Latest / Great Houses / 28. Will Tanner Talks Great Houses

Transcript

28. Will Tanner Talks Great Houses · Great Houses

0:00
Hello everybody, and welcome to this episode of The Great Houses
0:03
Forum, where we gather interesting people to talk about the, how to
0:08
rebuild great houses in our time.
0:09
Great houses are, you know, those pillar institutions which in every
0:13
age in- including, uh, the most recent one, though it's been a little
0:16
bit hard- harder to see them, are the, the pillars of civilization.
0:20
They're the, the, the foundational families, businesses,
0:23
self-perpetuating institutions that, that actually reproduce and allow
0:28
for human civilization to endure.
0:30
Um, and so this, you know, one of the, my long-term goals with this,
0:34
with this forum experiment is to try to get people on to talk about their
0:38
ideas, to understand, like, h- how are these things, in particular, how
0:42
are these things applying to us today?
0:43
So I am honored and pleased to have, uh, Will Tanner with us.
0:47
Will Tanner runs, uh, The American Tribune on Substack, and, uh, and his
0:50
podcast is called The Old World Show.
0:53
Um, and, and again, Will, you know, of the many things that I appreciate
0:56
you, it, you're, the fact that you're, you're pressing on and being enormously
0:59
successful while maintaining three different brands is, uh, is, is of,
1:03
of great personal interest to me because I'm doing the same thing.
1:05
So I, I, uh, now with, with not nearly necessarily as, as much talent as
1:09
you are, but, uh, I'll get there.
1:10
I'll get there.
1:11
So great to have you here, Will.
1:13
Yeah thank you for having me on
1:16
All right.
1:16
Well, so, we could talk about whatever, whatever it is that you wanna talk
1:19
about because I think you're, one of the, the most interesting thinkers.
1:22
I think one of the, the first articles, that I, I read from
1:25
you was, your yeoman article.
1:27
You had a, an article about, uh, how to survive as a yeoman in an oligarch's
1:32
world, which I thought was just really insightful and, and in many ways,
1:35
like the thinking and researching that I did as a result of, of reading
1:39
that article is, is one of the things that led to my current stance on AI.
1:43
Um, tell me about, uh, tell me about that article and tell me about what
1:46
you're, what you're thinking and, and, um, and, you know, at some point, o-
1:49
obviously, and if you wanna, if you can work this in, then, then feel free to.
1:53
But at some point I want to, uh, talk about your, your studies in, in the cursus
1:57
honorum and, and how important those sorts of things are to, to any society.
2:01
And, and if we're, if we're about to rebuild a society, we
2:03
probably should rebuild a cursus honorum to go with it, so.
2:06
Yeah.
2:07
So that article stemmed out of m- my original research into the r- reasons
2:12
that America's WASP aristocracy fell apart, and the reasons the
2:16
British landed elite fell apart.
2:19
uh, because the, those two were actually quite different.
2:22
In the case of the WASPs, it was largely their holding securities that
2:26
didn't keep up with inflation, th- they preferred bonds to land, uh, and
2:30
their lack of a sense of duty, which gets into the cursus honorum thing.
2:34
Um, particularly during the Gilded Age.
2:35
Uh, some of them were better earlier on, but by the Gilded Age, uh, with the
2:39
exception of maybe Henry Adams and Charles Adams, it was a pretty decayed order.
2:43
Um, Teddy Roosevelt was good, too.
2:45
A- anyway, i- in the case of the British landed elite, it was much more a hostile
2:49
government policy that destroyed them.
2:51
And if you look into the financial transactions they made, the, the
2:54
8th Duke of Devonshire, I think, uh, I think it's the 8th, it might be
2:57
the 9th, is a really great example of kind of rebuilding the family
3:01
fortune in the New World and keeping the traditions intact as he did so.
3:05
The, um, uh, father of the current Duke of Westminster is
3:09
another great example of that.
3:11
I, I think that was the 6th Duke, but I could be wrong.
3:13
I- in any case, uh, th- they're different situations and they're interesting to
3:17
study because there's so much information a- available about them 'cause people
3:20
are generally interested in those groups.
3:22
Uh, if you look at that though, people, you know, most, most of us, myself
3:26
included, don't happen to be English lords, which, you know, maybe in another
3:30
life, but in this one I'm not a duke, um, and n- nor are most of my readers
3:35
So, um, so people ask, "Well, you know, how is this applicable to the
3:39
middle class?" And I, I think that's actually a much tougher question
3:43
because the, the middle class's problems are different in different eras.
3:47
You have, uh, really the burgeoning of the middle class in the mid-20th
3:51
century, which was just a dismal period for aristocracy generally.
3:55
Um, but you also have different periods that aren't great for the middle class or
3:59
that are good for it, uh, like the early 20th century was pretty good for it and
4:03
also good for the kind of lordly class.
4:05
Uh, so it goes back and forth.
4:06
And, and I think if you're looking at, well, when was a period where
4:11
the middle class or what would be termed the, the yeoman of the day,
4:15
uh, faced the same sort of challenges the, the middle class of today faces?
4:20
Whi- which I would argue are largely paid wage work not
4:27
being, uh, a way to build wealth.
4:29
E- essentially it being impossible to build wealth if you work for someone else.
4:33
That's the case today.
4:35
It's why people complain about house prices.
4:37
You can kind of track that in terms of ounces of gold and what
4:40
people were making back in the day compared to house prices versus now.
4:43
House prices haven't actually changed, just the value of paid work has.
4:46
And that's because of a s- surplus of labor.
4:49
Uh, and so if you look at the last time that was really the case in
4:55
America in a notable way, it was the antebellum South, but particularly
5:00
the Virginia of the late 17th century.
5:03
Because that was a period where, much like today, um, i- in the couple
5:07
decades leading up to it, you'd actually had nowhere near enough labor,
5:10
so labor was quite valuable, and the people who came over with nothing
5:14
could build a little bit of wealth.
5:15
They… Really none of them became great lords or the Tidewater barons,
5:19
um, but they did become yeomen.
5:21
And, and they were able to amass land in a way they wouldn't have been able
5:23
to in Europe, and maybe patch together 300, 400 acres, something like that, and
5:28
make reasonably good lives for themselves
5:29
a respectable inheritance, as they
5:31
Yes.
5:32
A- and then that completely fell apart in the late, um, 17th century,
5:36
i- in part because of taxation involving Governor Berkeley.
5:39
Um, you, you have, uh, Bacon's Rebellion flow out of that.
5:42
But that really ended, and it wasn't as much of a class struggle as just, you
5:47
know, uh, being infuriated over taxation and the Indian problem, both of which
5:51
were just solved by the rebellion.
5:53
And really it was this economic situation where because the price of tobacco
5:58
had gone down, um, i- there wasn't a way for the middle class to build
6:03
wealth by acting like the middle class.
6:05
W- whether in wage work or in kind of the contemporary equivalent
6:09
of being a solo la- uh, farmer.
6:14
I, I know, I know that's not quite wage work, but yeah, i- it's essentially
6:17
the same thing as like, you know, being a blue-collar employee now or
6:21
a low-level white-collar employee now, where you're just kind of,
6:24
uh, you're in it for the ride.
6:26
And, you know, how you do kind of depends on other factors.
6:29
And i- i- th- so what had been a situation where, you know, one guy who, with his
6:35
couple kids could grow enough tobacco to fill the cou- fill a couple hogsheads
6:39
and make a good living for himself, all of a sudden he couldn't, uh, because
6:43
the tobacco wasn't worth anything.
6:44
It was worth less than a penny a pound.
6:46
Uh, he would go broke by doing that.
6:47
Yeah, it was not good.
6:49
Uh, and tobacco's very labor-intensive, so they got frustrated with that situation.
6:53
Uh, but that didn't mean the situation was hopeless.
6:55
If you look at what happened, on one hand you had the people who didn't
6:58
adapt with the times and didn't really put in the, uh, the risk-taking,
7:03
but also just the, like, diligence required to, uh, ascend the ladder.
7:08
They fell into being tenant laborers or kind of perpetually along the frontier
7:12
and never really building wealth of note, probably getting killed by Indians.
7:16
But at the same exact time, you had the other people, uh, the
7:19
other parts of the yeoman class who kind of examined the situation.
7:23
They leveraged themselves or they worked a little bit harder a couple
7:26
years when they really could or waited for the right opportunity.
7:29
And then if you could just import one, maybe two indentured servants or buy
7:33
one, maybe two slaves, not to get into the morality of that, y- whatever,
7:37
um, then all of a sudden you were on the capital, capital growth flywheel.
7:41
And having those o- yeah, those one or two productive assets producing wealth
7:46
for you r- really under your oversight and direction meant that all of a sudden
7:50
you'd be able to continue expanding that, bringing more over, expanding your
7:54
ability to cultivate tobacco at scale.
7:56
And though it wasn't as quick of a way to build wealth as it had once been, uh, you
8:01
could do it, and you could become part of this landed gentry class or upper yeoman
8:05
class that maybe in, by the time the Civil War happened, had like five or six slaves.
8:09
So you're not poor, you're not a baron, but you are wealthy and w- well-to-do-ish.
8:16
I-
8:16
And, and, and I think you make money pr- so one of the things that I would say
8:19
when people are like, "Well, what, what do we mean by middle class here?" We would
8:22
mean, uh, you're, um, you're not ruled by anybody and you don't rule anybody, right?
8:28
You're, you're not, you're not a manager and you're not managing, right?
8:31
You're … So the, the, the, the thing about, you know, even if you just have,
8:35
you know, five or six slaves on your plant- in your, your, your farm, it's not
8:37
really a plantation at that scale, right?
8:39
If you only, if you've got five, y- it is much more important for you to
8:43
make sure that those people are doing what you need them to do correctly
8:48
or, or, or close enough than it is for you to just work 10% harder, right?
8:52
You cannot outwork the, uh, you know, bad prompting, if you will , right?
8:58
Uh, which, which sort of leads into the, the, the, the place that
9:01
you go in that article, which I, which I wanna get to in a second.
9:03
But so c- but, but keep going on.
9:04
Tell, tell, tell us how that, how that worked out.
9:07
Y- yeah.
9:07
So y- you have, uh, like if you read the history of the early 20th cen-
9:11
or the early 20th century historians reviewing this period, like Thomas
9:14
Wartenbaker is kind of the most famous one who wrote about this in depth.
9:17
He had three different books on it.
9:19
He's very frustrated by it, says it was this great crime, the
9:21
importation of Africans meant that the yeomen were displaced, and, you
9:25
know, that's this horrible thing.
9:27
Which may well be true, but it's also kind of beside the point.
9:30
I, like if you actually have to exist in the world that was Virginia circa 1705,
9:36
which, you know, the people there did, you can die of mosquitoes or exist, well,
9:40
it makes sense, I think, to examine how to succeed in that situation and kinda
9:44
a- approach that from a practical angle.
9:46
So, so the ones who did
9:47
of tobacco was the price of tobacco, right?
9:49
Like, there was, there was no government conspiracy to change the price of tobacco.
9:53
That's just how the economics worked out
9:55
Right.
9:56
Uh, with the exception of, you know, like the Navigation Acts funneling it
9:59
all into England, which depressed the price, which is also applicable to today.
10:03
Uh, th-there are structural constraints, I think, that help make the value
10:08
of middle class labor worth less.
10:09
Um, kind of can get into that.
10:12
But, um, the, just the, the general situation, wh-what I took away from it
10:17
was, uh, the people who managed to look at what the actual upper class was doing,
10:22
which was importing more laborers to grow tobacco at more scales than they
10:25
could make money kind of on volume rather than hoping f-to make money on price.
10:30
Well, they did quite well, and their families continued to do well, and it's
10:33
those people who formed the backbone of the state that then, uh, once prices
10:37
recovered a little bit, had its golden age and really formed the foundation
10:40
of the Republic, where if you look at, uh, all of the founders who mattered
10:44
and came from the South were large planters, m-um, and there were far more
10:49
of them from Virginia than anywhere else.
10:50
Uh, it's just, uh, th-that generation, it was the Virginians who mattered,
10:54
uh, largely, particularly after you move past the old revolutionaries
10:58
and into the Founding Fathers, which is an interesting split.
11:01
It, it's the Virginians.
11:02
And, and so it's, uh, this, I think, attitude towards, um, understanding,
11:07
uh, the ability to, uh, marshal assets behind you and figure out ways to make
11:13
that happen, uh, and then a-apply virtue towards that a-as their cursus honorum,
11:18
which we'll probably wanna get into, um, i-is what made them so successful.
11:22
And those who just couldn't get with the program, whether for moral reasons
11:25
or for just not caring reasons, was the much bigger problem actually.
11:30
That, though, like a lot of these people just liked hunting, they liked
11:32
farming by themselves, they didn't wanna deal with this, and they died out.
11:35
And that's in the historiography.
11:37
That's not me making that up.
11:38
That's, you know, uh, documented at the time.
11:41
That's the reason they died out.
11:42
And, and so I think that is really the lesson and the warning to the middle
11:45
class, wh-which is, uh, assets matter, uh, much more than income, because
11:50
eventually… Uh, assuming they're the correct assets, because eventually
11:53
those will produce the income and can do so sustainably, which then is what
11:56
leads into this ability to cultivate virtue and cultivate leadership and
12:00
establish sovereignty, uh, eventually.
12:02
Uh, because the flywheel generally continues to spin once it's started
12:06
in the absence of, uh, the state smacking it down as happened to
12:09
the British in the 20th century.
12:11
Yeah.
12:12
I mean, one of the interesting things that, that I, it, I, I wanna
12:15
think about before we move on to the next point is just how productive
12:20
and successful the Virginians were.
12:22
So you think about challenges like, you know, uh, I've, I've spoken before
12:25
about, you know, the, the last line of the Declaration of Independence, right?
12:28
To m- we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.
12:32
Um, and, and that was the form of a legal oath, right?
12:35
Like, you could, if you wanted to, interpret that as, and we will sort
12:38
of mutually ensure if one of… If something goes bad for one of us,
12:42
right, and we, and we lose our lives, our fortunes, or our, or our honor
12:46
doing this thing, then the others will come around and, and pay things back.
12:50
And largely, Virginia… I mean, Virginia was able, actually,
12:54
technically to, to pay off all of their war bonds, all their wartime debt.
12:58
They, they sort of were able to kinda gather around as a community
13:00
and collectively pay things off, as opposed to, say, New England, which
13:04
was never able to pay those things off.
13:06
And tho- you know, Vir- New England war bonds were still floating around
13:10
by, I mean, I think by the War of 1812.
13:12
Like, th- there was, it caused long-term financial problems.
13:16
I mean, that, that's, is, you kinda gets into, uh, the origin of
13:19
the Bank of the United States and kind of what was going on there.
13:22
Like, that's why i- in the opinion of many of the, the Dutch, you know, bankers,
13:26
we needed a Bank of the United States, was to deal with this lingering New
13:29
England debt And, and, and, you know, it's interesting when you, when you, um
13:34
This was something that, that I, I discovered as we were corresponding.
13:37
'Cause when I'd read the histories it was just sort of, well, there
13:39
was this debt hanging around, just hanging over the colonies, right?
13:44
And it's like, well, no, but it wasn't evenly distributed, right?
13:47
Because the, the, Virginia in particular and, and maybe the, the southern colonies
13:51
more broadly were able to pay off their debt and take care of their own and
13:55
kind of get, get things moving again.
13:57
And it was the New Englanders that, that, uh, uh, as in so many ways, you know,
14:01
were, were, uh, you know, the, the, unable to keep up their end of the bargain.
14:05
The same thing is true on the education side, right?
14:07
We, we had a, an interesting exchange, uh, you know, um, it's one of the
14:10
pleasures of following you on X is that I, I, I learn new things.
14:14
I have, I have some friends, some of whom might be on this call, who tease
14:17
me for being the kind of person that when I'm asked a question I respond
14:20
with a book recommendation, right?
14:22
And so the- by the way, the, the, the, the, the goal of my life is to surround
14:26
… Well, you're better at that than I.
14:27
You've, you read, you know, more books and respond with more, more
14:31
volume of bibliographies than, than, than I do, for the record.
14:34
Which I love, right?
14:35
That's, that's, that's why, you know, you're, you're, you're here
14:37
and, you know, my, my goal is to surround myself with such people.
14:40
Um, 'cause I'm a, I'm a reason- to be a, a reasonable, moderate,
14:43
centrist book recommender.
14:44
Uh, as, as, as we all should seek to be.
14:46
Uh, but you were talking about, you know, the, the public school system, right?
14:49
And that in Virginia, and again broadly replicated throughout the
14:52
tobacco-growing states, there wasn't a need for a public school system
14:55
because the large families, you know, took, took care of it themselves.
14:59
Um, you know, there's a story that I think I've told on the podcast before about, uh,
15:03
there was a building on the ranch that I grew up on called the nursery schoolhouse.
15:07
And, you know, as, as a kid I asked, "Well, what's, what's
15:10
the nursery schoolhouse?" And I was told this fascinating story
15:13
about my great-grandmother, my, my mother's father's, uh, mother.
15:18
And she, she was the person who came over from back east when, when
15:21
my family settled in California and got their, their square mile.
15:24
Uh, their, their 640 acres which they then divided between two brothers.
15:27
So we had, you know, 320 acres, um, that, that, that we were living on.
15:32
And, um, so they, they had gotten a number of hands that for, for a variety
15:36
of reasons didn't speak English.
15:37
And so this, you know, Pennsylvania Dutch woman decided it was her duty to, um, to
15:43
educate all of the hands and their wives and their children so that they c- And
15:47
she was a, a Methodist back in, back in the day when the Methodists were, were
15:50
still, like, very religiously rigorous.
15:53
And so, uh, she, she gave them a, a, a, a
15:56
She taught them how to read and write and speak English, taught them our
15:59
place, their place in our household, and our household's place in the story
16:02
of the West and the story of the world.
16:04
Which included a pretty heavy-handed, I'll note, you know, gospel presentation
16:08
in kind of that old Salvation Army, you know, Methodist way, right?
16:11
That they had.
16:12
Uh, g- good, good, good times.
16:14
Good times.
16:14
And, and, and one of the, the anecdotes was she always blamed
16:19
property taxes on the factory owners.
16:22
'Cause in her opinion, a landowner, a farmer, right?
16:25
A- a- and really as, as a landowner, as an employer, it was in her opinion
16:28
your, your bounden duty to educate not just your children, but the children
16:32
of all who you were beholden to, right?
16:35
Um, and I mean, that, so by the way, the, the nursery schoolhouse
16:38
also educated I think like half of the neighbors at the time, right?
16:41
People that really didn't have an economic connection to my grandfather at all.
16:44
But, but that was just, it was open, and so if you were part of the community
16:47
you were welcome and, and she would, she would teach you that stuff.
16:50
And she considered that her duty as a landowner's wife.
16:52
That was just part of what we were supposed to do.
16:55
Um, and, uh, and, and in her opinion, the reason we got property taxes was 'cause
16:59
all these factory owners came in and they didn't, uh, they didn't teach their kids.
17:03
They didn't, they didn't, or not just teach their kids, they didn't teach
17:05
their employees' kids how to read and write, and that caused social problems.
17:08
So it was, it was the factory owners' fault that we had property taxes.
17:12
Um, so yeah, as, I, just, just that, that, that contrast has been really
17:16
interesting kind of as, as I've interacted with you, learning about that contrast
17:19
between New England and, and Virginia.
17:21
Because again, New England had the serious problems of they needed the
17:24
public schools because they weren't able to fund this stuff themselves.
17:30
Yeah.
17:30
You know, there's a lot of myths about the, like, the early republic
17:34
era, particularly the period kind of between, I don't know, like, the
17:39
end of John Adams' presidency and the, um, beginning of the Civil War.
17:45
It, it's entirely made up.
17:46
Like, like, you have this myth that the South was, uh, anti-industrialization
17:52
or that they didn't understand debt, which is total nonsense.
17:55
If you look at, say, the debt issue, a- as you mentioned, Virginia actually
17:59
paid off its Revolutionary War debts, and then when all the other state debts
18:02
were folded into the national debt, you had, like, Arthur Lee coming back, who
18:06
he was, um, one of the sons of Thomas Lee and one of the Founding Fathers.
18:10
He's a great spy, and he's actively encouraging the state to buy up these
18:13
securities that are depressed because he knows the price is gonna go up.
18:16
It largely didn't because they had other productive things to invest the money in
18:20
rather than speculating in debt markets.
18:22
But the, um… L- l- like, they understood what was going on.
18:25
Or, you know, with industrialization, the Tredegar Iron Works were h-
18:29
hugely profitable, hugely productive, as was Richmond industry generally.
18:33
Just the difference was that they used slave labor to staff it instead
18:37
of imported Irish and Italian labor.
18:39
And so there were fewer, you know, no one likes hearing this, there were
18:43
fewer, uh, social problems associated with that, at least before the war.
18:47
Um, because they, they didn't, like, have this imported socialism thing.
18:51
They just had Virginia society developing as it had developed for centuries,
18:55
and they knew how to deal with that.
18:56
Uh, and that's been largely, uh, forgotten, uh, for reasons discussed
19:01
in the book, the British gentry, the Southern planter, and the Northern family
19:04
farmers, kind of this clash of cultures.
19:06
Uh,
19:07
Yeah
19:08
the…
19:08
A- anyway, my only point there is the, the, the Virginia gentry in
19:12
particular, even, uh, separated from the Deep South, uh, planters, which
19:18
were a different group, was actually highly competent across domains and
19:22
knew what was going on and wasn't really being outsmarted by some of the
19:26
Yankee industrialists or plutocrats.
19:28
It was rather going along with some of the stuff for the sake of the
19:31
nation, the debt issue in particular.
19:33
Um, and it was the continuing develop- or the, the continuing development and
19:39
cultivation of personal virtue as applied to Republican politics, uh, really in the
19:45
classical tradition that molded them and molded their behavior in that respect.
19:49
And simultaneously, it was their continuing ability from the kinda
19:53
upper yeoman class, the, the planters who had a couple slaves, to the large
19:58
Tidewater barons, their ability to continually, um, make their land
20:04
profitable well into the 19th century.
20:07
It, it made them a continuing economic force, uh, which has largely been
20:11
forgotten, and also a- able to support that public virtue because the,
20:14
the two were related to each other.
20:16
Uh, so I, I think that's important to remember, and it is kinda
20:18
why I talk about them as I do.
20:20
Yeah.
20:20
Well, and you know, people, I think one of the things that, that, that I
20:24
remember learning when I was studying the history of public education was
20:27
just the i- incredible influence of the New York Board of Educators, which was
20:32
essentially like an early teacher's union.
20:34
Um, so for instance, reading levels, um, w- as you know, like a third
20:39
grade reading, a fourth grade.
20:40
For, for a long time now, reading levels have been set by the
20:43
New York Board of Educators.
20:44
There's actually a, uh, a Bible translation, uh, that I won't name
20:48
who, who … They, they have a problem because they, they have in their, like
20:53
the, the incorporating documents of their nonprofit set that the, the Bible
20:57
translation that they issue will hit a certain reading level, and it's like
20:59
nobody bothered to think about who sets the reading level in this country.
21:03
And so they, they, uh, they, they had to have a fairly clever, clever workaround
21:08
that, that, uh, that, that resulted in, in what's, uh, the Legacy Standard Bible.
21:12
Um, and, uh, that, that, that's kind of avoids the reading level thing.
21:16
Um, but, uh, but it's a fascinating … You know, it's a fascinating thing
21:19
because the, you know, again, the New York, the New England group had invested
21:23
all of this kind of institutional weight in public schools, so when the public
21:27
school thing broadened to the rest of the country, it, it resulted, you know, de
21:30
facto in a bunch of these New York people kind of spreading across, uh, you know,
21:35
like insert your unf- uh, unflattering insect, uh, metaphor of choice here,
21:40
across the rest of the country and kind of bringing their ideas with them.
21:42
So, okay, anything else you wanna, you wanna think about on that topic before
21:46
we move on to the, the cursus honorum?
21:49
Yeah
21:50
Yeah, so I think, um, y- the Romans of course had their cursus honorum, which
21:56
most people know about, kind of the progression through public offices.
22:00
I, we, I don't really need to get into it in more depth than
22:02
that 'cause it's not particularly relevant other than the purpose
22:05
listening, we, we've done, we've done, like, three or four episodes on the
22:07
Roman cur- Cursus Honorum, so go back and listen to my other podcasts on the topic
22:11
Yes.
22:11
So the same sort of thing was developed in Virginia, though with
22:15
different positions because, of course, the positions were different.
22:18
And, uh, the general concept was that when cavalier society in Virginia
22:24
really fermented and developed under the period really where Governor
22:28
Berkeley was in charge, kind of in the late-ish, mid to late 17th century.
22:34
Not that many cavaliers, like aristocrats who mattered came over, um, but some
22:40
of them did, and particularly there were just enough, um, the, the general
22:45
planter society was leavened, is the term typically used by their presence,
22:49
where it adopted their mindset, their view of life, and their general,
22:53
um, economic, political, religious views, which combined represented this
22:59
union of church, state, and property.
23:02
Where the general idea was that the landowners kind of up and down
23:06
the pyramid should be involved with the established church, not
23:09
the Quakers or the Puritan church.
23:11
Uh, they hated the dissenters and repeatedly forced them out of the state.
23:15
It was an Episcopalian project, right?
23:17
Yes, exactly.
23:18
Um, and so you have the established church, the landowners, and the landowners
23:21
are expected to be in the government of the church and the government of
23:24
the state, and it kind of forms this, uh, this trinity, you know, which is
23:28
appropriate, yeah, given the religion.
23:30
Where it's all united, and it's all devoted towards the proper cultivation
23:35
of the territory and its people.
23:37
And so the way that worked was, uh, this combination of democracy and aristocracy,
23:44
um, that's really interesting, where at each level there was kind of input
23:48
from the populace, but also input from the established authorities.
23:52
Kind of if you imagine this developing over time, there were the old men
23:55
who have always been in it, and then the y- the younger men coming up.
23:58
And so it started at the plantation level where because tobacco's price is in part
24:05
determined by its quality, there are other things as well, such as the strain
24:08
or just the general commodity price.
24:10
But quality matters, and quality can be discerned because you can see if
24:13
the leaves kind of look bad or if there are a bunch of worms crawling on them.
24:17
So a, a planter's ability to grow good tobacco was generally the way, uh,
24:23
his neighbors viewed him as a man.
24:24
That played into, uh, credit decisions.
24:27
It played into, you know, what social situations he'd be invited to.
24:31
It determined what level of respect he'd get because people could just,
24:34
you know, ride their horse by your fields and look over and, you know,
24:37
see what your workforce was up to.
24:38
And if your tobacco looked bad, they'd realize you probably were inattentive
24:41
or incompetent, and they didn't really want to be associated with you.
24:45
Um, and th- there were other things that kind of played into that, such
24:48
as if you'd ever reneged on a debt, you know, that was a big black mark.
24:51
Um, or if you refused to loan to people who were good credit risks,
24:55
um, you, you seemed overly greedy or, you know, not trusting of your
24:58
fellows, and they didn't like you.
24:59
But the main thing was, uh, the quality of your leaf, the quality of your tobacco.
25:03
And if you were competent in that respect and you could manage your
25:06
plantation well, as all around you could
25:08
t- Oh,
25:08
they called this the habit of command, right?
25:11
Uh, kind of.
25:12
Kind of.
25:13
Okay.
25:13
So, so, so get, yeah, get into that
25:15
yeah.
25:15
So then coming out of that, you know, if you think about the way, uh, liberty and
25:20
equality, uh, conflicted in Virginia, uh, uh, the men in charge, if they were
25:25
gonna grow good leaf, they had to develop, yeah, what you just called, or the habit
25:29
of command, which is a term that actually comes from, uh, Charles Francis Adams Jr.,
25:33
which is funny that he kinda, uh, immortalized it given,
25:36
you know, their Puritan bent.
25:37
But regardless, the, um, it, it was understood that the sort of man who would
25:42
be able to grow good leaf was the sort of man who had this habit of command
25:46
and who could probably command and could probably lead his fellows where he was
25:50
worthy of consideration for the next step up the hierarchical ladder, the
25:54
next step up the Virginia cursus honorum.
25:57
Uh, in that leads into the vestry board because each Episcopalian church,
26:01
um, and kinda community surrounding it is governed by the vestry.
26:04
Uh, and at the time that was much more important than it is now because it was,
26:08
uh, the, the board that handled not just management of the church, but management
26:14
of the people associated with the church
26:16
and
26:16
like a, we could a k- it would be like a, like a, like an all
26:19
purposes arbitration board,
26:22
Yes.
26:23
So like
26:23
one that you were socially expected to submit a whole list of, of,
26:27
of certain types of disputes to
26:29
Yes, that's a great way of describing it.
26:31
So it was essentially that, and importantly, um, it wasn't elected.
26:35
It was determined by c- the current members of the board in cooperation
26:39
with the state legislature and the governor, but primarily just the men
26:43
who were on the board and m- maybe a few other influential people.
26:47
So it was more aristocratic than democratic, but you had to be adding
26:51
people to it, uh, who would be acceptable to the community because it was this
26:54
community arbitration board, so there was that break upon oligarchic tendencies.
26:59
Uh, and also it was unpaid, so, uh, to submit yourself to being a part
27:03
of it, you knew you were gonna be dealing with huge social headaches
27:06
and kind of the most difficult people in your community continuously for
27:10
no money whatsoever, and indeed you'd be pulled away from your plantations.
27:13
You'd have less time to devote to management of your estate, which meant you
27:17
had to continue developing in your skill of doing that and your ability to handle
27:20
tenants or slaves or indentured servants.
27:23
Uh, so it was kinda… It was the next step up the cultivation of leadership,
27:26
cultivation of the habit of command ladder, and it was, uh, the, the intent
27:30
of it was to acculture one to dealing with community members who weren't of
27:34
his rank, uh, typically people below him, um, and also to see who could pass
27:39
the shit test of, um, you know, dealing with a- all this nonsense constantly.
27:44
Um, and it worked in that regard.
27:46
It did screen out the people who weren't willing to submit themselves
27:48
to public service, and then they would be somewhat socially ostracized if
27:51
they weren't willing to do so, which was important to the continuance of
27:54
the system, it… while also helping develop these people as leaders early
27:58
on in a relatively low stakes way.
28:00
I- if they did well in that position, the next step up the
28:03
ladder was the, uh, justice of the peace role in the county courts.
28:07
Once again, county courts were a much bigger deal then than they are now
28:10
because they met about once a month, and it was a big social event when they met
28:14
because people had nothing else to do.
28:16
So they'd show up, they'd drink, they'd trade horses, they'd poke around
28:19
the courthouse, and they'd wait to see who was gonna be hanged, who was
28:22
gonna be fined, who had the bastard child that needed to be supported.
28:26
A- all the fun things one can imagine in a semi-frontier county court.
28:30
And once again, the justices of the peace were appointed by a mixture of
28:35
the current members, but in this case much more the governor and s- some
28:39
influence of the Council of state, uh, which, uh, we, we'll get into in a
28:43
minute, uh, and the House of Burgesses.
28:45
And so it was once again appointed, but they had to be respectable people who
28:49
would be respected by their community members, and this was a higher stakes,
28:53
uh, version of the vestry board, essentially, where they would have to
28:56
continue cultivating themselves, learn the law, learn how to lead, and learn
29:01
how to, um, make decisions that both pushed the community in the correct
29:06
direction while also being acceptable to that community, uh, which made the
29:10
Virginia leadership group a relatively conservative group overall, and also
29:14
kind of well accustomed to wielding this habit of command in the right way.
29:17
And they had to continue managing their plantation and dealing with
29:20
the vestry responsibilities as they did this, so it was a big
29:22
thing.
29:22
Y- yes, it stacks up over time, and you have to keep doing
29:26
all of it well as you do it.
29:27
Um, so then
29:28
the things that I, I, I, I think about, when, when … Wou- would you say, like,
29:32
there's, there's some point between kind of the justice of the peace and, and
29:35
then the, the, the higher ranks, right?
29:37
The, obviously the, the House of Burgesses, uh, you know, where you're
29:41
dealing with things that primarily are gonna matter for their second
29:44
or third order effects, right?
29:46
You know, one of the things that we're constantly talking about on X is
29:48
that there's just this whole group of people that have no apparent ability to
29:52
recognize that there is such a concept as second or third order effects.
29:55
And, and everyone just kind of wanders around saying, "Oh, this is
29:58
terrible. This is ter-," like how
30:00
There's … But, but, uh, people don't seem to be aware there is
30:03
actually a, a structure of human organization and human civilization
30:07
that really does solve this problem.
30:08
You just make, you just have this layer where if you don't do a good job thinking
30:13
about second and third order effects, you don't get past this layer, and we
30:17
don't listen to you on anything important
30:19
Yes.
30:20
That's a point that, um, both Charles Sinder in his book American
30:24
Revolutionaries in the Making, and also Carl Bridenbaugh in his book The Seed of
30:27
Empire make explicitly, which is that, uh, you know, one had to think about
30:32
all these things at each chain up this, but, you know, more so as it went on.
30:36
Because i- if you experimented too much, or if you didn't think things
30:40
through before embarking on some project, uh, it could me cap you.
30:43
Uh, y- you'd lose all your respect, uh, say if your tobacco went poorly
30:47
because you decided to do some insane thing that year, um, and you wouldn't
30:50
be able to do any of this anymore.
30:51
Or, you know, if you started making horrible decisions as a justice of the
30:54
peace, or, uh, be obviously partial in your decision-making and kind of
30:58
'Cause those things would follow you, right?
31:00
It, it was… It- people knew you.
31:02
It was a, it was a political system that was scaled at the personal level.
31:07
It, it was, it wasn't a bureaucratic scale, it wasn't of industrial
31:10
scale, it was a personal scale, and it was in an honor community
31:13
where these things did matter.
31:14
Um, and so y- yeah, you had to, you had to be able to consider how your decisions,
31:20
your experiments, um, your thoughts and your application of political theory to
31:24
reality, uh, would ripple through society, and you had to be able to, you know,
31:30
cultivate yourself in order to cultivate society, which was really the purpose of
31:34
it, 'cause it was threshing the, uh, chaff and the wheat at kind of each level up
31:38
I think up until this point, still completely unpaid, right?
31:41
Yes, uh, entirely unpaid.
31:42
Um, so then the next step was the House of Burgesses, which was e- effectively
31:47
the House of Representatives at the state level, uh, at a time when state
31:51
legislatures, uh, mattered much more.
31:53
And so this one was the first one that was more democratic than aristocratic.
31:56
Typically, what would happen is each county got, I think, two, um, m-
32:00
Burgesses, um, or y- y- and so then those typically mult- four or five
32:07
people could run, something like that.
32:09
But typically you had to get the green light from established authorities
32:13
within it, um, particularly the older members who are higher up the
32:16
ranks within it in order to run.
32:18
It were… You know, they didn't want just anybody doing it, and they also wanted
32:23
to screen out the troublemakers or screen out the people who would dis- detract from
32:27
the general respect accorded to the body.
32:29
Um, so you, you had to have done well at the vestry level and at the
32:33
justice of the peace level to even run.
32:35
You also had to be wealthy enough to provide snacks for your potential voters
32:39
because election day was yet another big deal where people showed up and you had
32:43
to have a lot of liquor, a lot of wine, and a lot of beer available to hand out.
32:48
Not as a bribe, that was illegal, but just, you know, as a treat for
32:51
your friends to thank them for, uh, making the journey to vote for you.
32:55
Uh, so yeah.
32:57
Like, it- Washington has these amounts noted in his personal ledger, and
33:01
it'd be, you know, some headache of paying five pounds for, you know,
33:05
hogsheads full of Madeira to hand out to voters in the hope he'd get elected.
33:09
It's stuff like that.
33:10
It's kind of these, uh, funny things that w- they were more entertaining
33:13
when they were kinda openly encouraged rather than having to be hidden like now.
33:17
In any case, um, that mattered because, you know, n- you had to be given the green
33:22
light by the established authorities, which made it semi-aristocratic,
33:25
but you also actually had to win the respect of the local freeholders.
33:28
And it typically, it was people over 50 acres in landed property who could vote.
33:33
It, the, the restriction to think of to make it applicable to modernity
33:37
would essentially be net taxpayers, um, y- people who are productive
33:41
and add something to society.
33:43
It, it screen… The property voting wasn't really a way of establishing
33:47
oligarchic authority so much as just screening out the underclass because
33:51
people thought they wouldn't vote responsibly, which of course was true.
33:55
Um, and so then you had to be able to win the respect of those people.
33:58
yeah, I mean, one of the, one of the ways I, like, w- w- I, I think
34:01
also it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be waged workers in, in, in many ways.
34:05
Um, so, so a- a- as we understand this today, maybe, maybe, maybe
34:09
waged workers in the '70s or '60s or something of that nature, right?
34:12
Uh, which, which, which was one of the things, the criticisms that
34:15
people made about property voting.
34:17
Uh, but, but the, the goal I think was, we don't want you voting if you could,
34:21
if you could have ever been somebody who, who worked for this guy, right?
34:25
We don't want somebody who was submissive, you know, underneath the,
34:30
the, the guy that's running, because we just assume those people are
34:32
gonna vote for their patron, right?
34:34
It w- it would be sort of dishonorable for them not to.
34:36
And so you need to be independent at least to some degree, um, in,
34:41
in, in order to, to, to vote.
34:42
You can't, you can't have abject dependents.
34:44
Obviously th- these guys had m- a multiplicity of economic long-term
34:48
economic relationships with their fellows and the, the people in
34:50
their community, and that was okay.
34:52
But y- you know, that wasn't, they, they didn't want you to have the people that
34:55
you had kind of economically supported in a, in a significant way voting, at least
35:00
or the other people in the state had economically supported, um, w- which was
35:05
even the bigger deal because, uh A- as came up, say, with the controversy over
35:11
John Robinson appropriating public funds to loan out to his friends to try and
35:15
… He, he had noble motives of trying to keep the state from just crashing economically,
35:19
and he didn't make any money from it.
35:21
But it was a bad situation.
35:22
And had Richard Henry Lee not actually been independent and have been elected
35:26
by independent voters, had he instead been elected by people who were dependent
35:30
on John Robinson, uh, the investigation wouldn't have happened, the rooting out
35:34
of corruption wouldn't have happened.
35:35
It would've been quite bad for the state.
35:36
So that's, you know, the sort of thing they were trying to prevent is
35:39
the situation we have now, where it's just people directly voting for some
35:43
handout at each and every election.
35:45
They wanted the people who, uh, weren't gonna be getting the handouts, who were
35:48
gonna be, you know, participating in society fully as members of the res
35:51
publica, uh, though it wasn't a republic at this time 'cause it was the colonial
35:54
world, a- a- being the ones who had a say.
35:56
Um, and so y- you get this interesting situation where the sort of person
36:00
who's elected had to be dignified, kinda like you think of Washington
36:03
or you think of the Lees, but also couldn't be overly haughty because
36:06
if he was a jerk to people on the road, then they wouldn't vote for him.
36:09
So it had to be the sort of guy who could do both, the guy who was actually
36:12
a good leader, actually possessed the habit of command and leadership
36:16
rather than just being an oligarch.
36:18
Um, and that really, really winnowed the crop.
36:21
And you see a lot of the First Family types after a couple generations, one
36:25
or two sons will lose elections, and they have to reorient themselves and
36:28
run again after being a bit nicer for a couple years, and then they'll win.
36:31
It's this kinda interesting cycle where the fathers will make fun of their sons
36:35
for either being too accommodating to the body public or not accommodating enough.
36:40
Um, and so th- there're some hilarious letters exchanged about,
36:44
um, you know … Uh, you, you can imagine what they said to each other.
36:48
Um, in any case, w- once elected in, in the House, those who were there as young
36:53
men were expected largely to sit, listen, do the, um, administrative things that
37:00
were headaches, learn how it operated.
37:02
And as they did that, the older members of the House were expected to pick
37:06
out those with special talents so that they could go on to do great things.
37:09
And you saw this particularly during the Revolution.
37:12
Like, the reason Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of In-
37:15
Independence was that a couple guys in the House of Burgesses noticed
37:18
that though he was terrible at public speaking, he was actually a really
37:21
good writer and could do this well.
37:22
And so they sent him to the Continental Congress with kind of the, you know,
37:26
behind-the-scenes letters to that body and its leaders being, "Hey, uh, don't
37:29
try and get this guy to talk, but he can write quite well, and, you know, you might
37:32
wanna use him in that position." And th- that sort of thing happened continually.
37:35
So it was a way of continually molding skills, continually molding personal
37:39
development, and producing the best leaders, uh, that could be produced as
37:44
part of this general society, and also one in which, um, the interests of the voters
37:49
were generally aligned with the interests of the politicians because they were
37:53
all planters, just at different scales.
37:56
Uh, and so it, they had the same general, uh, interests in mind and w-
38:01
you know, what was good for the state was good for the politicians and was
38:03
good for the people who elected them, which created this union of interests.
38:08
Then the particularly notable people could be leaders in the House, or they really
38:13
aspired to be members of the Council of State, which was appointed by the governor
38:17
and was something like a Supreme Court mixed with a Senate, um, and that it
38:21
had a veto over legislation and is also, so was the court of highest appeals and
38:26
dealt with foreign policy regarding the British state and its colonial officials.
38:30
And then there was the governor, who other than Thomas Lee was never a
38:34
Virginian, uh, up until the revolution.
38:37
Um, it was someone sent from Britain.
38:39
And so that was how the political system functioned.
38:41
And in it, I think you see that, uh, triune, um, organization of society
38:46
between the union between church, state, and land, and how they used that
38:52
to cultivate virtue and to cultivate political leaders who could, you know,
38:56
actually have the potential because of their capital and because of their
39:00
training to exercise that virtue in, uh, service to the state and continue to do so
39:05
because they were both socially obligated to do so and saw that as being the highest
39:09
good rather than just always wanting to accumulate more land or whatever it was.
39:14
Mm-hmm.
39:14
Yeah.
39:15
Yeah, so I mean, I think the-- thank you for that and that, that, you know,
39:18
this is, this is, again, to the-- this, this, these are the kinds of people that
39:22
I, I, I try to surround myself with.
39:24
Uh, Will's got an incredible wealth of knowledge on this topic.
39:27
So you had another article, um, about, you know, embodying aristocratic
39:32
excellence in modernity, what would a rebuilt American gentry look like?
39:35
So, you know, I think, I think we're, we're at the cusp at least.
39:38
You know, I've, I've done several episodes.
39:39
I, I think we're on the cusp.
39:41
I mean, I, I think generally w-we, we had gone so far on the side of, you
39:45
know, egalitarianism and trying to break things down to the atomistic individual
39:49
level, uh, you know, d- to the point where people are, you know, engaging in
39:53
the trans stuff where they're, they're trying to redefine what gender means
39:57
for themselves and this, you know, that e-every single individual person gets
40:01
to negotiate literally everything about their relationship with the rest of the
40:05
universe, you know, a-ad infinitum, right?
40:07
Sort of in that, that, that kind of Patrick Deneen sort of, uh, sort of
40:11
recognition that, that there something, something has gone wrong here.
40:14
And so I think there was always going to be, there always had to be
40:17
a, a, a, a swing back the other way.
40:20
Um, but, but I think that there's s- you know, what I've been talking about
40:23
for the last couple weeks has been these new technological improvements, these
40:27
new technological shifts, um, l- with like such as robots and AI and, and, and
40:34
some of the, some of the, the, the, the rockets that, uh, that Elon is doing.
40:38
We're, we're about to have much more.
40:39
I don't know that we'll actually get to Mars or anything like that, but we, we
40:42
are about to have much more control over the space, say, between here and the moon.
40:46
Like, that's about to become a commercial space in a way that it hasn't.
40:50
And, and, and, you know, maybe by the, by the time, you know, we're, we're,
40:54
we're old, we will be start sending ships, you know, pretty far out.
40:57
Um, you know, somebody, you know, one of the, one of the things that, that
41:00
is we don't really understand how much wealth would be generated if we could
41:04
actually get to the asteroid belt and start engaging in asteroid mining.
41:07
Like, that's the sort of thing that would, you know … W-we would look obviously
41:13
to, like, the Spanish exploitation or the, the Spanish, you know, getting
41:16
the silver from the New World.
41:17
And, uh, but it would be a-another order of magnitude greater than that, the kind
41:22
of resources that we would suddenly have access to, uh, the, uh, an abundance
41:26
of, uh, of, of metals and, and, and rare elements that, that we, we really have
41:31
no idea what would, that would look like.
41:32
So, um, as, as we're thinking about this, again, I think, I think the, the, the
41:35
broader context is we, we've swung so far to the one side, we have to swing back.
41:40
So what do you think that would look like as we, as we start to
41:43
try to rebuild an American gentry?
41:45
And then a-as you have thoughts, I'd love to hear about what do
41:47
you think in terms of, um, um, how these new technologies impact that?
41:54
Yeah.
41:54
Uh, so I, I think the basic framework is if you look at y- what's the difference
41:59
between a plutocracy and an aristocracy?
42:03
I, I would argue the main difference is that a plutocracy is where the, you
42:07
know, the, the important people have one skill, and that's their ability
42:13
to use money to make more money.
42:15
Uh, just the ever-expanding riches is their reason for existence
42:20
and the one thing they can do.
42:21
Uh, on the other hand, an aristocracy is dominated by people who, uh,
42:26
have cross-domain excellence.
42:28
They might not be the best money makers, but they can do that well, and they can
42:32
do a thousand other things well as well.
42:35
Uh, and y- that does trickle down through society.
42:37
I- if… This is a point, um, like, uh, The Aristocracy in England, 1660 to 1914
42:44
is one of my favorite books, and in it, the author makes the point that if you
42:47
look at the British middle class and the upper gentry, the upper yeomanry,
42:51
kind of all those people, uh, before the Parliament bill, they aspired to be like
42:55
the aristocracy, which meant they sent their sons to learn classical educations.
42:59
The Virginians did this as well.
43:01
Uh, even if, you know, the father was a successful accountant, he
43:04
wanted his son to do other things.
43:05
Even if he ended up being an accountant, too, he, he was kind of expected to be
43:09
excellent across domains, be able to ride a horse, to hunt a fox, uh, maybe
43:12
do something in the colonies for a bit, make money, certainly know how to speak
43:16
Latin, be able to do all these different things rather than just being neurotically
43:20
focused on expanding his wealth.
43:22
I- on the other hand, now, really in America since whenever, you know,
43:26
whenever you pinpoint the bad time as being, you just get the trickle-down of
43:30
plutocracy, which is I think epitomized by that stupid book, The Millionaire Next
43:33
Door, which, uh, probably has the worst selection bias of any book in existence.
43:38
I mean, it made it into when, uh, made it into a book of, of bad
43:42
statistical analysis, bad sta- Like, it was the example that they gave
43:46
for this is a statistically invalid selection biased, you know, pool
43:51
But, you know, th- that aside, the other issue with it is, well,
43:55
you know, what's the point of the existence described in this?
43:57
There's the Heinlein line that specialization is for insects, and
44:01
that's clearly demonstrated by that book where you have, like, the guy worth
44:03
$10 million who, you know, does nothing at all ever because he just wants to
44:08
turn it into $11 million and so on.
44:11
And I, I, I think…
44:12
he's hyper-specialized,
44:13
Yes, exactly.
44:14
And he can do nothing else, and he doesn't really aspire to do anything
44:18
else, wh- which I think is a big problem.
44:20
And so I think when you look at these, uh, technologies that have, you know,
44:25
re-sparked, uh, innovation and, you know, innovation that's applicable
44:29
to the real world rather than just, you know, making fun of each other
44:32
on the internet, which is fun for a couple years but then burns out.
44:36
The, uh, you know, like, for one, being able to build a nuclear
44:41
power plant or build a rocket requires more than one skill.
44:45
You can't just be good at coding.
44:47
You have to be able to know how to manage, you know, uh,
44:49
construction and subcontractors.
44:51
You have to generally understand what's going on with it, inside it.
44:54
You have to understand supply lines.
44:56
You have to have some commercial purpose in mind that's gonna make this worth it.
44:59
You need to know how to deal with the government and kinda handle
45:01
cutting through bureaucratic red tape.
45:03
You, you need to have a, a bevy of skills that you're able to
45:06
exercise well, both as necessary and preemptively to make that a success, and
45:12
particularly if you wanna do anything with it that's r- really of worth.
45:15
Kinda like you see, uh, whether it's Microsoft or Google
45:18
restarting Three Mile Island.
45:20
Y- you, that's all interconnected, where you need to know how to do the AI thing,
45:23
the data center thing, the nuclear power plant thing, the government thing.
45:27
Microsoft has its problems, as we've all seen on the internet, but
45:32
regardless, there's something there.
45:34
And the sort of people who can harness that I think will be people
45:38
who, like the Virginia gentry or the British landed elite, have this, uh,
45:43
cross-domain excellence kinda built into them and are able to, um, uh, exploit
45:48
opportunity as it pops up, and do so in a way that continually builds, uh, th-
45:54
their ability to do so in the future i- in more ways than just earn money.
45:58
I, I think the question is whether the kinda plutocratic mindset is
46:01
baked in so deep that they don't think about legacy because, uh, these
46:04
projects are multi-generational.
46:06
And so what we'll see with Elon is, well, if he wants to, like, do anything on Mars,
46:11
that's gonna be a 20-generation project.
46:14
And so the Grosvenor family of England could have colonized Mars by now.
46:18
They've been around for 1,000 years pretty much in the same spot, Chester.
46:22
Um, you know, although they have the property in London
46:24
that's quite valuable now.
46:25
Uh, but, you know, e- they've been rooted in the same territory
46:30
for 1,000 years, as has the Percy family, the Fitzwilliam family.
46:34
Uh, up until semi-recently, the Lee family of Virginia was
46:37
here for a few hundred years.
46:38
You, you have people who think about legacy and who are able
46:41
to continue demonstrating skills over generations across domains
46:45
because they've cultivated it.
46:46
In the past, that was military, economic, and political.
46:50
Now it's probably more political, economic, and social with kind of
46:50
the military aspect being, uh, a side part of technological excellence
46:50
or kind of ability to harness that just 'cause of the scale involved.
46:50
But regardless
46:59
Right
47:02
Yeah, they talk about, they talk about the pharmaceutical media complex as opposed
47:05
to the military industrial complex, right?
47:07
Yeah.
47:08
Yeah.
47:08
So there's all of that, um, plus being able to drop rods from God
47:12
kinda helps obviate some of the
47:14
Yeah, it, it's a totally different … Yeah, it, it, it
47:16
changes, it changes things, right?
47:18
Yeah.
47:18
Couple of tungsten rods in orbit and, uh, that's a different … He who,
47:22
he who controls the orbitals, right?
47:23
Something like that.
47:25
Um
47:25
Yeah.
47:26
A- anyway, th- that's how I would predict that going, and I think we'll, we'll
47:28
just have to wait and see on that front.
47:29
But it's why trying to inculcate this mindset and teach the importance of
47:33
these things is so important, um, because if we're gonna succeed in any of these
47:38
endeavors, it really requires the…
47:40
It requires the effective union of church, uh, productive property, and
47:45
state to make happen, and it's only aristocracy that can make that happen
47:50
Well, there was an interesting post from, uh, Marc Andreessen.
47:53
Or, well, it wasn't from Marc, but it was a, it was an interview of Marc Andreessen,
47:56
and he, he, uh, he talked about there's this three-way Mexican standoff between
48:00
coders, project managers, and designers.
48:02
And, uh, so he says, uh, the quote is, "I'm seeing it in a bunch of the early
48:06
leading-edge companies in the Valley.
48:08
They're circling around a job title loosely called builder or something
48:11
like it." And basically, the idea is you had these separate jobs in
48:13
the past of programmer, project, product manager, and designer.
48:16
And I've been describing what's happening in the Valley, um, w-
48:20
where the programmers think that they don't need the product managers and
48:23
the designers anymore because they can't, they can have AI do that, and
48:26
then each of the other two doesn't think they need the other two either.
48:28
Uh, and, and, and Marc Andreessen's take is that he thinks they're
48:31
all, they're all right.
48:32
He thinks that they're all correct, that, that the new job is builder,
48:35
and all three of these formerly siloed groups are now builders and,
48:41
and, and are gonna compete and be expected to compete against each other.
48:45
You know, one of the things that I've really been, been doing some,
48:47
some thinking and talking about is this idea of having unified games.
48:51
You, you mentioned that the, the unified game, the, the, the kind of
48:54
the entry game that people had to play in the Virginia context was what was
48:57
the quality of your tobacco, right?
48:59
And, and that was something that anyone basically could look at, and if you
49:02
had domain expertise, you would know what… I mean, even, even as you said,
49:06
riding past the fields, you could look and see, oh, is this person good at
49:10
this or is this person bad at this?
49:11
Um You know, it's so, it's so important because there's kind of
49:15
a, a man in the arena, you know.
49:17
Um, I, I just did an article, uh, uh, called The, The Modern Tower of
49:20
Babel, and, and one of the things I was mentioning was that people, you know, the,
49:24
these modern kinda siloed groups, uh, you know, where you become a billionaire in
49:29
one hyper-specialized industry, right?
49:32
And that's all you know how to do, and that's all that you have.
49:35
And then, you know, y- you can't compete with anyone.
49:38
No one else can evaluate you.
49:39
You're the best in your teeny, tiny little field that, that, that, you know, isn't,
49:44
isn't actually able to generate a society.
49:46
Like, the, the thing about, like, the great estates, the plantations, like,
49:50
their opinion was that they could survive quite comfortably if the rest
49:53
of the world, you know, vanished in a, in a, in a ball of fire, right?
49:56
They might need to send some ships out to get salt from somewhere, but,
50:00
but their, their broad opinion was, "Yeah, the rest of the world could
50:03
go to hell. We'll be fine." Um, and, and that is just not the case.
50:06
Like, all of these people are, are crazy interdependent in ways, uh…
50:11
But they're also, paradoxically, super inter- interdependent, but unable to
50:16
fairly compete with one another, right?
50:18
There's no, there's no common domain that they… I mean, aside from, I suppose, raw
50:22
pol- power politics and finance, right?
50:24
Which is kind of the places where they're competing right now.
50:26
So I think it'll be really interesting to see if, if AI starts to break down silos.
50:31
And it's not, this is not the n- the, the, like, the number of jobs
50:35
in terms of the number of jobs created that people are working in.
50:37
The number of different specialties that people have, if that starts to shrink,
50:42
if that, if, if instead of the, the, the plan for everybody is to become
50:45
hyper-specialized in some niche, if it's, no, there's actually fewer and
50:49
fewer with every new iteration of AI, there's fewer and fewer specialties
50:53
and we're all kind of defaulting to, to a, a, a smaller number of skillsets,
50:58
well, that gets very interesting.
51:00
That gets very interesting, so.
51:01
Well, and you know, if, if you look at even the Gilded Age, uh, who was
51:05
it that actually exercised power and was able to shape things in that era?
51:09
It wasn't really the railroad barons nor the steel barons.
51:12
It was Andrew Mellon and JP Morgan in, in the American context because they
51:17
were able to marshal resources in a way that allowed them to utilize their
51:22
understanding of different sectors and different issues in different sectors
51:26
to then, you know, shape the direction of those, whether through JP Morgan Bank
51:30
or Union Trust Company or Mellon Bank.
51:33
Uh, th- they were the people who mattered in a way that those who
51:36
were of more wealth really didn't, which I think will come up again
51:41
and w- we'll see how it plays out
51:43
Yeah.
51:43
Well, any, uh, we, we, we're gonna, we're gonna kind of wrap up the
51:46
public version of, of this, and then, and then, uh, hopefully you have
51:49
time to stick around for a little bit of Q&A, uh, with the audience.
51:53
Um, so any, any final thoughts?
51:55
We've, we've covered a bunch of topics, and, uh, sometimes I, I, I bounce
51:58
from thing to thing, and so any, any other comments or thoughts you
52:01
had, uh, that, that you wanna share kind of with the public audience?
52:05
I, I would just say, um, you know, it-- the-- though this is a more democratic age
52:11
in a lot of respects and certainly a more plutocratic one in a lot of respects, I,
52:14
I think if you plan on building anything important, uh, these aristocratic virtues
52:19
and mindsets still matter a great deal.
52:21
And just to harp on the Gilded Age example, you know, J.P.
52:23
Morgan loved it in Britain and had an estate there and tried
52:26
to apply that mindset generally to his American business.
52:29
And similarly, the Mellon family had a lot of the same Anglophilic tendencies
52:34
and tried to apply that to the American context, and it made them more
52:37
effective because it made them willing to look at the long term rather than
52:40
just what was right in front of them.
52:42
I-- and, uh, that I think is more important now than ever.
52:45
And examining, uh, you know, great men of the past who were aristocrats of the
52:50
soul and typically of blood as well, um, it allows one to kinda see how
52:55
that worked out and start implementing it in personal life, which I think
52:58
is important and is what makes it applicable rather than just interesting.
53:01
Yep.
53:02
You know, it's really interesting.
53:03
W- w- in one of the recent government shutdowns, there's been so many that
53:06
I can't quite remember which one it was, but in one of them, um, in, in
53:09
the last I think six to nine months, there was a period of time where we
53:12
were not paying our military, and it was actually the Mellon family personally,
53:18
I be- I believe it was one of their very old trusts that they have that
53:22
stepped in and fronted the funds.
53:25
Which, which if, if it was one of their trusts, uh, then that's really interesting
53:28
because those old trusts, you have to have a provision in the trust that says
53:32
you're allowed to spend money this way.
53:34
It was, uh, e- so it, what happened was it was Paul Mellon who had used original
53:40
investments the family made in, I think Gulf Oil, which got bought by Chevron,
53:46
and then had grown to a huge amount.
53:47
And he had been the one that managed that, along with building a railroad
53:51
based on old family railroad holdings.
53:54
Uh, so he had money that wasn't included in one of the trusts
53:57
Oh, okay.
53:58
Mellon had set up that enabled him to do this.
54:00
Anyway, uh, it's
54:01
But it's, but, but still, I mean, that's, it's a really interest-
54:04
like that, that's, it's a very aristocratic kind of thing to do, right?
54:08
To step in and s- and obviously I think he got paid back, right?
54:10
Probably at a fairly, fairly generous interest rate.
54:13
But, um, but you know, they, they, they stepped in.
54:17
They said, "Hey, our, our, our soldiers need this, and, and this, this money is
54:20
going to solve this problem until the, the, the public purse can be restored,"
54:25
which I, I just, I find, I find that, that really interesting that that's happening.
54:29
So yeah, it's a, it's, it's a fascinating time.
54:32
Again, my, my take is that, that we, the pendulum swung
54:35
way too far in one direction.
54:37
You know, woke was this aberration.
54:40
A- and I think, and I think even in many ways the, the plutocratic
54:43
thing has, has run its course.
54:45
People are not happy.
54:46
You know, when you talk to, like, when recruiting, if you have a
54:48
straight plutocrat company, they can't recruit very well, right?
54:52
You know, famously millennials wanna know what, what, what purpose are you,
54:55
are you, uh, are you aiming for here?
54:57
Um, and, and, and so I think that, that when you talk about the, the purposes
55:03
that can make money, the purposes that can endure and be profitable, so you've
55:06
gotta, you've gotta satisfy those, those high-minded ideals, and you have
55:10
to survive by being profitable and productive and useful in the world.
55:15
I think the, the thing that does that is something more
55:18
like an aristocratic mindset.
55:19
Well, again, thank you.
55:21
Oh, yeah?
55:21
could I add one more anecdote just kind of showing the, uh,
55:24
the way this remains relevant?
55:26
So there's this great book called Aristocrats by a guy named Robert
55:28
Lacey who tracks really the few thousand-year families in Europe, and
55:32
one he talks about is the Grosvenors.
55:34
And in the '80s, the gov- the British government was trying to
55:36
actually just expropriate their London, you know, houses, not through
55:40
death taxes or income taxes, but
55:42
straight raw
55:43
just straight expropriation.
55:45
So then they bought themselves some time by suing and going
55:48
to, like, the International Humanitarian Court or whatever.
55:51
But the big thing was that, uh, I think his name was Gerald Grosvenor, uh,
55:55
whichever duke it was, he was hyperactive in his county militia and, you know,
55:59
he still had all these feudal rights that he actually exercised, um, to make
56:03
himself a man of local note who hundreds of people trained with every weekend,
56:08
and they, they did all the things.
56:10
And then eventually the government just decided it wasn't worth it and backed off,
56:14
and I, I don't think they lost the case.
56:16
They just kind of dropped the law and dropped the whole situation because
56:19
they didn't wanna deal with it.
56:21
And had he not been that guy, had he just been Mark Zuckerberg,
56:24
the government would have taken everything 'cause no one would have
56:26
sure.
56:26
Steamrolled him.
56:27
Yeah, exactly.
56:29
But because he was the guy, because he actually did it and it was well-liked and
56:34
in, like, a just slightly martial tone, it's not like those hundred guys could
56:37
have taken on the Cold War-era British Army, which was better than it is now.
56:41
Perhaps today they could take it on, but regard- regardless.
56:44
He was just… It was, it was enough of a hard target that they didn't feel like
56:48
dealing with it and let the matter drop, and it kind of just ended there and moved
56:52
on, and the tax situation and everything got a lot better from that point forward.
56:55
And so it, it's, it's, it's just worth remembering that though things
57:00
have changed so much and the scale of life is very daunting, a lot
57:04
of this stuff, including at the community and personal level, is still
57:08
exceedingly relevant and can actually matter even in such a enlarged world
57:12
Yeah.
57:13
I mean, when you think about things like, like the Bundy Ranch in Nevada, I think
57:16
that was sometime during the Obama years.
57:18
I can't recall quite when.
57:19
You know, it's not like those guys could have actually taken on e- even
57:23
an institution as small as the, the Las Vegas Police Department, right?
57:27
Um, let alone, you know, the, the forces of the Bureau of Land Management, which,
57:30
which has effectively a private army.
57:32
But, but they didn't wanna do that.
57:34
Uh, you know, in fact, when you, when you look into it, if you can get organized,
57:37
if you can have local loyalties, if you can have people … It's not that they're
57:40
gonna be capable of fighting a modern military, but if you just have people
57:43
that stand up and say, "No, this is wrong.
57:45
We, we, we, we don't like this," it is shocking how often these big, bad, you
57:50
know, infinitely powerful sovereign states will, will back down and leave you alone.
57:54
Um, which, you know, I suppose is, is what the American constitutional
57:57
experiment is all about, really.
57:59
Um, so thank you so much and, uh, for, for this, Will, and this concludes the,
58:03
uh, the public part of this recording.
58:04
So let's move into the Q&A.
58:06
Oliver?