you prefer to have steak or lobster.

00:50:05.820 No, this is Thanksgiving in America.

00:50:08.060 We eat turkey.

00:50:09.160 You can eat whatever you want on all the other days.

00:50:11.320 You eat turkey today.

00:50:12.660 You can have another meat on the side if you want.

00:50:14.600 But tradition, you eat the turkey.

00:50:16.340 I don't want to hear about how you barbecued something.

00:50:18.800 I don't want to hear about all the different, you know, Asian dishes.

00:50:23.060 No, we make turkey.

00:50:24.500 This is America.

00:50:25.540 It's Thanksgiving.

00:50:27.020 I don't want to hear about it.

00:50:28.180 All right.

00:50:28.620 So that's it.

00:50:29.620 Johan, it's been great speaking with you.

00:50:32.000 I think you're doing fantastic work.

00:50:33.680 Again, it's one of those issues that should be obvious at some level, but we have gotten

00:50:38.620 so far away from it that it's critical for a guy like you to reground this and to lay 0.98

00:50:42.860 out the logical, moral, fiscal framework, just approaching it from the difficulties

00:50:48.940 we have today and the broken chain and the way we can restore that.

00:50:53.280 So I'm really glad that the book was written.

00:50:56.080 Can you let people know the name of the book?

00:50:57.780 Where can they find it?

00:50:59.440 Show them a copy, everything.

00:51:00.480 Certainly, I have an author copy here.

00:51:04.260 This is an advanced copy, so it's marked up.

00:51:05.940 I apologize.

00:51:06.560 But it's called Leaving a Legacy, Inheritance, Charity, and Thousand-Year Families.

00:51:12.020 Thanksgiving is coming up.

00:51:13.060 It might make an excellent gift for the patriarch or matriarch of your own family.

00:51:17.560 But yeah, it's on Amazon.

00:51:19.600 That's where you can find it.

00:51:20.660 You can get it in e-book, you know, paperback or hardcover as you prefer.

00:51:26.140 Yeah, and yeah, I write at becomingnoble.substack.com.

00:51:29.440 But I'm here to show the book, so please, please do check it out.

00:51:31.800 I worked very hard on it.

00:51:33.620 Well, and I know the temptation is for every Zoomer and every millennial out there to grab 0.98

00:51:37.940 as many copies as they can and give it to every boomer they see, just chucking it at

00:51:42.200 boomers in the retirement center.

00:51:43.900 But you need to read this too, guys.

00:51:45.660 I made an episode a while ago called You're the Boomer Now, which is you have to be careful

00:51:51.680 not to fall into this same trap.

00:51:54.340 You can't decry all this, oh, I didn't get things passed down to me, the generations

00:51:59.740 before me didn't do the work, and then you don't do it.

00:52:02.560 Like you must break that cycle if you actually want things to change, which means you need

00:52:08.080 this book just as much as your parents or grandparents do.

00:52:11.220 So make sure that you're checking it out.

00:52:13.200 And of course, if it's your first time on this channel, you need to click subscribe

00:52:17.600 on YouTube, bell notifications so you know when we go live.

00:52:21.340 Sorry, this one isn't live today.

00:52:23.000 This is pre-recorded, so we will not be able to answer Super Chats.

00:52:26.840 I'll make sure to put that at the beginning of the episode as well in chat.

00:52:30.600 And of course, if you would like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to subscribe

00:52:34.700 to the Oren McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.

00:52:37.680 If you do leave a rating or review, it really helps the algorithm magic.

00:52:41.440 Thank you, everybody, for watching.

00:52:42.460 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - November 19, 2025

Leaving a Generational Legacy ｜ Guest： Johann Kurtz ｜ 11⧸19⧸25

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