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Speaker 6: All right, Johan Kers, Welcome to the Jay Burdens Show.
How are you doing, man?
Speaker 7: I'm good. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. This is our
first face to face conversation, which obviously always makes things
a little bit easier, and I'm really glad to have
you here.
Speaker 7: Man, definitely.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 7: No more awkward me staring at you. You wondering who
the elliot's talking to?
Speaker 6: Well, OK, as someone who's on the other side of it,
who was fully anonymized for a very long time, I
one hundred percent get it. But the experience of talking
to someone face to face, even by a camera, is
so much easier than waiting for the soundbar to go flat.
It just makes it much more natural. I can actually
look at you and see if you're done talking, if
you're waiting to finish. A thought point is this doesn't
matter to my audience, but I am glad to be
talking to you face to face.
Speaker 7: No it's it's good for me too. And the funny
thing is I can I can kind of relax as
a bit cagy, like I'm showing my face, you know what,
like what's gonna happen? What's the worst that could happen?
And that announcement post for the book on Twitter for
whatever reason, I mean, we have some very generous friends
with like some retweets got a half a million views
almost and immediately people from my former employer started following
me and messaging me. So I was like, Okay, well,
I'm completely unemployable now, as we'll go all the way
in on the on the J. Burtons show, nothing to worry.
Speaker 6: Well, I'd be as someone who recently went through that
it was sort of freeing because you're waiting for the
hammer to drop and you realize, oh wait, there really
was no hammer at least in that way.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 6: Okay, Sure, you might have a few people calling you
gay and instead of doing it the normal way, they
edit a photo of your face, but I kind of
expected that, Yeah, really was I'm not surprised that it
went well, but I'm glad. Nonetheless, so you were here
not just to talk about your physical appearance, but to
talk about a book you have written, you were generous
enough to send me a review copy, and I really
enjoyed it. I read a lot of books for this channel,
a lot of books written by people with online followings
to one degree or another, and I don't necessarily review
all of them, because if you can't say something nice,
don't say anything at all. As the aphorism goes, your
book was very good. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
I read it in one sort of mad cap sitting,
and there were a lot of things that you mentioned
there that were sorely needed if we're going to make
this project, our project generational. So if you could, Johann,
could you just introduce this book?
Speaker 7: Sure? Yeah, Well the book has got a copy here.
Why don't I show it now that my camera's on.
The book is called there we Go. Yeah, called leaving
a legacy, inheritance charity and thousand year Families. And the
concept is, or at least was quite simple, which is
that increasingly we're seeing various kinds of skepticism from the
wealthy older generation about passing on their wealth. This takes
various forms. Some of it is an entitlement spin that
wealth down some of it is a growing notion that
it's more morally right to give your wealth to charity
rather than to your children, or that you know, giving
wealth to your children just encourages them to be lazy
and robs them of that kind of bootstraps experience. That
the boomer is new and loved. And I thought that
this was a difficult discussion that was worthy of an intervention,
a book length treatment, because there are actually only certain things.
There are certain things which can only be accomplished in
the context of intergenerational collaboration, dynastic efforts, these great projects,
you know, at the sort of maximum scale, this is
the sort of cathedrals of this world. But at a
smaller scale, it's meaningful communities that are built around families.
It's families that are flourishing in multi dimensions and multiple
dimensions of their lives, with you know, having the opportunity
to have children of their own and so forth. And
so I wrote this book, which is sort of a
philosophical defense of inheritance, and it tackles all of these
issues one by one. I thought it would be a
simple book. Actually, it turns out that a lot of
these concepts are far more either complex or misunderstood than
they might appear. So it became necessary to define what
is charity, what is philanthropy, what is meritocracy? What is nepotism?
Like we throw these terms around and people base some
of the most important decisions in their lives around them,
only having the vague sense of what they mean when
situated correctly. Where these terms come from, what they were
intended to do, And so the book is anyway, it
ties all of this together to try and make a compelling, persuasive, kind, approachable,
intuitive argument to an older, non radicalized Christian sort of
boomer patriarch the value of and a guide to building
something dynastic within their own family, either a great wild
or at audest wealth. But basically, I just wanted to
make sure that our guys had the tools to defend
their own position and to claim what I think is
rightfully this.
Speaker 6: So let's start with charity and philanthropy as an example
from my family, not particularly close, but nonetheless someone in
my immediate circle who is you know, aging, has no children,
wealthy and has said I'm leaving it all to the
animal shelter to charity when we're both gone. It all
just disperses will be used for good works. So you
pretty thoroughly, I guess, pull apart that idea. But let's
start at the top, which quite what's wrong with that
line of thinking?
Speaker 7: So great question, I think a good provocation to even
start this discussion is what is charity or what is philanthropy?
You hear these terms, and I've you know, I've spoken
to some in the course of researching this book and
since its publication, I've spoken to some people that do
control significant wealth, and you would think that these basic
building blocks of reasoning were at least clear in their minds.
But if you ask them to define charity in philanthropy
and what's the difference, they're often in a loss like these.
Our culture is really neglected nurturing clarity on these issues.
But the history is very interesting. So charity and philanthropy
is necessary to sort of define these things at a
basic level to answer your question, which is, why is
it wrong to leave your wealth to a dog shelter?
Charity is a Christian virtue that's at least originally what
it was. It doesn't mean giving things to people. Charity
comes from the Latin catitas, which comes from the Biblical
coin Greek agape, which is a sort of higher expression
of personal love, and then it a sort of more
rigorous Christian definition would be something like love for your God,
and due to that love for your God, love for
your fellow man, who is a reflection of the Creator.
He's made in the likeness of his Creator. And following
divine law, you should love your brother as well. And
so in the sort of christendom, you know, the tradition
that built the West with its beautiful cathedrals, and are
really the entirety of our patrimony, our history, and everything
we've accomplished. This is what charity was understood as, this
theological virtue that finds a diversity of expressions, whether that
is almsgiving, which is giving to the poor, whether that
is liberality, which is a notion that when you're confronted
with the situation that demands an outlay of wealth to
achieve something important, you're willing to just part with the
wealth because you understand that wealth is a tool to
achieve things in the real world. It's not something to
be hoarded in the abstract and a bank account. But
also things like fraternal correction, really any form of desiring
and acting on what is best for your fellow man.
But the important thing is that all of them are
grounded in love. And indeed, I would argue, as I
do in the book, a sense of personal love that
can only really emerge in personal encounters and personal relationships
and communities and families and so forth. And you know,
all of these ideas my ideas, and really are society's
ideas about charity more generally, basically spring from a small
number of Biblical passengers, arguably chief amongst them are the
parable of the Good Samaritan, which is this very interesting
and complex interaction which results in moral obligations to those
present at the scene, regardless of their backgrounds. Philanthropy is
something differ different. Philanthropy comes much later, and it's a
distinct activity. Philanthropy is something that merges out of this
confluence of events where you have this incredibly wealthy selection
of men in the late nineteenth century, men like Rockefeller
Andrew Carnegie, big industrial magnates and the richest men of
their day, who, especially in the case of Carnegie, has
this very very tenuous relationship with his faith. He attends
church sometimes can't quite justify it, perhaps as a deist
but is certainly fading and definitely doesn't live his life
or conduct his charity according to theological principles. So he
basically is one of the main initiators in this very
famous text called the Gospel of Wealth, of creating this
thing which is called philanthropy, which basically says, like, Okay,
if I'm not going to follow Christian tradition of charity,
which is rooted in particular communities, it's typically palliative, so
it finds people who are suffering and finds ways to
ease their pain and suffering. So it, you know, clothes
the homeless, It feeds the hungry, It gives arms the poor,
It increases the funding hospitals, local hospitals, hospices, you know
these kind of things. He says, well, if I'm not
bound by that entire moral framework, what can I deploy
to maximize the use of this tremendous fortune. And he
turns sort of to the post enlightenment principles science are
the emerging sciences of sociology, psychology, really governance as we
now understand it, And he says, and he condemns people
that give to those who are close to them who
haven't rigorously analyzed that giving in scientific ways, and he
constructs this vision of philanthropy as distinct from charity, which
is basically institutional. It's scientific bureau. It attempts to really
alter the human condition fundamentally, to prevent the things that
we would recognize as the consequences of a fallen world
from ever occurring, so poverty, et cetera. To go to
the source of these problems. The problem there is that
what you're essentially discussing at that point is something It's
a bit like governance, it's a bit like politics. It
certainly has these kind of appearances and logic of macroeconomics.
It's not really charity at all. It demands no personal connection,
no love, and indeed it has all these useful characteristics
like whoever undertakes this activity gets to accrue personal power
to them, They get to lead powerful, well staffed institutions.
They So this I think will be a familiar you know,
you can see where I'm going. Anyway, The fundamental point
is this, and in the second chapter I look at
how disaster some of this is, but perhaps I won't
cover whole chapters at a time. The point essentially is this,
if you're a Christian, and you think that it is
moral incumbent on you to give to a quote unquote
charity so called because of your Christian moral obligations. Giving
to a dog charity after your death does not meaningfully
satisfy that. It certainly wouldn't in a patristic sense according
to the Church Fathers. Sambasil says that wealth given after
death is not charity because you're not releasing money, you're
not sacrificing. You don't know you know the consequences of that.
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Speaker 7: Supermarket death is releasing your riches. You're just sort of
like directing them with one last gasp and then releasing
them out into the world. So whatever you're doing, it's
an entirely new thing. Now, what I argue in the
book is, and I you know, it might be a
bit of a leap to go straight to the end
of that conclusion, but I sort of look at this
from various angles. When you unte the money and you
send it off into the world untethered from a family
with a mission that's been inculcated with virtue and a
sense of gymnastic purpose, the effects of that are very,
very negative for society as a whole, but especially I mean,
frankly I mean to just cut to the chase. When
you have a civilization which is in the state that
ours are now in, right with our guys struggling to
form families, struggling to form relationship, struggling to buy land
that lews them to get on the property ladder, you know,
dying deaths of despair. There simply are people in all
of our lives whose lives could be improved immeasurably, like
the basic facets of their dignity, by the right intervention
by someone who is prepared to go to them, to
deeply understand their problem, to love them right, to enact
this charity, and to invest in them to improve that situation.
Like I think that that our civilization very clearly needs
that right now. So these like confused, self indulgent moral
loss stands by people that are not willing to embed
themselves in the lives of the needy, whether these are
the local poor or family members or anyone else, and
grapple with the complexity there. I just don't think that's
a morally just what defensible act.
Speaker 6: Several things there. One It reminds me very much of
the the the kind of early you know, moral problem
you hear repeated in The Church Fathers, which the idea
of should you sell your children into slavery to feed
the poor? And the counter that is, obviously no, you
should not. You were giving something that is not yours away,
right you were? You were you were selling someone else short,
I guess literally in this case, so violating your primary
obligations those close around you for the benefit of sort
of aggregate humanity. It's the sort of Benthamite idea of
kind of maximizing utils, you know, maximizing the scientifically derived
amount of human flourishing. I'm using that term somewhat ironically right,
kind of poking fun at Harris. But nonetheless it is
sort of an interesting deferral of responsibility. And that's a
point that you make that you are effectively accruing the
benefits of charity without the hard work or the responsibility,
while also, as you've said, you know, leaving a certain
moral obligation. I think that the example you go into
examining the Ford Foundation, which is something that will be
familiar to I hope all my listeners, is sort of
a primary example of that of one, you know, this
sensibly very successful version of philanthropy, one of the richest
men in the world, you know, creating this sort of
eternal pot of money to do good, and not only
does know he and his progeny lose control of it,
which is very important, right, it sort of becomes part
of the managerial regime and used for and directly opposed
to those for which it was set up. But also
so I mean, looking at it that way, even if
that sort of posthumous don't even if that hands off
charity is maximally successful if you were able to start
your own foundation, I think it's important to acknowledge the
fact that even if you were able to do that,
it does not accomplish the sort of good you would
want it to. You ultimately lose the authority over it,
and someone else will be making those decisions. And particularly
if you are religious, if you are in some ways
a dissident, you must understand that the managers selected on
the open market will not share your values. They will
take that elsewhere. We see that already in charities, right,
the meme of Catholic charities in the EUS, which are
ostensibly Catholic organizations headed up by people who do not
seem to be Catholic, you know, based on it either
their heritage or their actions, and you can see that
what may have been started with noble intentions has been
perverted to completely different ends. You mentioned you actually quote
from Calvin right to support this, but there's a piece
your own writing. I would have quote sa that it
was quite well stated. We cannot truly love who we
do not know, who we do not see, and who
we do not understand. Can you explore the relationship between
knowing and sort of performing charity? Why does that kind
of heat map meme matter with regards to charity. I
know you've mentioned that for many of us there are
people immediately in our lives who need charity. But wouldn't
the counter argument be, well, what does it matter if
it's this drug addict I know or some drug addict
somewhere in the world. Clearly I can just give my
money and accomplish the same net amount of good.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's two ways
to approach this. One is a practical sense, and then
another is a sort of more metaphysical sense. I'll start
with the metaphysical sense because I think probably people will
intuitively understand what I'm trying to communicate, and then I
can move to the practical in the metaphysical sense. The
problem with what's called telescopic charity, which is this notion
that you know you're called to love every man in
the world, but no man in particular, right just identify
the however far off, however distant, some kind of mathematical
abstraction of the most efficient use of your money, your
charitable dollars. The problem is is that very very often,
I think subconsciously that is chosen as a trade off
is made, which in my mind is an unacceptable one.
The trade off is this, On the one hand, I
concede that I will not personally understand what my money
is doing very well. For example, even if I'm given
something like them. The best effective altruist case, it's buying
mosquito nets are the most efficient price to be deployed
in Kenya, which is like mathematically proven, save the most
number of lives. I still understand nothing about the community
that those nets are going into. I don't know what's
going to happen to those children. I don't know why
that community can't produce something as inexpensive as mosquito nets.
I don't know ultimately whether this will lead to a
virtuous outcome, because I don't know anything about the trajectory
of that society, Like am I accelerating a trend in
which more and more mouths to feed are being born
every year due to this ill informed money pumping into
the system. Is their corruption in the area, like the
list goes on basically because I've never been there, because
I understand nothing about the society, the cause of the problems,
the long term solutions, how multi layered those solutions have
to be. Who are good actors, who are bad actors,
How we came to be at this place. I understand
nothing about it. So the trade off is something like
I can see that I'm not going to understand any
of this. On the other hand, what I gain is ease.
It's just a bank transfer, right, I can go on
whatever effective altruist listing website.
Speaker 6: But steeling in the position, you could also make the
argument for economies of scale, it is simply more efficient
division of labor. Simply it is more efficient to have
someone whose whole job is charity then to have me
be a act as a part time philanthropist.
Speaker 7: Sorry that yeah, But the counterpoint to that argument of
scale is institutions which are supposed to change people's lives
for the better. As they scale up, as they become
more bureaucratized and abstract and separated from particular or lived communities,
become more and more crude instruments for improving people's lives.
The Gates Foundation, for example, throws around a huge amount
of money and lots of different domains, but if you
actually dig into the actual effects in those domains even more,
on the surface it would appear to someone like you
or me to be like a defensible line of effort.
It's pretty questionable how well it's doing compare to local
charities on the ground, local government, the natural trend of
scientific development, and so forth. And then if you look
at somewhere like New York, there's this crazy statistic that
north of twenty percent of private workers and New York
are now employed by nonprofits. But it's just like transparently
not making New York a better place, because it's just
like money and organizations, bureaucracies, different legal entities thrashing around
a system without any kind of personal moral structure or obligations.
So that's the kind of like argument against telescopic charity.
It's like, well, that's the argument for telescopic charity. It's
convenient although you acknowledge that you're making something of a
trade off. The problem is is that like people delude
themselves as to the nature of the trade off they're making.
What they're actually doing is they're avoiding the difficult, tedious,
sometimes risky, often painful, often quite boring act of like
meeting the people who are struggling in your own life
and community, in your family and going through the deep
like process of understanding them deeply what's you know, how
can I actually help you? And that's uncomfortable, Like that's
a huge investment that transcends, you know, bank transfer to
Oxfam or whatever, and people just use the excuse of
these people in Africa are like objectively more needy as
a kind of like consolation for themselves, and they're like
sub conscious that that ares of them, that they're not
really being nice people to the people who really depend
on them, the people who they you have a unique bond.
And I would argue metaphysical responsibility too, but it's really
only that latter form, these like deep investments and bonds
of understanding, they can really produce transformative change. And I
think that's that's true growth in the charitable sector. There's
a very good book called Toxic Charity by this ve
veteran charity industry leader, Robert Loupton, who looks at all
these different projects and basically says, like a lot of
these charities have been coasting for decades based on the
presumption that they must be doing good because they have
a noble mission and a lot of funding, and they
like are active in areas with a lot of need
in them. But if you actually look at their effects,
they basically just generate massive dependencies on structures that actors,
like handout institutions. They just create a whole class of
dependence and prevent anyone from engaging in like transformative change
or industry within the communities. On the other hand, like
if you think about how really transformative effects on society
or families are actually achieved, it's a sustained multilateral effort
that leverages relationships, love, care resources. But also like you know,
it's people facilitating introductions, it's people checking in on people.
Even though something is like abstractors as venture capsule, which
is the thing I talk about in the book, like
top VC firms are incredibly involved are you know, in
getting their team on the boards of companies, making sure
that the companies are receiving the right advice, guidance, connections,
facilitations as well as funding. It's not just like a
he's a check, I never want to hear from you again.
I know you're going to go off and do good
things with it. Goodbye. That's just not how the world
of actual effects work. So there's this whole fake industry
which has grown up around accepting people's checks to make
them feel good, and its effects on the world, like
the best, deeply questionable, and in the case of something
like the Ford Foundation, it's just complete chaos.
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Speaker 6: But one of the other, shall we say oft repeated ideas,
is the fact that you know, even if it's not
directly towards charity, it's the idea that I will spin
down my wealth before I die, I will die with nothing.
You mentioned Bill perkins book Die with Zero, and in
the section of the book you surmise the three basic claims.
So I'll quote you from your own writing, and then
I'll let you respond to that claim.
Speaker 13: One.
Speaker 6: One's hard earned wealth is your own to spend. Two,
the pursuit of pleasure is a legitimate way to spend it.
And three this is an entirely reasonable way to spend
your older years. So given those three claims, what is
your response? Why should you not simply spend all your
wealth down and let your children claw their way up
the way you did.
Speaker 7: It's a good question. Forgive me for answering the first
point theologically, but I think even if you're not Christian like,
you'll follow the moral logic and be able to transpose
it onto whatever your own system of belief is. The
session that what we have earned is ours is one
that has to be approached seriously but also carefully from
a Christian perspective. On the one hand, there is a
very strong theology and tradition of private property in Christianity,
one of the reasons the Catholic Church came out incredibly
strongly against communism. If you read an in typlical like
rerem enviroum, it becomes obvious why that is. On the
other hand, there is a tendency in the opposite direction,
which is very much a sort of recent post Enlightenment
Western idea, which is this notion of it's a it's
a kind of maximalist notion of private property, which says
something like that which I own, I alone own, and
I have there are no natural duties which attached to
that property or my stewardship my ownership of it. So
it's something like property means that which I control and
that worth which I can do whatever I want, and
there's a there's sort of no moral obligation inherent to
the fact that I've become wealthy or powerful through control
of this asset. That is, that would be an alien
concept to basically the Christians of high Christendom. There's something
that is now sort of called the dominion mandate, which
I think is a reasonable term. It's this notion that
the sort of cut further back in time than our
sort of post John Locke conception of and it might
even be like a like a parody almost that we've
inherited of John Locke's more subtle thought. But before that,
if you go back to like what is property, there's
this very intimate relationship between an asset and stewardship of it,
and that really is is built of the recognition that
everything we have. It is true that we have mixed
our labor with the wonderful natural resources of the world
and have created something that we can rightfully call ours.
But at the same time it has to be recognized
that even our labor and the world as natural resources
are in some sense of gift. Existence itself is a
gift right, So did we create our particular talents. Do
we create our geniuses? Do we create the men who
we have to collaborate with to be productive, the men
we learn from our fathers? Did we create the systems
that we were brought into? And the world? I mean
the world itself. There's a wonderful passage from Montaigne, you know,
do we create you know, the horror moving vaults of
the heavens and so forth. It's the point is that
we have to approach like great wealth with a perspective
of stewardship rather than sort of flippancy. Like it's a
position of humility that even the wealthy and powerful must
have to the world. And there's this there's there's a
very good sort of Christian tradition there, and I think
there's a lot of interesting argumentation to pull from. So
so that's that's the kind of starting point, which is
that like, yes, you are the rightful steward of these assets.
The key word they're being steward, Like this is something
that you must nurture and nourish as part of the
gratitude for the privilege of living this life of wealth
and power. The second point is what was it like pleasure?
Is it remind me of my own writing.
Speaker 6: Here the pursuit of pleasure is a legitimate way to
spend your wealth.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So what I look at in the book is,
again there's there's a kind of reasonable position in a
maximalist position, which I think is to the reasonable position
would be something like part of glorifying God and enjoying
the gifts he has given us, is enjoying life, is
appreciating beautiful things, is building beautiful things, commissioning beautiful things,
treating people to beautiful things. It's a life of our appreciation.
It's a life of richness, it's a life of beauty.
This is all true. On the other hand, the nihilistic
extreme version of this is something like hedonism, whereby one's
entire life and life plans are sort of oriented to
this kind of question of how do I derive maximal
pleasure from rearranging reality around me? The problem there, and
I look at the work of Robert Nozick, who is
an influential twentieth century philosopher on hedonism, and makes this
compelling case, which again is it's a secular argument, but
I think it aligns fine with a Christian tradition. The
question of why Nosa gives this example of an experience machine,
which is like, you can create any experience you want.
It can be the most pleasurable thing to you. And like, frankly,
like I think in the age of the computer, we
can all kind of the experience machine has really come
to life. Why is that wrong? If that's giving you pleasure,
if you're enjoying it. And the answer is something like yes,
there is moral import attached to the world of experience
and pleasure, even aesthetics. But equally there is moral import
attached to the world of being and this question of
what are you? You know, what have you become? And
any moral system in which someone that is just despicable,
that is ugly disgusting, corrupted, feted can participate as fully
as a sort of stalwart good man is one that
is clearly morally bankrupt. And so the problem with adopting
this fully headonous position is that it's sort of like
it implicates you your being.
Speaker 6: What are you?
Speaker 7: Do you really want to spend your final years on
this earth in this act of like cheap lukewarm hedonism
on pi Ando cruises or whatever. It's just like, this
is your chance at existence. I really like that section.
There's a quote from some Alphonsi's Legori that that that
chapter ends with, and he says something like in the
heavens there will be no tears, but if the blessed
could weep, they would only do so because they now
have no more time to achieve glory on this earth,
which is like, this is it. This is how you
define your legacy, this is what you define you will
be for eternity, just wasting it. So really it's the
synthesis of those two things, which is I think is
an inspiring reality, which is that no, your duty to
those you love, your community, your posterity, your generations, your legacy,
and your forefathers for that matter, does not end when
you legally retire and start collecting pension checks. Like those
are two entirely different systems. Your command to dominate the
world in the best sense, in the sort of kingly sense,
continues and it will continue. That's a Christian virtue that
will continue until the end of your days, until you
draw your last breath. And that means you still have
duty purpose. You have to be involved deeply in the
lives of those who depend on you, and be asking
very deeply how can you place a marker in the
ground which will sort of stretch forth throughout the history
that follows, so you know there's nothing there are redeemable
qualities to Bill perkins book, it's a sort of useful
illustration what I've talking about. I like that he challenges
people who are very flippant about their money to like
confront Okay, this is how long I have left on
this earth, and this is how much I have in
my control. How am I going to use it? I
think that's a useful challenge. I think unfortunately Bill Perkins
does not have the metaphysical law, feel logical framework and
depths necessary to answer that question properly.
Speaker 6: So one more hypothetical, and then I really want to
spend the majority of what time we have left talking
about the mechanics of how to do this, because I
think this is if I could be so bold, I
think this is the best part of your book. But
one more that's worth talking about is then off repeated
idea that well, if I ask my wealth on to
my family, I will create layabouts useless adult children who
have access to too much money and they will squander
it all or alternately, in the case of a business.
If I pass my business to my son or my nephew,
I would be better served by finding a manager, right,
finding someone who has a degree who's better trained to
do that. Surely a family business in that sense must
be less efficient. So if you could address those kind
of two common critiques there.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they're both quite complex questions. I'll answer the second
one first. This is a really complex area, like why
there are people who have very legitimate objections to their
ability to pass on their wealth to their children. There's
actually a whole industry of professional succession planning. In my
estimation to oversimplify a complex issue. A lot of this
has to do with starting the process far too late,
because people regard a career as just like it's a career,
like I'll just offer him a good job when I'm
about to retire, and I'm sure he'll take it. But actually,
a career is an expression of one's purpose in life.
It's an expression of one's identity. It implicates where you
want to live, who you want to socialize with, which
status networks you want to be a part of, what
you want to project out into the world, what you
want your legacy to be. And that has to be aligned.
There has to be some facilitation of identity integration from
a very young age in life. Aristocratic families who obviously
have to achieve this successfully generation after generation. They're all
in the same family business, which is power rule for
hundreds or thousands of years. The ones who have done
this successfully understand that this has to start at birth,
and if you start too late, you're inevitably going to
be playing catch up. You might be able to save it,
but it's going to be very difficult. And the common
paradigm is there's like a one common failure mode is
this person needs to learn to stand on their own
two feet before they come and work for the family business.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to
send them off to a generic college on the other
side of the country. I'm then going to get them,
encourage them to start work in a field. But they've
got to prove themselves. They've got to learn how life
is with no leg ups. They've got to work a
few layers up. Maybe they've got to meet and impress
a woman. And then you know, when they've proven themselves,
when they know the value of hard work, they can
come in and work for the family business, if they're
even interested in doing that. After they've charted out an
entirely separate life path, they will then come back into
their industry be surrounded by people who have been work
in that industry for ten plus years, already know everything
about it no more than them. They will feel what
is called commonly imposter syndrome, although in this case it's
largely just being an impost You actually just don't know
as much as all these people. You're not supposed to
be leading, and they'll retreat in embarrassment, and that the
thing falls apart, and you hear that time and time again.
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Speaker 7: Done correctly, though it absolutely doesn't have to be this way.
So an interesting finding, well established by the way in
the business literature is that family firms, certainly top family
firms outcompete and outperform publicly traded firms. And the reasons
for this are multifaceted, but it has to do with
family firms being uniquely positioned to overcome the perpetual ultra
short term planning that besets publicly traded companies pursuing specific
quarters with a rotating cast of you know, sort of
mercenary managers who have to hit specific KPIs on a
specific schedule. The incentives will work much better for family businesses.
They can think on time horizons, they can start succession
planning very early, they have a natural loyalty to the company,
they have assets other than purely financial and mercenary ones,
and so forth. So there's an established and break good
literature on this front. Professor John A. Davis, formerly of
have A Business School and MIT Slain School of Managements
is the place to start for that about it's widely discussed.
Remind me what your first question was.
Speaker 6: Sorry, oh well, I can't remember, so it must not
have been important. What I want to move on to next,
because I think, like I said, this is perhaps in
my mind, the most important part is, well, how do
you build a dynastic family? And assuming that you are
and look, I don't have a lot of insight into
my podcast demographics, but I have at least rough age estimates.
Assuming you are a guy starting out right, you've got
young children you're looking to, you know, kind of copy
this model in your own life. What are the first steps?
What should you prioritize? What are the things that enable
a family to create a culture that can be passed
down through time.
Speaker 7: It's a great question. So the first thing to say
is that the book is written from the perspective of
wealthy and aristocratic families. There's a few reasons for this,
but I would argue that a happy finding is that
most of these are practicable at a more modest level
for families that are not ultra wealthy, which is a
happy finding. For me because I am not ultra wealthy,
although I did grow up I mean it's not entirely
Internet based. I grew up around some wealthy families, so
I do have some personal experience of life in these communities.
The first thing is is like, there's this concept that
I talk about in the book, which I like very
much as sort of my personal favorite aspect of the book,
which is this concept of kind of eternal time, that
the individual family member is situated within a community of
those who went before, of those who went before, and
those who will come after in a very intense and
lived way. Alexis to Tokville has this wonderful passage about
the importance of a landed family estate passing from generation
to generation, and he says all generations are as it were, contemporaneous.
It's this notion that you actually grow up in the
felt presence of your forefathers, and as such you feel
their moral expectations to be incumbent upon you. You feel that
your family name in its very essence bears a sense
of moral expectation. But more than that, you feel empowered
by the sense that their blood runs in your veins
and you're capable of what they achieved. So there are
a lot of things you can do to move your
family from the kind of contingent moment into a more
felt sense of this eternal time. The thing that a
lot of aristocratic families do but is difficult in the contemporary,
certainly in America, is this multi generational property where quite
literally you are building on the same foundation as your
forefathers built, and that bears brings other advantages too, because
you're inheriting the estate, which is something that is theoretically
very valuable, but it brings these intense obligations of stewardship
in a very direct way, rather than being kind of
liquid capital that's easy to squander. So it sort of
trains you and demands of you as the air to
pursue the best things in life, the most beautiful things
community building, estate management, patronizing artwork, sustaining the entire economy
of individuals that revolve around that family and community. But
more modestly, it's this whole sense of like participation in rituals,
certainly in a religious life. One of the funny things
that I guess it's December, so I can speak fairly
unassumedly about Christmas but there's this funny thing about Christmas,
which is kind of everyone returns to the faith just
a little bit on Christmas. You know, everyone wants to
get a mass for Christmas. Things aren't quite felt proper,
things don't have their phenomenological richness in them. If Jesus
isn't present, if there isn't you know, if you don't
hear the carols being sung. And there's something about the
ritual of Christmas that is a good illustration of the
broader principle that I talk about in the book, which
is the kind of ritualized family, the ritual protected family,
which is, you know, I like that quote from Bungchulhan,
the Korean German philosopher, who says that while houses are
homes in space, rituals are homes and time. They're this
thing that we can return to and find identity and
constellation in that are deeply affirming of a particular continued identity,
the sort of historical continuity. But in Christmas, I think
it's in large part because Christmas is such a ritualized
day that the practices of five hundred years ago are
still totally legible to us. On that day, we still
act out the same functions. We still believe the same things.
Maybe there have been subtle changes, but the music is
similar that you know, you still go to the same churches,
midnight Mass, and the same sets of foods and so forth.
These things, of course gradually evolve, but especially with this
kind of eternal religious component, it's the same themes. The
sermons are on the same moral dimensions, and that ritual
dimension which ties together moral assertion, tradition, belief, action, and
then expectation all in a single day. There's no reason
why that principle should extend only to Christmas, right. So, actually,
it turns out if you look at the literature, the
families who best pass on the faith throughout the year
lead these incredibly ritualized existences which sort of ties the faith.
And here, if you're not a Christian, you know you
can substitute in the values that you hold dear, the
kind of children that you want to raise. They substitute
in those beliefs at every element. They tie them into
rituals all through the calendar in a way that evokes
a sense of warmth and comfort, of medial solidarity, even
nostalgia for a warm childhood full of fun. The classic
Christian expression of this is the liturgical calendar, and then
the calendar of like kind of fun and festive events,
which was sort of parallel to the liturgical calendar, so
like all the year around you had different festivals. What
we think of now is Christmas is kind of like
the last pillar still standing of an ancient ruin which
was once majestic in its glory, you know, full of
pageantry and strange myths and expressions of belief and identity
and community. And there's many reasons why that's gone, but
that the kind of thousand year family. The great aristocratic
families are highly ritualized to this day. If you look
at the British Royal family, and you know, there's a
lot of issues with the British Royal family, but people
are familiar with them, so I'll use them for the
ease of convenience. They have this very specific calendar that
comes with obligations the children are involved with from very
young Monday Thursday traditions and so forth. That I think
is this kind of well spring of perpetual identity and
actually strengthens through time as opposed to becomes dissipated through time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so you use this term ritual protected families. I
think it's quite interesting you in sort of the last third,
you describe effectively four common themes throughout generationally successful families.
One of the things you get into is that you
can actually track the success of these sort of families
in highly diverse circumstances. So stands to reason and in
the feudal system such families would do well. But those
same names, even into the twenty first century, continue to overperform.
So these four points are never forget the normal practices
and rituals of raising healthy children. Ensure that your family
has a strong faith and knows duties as well as privileges.
Impress upon your children your family's identity, mission and values.
And initiate children into structures beyond the atomic family. So
two things I want to bring up there, because several
of them are I would consider them to be widely
accepted among conservative circles rit large. But there are two
that are I think would raise hackles. Which is one
the idea of noting duties as well as privileges, and
then also initiating children into structures beyond the atomic family.
Do you want to speak about that a little bit?
Speaker 7: Sure? Well, let me take the initiation one first, but
let me remember your first question this time, which is
the duties as well. So man has this deep psychological
need to know who he is, to subsume his identity
into wider and established structures as a source of self ratification,
and to be accepted by his community of peers as
that thing that he strives to be. The simplest example
of this is like if you think about a soldier,
especially in the US context, where soldiers are very revered,
it's considered a privilege to wear the uniform to graduate.
At that point, people will recognize you as a serviceman
of a particular branch, and you will become, as it were,
a contemporary of all the great men who wore that
uniform before you. You will share in their identity. You
will find a foundation of the self there. You will
be respected as such by others. And that's a kind
of heightened example of something that we all need, Like
initiation in its most abstract form, as a human universal
there are life stages that we expect people to go through,
and then we recognize that they have been tested and
that they have passed the test, and that they have
therefore been assumed into a particular body within society. In
pre in the pre modern West, this was very very universal,
so you didn't just have the kind of last one
standing now is university like graduates are epistemically distinct from
non graduates. Like we think of graduates and non graduates
as two different things, like did you go to college?
Where did you go to college? You know, a you,
a Yale man, whatever, you know? It's this, it's this
kind of like series of tests which results in something
given to you. You are now recognized as something else,
which affords you status in society.
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Speaker 7: And that's not just practically useful, it's like psychologically important.
Like some people I've met who didn't go to university
but wish they did kind of have a complex about it.
And I'm not saying at all you should have a
complex about it. Well, that's right, but like in their
particular example, they clearly felt that that process of initiation,
that particular expression of initiation was an important one that
they never got the chance to prove themselves to be
something that they felt they were. But in older times,
you know, in the West, you had guilds, you had
I mean, you had families, chaval re orders, monastic orders.
I mean there's a very diverse expression of a tradesman
in a particular domain recognizes himself in a particular way
and wants to be recognized as that by a community.
Of his peers as someone who has a dignified calling
in life and who has taken on a difficult profession
and risen to it. And then if you go back further,
you know, if you look at the work of Arnold
van Ganev and Merchieri, are they and so forth, they
kind of find that this is a universal amongst pre
modern human communities, especially for young boys. Boys need to
go through this transition where when they're very young, they
sort of like, you know, they cling to their mothers.
They form under their mother's protection, and that's useful for
them to like physically mature in a dangerous world, to
have that sense of comfort. But to be recognized as
a man in all pre modern societies, there has to
be a decisive moment where the boy is separated from
the mother. He's presented with a test which he must
perform in front of the community. The community must recognize
that he passed the test and is therefore he is
recognized as a man, depending on the configuration, as a
warrior or whatever else, and he has therefore accorded a
certain respect identity in society which bonds beautifully with his
own identity, his individuation. But it Also it's this process
of fight integration with a community those who went before
him that will come after. That is a very long
way of explaining initiation, and I apologize for it, but
the point is this, we've really gone through a process
of weakening in this regard, and which I regard as
like a major psychological challenge to the man of the West,
psychological and spiritual challenge. They don't have any sense of
who they are, what uniform they're supposed to be wearing,
which men they are like, which men of history they
are supposed to be, the equals of, whose standards they're
supposed to live up to, what it means to express
those standards, which stories from history and most relevant to
their own struggles. Like they're just totally untalthered because they've
never had any of this. One of the things I
note is that aristocratic families, and they by no means
do this perfectly to this day, but there are certain
families that do it well. They have initiatory bodies which
continue deep into adult life, that have privileged and status
accorded to them. These can be knightly orders, Order of
the Golden Fleece, you know, Order the gartera in the UK.
But they can also be fraternal societies, they can be
private members clubs. There are all these different kinds of association,
various titles that make demands of the moral character of
the individual and then recognize them and initiate them into
a privileged network should they be completed, and at that
point they can sort of represent themselves. And you know,
this isn't, This isn't doesn't really live on strongly to
this day. But still in London you still get a
bit of the old boys club. I belong to this club.
I belong to that club. Like there's a sense of
solidarity with other people in the same situation as you,
which I think is very useful. So in so doing
you initiate yourself again into this community of peers with
moral expectations which are incumbent upon you, and that is
very necessary, along with faith and so forth, to feel
that your privilege comes with this sense of duty. And
if you fail in that duty, there are real penalties.
Speaker 6: We're fast coming up on time you're hunt. But I
feel like it's worth discussing s a through line through
almost everything you've mentioned. What about the dangers of nepotism?
Surely we don't want to again have anyone other than
the perfect person for any given role, as chosen by
a sort of vaguely defined meritocracy. Is your what is
your I guess rebuttal to objections based off of nepotism.
Speaker 7: Yeah, something very weird is happening with this concept of nepotism.
Like I'll look at the history of the term in
the second, but just like to start with a very
basic observation. If you look at the like textbook nepo
baby quote unquote controversy industry at the moment, it's acting, right,
But like acting has always been a family business. There
are like generations of families who act, and you know
who like higher within the family, who initiate themselves into
the industry, who like the same is true in music.
I wish I could remember who it was. I was
listening to an interesting discussion the other day. It might
have even been on your show, told me if it was.
But it was about Bach and how Barr came from
an extended and broad family of musicians, of even genius musicians,
and there was there appeared to be even some kind
of like level of selective breeding going on that which
inevitably resulted in the genius. But the point is that
like family business is completely normal with Western history, are
obviously going to arise. It doesn't make sense. It is
completely illogical to assume that someone who has spent a
life accruing experience and knowledge and mastery and relationships within
an industry makes no attempt to pass that on to
their children and just expects their children to go and
work at law firm or whatever. Like. That's insane. So
the West is always operated in this way instead. I
think what is pathological about nepo babies is the level
of like celebrity and societal leadership that the actor class
now has. That's the real problem. And then so it's
like there's such wealth and status and riches and everything
else that accrues to these people who are might be
very talented actors, but are clearly unworthy of like wielding
that level of societal influence and being the stars of society.
That so that's anyway, that's a much more complex issue.
But nepotism can be very productive. Like the best athletes
of all time most come from like families where their
fathers were professional coaches or players, you know, like Williams Sisters,
Tiger Woods. You know, basically you name it floy May
with a bunch of people in football, Maxi staff and
in Formula one. Like, it's just like growing up around
geniuses within a particular domain and being introduced to that
domain at a very young age because the genius is
already like invested in it. It's just a recipe for
creating genius. So the idea that nepotism is like has
this antithetical effect on quality is tenuous. I mean, there
are examples of it becoming pathological where people that clearly
deserve to be in an industry are shut out because
they're not part of like a clan. But there are
compromises which allow for the best of both worlds. In
the West, there's a long history in that regard, but
to very quickly examine the term itself, because I think
it's clarifying. Nepotism as we now understand it sort of
gained its meaning in the West from this book. It's
Gregorio Letti's work in the seventeenth Centurytismo di Roma, and
it's a history of the Pope's nephews. Pope's nephews were
a particular role within a papal court, which stretches back
a very long way, totally unquestioned at the time, probably
a little bit odd by now, but it survived for millennia.
The notion was simply that the pope had a right
to bring someone into the papal court that was a
blood relative, but since popes did not have children of
their own, they typically bought in a nephew. Now this
was for two reasons. The first is that, like family
businesses of all kinds in the ancient and medieval world,
you know, there's this concept of pietass which is like
special moral obligations to your family which extend outwards from
the divine commandment and the Decalogue to especially honor your
father and mother. So you have a particular obligation to
your own and indeed, in the context of the papal court,
with its intrigue, its diverse responsibilities, and so forth, it's
very useful to have an associate of unquestioned personal loyalty
to help you in your most sort of trying enterprises.
Nepotism refers to a single well, a single period of
corruption of that specific office in which, in the context
of a broader moral decline, of the papency. There were
a series of popes with illegitimate children and other relatives
who were brought in under the pretext, under this title
of the pope's nephew who basically just ransacked the church.
And so there was this whole and this lasted for
like one hundred years. There's this whole broad breakdown of
the function of the office that resulted in something that
everyone everywhere would recognize as sinful and wrong, which was
like corruption, looting, lying, et cetera. All of that is
what the original conception of nepotism was. It's like gaining
entry to a public institution which is meant for a
particular purpose, ransacking that institution from the inside while lying
to people extracting that as personal family wealth. And it's
like the same you see this in politics, Like this
has contemporary parallels, But what it doesn't mean. It's just
like I've spent my whole life working in an industry
I love, I want to help my children get into it.
That is simply not the same thing. Like the moral
dimensions of that are completely different. And unlike ransacking the
church that like obviously has strong societal benefits, personal benefits
that allows a family to continue in the same tradition,
maintain family businesses, maintain intergenerational relationships between networks of families,
to live in the same place, to pass on rich
knowledge to each other that would otherwise die this kind
of embodied knowledge, to feel the sense of affinity between generations,
and indeed to produce mastery. And the examples of the
sports and family businesses which we gave earlier. So feeling
that you shouldn't, like specially help out your children because
nepotism is bad is just one of the most confused
aspects of our contemporary moral discourse.
Speaker 6: In my mind, I think that was well answered. We're
unfortunately nearing the end of our time. But I just
want to say is very good. We didn't touch on
a tenth of it, double negative, but there's much more
material material here. I highly recommend it, both as because
Johann is a friend and I think he should be supported,
but also because it's a very good book. It addresses
common problems for both younger and older men. What is
the purpose of you know, what I have collected over
the course of my life, How ought I to act
as a patriarch? But also for those kind of aspiring patriarchs,
How ought I to raise my children? How ought I
to direct them through life? And you know, as someone
who's at the very early stages of that, it was
very interesting. I got a lot from it. In addition
to I think I told you, I made my best
friend buy a copy of it, and I've sent a
few to people around me. I like it enough to
recommend it to people who don't care about my podcast,
so through endorsement, there be a link down in the description. Johan, again,
thank you so much for your time. Man, this was
a fascinating discussion.
Speaker 7: It's been brinant. Thank you for having me, and I
expect see you wearing a suit next time. By the way,
this is a pull showing fair enough.
Speaker 6: I will obviously I will link to your book as
well as your substack, which I highly recommend, as well
as far as my stuff. Jay Burdens Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
anywhere you want to listen to podcasts. If you want
to support this show, you can throw me a few
bucks on Patreon, gum Road, or substack. Get the episodes
early in ad free or check out our sponsor, Axious
Remote Fitness and Coaching. Again, johann I appreciate it. Never
run at home, keep your head off.
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fuller than Santa Sac. On the twenty fourth at the
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is lapping us and Brown Thomas's spraying the perfumes around
like air fresheners. We do Harvey Nichols and always Reese
m Ands. She gets her browsed done at Edvard and
pink talk about a new face. Then it's Katsus and
Wagamamma and a Hansol and Gretel Panto at the Mill Theater.
Later I drop her home and Mom says, thank you, pet.
Best day out in ages, search Dundrum Town Center and
make a day of it this Christmas.
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anymore like normal people, because that dreadful sound is ringing in.
Speaker 14: My head day and night.
Speaker 1: Woo woo woo.
Speaker 11: With their damn fifteen seconds response time, I'd never get
away with us. Plus they're twenty four to seven monitoring
the app Camera Motion Detector's wireless video door bell. I
might never be able to burgle again.
Speaker 5: Get the alarm Arm Burglars Fear for just ninety nine
euro Don't be alarmed, be phone Watched. Offer ends December
thirty first monitoring fees in terms apply