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29. James McPherson Talks Great Houses · Great Houses

• 0:00
  Gregory Treat: All right.
• 0:00
  Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Great Houses Forum, where
• 0:04
  we talk with interesting people about the, uh, the ideas surrounding great houses.
• 0:10
  Great houses are those multi-generational business owning, people forming,
• 0:14
  culture supporting institutions.
• 0:17
  They are families, they are households.
• 0:19
  They are bigger than what we normally think when we use the
• 0:21
  words families and households.
• 0:23
  And so I've found great houses to be just an incredibly helpful and
• 0:27
  useful term and, so I, built my podcast and, and some of the online
• 0:30
  things that I'm doing around that.
• 0:31
  So today we're talking to James McPherson, who is the the author at
• 0:36
  Aegis of of Zeus, on Substack, and I've greatly enjoyed, uh his content and so
• 0:42
  we're, happy to have him here today.
• 0:43
  Thank you so much for being here, James.
• 0:46
  James McPherson: Thanks for having me, Greg.
• 0:47
  Gregory Treat: Absolutely.
• 0:48
  James McPherson: to be here.
• 0:49
  Gregory Treat: So, so tell us a little bit about yourself and, uh, and how
• 0:51
  you, uh, how you came to have such an interestingly named… I appreciate
• 0:55
  the name of your, of your Substack.
• 0:57
  Um, and so, so tell us how you came up with that
• 0:59
  James McPherson: It goes back to high school actually.
• 1:01
  my father was the headmaster of the school I went to, the boys school
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  I went to from third to 12th grade.
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  And as you probably know, at some point in your teenage years, you
• 1:12
  need a, a different adult male than your father mentor you because you're
• 1:19
  butting heads with your father.
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  I was a good student, but I was, uh, … I was hard to deal with.
• 1:25
  Gregory Treat: So where, where did where did you grow up?
• 1:26
  Kind of where was the family, like, placed?
• 1:29
  James McPherson: I was born in Washington, DC, and raised just outside the city
• 1:35
  limits in Silver Spring, Maryland.
• 1:38
  Gregory Treat: Sure
• 1:38
  James McPherson: And my parents are from Boston.
• 1:40
  My mother is, Boston Irish.
• 1:43
  My dad is a mix of, um Scottish, Irish, and German the Scots came over to Nova
• 1:50
  Scotia after the Battle of Culloden and then migrated to Boston, which
• 1:57
  at that point was so run by the Irish that they dropped the A in Macpherson
• 2:03
  to, to fit in, so it became Mcpherson.
• 2:07
  Gregory Treat: I love
• 2:08
  James McPherson: And, um, my father went to Harvard and he was the townie
• 2:13
  in, in town and gown, graduated in 1970, so there was a lot of cultural
• 2:18
  change going on even there at that bastion of the Brahmin establishment.
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  , They moved to m- Washington, DC right after they got married my father took
• 2:30
  a teaching position at the Heights School, which is, uh, under the spiri-
• 2:35
  spiritual direction of Opus Dei.
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  A mentor of his at Harvard, Father Bob Jackson, who's a Welshman, was
• 2:43
  the first headmaster of the school and brought my father on board, and
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  then my father became the headmaster.
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  in Maryland, my father really got into Catholic history 'cause it was the
• 2:54
  only Catholic colony really grew…
• 2:57
  I, under his sort of mentorship, I just grew to love the, the soil of
• 3:01
  Maryland and the history of Maryland and it's, it's a fascinating state.
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  I was, uh, a charge of his as a son and a student and, um, yeah, I was kind of
• 3:15
  a hothead in high school he was friends with a professor at Georgetown named Dr.
• 3:20
  Jos- Joseph Palmer, and who was, uh, written his dissertation on Aristotle
• 3:28
  and was a, a student himself of Father William Wallace, who was an
• 3:34
  Aristotelian, who basically wrote about science as a series of models.
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  So we create models of reality and Palmer then applied that to the ethics
• 3:46
  as a, you know, we model behavior and until it becomes second nature.
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  The way to become virtuous is to imitate a virtuous man, right?
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  And then it becomes second nature.
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  then how art is a model of reality and a model of character.
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  So, so my father said, "James, why don't you go talk to Dr. Palmer about
• 4:11
  interesting things?" and he sort of became a mentor to me, I edited his,
• 4:17
  the second edition of his book, On Moral Character: A Practical Guide
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  to Aristotle's Virtues and Vices.
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  But talking about Hesiod's Theogony, with Dr. Palmer, he felt like the modern
• 4:32
  world had lost a model of leadership that was embodied in what he called the Zeus
• 4:41
  principle, and also the aegis of Zeus was a word he used, which is a shield.
• 4:49
  And if it's
• 4:51
  Gregory Treat: an invisible shield, right?
• 4:53
  James McPherson: right?
• 4:53
  Gregory Treat: When the, lightning splits around you.
• 4:55
  So
• 4:57
  James McPherson: So this idea of, the embodiment of order and
• 5:01
  natural law in the story of Hesiod.
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  So Hesiod is then, you can view Hesiod as proto-philosophical, right?
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  He doesn't have abstract nouns yet, so… But neither did Aristotle, right?
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  The word that Aristotle, when he talks about the material
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  cause, is, is wood, right?
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  So I started reading Greek myth as this sort of proto-philosophical language
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  the last year I finally wrote the book I wanted to write, teasing this
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  apart, called, About the Aegis of Zeus.
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  Right now I kinda, the title is tentative.
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  It's called Throw Thunder: How to Lead Like Zeus.
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  That'd be more of an airport book, you know, like a Steven
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  Pinker book or something.
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  And I tried to sort of keep it there, but it just kept going
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  into sort of philosophy and,
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  Gregory Treat: are you in the academy today?
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  Are you, are you, you know, involved in… Okay.
• 5:58
  How, how, how, how do you, how do you make your way in the world?
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  James McPherson: Um, I, I don't very well.
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  Um,
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  Gregory Treat: Many says m- most of us, most of us are in that,
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  in that, in that zone, I think
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  , James McPherson: I taught for a number of years.
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  I taught at my old high school.
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  They needed a replacement teacher.
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  I was in my early 20s, and I fell in love with teaching, and then my uncle
• 6:18
  and… who was the headmaster at the time, my father's younger brother, we
• 6:23
  went and started another boys school,
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  Gregory Treat: Mm-hmm.
• 6:26
  James McPherson: and called the Avalon School.
• 6:29
  And I notice your, your organization is Avalon Circle.
• 6:32
  Gregory Treat: I do like that word.
• 6:33
  There's a lot in that word, especially for Americans, you know?
• 6:36
  James McPherson: Right.
• 6:37
  Well, it was the first colony of Lord Baltimore was actually in Newfoundland,
• 6:41
  and it was called Avalon, and then he founded, he founded Maryland after that.
• 6:46
  Gregory Treat: Yep
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  James McPherson: And obviously it harkens back to King Arthur and-
• 6:49
  Gregory Treat: Sail off the western edge of the world, and there you are.
• 6:52
  James McPherson: Yeah.
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  Um-
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  Gregory Treat: think the, the fact that we built a nation here
• 6:56
  where there are no walls, right, around cities is kind of amazing.
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  Like, when, when you think of, like, like, when you think of the mythic
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  import of that, that we have, you know, one street called Wall Street, right?
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  Because we built a wall there.
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  Nowhere else in our, in our fair land do we build walls.
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  It's just not been our thing until, uh, fairly, fairly recently.
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  Uh, that's, that's kind of amazing, right?
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  You think about, you know… 'Cause the story of Avalon is this magical
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  land where they, they don't really have kings as we understand them.
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  They sit in circles, and they don't have any walls, and they kind of ride around.
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  I mean, that's, that's a different kind of, of, of world, you know?
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  And, and then to realize that we literally made that myth into reality in America.
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  Like, we, we are a, we are a tolerably acceptable fulfillment of the
• 7:41
  depictions of Avalon in many ways.
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  Um, I find that, I find that really interesting.
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  It's one of the things that gives me hope.
• 7:48
  James McPherson: That is interesting.
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  I never thought about the fact that our cities don't have walls.
• 7:52
  It's probably why we have so much sprawl.
• 7:55
  Gregory Treat: Yep.
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  Yep, yep
• 7:57
  James McPherson: And, uh, I was teaching for a couple years, and my father
• 8:01
  said, "So what do you really wanna do?" And I was like, "I don't know.
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  Maybe go to law school." And he said, "That's what people do when
• 8:08
  they don't know what they wanna do."
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  And I said, "Dad, you went
• 8:11
  Gregory Treat: As, a- as, as exactly, as someone who went to law school, the same.
• 8:17
  James McPherson: But my
• 8:18
  Gregory Treat: my, if any of my children come to me and say, "Can I go to law
• 8:20
  school?" I'm gonna say, "Ca- can't you figure out something, like, better to
• 8:23
  do?" Uh, you know, "I'll help you." I'll help my children with whatever,
• 8:26
  whatever God puts in front of them.
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  But, but if they ask me about law school, I'm gonna be like, "I mean, have you
• 8:30
  thought about alternatives, friend?"
• 8:33
  James McPherson: Yeah.
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  And, and so my father had gone to law school at night at Georgetown while
• 8:37
  he started, helped start this school in case it didn't work out, you know.
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  And I think he graduated from law school.
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  We-- My, I was, I'm the oldest of six, and I think by that time
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  we had, there were four of us.
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  So I was, you know, thinking about that and a lot of my friends were in, from
• 8:57
  college were in consulting or investment banking, so I started looking at that.
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  And then they, you know, they lost a teacher midyear.
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  , I started t- filling that spot, taught trigonometry, algebra,
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  and Latin, and I really loved it.
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  And coaching, I coached eighth grade baseball, and that was awesome.
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  So I came back the next year for a full year as a full-time teacher, and
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  I coached soccer and basketball, which were my sports, and then more, more Latin
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  and classics And I was able to teach a class to seniors, called, uh Monarchy
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  Kingl- Kingliness as a Character Trait.
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  So this idea of the Zeus principle through history.
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  You know, we read the Theogony, parts of the Iliad.
• 9:47
  We watched Fight Club.
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  Gregory Treat: As one does
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  James McPherson: well, I think Fight Club is basically the story of Achilles.
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  when Achilles comes face to face with Hector at the end,
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  Hector's wearing his old armor.
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  So Achilles kills his old self, his alter ego.
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  He's had this loss fr- from his anger.
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  He's… A lot of the Greek soldiers have died, but his
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  best friend, Patroclus, died.
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  I thought it was a good visualization of what that really looks like, killing your
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  old self had to fast-forward through a few scenes at the Catholic high school.
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  But, um, the kids loved it.
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  Other teachers would ask, "You know, what are you studying in Mr. McPherson's class?
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  What is kingship all about?" And they would, they would answer, "The first rule
• 10:36
  of kingship class is we do not talk about kingship class." You know what I mean?
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  The buy-in was great.
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  And actually, I had one of the students in that class, he's a lawyer.
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  He's argued a few times in, in front of the Supreme Court.
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  And he told me, he said, "You know, I use the Zeus principle when I think about,
• 10:57
  assigning my lawyers to different tasks on a case." That was great to hear.
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  And then the next year, we went and started another school called
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  the Avalon School, as I was saying.
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  The parents said, "Can you start a girls school?" And we had planned to
• 11:13
  start a sister school, but we got-- They-- Parents found the property.
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  They, they got it up, you know, got it up and running in the next year And I
• 11:20
  was approaching… I was in my late 20s,
• 11:23
  Gregory Treat: Mm-hmm.
• 11:24
  James McPherson: Approaching 30, it's like wait, by default I've just been teaching
• 11:27
  for eight years, and I never, you know…
• 11:30
  I think if I had read Johan's book
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  Gregory Treat: It w-, it is sort of your family trade, right?
• 11:35
  James McPherson: Right.
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  Exactly.
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  You know, I, I never would've left.
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  But both my sis- my sister went to Wharton.
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  She was a nurse, and she went to Wharton for MBA, she called me up and she said,
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  "This is the stuff you think about, like managing and leading people.
• 11:51
  You should go to business school." … I was dating the woman who would become
• 11:54
  my wife, and she was in consulting, and she said, "You know, the way
• 11:58
  you think is like a McKinsey guy.
• 12:01
  You should go to business school." So I was like, "Ooh-hoo.
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  I can still th- keep thinking about the same weird stuff and make money?"
• 12:09
  So I went to Duke for my MBA, , it was in the great recession, so it
• 12:13
  was a little tough to get a job.
• 12:16
  But I got a job, um at an 80-year-old science education company called,
• 12:20
  , Carolina Biological Supply, and the CEO hired me to start a new business for him.
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  I started their e-learning business, helped launch, and then did a lot of
• 12:29
  change management within the company, like streamlining things and, we launched
• 12:34
  a couple other, experiments at home for distance learning, uh, line of
• 12:38
  business, and, uh, I was there for about six years that was a great experience.
• 12:44
  My CEO there, Jim Parrish, he had, um, been hired out of
• 12:47
  business school by Mitt Romney
• 12:49
  Gregory Treat: Hmm.
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  James McPherson: I wanna say on Link- LinkedIn somehow that Mi- Mitt Romney
• 12:54
  is my business grandfather, but
• 12:59
  see if I can get some clout points out of that.
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  , But yeah, he was a great mentor And then they eliminated my position
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  and I was like, "Oh, this, this has been a good experience.
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  I've learned a lot.
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  I've done a lot.
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  I'll get a job." And I just, I couldn't get a job.
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  So I started my , my own consulting company
• 13:15
  Gregory Treat: Mm-hmm.
• 13:16
  James McPherson: with, uh, a couple other guys who had all
• 13:18
  been laid off by the big fours.
• 13:21
  And we did that for a little bit.
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  And then, um a client picked me up full-time for a telecom startup, 5G
• 13:28
  broadband wireless telecom startup, and I ended up being the COO and chief of staff.
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  And it was four guys who all had gone to law school together and
• 13:38
  they had all had exit events.
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  One was the head of intellectual property at Yahoo,
• 13:43
  Gregory Treat: Mm.
• 13:44
  James McPherson: got bought out when Google acquired Yahoo.
• 13:48
  The CEO had sold his prior telecom company to AT&T for 200 something million dollars.
• 13:54
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
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  James McPherson: And another guy had a political polling and, marketing
• 14:00
  company in Iowa which he sold.
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  Yeah, so that was three.
• 14:04
  It was three of them.
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  And then one-- Oh, one had, had a broadband wireless building company, so
• 14:10
  he would train veterans as wireless… as wire and wireless installers.
• 14:15
  that was really interesting.
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  And then I thought that was it.
• 14:19
  Like, we'll build this for a couple years and I'll exit and go be a very charitable,
• 14:28
  Gregory Treat: a gentleman of leisure.
• 14:29
  James McPherson: Yeah, COVID just blew it up.
• 14:32
  I mean, I, I can't go into all the details of why that happened, but we
• 14:36
  basically had 100 of million dollar contracts, uh, evaporate, , with COVID.
• 14:45
  Gregory Treat: Ah, really?
• 14:45
  Like wireless i- going away in COVID?
• 14:48
  Like that's,
• 14:49
  James McPherson: Well,
• 14:50
  Gregory Treat: the story that we're all told
• 14:52
  James McPherson: our contract did.
• 14:53
  Um, there were multiple reasons for this.
• 14:56
  None of which were really fair, but, you know, life isn't fair,
• 15:00
  especially in Washington, DC.
• 15:02
  Um,
• 15:04
  Gregory Treat: Yeah.
• 15:05
  Yeah, I knew some guys that were in- involved in trying to get the, uh,
• 15:08
  the Indian broadband stuff going and man, that, that was a, that was a
• 15:14
  rough go for several of the people that, that, that kind of bet, bet
• 15:17
  on themselves in that, in that arena
• 15:20
  James McPherson: On the, uh, reservations you
• 15:22
  mean?
• 15:23
  yeah,
• 15:24
  Gregory Treat: yeah.
• 15:24
  There was a, I mean, there was a huge amount of money that was allocated to
• 15:26
  that, and then the way it was spent was not handled super well, and so then
• 15:32
  people, people were mad and asking mad questions and just kinda, you know, was
• 15:36
  not good for several people involved
• 15:38
  James McPherson: I mean, the amount-- if you go, if you do, like, a
• 15:42
  Google or AI search on the rural internet, funding over the last two
• 15:48
  decades, and they keep doing it.
• 15:50
  Here's a couple billion dollars to build high-speed internet in rural America.
• 15:54
  if you did two billion in twenty fifteen, why do you have to
• 15:58
  do it again in twenty twenty?
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  You know.
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  So
• 16:01
  Gregory Treat: Where's the money going?
• 16:02
  Somewhere, right?
• 16:04
  James McPherson: That was interesting and, I was up in DC and my kids
• 16:08
  are down here, North Carolina.
• 16:10
  I got stuck up there.
• 16:12
  My father passed away twenty nineteen and then COVID came and I was
• 16:18
  sort of, you know, stuck up there.
• 16:20
  And then as soon as that started lifting, I was interviewing back in North Carolina.
• 16:25
  I mean, I had been back and forth a lot, but, I just know my own experience
• 16:29
  as a teenager, like, I need to be in front of my son's face when he
• 16:33
  says, "I wanna punch you, Dad." You
• 16:35
  know?
• 16:36
  So I moved back and, uh, they were opening a new Catholic high school in
• 16:39
  Durham, and they needed a a business office manager, and so I became
• 16:43
  the business office manager there.
• 16:46
  When I got the job, they said, "Oh, by the way, you're the CFO." It's like: Okay.
• 16:51
  so I used a lot of YouTube training to get up to speed on,
• 16:54
  on actually that, on the metrics.
• 16:57
  And my sister was fun.
• 16:58
  She's, uh, the one who went to Wharton.
• 17:00
  She ended up being the CEO and president of several healthcare companies,
• 17:05
  dealing with geriatric care, and that's what her specialty as a nurse was.
• 17:09
  Gregory Treat: Mm-hmm.
• 17:10
  James McPherson: And she, she was cute.
• 17:11
  She sent me an email of, uh, their, their CFO's presentation.
• 17:17
  Uh, she was on the board of the private school in Tampa where her kids went.
• 17:22
  She sent me-- She's like, "Does this look right?" I was like, "Yeah, it looks
• 17:25
  fine." And then I was like, "Oh, this is what my report is supposed to look like."
• 17:31
  You know.
• 17:32
  She didn't wanna say, like, "Do you know what you're doing?" And, uh, she
• 17:37
  very, elliptically got me to think, "Oh, this is what I'm supposed to be.
• 17:43
  This is what my report should look like."
• 17:45
  Um, that was funny
• 17:48
  Gregory Treat: it's an interesting… I mean, that, that, those
• 17:50
  are, those are good things.
• 17:51
  I mean, the, it's funny how successful people and successful
• 17:54
  families have these classy ways of preserving each other's honor.
• 17:57
  So come- it can be cumbersome at times, right?
• 18:01
  But, uh, but it, it matters, man.
• 18:03
  It matters, so
• 18:04
  James McPherson: so I was there for two and a half years while
• 18:07
  we started the school, and then I got a call from a friend who was
• 18:11
  taking over his consulting company
• 18:14
  and he said, uh, "When I buy out my partner, most of the people are gonna
• 18:18
  retire. Would you like to come on board?"
• 18:20
  And I was intrigued ' cause it was a good amount of money,
• 18:24
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 18:25
  James McPherson: and at the school I wasn't quite making what I thought
• 18:29
  I needed to be making for sort of future-proofing, , myself a little bit.
• 18:35
  And so I, I left the school and went to work for him, but no one retired that he
• 18:43
  thought was gonna retire, and I didn't get the training… It was a very niche
• 18:48
  consulting, economic consulting group.
• 18:50
  And, uh, I brought up the fact that I wasn't-- I was making about 50%
• 18:55
  of what was promised, and he's like, "Well, we're gonna have to let you
• 18:57
  go." I was like Do you know how hard it is for a 50-year-old white guy to
• 19:02
  get a job in this country right now?
• 19:04
  So, I was pretty upset.
• 19:07
  I basically always had this startup consulting group On the side.
• 19:13
  And so I just, uh, turned that back on But yeah, it's a, it's a scramble.
• 19:18
  I had to sell my house.
• 19:19
  It was a nice cabin built in nineteen hundred on seven acres
• 19:24
  up near the Virginia border.
• 19:25
  It was really, really nice.
• 19:27
  but it was too isolated for my daughters.
• 19:30
  So I have two sons and two daughters.
• 19:31
  My daughters are very young and, uh, three and one, and they couldn't walk
• 19:38
  to a playground or anything, so it was kind of a blessing in disguise.
• 19:42
  So I sold it, um, made some money, which gave me a little bit of a cushion, and
• 19:47
  now I'm renting back down in Chapel Hill.
• 19:50
  , I run a, morning shift, the first shift of a warehouse, I have a, a company
• 19:56
  I'm involved with called NimbleDraft, and we're doing a lot of AI solutions.
• 20:02
  my business partner in that is a friend from college who I walked onto
• 20:08
  the basketball team in college as a freshman, and my business partner
• 20:12
  James saw me walk onto the team and he said, "I can do that." And he walked
• 20:16
  on as a sophomore and took my spot.
• 20:19
  we became good friends and we're still friends, you know,
• 20:22
  twenty-five, thirty years later.
• 20:24
  I mean, he's ninety-nine percentile of AI knowledge.
• 20:28
  I mean, he's really sharp and he's teaching me a ton.
• 20:32
  And so we're sort of trying to build, build a business there.
• 20:35
  And
• 20:36
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 20:37
  James McPherson: when I started writing on Substack, they were
• 20:38
  saying, "Oh, it takes about a year to get traction." And, and that sort
• 20:41
  of has been true about everything.
• 20:43
  You know, you start a business, about a year.
• 20:46
  things are sort of stabilized.
• 20:48
  But yeah, I run a, I run a warehouse shift.
• 20:52
  I write.
• 20:53
  I try to be a good father and husband, and I, um, work on AI solutions.
• 21:01
  Gregory Treat: Well, so, uh, how did you get, you know, like obviously
• 21:05
  you, you were interested in coming on the Great Houses, uh, forum.
• 21:08
  So, and, and you, you'd mentioned that you've read Johan's book and, you know,
• 21:11
  kind of a, an appreciator of some of the things that are, that are happening.
• 21:14
  I mean, it's a, it's a cool space, right?
• 21:15
  You know, uh, Benjamin Black at Dynastes is killing it as well, and there, there's,
• 21:20
  there's a growing kind of group of us.
• 21:22
  So, so te- tell me, tell me how you got into this space and, and,
• 21:26
  uh, you know, I'm assuming it was, I'm assuming it was Johan.
• 21:29
  And, uh, so what did you think of his book?
• 21:32
  James McPherson: The book was, better than I expected.
• 21:34
  , The whole discussion of philanthropy versus charity is absolutely critical.
• 21:42
  the way I found Johan was I'm a member of, uh this group called Catholic Founders,
• 21:47
  and, um,
• 21:49
  you might know Silas?
• 21:50
  yeah.
• 21:51
  I think he's been on.
• 21:52
  and he interviewed Johan, and I, I thought, oh, this is, Something's
• 21:58
  happening in the zeitgeist here.
• 22:00
  I think I had found your Substack prior to Johan
• 22:04
  and,
• 22:05
  Gregory Treat: wow.
• 22:06
  Wow.
• 22:06
  James McPherson: yeah.
• 22:07
  Gregory Treat: I'll chalk that up
• 22:08
  James McPherson: one of the things for me is this concept in business called best
• 22:13
  practices, we have that as a civilization.
• 22:17
  in Christendom, we have the best, best practices, right?
• 22:22
  We, we kept the Greek and Roman, we added Christ, and The flourishing,
• 22:28
  I mean, that came from that.
• 22:31
  The Making of Europe by Christopher Dawson.
• 22:33
  heard of Johan's book.
• 22:35
  , Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe was a profound
• 22:38
  influence on me, in college.
• 22:41
  I think going to business school and you're studying these best
• 22:47
  practices and you're like, " This is, this is a foetus from feudalism."
• 22:53
  You know, this is not we didn't reinvent anything.
• 22:56
  Gregory Treat: Yeah, yeah.
• 22:57
  Yeah, the futile instinct, man.
• 22:59
  It, it doesn't go away
• 23:00
  James McPherson: but the other thing is, like, you'll see the meme of, like,
• 23:03
  progressives back engineering themselves into a traditional moral you know?
• 23:07
  Like, hey, you know, if women can't have abortions, then men
• 23:12
  should have to stick around for the… Yeah, it's called marriage.
• 23:16
  Gregory Treat: Yeah.
• 23:16
  yeah.
• 23:17
  yeah.
• 23:18
  Christian marriage in particular actually.
• 23:20
  So there's a, there's, there's a, a guy named Vishal Mangalwadi, um, who, uh,
• 23:24
  you know, from India, and he, he kind of started out with the basic question of
• 23:28
  why is Europe so much better than India?
• 23:30
  Which is a fascinating question that basically only in America today, only
• 23:34
  someone from his, his ethnic background is allowed to ask such questions.
• 23:37
  And, uh, he, he came out with some really brutal facts in terms of answer.
• 23:43
  Um, so he, he wrote a book called The Book That Made Your World that's
• 23:47
  very approachable and very, you know, very readable, very interesting.
• 23:51
  Um, so but I've, I've always… But you know, he, he talks about that,
• 23:55
  that basically the secret to, to Western economic success is our, our,
• 23:59
  our concepts of marriage, um, which are different than any other concepts
• 24:03
  of marriage anywhere in the world
• 24:04
  James McPherson: so I was like… I was sitting there, and then I'm in edTech,
• 24:09
  and no one knows… Well, let me back up.
• 24:11
  I was in business school at a party, and I quoted Chesterton or something,
• 24:15
  and I said, "Oh, my favorite author said this." And the couple I was
• 24:20
  talking to, they turned to me and said, "You have a favorite author?
• 24:24
  Pfft, that's weird." I s- you know, you start developing this
• 24:27
  sense of like, these degrees are
• 24:30
  Gregory Treat: intellectual bastard children.
• 24:32
  No, no lineage, no connection to anything.
• 24:35
  Just, "I, hi, I'm here. I'm a spiritual intellectual orphan.
• 24:38
  I've never been fathered by anybody." Oh man, what a thing.
• 24:43
  James McPherson: But there's no best pra-
• 24:44
  Gregory Treat: author
• 24:45
  James McPherson: we, we, we have no best prac- we lost it all.
• 24:50
  You know, in the sort of late 20th century, post-'60s
• 24:55
  deracination of the curriculum.
• 24:57
  Like, someone like me, I'm sitting on a gold mine, I often think, " Hey,
• 25:03
  Claude, rewrite the Iliad as a story of two houses fighting over a business."
• 25:10
  What's the Iliad?
• 25:11
  It's a trade war between, you know, the eastern side of the Aegean and
• 25:15
  the western side of the Aegean.
• 25:17
  or it probably was may- you know, I don't know for sure.
• 25:21
  but yeah, so this, this idea of heritage, inheritance, and best practices that
• 25:26
  are lost, and I think of it in terms more of like a parish community and,
• 25:32
  like, what was lost with the, the flight to the suburbs of the Catholic
• 25:37
  ethnic groups and how much they lost.
• 25:39
  And, and that Johann's recent article on the, the loss of social capital,
• 25:44
  So I've, I read, uh, E. Michael Jones' book, um, The Slaughter of Cities:
• 25:49
  Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing in college, and it just blew me
• 25:53
  away and answered so many questions.
• 25:56
  Like, why, why did my parents leave Dorchester, South Boston for suburbs?
• 26:03
  And why am I in Maryland?
• 26:05
  And now I'm in North Carolina.
• 26:08
  I mean, that is absolutely Horrible.
• 26:13
  You know, like…
• 26:14
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 26:14
  James McPherson: and my father always noted that, there was a, in
• 26:18
  his cousins, like huge families.
• 26:21
  My father was the oldest of seven.
• 26:24
  My mother was the oldest of six, and they came from families of… , and
• 26:29
  their parents were, you know, 15 kids, and seven kids, and 13 kids.
• 26:35
  And so the grandparents were from big families, and
• 26:39
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 26:39
  James McPherson: so I had a lot of cousins and second cousins,
• 26:43
  and there's still a thick network of them up in the Boston area.
• 26:48
  And in times of trouble, your cousins always have your back, you know?
• 26:53
  And I know that, and I would love to be back up there.
• 26:57
  And I think we're sell- so we're selling the house.
• 27:00
  My mom's selling the house we grew up in, and I think a lot about,
• 27:04
  well, where are my roots, you
• 27:06
  know?
• 27:07
  Are they… And I think they're more in New England than they are in DC.
• 27:11
  Uh, although I love Maryland a lot, it's just so impossible
• 27:15
  to live there right now.
• 27:16
  I did have lunch at a, a Johns Hopkins event with current
• 27:20
  Governor Wes Moore once.
• 27:23
  Uh, that was interesting.
• 27:24
  I was there 'cause I won a Fulbright scholarship, and he had gotten a
• 27:27
  Rhodes, I believe, and it was sort of a bunch of alumni coming to
• 27:32
  talk about their experience with these postgraduate scholarships.
• 27:36
  So there was like the the German DAAD, D-A-A-D scholarship,
• 27:41
  and then the Fulbright, the Rhodes, the Marshall, the Truman.
• 27:45
  And so we were all at this lunch talking to undergrads about our experiences.
• 27:49
  , And I was sitting with Wes at, at lunch.
• 27:52
  for publication purposes of this podcast, I'll leave it at that.
• 27:58
  Gregory Treat: Very good then.
• 27:59
  James McPherson: Um, just thinking about heritage and lost wisdom really.
• 28:05
  So in business school, it's best practices.
• 28:07
  In culture, it's wisdom.
• 28:09
  It's cultural wisdom,
• 28:10
  and just thinking of the loss of, of that, and that's sort of what
• 28:14
  I try to write about, I think.
• 28:16
  and the Ages of Zeus, I really wanna bring back this concept of
• 28:21
  leadership that I think basically ran from Zeus until World War I when
• 28:26
  all the kings were exiled or killed.
• 28:27
  and I think there's so… You know, I was talking to my parochial vicar about this
• 28:31
  at lunch, and he's, like, talking about liturgical reform and things like that.
• 28:34
  He's like, "There's a reason things stopped. It's because they stopped
• 28:38
  working." You know, and I think Blessed Charles Joseph of Habsburg was a good
• 28:44
  man, but I think a lot of the monarchies had become desiccated and corrupt
• 28:49
  and, you know, probably the French Revolution is the start of the regicides.
• 28:55
  But, but that's a big loss, and I think this idea of, that you guys
• 29:00
  have about a household is, and the father binding through time,
• 29:05
  Gregory Treat: Mm-hmm.
• 29:05
  James McPherson: that's what a king was, and that was a model that was wiped out.
• 29:09
  Going back to Palmer and Aristotle and modeling knowledge and modeling wisdom,
• 29:16
  if you have a king, it's a model for a father, you inherit obligation of
• 29:22
  your family name, and you're supposed to inherit it and, and pass it on.
• 29:25
  so that's when, you know, I started seeing you guys, and now the al- algorithm's
• 29:31
  throwing Ben in my feed, and I'm like, "All right. This is cool." and my
• 29:35
  understanding is that what you're doing is the legal framework to do this.
• 29:41
  Gregory Treat: In many ways.
• 29:42
  Well, uh, it, it, yes, it's, it's the legal framework.
• 29:45
  You know, sort of I, I backed into consulting because I realized that,
• 29:48
  uh, people were not u- p- you know, I, I, I started having a crisis of
• 29:53
  conscience about selling some of the legal products that I sell because people
• 29:58
  didn't know how to use them, right?
• 29:59
  So w- you know, I, I worked for a firm.
• 30:01
  We had two types of clients.
• 30:02
  We had kinda old money clients who've been doing this, some of them,
• 30:04
  for three, four, five generations, and then we had new money clients.
• 30:08
  And we were, you know, faithfully giving them good, high quality
• 30:12
  legal work, the same trusts and tax strategies and family limited
• 30:16
  partnerships and all of the, the, the, the wonderful, beautiful complexities.
• 30:20
  I, I love, you know, designing trusts.
• 30:22
  They're… I think they're just a, a beautiful and, and
• 30:26
  wonderful legal form to work in.
• 30:28
  Um- But I was realizing, oh my goodness, like apparently there's a last mile
• 30:35
  cultural gap where the clients that I'm giving these things to, they
• 30:38
  don't know how to use them, and so they're not getting the same outcomes.
• 30:42
  Um, and, and, and in some ways, you know, when, when, you know, the, basically
• 30:47
  the first, the first rule of trust work is you have to, you have to get the,
• 30:51
  the, the main guy, the money maker, right, the rain maker, to understand
• 30:55
  that once the money goes into the trust, it's not your money, right?
• 30:59
  Like, you can cause yourself, even if, even if with the best legal work and the
• 31:02
  best tax work, if you go around calling the money in the trust "my money", okay,
• 31:10
  you can cause a whole bunch of problems with the IRS just by saying that.
• 31:13
  A-and it's not just saying that, right?
• 31:15
  It's, it's also when you say that, you're gonna behave in a certain way and you're
• 31:19
  gonna disregard the structure and you're gonna, you know, demand things in a way
• 31:23
  that, that is, that is improper, and then you're gonna, you know, find yourself in
• 31:27
  a, in a sticky situation with the IRS.
• 31:29
  A-and I just remember, like some of these, some of these older
• 31:31
  families, they were flawless.
• 31:33
  They never made a mistake.
• 31:34
  'Cause they genuine- Like, like I came, what I came to realize was they
• 31:38
  weren't not making mistakes, right?
• 31:40
  Like you were talking about models that become second nature.
• 31:43
  They genuinely didn't think of the money in the trust as their personal
• 31:47
  money, and so they never, th- there was never a conflict of, "Well, it's
• 31:51
  my money and I have the right to it.
• 31:53
  Oh, but, but for tax reasons I can't say that out loud." Like, for them,
• 31:56
  they really, they really understood, "Oh, this genuinely isn't my money.
• 32:00
  I've given it up.
• 32:01
  We've entered, my family has entered into this long-term contract, uh, i-in,
• 32:06
  in, in a way of which kind of the IRS is almost the, the covenantal guarantor
• 32:10
  in the sense that if you, you know, th- they're not really a party to it, but if
• 32:14
  you break your covenant with your fathers and grandfathers, they think that they
• 32:17
  get to tax a whole bunch of years of money that wasn't, you know, collected.
• 32:21
  And so they, uh, they, they, they, you know, can be quite attentive to, uh, to
• 32:25
  some of the things that you're doing.
• 32:27
  Um, and so that's kind of how I got into this, but, but I've really come
• 32:31
  to the conclusion, I mean, I, I, I do less and less legal work, um, uh, first
• 32:37
  of all because I'm doing a lot of work outside of the state of Texas where
• 32:39
  I'm licensed and so, you know, outside of Texas I can't do the legal piece.
• 32:42
  Someone else has to do that for me.
• 32:44
  But, uh, but even in Texas, the, the, the templates that people work with,
• 32:48
  the things that they get, what's in a irrevocable trust that you get from,
• 32:53
  you know, Westlaw or, uh, you know, uh, WealthCounsel or any of these,
• 32:57
  you know, legal templating programs that are, that are designed for
• 32:59
  estate planning work, they're great.
• 33:01
  Like, they've got all the pieces in there, it's just people don't know, uh,
• 33:05
  they don't know how to use them, right?
• 33:06
  It's, uh, you know, they, they sort of, I, I… Now do you ever, have
• 33:09
  you ever, uh, been in a, an old, uh, an old, um, semi truck that
• 33:14
  has two stick shifts, two, uh, two transmissions that you can move around?
• 33:18
  Um,
• 33:19
  James McPherson: I've, I've, I haven't been in one, but
• 33:20
  I know what you're talking
• 33:21
  Gregory Treat: Yeah.
• 33:22
  So, so it's, it's sort of like somebody that's, that's they're n- you know,
• 33:26
  there's actually… First you gotta teach them to drive a stick shift,
• 33:29
  'cause most of them have never done that.
• 33:30
  But then you say, "And, and by the way, there's that other lever over there that
• 33:35
  you can also use to get some extra stuff and do some really cool things with this
• 33:39
  machine that you don't know about," right?
• 33:41
  Like this machine is not a, a vehicle like, uh, you know, the,
• 33:45
  the way, the metaphor that I, that I, I'm gonna abuse here for this.
• 33:47
  So if, if it's a semi-truck, if your trust is a semi-truck, people
• 33:50
  use it to drive to the grocery store, you know, once a year, right?
• 33:53
  And, and, you know, to keep, to keep, to make sure that it still
• 33:56
  turns on and runs, and they leave it in first gear the whole time.
• 33:58
  They don't do anything with it.
• 33:59
  And it's like, man, this thing could serve your family in ways
• 34:05
  that more than take care of it- than more than pay for itself, right?
• 34:08
  This doesn't have to be a cost center.
• 34:10
  You can make a lot of money if you're, if, you know, with, with this structure
• 34:14
  if you know what you're doing.
• 34:16
  Uh, now you gotta have, you gotta have the inputs for that.
• 34:18
  Um, but, uh, but that's, that's the, uh, that… So that's the thing that I'm
• 34:22
  doing right now is, is helping people develop the skill set to use, um, you
• 34:28
  know, these, these wonderful legal structures that, that you can now get
• 34:31
  very, you know, you get the legal work done, you know, most of the case, most
• 34:34
  of the time for less than 20 grand.
• 34:36
  But learning how to use the, the legal piece that you've gotten is,
• 34:41
  is in many cases significantly more expensive than that, uh, 'cause it
• 34:45
  takes time and it takes a mindset shift.
• 34:46
  It takes a, a, a difference in belief, right?
• 34:49
  You, you have to really come to the idea that there, there i- you know, there is
• 34:54
  or was a, a thing called a family that is greater than the sum of its parts, that
• 34:59
  has some relationship with, you know, God or the universe or whatever higher
• 35:02
  power you believe in, and this legal document is the, the legal instantiation
• 35:08
  of that preexisting spiritual, social, you know, psychological reality if, if, you
• 35:14
  know, however, however people frame it.
• 35:16
  And, and most of my clients are basically, you know, Christian
• 35:18
  of one stripe or another.
• 35:19
  Uh, but you know, it's, it's, this is… You know, it's really interesting.
• 35:23
  Trust law in, in, in, in the Western context, the Anglo-Western
• 35:26
  context is, is essentially, it's a very religious body of law.
• 35:30
  Like you go back 200 years and you are, you are reading treatises by, by pastors
• 35:36
  and priests, not, not, you know…
• 35:38
  It's, it's, it's, it's a very, it's a very religious piece because there's so
• 35:42
  much about, you know, passing on what are the spiritual duties of these people?
• 35:46
  How do you think about all this stuff?
• 35:48
  Um, so yes.
• 35:50
  I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of the, the, the, the specific piece
• 35:52
  but, but you know, the, the, the legal thing is, is, is interesting
• 35:57
  because I don't actually think it's the bottleneck for a lot of these things.
• 35:59
  Um, I think, I think the bottleneck is a mindset issue
• 36:03
  James McPherson: Yeah, and that's, that's interesting w- that the older
• 36:06
  families, it's become second nature.
• 36:10
  I was reading an essay by Daniel, Catone.
• 36:15
  He has a Catholic money podcast,
• 36:17
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 36:18
  James McPherson: and he talked about investing as a way to develop virtue.
• 36:24
  And surprisingly, pleasantly surprisingly, he talked about habit
• 36:32
  Gregory Treat: Mm-hmm.
• 36:33
  James McPherson: And so to be a disciplined investor, you know, you
• 36:35
  have to develop habits, virtuous habits.
• 36:39
  And I had never thought of investing that way,
• 36:42
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 36:42
  James McPherson: right?
• 36:44
  And anything that's, you know, habit-forming fascinates me.
• 36:49
  And so like when you're ta- you know, so a family has a habit.
• 36:53
  And so the, the old money with the family mindset and the habit that aligns to
• 36:59
  that teleology, then it's second nature.
• 37:04
  And then so taking, uh, new money and trying to teach that habit,
• 37:09
  that's really challenging I bet.
• 37:12
  And, but also that's the real value add.
• 37:14
  Gregory Treat: It's rewarding is what I'll say, for sure
• 37:17
  James McPherson: And I think al- also, like, our concept of the family and
• 37:21
  the household is so watered down.
• 37:23
  You know, I, I wrote an essay about, Laudato Si, you know, the Pope
• 37:29
  Francis encyclical on the environment.
• 37:31
  But ecology is the logos of the oikos.
• 37:36
  It's the logos of the household, and the household is not mom, dad,
• 37:41
  three kids on a plot in suburbia.
• 37:44
  It's a business, it's workers.
• 37:47
  Or in, in Athens, you know, it would've been slaves and freed,
• 37:50
  freed workers, freedmen workers,
• 37:53
  and you're running a, a small business.
• 37:56
  That's the household.
• 37:57
  And then economy, e- eco- oikos nomos,
• 38:02
  Gregory Treat: The law of the house or
• 38:04
  James McPherson: the r- rule of the house.
• 38:05
  So you have to have the… You understand the logic of the house, and then you have
• 38:09
  to then devise the nomos of the house.
• 38:12
  And, you know, getting back to those roots is, I think, is really important.
• 38:15
  And, and that's why I think there's a large section of Laudato Si on usury.
• 38:22
  Gregory Treat: Mm-hmm
• 38:23
  James McPherson: Because the geometric growth of the debt cannot be ever repaid
• 38:30
  at some point, at usually about 80 years.
• 38:33
  And so
• 38:35
  not just-
• 38:36
  Gregory Treat: debt is… Debt is the kind of thing that, that I'm not saying
• 38:41
  you shouldn't have debt, but debt creates a quasi household bond, if you will.
• 38:46
  Like, it's very… If you're indebted to someone, it's very difficult for you
• 38:52
  to… Like, the first things that the person who you o- owe is gonna wanna
• 38:56
  constrain is your ability to contribute to a different household than his, right?
• 39:02
  So you have, in some way, become a kind of slave to his house.
• 39:07
  Um, and, and, you know, I think, uh, the, one, one of the things is,
• 39:13
  is hav- having the recognition of, okay, if what we're doing is creating
• 39:17
  some kind of household bond, some, you know, some kind of, some kind of
• 39:20
  relationship that falls within this sphere, well, are we following the rules?
• 39:25
  Uh, you know, one of the, one of the, the things that I've, I've often observed
• 39:28
  about the ordo amoris and, and one of the reasons why I'm so happy that, you
• 39:32
  know, JD Vance, um, you know, brought that back into the kind of the public
• 39:36
  consciousness, um, by, by using it so frequently in interviews, is it
• 39:41
  really makes, uh, a lot of contractual relationships objectively eval…
• 39:46
  You know, you can evaluate them objectively.
• 39:48
  If, if there is an ordo amoris, and if that ordo amoris is, is logical and
• 39:52
  something that you could go out and calculate, then you could take that, some,
• 39:57
  some, you know, rubric and, and look at a contract and say, "Does this contract
• 40:01
  make, you know, one or both of these people more able to meet their covenantal
• 40:06
  duties before God and man, or less?"
• 40:09
  Right?
• 40:10
  And, and, and that's a, that's a really interesting possibility because, you know,
• 40:14
  what the libertarians wanna say is, "Oh, no, this is just a black box. It's too,
• 40:17
  too complex. You could, you could never know if it's a good contract or a bad
• 40:21
  contract, you know, w- if you constrain the individual freedom in any…"
• 40:24
  It's like, what are you talking about?
• 40:26
  Like, no, you, you absolutely can build rubrics.
• 40:30
  You absolutely can calculate does… You know, here are the duties, here
• 40:33
  are is the person's fitness, the, their ability to meet th- those, those
• 40:37
  duties, those obligations as they come in due course, and here is the net
• 40:41
  effect of this, you know, this contract.
• 40:43
  It's, it's reducing this amount of cash at a certain point.
• 40:46
  It's reducing this amount of time at another point.
• 40:48
  It's, you know… The, the… You're, you're sort of swapping obligations
• 40:52
  between these people, and then you can, you know… So you can evaluate the state
• 40:55
  before, and you can evaluate the state after, and what you want is for both
• 40:59
  gr- both people a win-win, a biblical Christian win-win, is somebody who
• 41:04
  said, "Well, the r- net result of this contract is both parties are more able
• 41:08
  to meet their obligations," or at least they are meeting their obligations and
• 41:12
  they're not being put into breach or, or the reasonable expectation of breach.
• 41:16
  'Cause I think if you wander around making contracts that put the people
• 41:19
  you contract with in reasonable expectation of breach, God is gonna
• 41:24
  have some thoughts for you, right?
• 41:26
  At a certain point.
• 41:28
  James McPherson: I think that's the 14th circle of hell, isn't it?
• 41:31
  In Don- 13th or 14th in Dante.
• 41:34
  And then I started writing and I was like, "Ah, I should've talked to Greg
• 41:41
  before I bought this cabin in the woods and set up…" 'Cause as smart as I
• 41:48
  am and as good as I am at some things, I did not have the legal structure
• 41:54
  set for when, when I went south.
• 41:57
  Such is life.
• 41:58
  I, you know, and so I, I kind of think, um, there's some sort of,
• 42:03
  Jobian struggle I'm, I'm going through now, which is clarifying.
• 42:07
  And I think once I see an Audi A7 and don't say, "Man, I want one of those,"
• 42:11
  I think God will be pleased with me.
• 42:14
  Gregory Treat: That's the, that, that's the test of your, uh,
• 42:16
  your, your spiritual maturity
• 42:18
  James McPherson: Yeah, exactly.
• 42:20
  Gregory Treat: good.
• 42:20
  Very good
• 42:21
  James McPherson: I have a funny, um, JD Vance story actually.
• 42:25
  I had a, a very, uh, charming but difficult Latin student and, uh, he
• 42:33
  went into the Marines right after high school, and he ended up in the
• 42:37
  journalism program in the Marines.
• 42:40
  He went to Parris Island and everything.
• 42:42
  I get an email from him in Iraq and he says, "How do you say fighting writers
• 42:47
  in Latin?" And so I give him a couple options and I was like, "What's this for?"
• 42:54
  He says, "Oh, you know, we're coming up with a motto for our, our, uh, company.
• 43:00
  We're the journalists.
• 43:01
  We're the war correspondents." Like, oh, interesting.
• 43:05
  And, uh, so he picks one.
• 43:07
  And anyway, JD Vance was in that company with
• 43:10
  him.
• 43:10
  Oh.
• 43:11
  So they used my line for their, their, their Latin motto.
• 43:16
  Gregory Treat: I love it.
• 43:16
  I love it.
• 43:17
  I love it
• 43:19
  Yeah.
• 43:19
  Well, it's, you know, it's an interesting time.
• 43:21
  One of the other things, you know, you mentioned that you're,
• 43:23
  uh, in- involved in kind of AI stuff, um, in your, in your work.
• 43:27
  You know, I, I've been writing and talking on the podcast about,
• 43:30
  uh, about AI and, uh, all this stuff and, and basically my…
• 43:34
  You know, the, the not to, not to hide the ball, my, my thesis is, um,
• 43:39
  that we are… And I think we were always gonna be in a moment where we
• 43:43
  were trending back towards hierarchy.
• 43:44
  We've been, we've been pushing ourselves as far to the egalitarian side as,
• 43:49
  as we possibly could as a society, and things were starting to break.
• 43:52
  I mean, you think about, like, peak woke was, was really bad, and it was really bad
• 43:56
  for an unusual amount of people, and kind of we're, we're starting to swing back.
• 44:00
  Um, but I, I really think that AI is gonna massively accelerate
• 44:05
  this trend towards hierarchy.
• 44:07
  I think it's gonna magnify, you know, in… both individual
• 44:11
  and group differences.
• 44:12
  I think it's gonna allow a new class of people to, to emerge, um, that, that are
• 44:18
  gonna have similar interests and similar experiences and similar daily things.
• 44:21
  I just put out, uh… or I haven't put out an article yet, but I'm working
• 44:24
  on an article about, uh, CAD and what CAD did to all the industries that
• 44:28
  CAD touched, which was basically it made them into one personnel pool.
• 44:33
  So if you worked in any CAD-dominant industry, you could move to, which meant
• 44:38
  you were competing with everyone that was, you know, using CAD, and you could, you
• 44:43
  know, you go from, you know, uh, doing dental fillings, dental modeling over to
• 44:50
  3D printing for this, over to prosthetics, over to da-da-da-da-da-da, right?
• 44:55
  And, and it all became one thing, which dramatically raised the quality, right?
• 44:59
  Still is a sort of one of those things that people think that, that when you, uh,
• 45:03
  when you have hierarchy, that hierarchy is always, like, anti-capitalistic
• 45:07
  and bad and all of these things.
• 45:08
  It's like no, no.
• 45:09
  Like, when we… What we're talking about is having a larger pool of competition in
• 45:13
  which a natural co- competence hierarchy can emerge, which improved quality, right?
• 45:18
  It really did.
• 45:19
  But it also meant that you, you knew exactly where you were.
• 45:22
  You weren't protected by the, the, the rankings of, of, of
• 45:27
  your, your little siloed industry.
• 45:29
  You were now ranked or potentially ranked against everyone else
• 45:33
  that was using the CAD program.
• 45:35
  Because what you were doing, right, you're logging on, you're, you're
• 45:38
  entering into some kind of 3D modeling CAD-based program, and you're,
• 45:41
  you're doing stuff in there, right?
• 45:43
  Um, and that's why, you know, the three or four big CAD companies, they have kind of
• 45:47
  the same tiers of their, their rankings.
• 45:49
  We kind of… It- it's, it's… I don't know why they didn't just use,
• 45:52
  you know, apprentice, journeyman, master, you know, maybe grandmaster.
• 45:56
  Uh, probably 'cause of the, probably 'cause the D&D
• 45:58
  implications or something like that.
• 45:59
  But they… But it's the exact same ranks.
• 46:01
  Like, they, they have four of them, and it's very clearly like, okay,
• 46:04
  this is… this person is just, you know, barely going, and then there's
• 46:07
  somebody that you can trust to work.
• 46:08
  Then there's somebody that can teach other people, and then, you
• 46:10
  know, we kind of have the, the, the, the ultra-high-ranked people.
• 46:13
  And, and it's like, oh, okay, so, so- We, we, we like this.
• 46:17
  Like this is the, this is what we're doing here.
• 46:19
  Um, and I think the same thing is gonna happen in the AI space.
• 46:25
  The problem is like the CAD space was two dozen industries maybe, all told.
• 46:30
  What industries are not included in the AI space, right?
• 46:35
  Like it, it, it, it's gonna be a massive sea change.
• 46:39
  You know, I'm noticing it in, um, in my industry, uh, you know, 'cause I'm in a,
• 46:44
  in a, in a tax adjacent legal specialty.
• 46:47
  And if, you know, if, if the accountant is using the older
• 46:52
  accounting tools, he's better.
• 46:55
  But if we're both using the AI tools, I'm either better or pre-- you know,
• 47:00
  very, very nearly as good at a whole lot of stuff that, that, that, you know,
• 47:06
  was accounting until fairly recently.
• 47:09
  And, you know, now I still need the accountant for legal reasons to sign
• 47:12
  off on the things that I'm doing, but that… it's really interesting to,
• 47:15
  to, to just recognize I, I understand the, the fundamentals of what's going
• 47:19
  on, and so I can tell an AI program, "Hey, pull me these numbers," right?
• 47:25
  And, you know, so you gotta check to make sure that it's actually pulling
• 47:28
  the right numbers and it's doing what, you know, like 'cause there's
• 47:30
  always the AI hallucination problem.
• 47:32
  But frankly, I've had the CPA hallucination problem
• 47:35
  probably more frequently than I've had the AI hallucination
• 47:38
  problem in terms of my career.
• 47:40
  Um, and so there's this, there's this leveling, there's this sense, you
• 47:44
  know, uh, uh, Marc Andreessen gave an interview where he was talking
• 47:47
  about, uh, software coders and, and, uh, designers and project…
• 47:51
  or yeah, project managers, and how basically, you know, all three
• 47:55
  of those groups are now, he's calling them builders, right?
• 47:58
  They're now the, the, those three jobs, those three distinct… So you know, so
• 48:03
  there, there are not less jobs necessarily in terms of the number of jobs, of the
• 48:07
  number of people working that is, but there are g- there are apparently gonna
• 48:10
  be less jobs in terms of like the names and silos that we give them, 'cause
• 48:14
  three distinct titles are now one thing.
• 48:17
  And presumably, you know, at a certain point a company will look around and
• 48:19
  go, "Wait, do we really need three builders on everything?" Right?
• 48:24
  Um, and, and that'll, that'll, that'll get interesting.
• 48:27
  Um, but yeah, I think that's a, that's, that's, that's what I see AI doing, and
• 48:32
  I think that'll have a dramatic impact on the amount of hierarchy in our world.
• 48:36
  Uh, because I'm, I, I think that hierarchy is relatively stable.
• 48:41
  Hierarchies of competence are relatively stable.
• 48:42
  People are, have very, you know, reliable levels of intelligence.
• 48:46
  People have very reli- especially at, as an adult, right?
• 48:49
  There's people that are better than you at a certain set of things, and
• 48:53
  there's people that are worse than you at a certain set of things, and that
• 48:55
  more-- mostly doesn't change, you know?
• 49:00
  James McPherson: Yeah, I, uh, I had a conversation at a wedding with a childhood
• 49:04
  friend's husband who was a investment banker in London, and I… That's when
• 49:10
  I really understood standard deviation.
• 49:12
  I was like, "This guy is a standard deviation smarter than me." I
• 49:16
  was so out of my depth, and I think I'm a pretty smart guy.
• 49:20
  But that was like, wow.
• 49:21
  And, you know, that's just a reality, you know, th- just talk to this guy.
• 49:27
  But, um, in terms of AI, it's a, it's a force multiplier.
• 49:32
  So sort of what you already have, if you multiply it,
• 49:37
  Gregory Treat: Right
• 49:37
  James McPherson: it's gonna exacerbate differences.
• 49:39
  And,
• 49:40
  Gregory Treat: Right
• 49:41
  James McPherson: you know, I think back to when I was in ed tech,
• 49:43
  I was in ed tech for six years.
• 49:46
  And it was, to be honest, there were a lot of boondoggles a lot of wealth extraction.
• 49:51
  So I, I wr- you know, I've written about Strauss and House fourth
• 49:55
  turning concepts in Amer- cycles, generational cycles in American history.
• 50:00
  And in the unraveling, which is what we were g- in up through the Great
• 50:05
  Recession, or maybe even after, it's like looting the treasury, you know?
• 50:11
  Like, "Oh, this is all coming apart.
• 50:13
  Let's,
• 50:13
  uh, let's loot." So when, when the LA Unified School District rolled
• 50:21
  out, um, one-to-one Apple iPads for their students, Steve Saylor said, uh-
• 50:28
  Gregory Treat: And what year was that?
• 50:32
  James McPherson: Question 12, 2012, 2010.
• 50:35
  he said, "Here's what's gonna happen In the poor school districts,
• 50:40
  all the iPads will be broken or stolen or attempted to be stolen.
• 50:44
  In the rich school districts, the kids are gonna hack the safety attempts or
• 50:50
  the, the governors, and they're gonna start using it and building stuff.
• 50:54
  It's gonna exac- and 'cause the idea was like with ed tech, the, one of the
• 50:59
  operating assumptions of ed tech was like, this will close the achievement gap.
• 51:04
  And Saylor, Saylor said, "No, this is gonna exacerbate the achievement gap."
• 51:09
  Gregory Treat: Right.
• 51:10
  Well, and, and, and implicit in the idea that, that this is gonna close the
• 51:13
  achievement gap is, is this underlying egalitarian communist vision of the world
• 51:18
  that says, "Well, actually people are all the same underneath, and, and it's
• 51:22
  just accidents of, uh, of, you know, socioeconomic factors that are, that are
• 51:27
  responsible for the, for the differences or at least the group differences," right?
• 51:32
  James McPherson: Right.
• 51:32
  And, and it's like Aristotle had to explain a thing, you have to
• 51:36
  know it by four causes, right?
• 51:38
  The final cause, the formal cause, the material cause, and the efficient cause.
• 51:42
  It is the d- denial of material, right?
• 51:46
  So Marx was called a materialist.
• 51:48
  So Dr. Palmer thought that Marx was an Aristotelian, but that he
• 51:53
  neglected the other too much to the…
• 51:57
  Which was a fault, a fi- a flaw in his philosophy.
• 52:02
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 52:03
  James McPherson: And then, 'cause it was, it lacked teleology,
• 52:07
  ultimately.
• 52:09
  And so, um, but reading, you know, Marx's Capital was a fascinating exper- I read
• 52:17
  that in college with this Professor David Harvey, it was a great experience.
• 52:21
  It was one of the most interesting classes I took.
• 52:24
  But at the same time I'm reading Chesterton, which is this sort of
• 52:26
  Catholic critique of capitalism, you know?
• 52:28
  And so it worked itself out, saved my soul.
• 52:31
  But so back, you know, so that causal reality and yeah, there's
• 52:35
  the blank slatism of the, the denial of the material cause.
• 52:39
  And Saylor was dead right.
• 52:41
  Like, they implemented the one iPad per student across the LA
• 52:46
  Unified School District, they had no insurance, no replacement program
• 52:50
  that, you know, all these things you do to implement something expensive.
• 52:54
  Gregory Treat: Sure
• 52:55
  James McPherson: And no one at Apple even flagged like, "Okay, to
• 52:58
  implement this across the school district, you need these protocols."
• 53:02
  Nothing.
• 53:02
  Just, "Here, it's magic," right?
• 53:05
  Which is another thing I see a lot of in late stage America is magic, right?
• 53:13
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 53:14
  James McPherson: And I, you know, I wrote an essay about this.
• 53:15
  Is education just a prestige sticker that says, "Oh, you get to be in the club,"
• 53:20
  or do you actually learn something?
• 53:22
  Gregory Treat: I mean, may- you know, I think the, the, the dominant sort
• 53:27
  of the… One of the problems is when you have people that are ostensibly
• 53:32
  arguing in favor of why you should go to Ivy League schools, and their
• 53:35
  argument is, "Yeah, it's a, it's a prestige marker. That's it," right?
• 53:40
  Or even, you know, Peterson, right?
• 53:42
  You know, Jordan Peterson has that, that famous speech where he talked about,
• 53:45
  you know, the, the only thing valuable about Harvard is the sorting mechanism.
• 53:48
  It sorts for really smart people, um, at the beginning, and it's like, huh.
• 53:54
  I mean, do you believe that?
• 53:58
  You know?
• 53:59
  Um, which I,
• 54:00
  you know, I think, I, I think it, the, the, uh, that's probably true about
• 54:04
  how those institutions are operating.
• 54:06
  But we should probably think about the fact that as that became true of those
• 54:10
  institutions, their social credibility and their, their excellence in the world
• 54:14
  has been dropping like a rock, you know?
• 54:17
  James McPherson: yeah, and, and, and that's the… Because it's also--
• 54:20
  So one of the products, you know, my business partner built is called College
• 54:25
  Aviator, and it's basically a Socr- AI Socratic method of finding fit.
• 54:30
  Gregory Treat: Yeah.
• 54:31
  James McPherson: Uh, and then if you-- And so I'm working on that with him, and so my
• 54:35
  whole algorithm is on like Instagram and Facebook are all these guys, like these
• 54:41
  two tricks to get into Ivy League schools.
• 54:43
  You know, all the college counseling is geared towards this prestige,
• 54:48
  and it's a trick to get into prestige, and so it becomes a game,
• 54:55
  right?
• 54:55
  Gregory Treat: that's the definition of magic.
• 54:56
  That's a spell, right?
• 54:58
  James McPherson: It's a spell, right?
• 54:59
  And yeah, exactly.
• 55:00
  And the prestige comes from magic.
• 55:03
  A prestige is the final thing the magician ju- does to reveal the trick.
• 55:10
  And so you can see that upper middle class families gaming the system, right?
• 55:16
  So you set up a 501[c][3] for your sophomore with $10,000 in it, and you…
• 55:23
  That sophomore starts a blood drive or, you know, feeding the homeless.
• 55:28
  And like, there's all these games people play to match the ideology
• 55:33
  of prestige to sort of get in there, and then they're there.
• 55:39
  Okay, now what?
• 55:40
  You know?
• 55:40
  And you'll-- There's plenty of stories of like, "My whole life was geared towards
• 55:44
  getting into Brown, and I got into Brown," and then I was like, "Well, now what?"
• 55:48
  Gregory Treat: Yeah.
• 55:49
  James McPherson: And
• 55:49
  so,
• 55:49
  Gregory Treat: have no telos.
• 55:50
  You know, I, I think about the, the, the transition in chess, you know, that
• 55:53
  I have, um, I have some, some legacy families that I talk to, some legacy
• 55:58
  founders that I talk to that one, you know, e- every now and then the question
• 56:03
  about chess will come up, which is just sort of int- it's interesting to me that
• 56:06
  that's, that that's a thing that comes up.
• 56:08
  And, and really what I've, you know, uh, learned from these, from these founders,
• 56:14
  you know, one of… 'cause, 'cause one of, one of the beautiful and terrible
• 56:17
  things about my job is I'm serving people who are at, many times at least
• 56:21
  one standard deviation smarter than me.
• 56:23
  I've got a lot of domain knowledge that they don't have.
• 56:25
  I've got a lot of sense for how, how, you know, the law works and how tax
• 56:29
  works that they don't have, but they're like super sharp cookies, right?
• 56:33
  Um, and what I've learned from them basically is that, uh, there used to
• 56:40
  be a way of playing chess that was a reasonably good training method for
• 56:45
  getting people to think about medieval logistics and deployment, okay?
• 56:51
  Um, and that the rules of chess changed over time kind of during its development
• 56:57
  because it was meant as a reasonably simplified proxy for how you think about,
• 57:04
  uh, medieval warfare, uh, especially from, from kind of a positioning side, right?
• 57:09
  And that's not what chess is anymore, right?
• 57:13
  Chess now is memorizing pictures and kind of…
• 57:16
  That, you know, the humans are training themselves to solve chess
• 57:20
  the way a computer solves it, right?
• 57:22
  Which is more efficient, like you can win the game that way, but doing that
• 57:28
  decouples, it makes chess not useful for the, for the traditional, you know,
• 57:34
  use of it, which was helping you train your brain to have, have some kind
• 57:39
  of mental model that helped you think about a, a simpler version of, you
• 57:44
  know, medieval combat and kind of think about, okay, will this work, right?
• 57:48
  How would I do this on a chess board?
• 57:50
  Um, kind of a deal.
• 57:51
  And, and, and I just remember, you know, one, uh, one, one of the guys
• 57:54
  kind of explained, walked me through that and I was like, "Huh, I would
• 57:58
  have never thought about that," right?
• 58:00
  But just the, the, the, this idea that there are, there are different ways to
• 58:03
  play this one game and the, the modern strategy, the modern way that that
• 58:09
  game is played is not terribly useful.
• 58:12
  It's hard though, 'cause if you try to teach your children to play chess
• 58:15
  the old way, they're like middle, middle rate players at best, right?
• 58:20
  No matter how smart they are, 'cause it's, it's a different, it's a different
• 58:23
  way of approaching the game, right?
• 58:25
  James McPherson: Yeah.
• 58:26
  Yeah.
• 58:28
  I was at a, a high school friend's house during a power outage in
• 58:31
  one winter, and so we stayed up and played chess by candlelight.
• 58:37
  I might've had a few beers while we were doing that.
• 58:40
  But he was… He had become really good at chess, and he says, "You know,
• 58:43
  you can tell a lot about a person by how they play chess." And I said,
• 58:48
  "What does my game say to you?" And he says, "Reckless and aggressive."
• 58:56
  Gregory Treat: Well
• 58:57
  James McPherson: I was like, "Yeah, that sounds about right."
• 58:58
  Yeah, that's interesting.
• 59:00
  And, and then it becomes just winning by the technique divorced from the purpose.
• 59:08
  And that's, yeah, and that's elite, elite college admissions.
• 59:12
  And it, you know, uh, Hermann Hesse, whose house was up the street from my
• 59:16
  parents when my father was a headmaster in Switzerland, he wrote, uh, Magister Ludi.
• 59:23
  the, the master of the game, the teacher of the game, and it was a futuristic
• 59:27
  world where all scientific endeavors had merged into one mathematical skill set,
• 59:36
  and it was called the glass bead game.
• 59:38
  Maybe like Chinese Go or something like that.
• 59:43
  And so
• 59:44
  everything was
• 59:45
  Gregory Treat: right?
• 59:46
  James McPherson: Right.
• 59:47
  Gregory Treat: Okay, yeah.
• 59:47
  I'm, I think I, I think I, I remember this, so
• 59:50
  James McPherson: But I remember, you know, my father talked about that, and
• 59:54
  he, he had taken me to his, uh, when I was 16, it was, uh, his Harvard reunion,
• 1:00:04
  and they had a session for parents, you know, how to get their kids into Harvard
• 1:00:11
  And we're sitting there, and I'm like looking at him.
• 1:00:13
  I'm like, "What is this?
• 1:00:14
  This is… I thought these were stodgy old wasps, you know?
• 1:00:18
  This is very liberal." And he said, "Well, yeah, I mean, this is what
• 1:00:26
  changed when I graduated and why, you know, the class of 1970 has the lowest
• 1:00:32
  donations of any class back to the school.
• 1:00:36
  It's because the old wasp establishment, thought Harvard had gone off the
• 1:00:39
  rails, so they, they didn't donate.
• 1:00:41
  And then the, the new, the new rulers of the Ivy League think
• 1:00:46
  they didn't go far enough in 1970, so they didn't give money."
• 1:00:50
  And, um, it's… But he, he also talked about… He mentioned Hessa then, and
• 1:00:55
  I d- never read Hessa until much later.
• 1:00:57
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 1:00:58
  James McPherson: But, but he talked about the glass bead game where it just becomes
• 1:01:01
  this sort of theoretical abstraction.
• 1:01:05
  And so prestige in America , has become that But it's also, you know,
• 1:01:11
  so hollowed out that within the next three to five years we're just gonna…
• 1:01:16
  things don't work.
• 1:01:17
  And so you have to start, you know, going to the engineering school at
• 1:01:22
  NC State and find that guy, right?
• 1:01:25
  And I'm not saying, like, I love NC State you know.
• 1:01:28
  And, and I think
• 1:01:29
  with the prestigious,
• 1:01:30
  the-
• 1:01:31
  Gregory Treat: League without the, the, the, the transcendent
• 1:01:33
  purpose that they had.
• 1:01:35
  Like, the, the Ivy
• 1:01:36
  James McPherson: they started as seminaries
• 1:01:38
  Gregory Treat: Yeah.
• 1:01:38
  Yeah, they started as seminaries.
• 1:01:40
  They started at… They, I mean, they started as trying to re- rebuild.
• 1:01:44
  I mean, their goal was, okay, we've got, like, 1,000 years of incredible…
• 1:01:48
  Like, let's say, let's say Charlemagne, you know, starts, jump-starts what,
• 1:01:52
  what we would think of as, as the European educational journey, right?
• 1:01:55
  So we got 1,000 years of that, close to it, as these Ivy
• 1:01:59
  League s- schools are starting.
• 1:02:00
  We wanna do that in 40 years.
• 1:02:02
  We wanna build for us what it took Europe 1,000 years to build.
• 1:02:06
  That's our goal.
• 1:02:07
  We wanna, we wanna push it to the, to the max, right?
• 1:02:11
  a- a- and be, you know, the, the genuine heirs, you know, the, uh…
• 1:02:14
  You know, Trump and, and, and, uh, Vance and, uh, Rubio giving
• 1:02:18
  these amazing speeches, right?
• 1:02:20
  About being, being the heirs of 1,000 years of, uh, of civilization.
• 1:02:25
  Um, and which is, which is incredible.
• 1:02:27
  Like, it's incredible that our leadership is, is saying this on the world stage.
• 1:02:31
  Uh, but that was, that was what Harvard was about.
• 1:02:33
  That was what Harvard thought it was doing, um, for a long time,
• 1:02:36
  and all the Ivy Leagues did.
• 1:02:37
  And, and that's what gave them their moral force.
• 1:02:40
  You know, one of the, one of the interesting things that, that I know
• 1:02:43
  professionally is, uh, you know, as the internal revenue code was getting
• 1:02:46
  started in the 19- teens and all of this stuff, a lot of, a lot of
• 1:02:49
  money, a lot of old WASP money went into trusts And the, the guiding
• 1:02:55
  principle of those trusts, and I'm, I'm oversimplifying to an, uh, uh, absurd
• 1:02:59
  degree here, uh, but, you know, so…
• 1:03:02
  But, uh, but the guiding principle of those trusts was, hey, the, the,
• 1:03:05
  the thing that's gonna make this not just a pure bloodline trust where the
• 1:03:09
  kid just gets something for breathing is he's gonna go to an Ivy League,
• 1:03:13
  or he's gonna go to a school, and he's gonna graduate from that school.
• 1:03:17
  And when he graduates, the trustee gets paid, the kid gets
• 1:03:20
  paid, and the school gets paid.
• 1:03:21
  So everybody wants this to happen, right?
• 1:03:23
  as far as I understand it, basically, you know, some, some trusts had, like,
• 1:03:27
  one school on it, and some trusts had, like, a list of schools, and kind of the
• 1:03:30
  concatenation of those lists from these various family trusts became what we
• 1:03:35
  understand as the Ivy League 'cause they had this extra funding source, right?
• 1:03:38
  They had extra capital that was more or less accessible to them, and that's, you
• 1:03:42
  know, there's some, some relationships between that effect and, like, the,
• 1:03:44
  the, the prep school, the legacy, you know, concepts in the Ivy League.
• 1:03:49
  and, and, you know, i- in the '70s as, as you were mentioning, that sort of went
• 1:03:52
  away and they, they must have gotten…
• 1:03:54
  I s- Somebody should go and do a study and figure out, like, where did
• 1:03:57
  the extra… 'Cause they, they had to have gotten some other source of
• 1:04:01
  funding, at least initially, to kind of move away from, from these things
• 1:04:04
  in the new direction that they did.
• 1:04:06
  A- and especially in the last 20 years when they have
• 1:04:07
  really, like, like Harvard has.
• 1:04:09
  I had a, I had a guy on my podcast that, that, uh, a couple weeks ago, um,
• 1:04:14
  that talked about just how his family was treated terribly, uh, by Harvard
• 1:04:18
  when he attempted to join, and many, many of his father's classmates had the
• 1:04:22
  similar experience of their children were just given the absolute shaft.
• 1:04:27
  Um, and, and some of those, those families were, are not small.
• 1:04:31
  Like, some of those families are not… You know, they, they are, they are
• 1:04:33
  wealthy and powerful families with, with significant trust and significant
• 1:04:38
  ability to make their displeasure felt.
• 1:04:40
  And the Ivy League feels that it has or had, you know, sources of funding that
• 1:04:45
  enabled them to just, you know, not care about that, which I, I, you know…
• 1:04:48
  There, there's some story there.
• 1:04:49
  I don't know what it is necessarily, but, uh,
• 1:04:52
  James McPherson: Yeah.
• 1:04:52
  Well, I
• 1:04:52
  Gregory Treat: if I have a…
• 1:04:53
  James McPherson: Well, they're, they're sitting on such a massive endowment
• 1:04:57
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 1:04:58
  James McPherson: that then just perpetuates itself for the most part.
• 1:05:01
  So, you know, the ideologues can definitely take over
• 1:05:05
  from the, the heritage.
• 1:05:07
  It is interesting that this sort of prestige marker and gaming the system.
• 1:05:12
  And so what is education?
• 1:05:13
  Is it a checklist of prestige markers or is it formation, right?
• 1:05:19
  And I, I just think it's become a checklist now, and you just… And
• 1:05:23
  you go into a lot of debt that you cannot get rid of via bankruptcy
• 1:05:27
  Gregory Treat: Yeah,
• 1:05:28
  James McPherson: for a checklist that even the culture is itself reneging on
• 1:05:34
  the, the terms of the agreement, right?
• 1:05:37
  So I was talking to, um, Dale Dougherty last week, who founded
• 1:05:43
  O'Reilly Media with Tim O'Reilly, and he started the Maker Movement.
• 1:05:47
  And when I wrote out about my experience in STEM, the Maker
• 1:05:52
  Movement and S- STEM education,
• 1:05:56
  I was on this group called Change the Equation,
• 1:06:00
  Gregory Treat: Mm-hmm
• 1:06:00
  James McPherson: and we were the only education providers on that group.
• 1:06:04
  Everyone else, it was Intel, DuPont, Dow, and they're, they're like, "We
• 1:06:10
  need a trained workforce." they need a minimal level of STEM literacy to
• 1:06:15
  come work in our factories, basically.
• 1:06:18
  Okay, that makes sense.
• 1:06:20
  but one, is it the job of taxpayer-funded schools to supply
• 1:06:27
  minimum label- labor criteria, or is the public school supposed to turn
• 1:06:33
  out well-formed adult voting citizens?
• 1:06:36
  Gregory Treat: And how much, how, you know, and when, when, not
• 1:06:39
  if, those two goals conflict, who, which, which, what wins?
• 1:06:44
  James McPherson: Right.
• 1:06:45
  So I, I was, you know, start this STEM business for us, and I do research.
• 1:06:51
  50% of hard science and engineering majors were working in consulting, banking, There
• 1:06:57
  are no jo- There weren't… We don't make anything anymore in this country, right?
• 1:07:01
  So there weren't, like, hard science jobs.
• 1:07:05
  And so
• 1:07:05
  Gregory Treat: you, have you read Eric Weinstein's discussion of, of
• 1:07:08
  the, the STEM job bait and switch?
• 1:07:11
  James McPherson: No, but it sounds like I should because,
• 1:07:13
  Gregory Treat: man, you would, you would, you would really enjoy.
• 1:07:15
  But the, the short version is there was this big push to get STEM majors,
• 1:07:20
  and then at the last minute, uh, y- you know, they, they, they didn't make quite
• 1:07:23
  enough of them, and so basically the federal government had s- or someone,
• 1:07:28
  someone, presumably the federal government plus some, some other interested
• 1:07:32
  parties, decided that, "Oh my gosh, we're gonna have to pay these people.
• 1:07:35
  They're, they're, they're, they're cratered full of student debt, so
• 1:07:38
  we're gonna have to pay them asur- absurd amounts of money." And so they
• 1:07:43
  just pulled in a bunch of people from India and China and, and, and, and
• 1:07:46
  wrecked, you know, suppressed the wages in those industries and that may
• 1:07:51
  be why one… You know, that's one…
• 1:07:53
  'Cause Eric Weinstein is on this quest to figure out why there hasn't been
• 1:07:56
  an a- you know, any innovations in physics in 45 years, and that's one
• 1:07:59
  of his chief… He has others, right?
• 1:08:01
  But that's one of his chief contenders is, like, we just destroyed an entire
• 1:08:05
  generation of Western physicists and, and STEM majors doing, doing this, right?
• 1:08:11
  So they're, they're basically, you know, debt slaves.
• 1:08:13
  Um, a- a- and 'cause to survive, one of the things people don't understand,
• 1:08:17
  o- one of my, my pet bugaboos is people talk about, "Well, well, I don't support
• 1:08:22
  student loan forgiveness." And it's like, oh, well, I didn't realize you wanted to
• 1:08:26
  change the laws, 'cause we already have student loan forgiveness for the left.
• 1:08:30
  If you go work for a non-profit for 120 months, then your loans are forgiven.
• 1:08:36
  And while you're doing that you can get income-based repayment, and so
• 1:08:39
  your employer can pay you next to nothing, give you a housing stipend
• 1:08:43
  or a credit at a, you know, some kind of a, of a joint, you know, housing.
• 1:08:47
  Um, the i- a- and, and, and I'll say, they're, they're…
• 1:08:50
  the only people on the right that I know that do this, uh, successfully
• 1:08:54
  are, there is a, is a, it's a couple of Catholic guys, um, that are
• 1:08:57
  doing it, and, and God bless them.
• 1:08:59
  It's a really efficient program.
• 1:09:00
  We could do a ton of it, right?
• 1:09:02
  But that is the law right now.
• 1:09:03
  Right now, the only people that student loan forgiveness
• 1:09:06
  does not materially apply to…
• 1:09:07
  And, I mean, and I mean, think about this, right?
• 1:09:10
  Like, if you get to your last year, your last 12 to 6 months, uh, before your
• 1:09:15
  loans are forgiven, and you've got to keep your job, and you know that if you
• 1:09:19
  get blacklisted that, you know, this, th- this debt will just hang around and,
• 1:09:23
  and be a, a, you know, this, this, this anchor around your neck, what wouldn't you
• 1:09:28
  do for the liberal establishment to keep your job for those last 12 to 6 months?
• 1:09:33
  Okay?
• 1:09:34
  And then if, if people were interested, they could go look at some interest-
• 1:09:36
  you know, certain, certain, uh, leftist a- activist and, and the, the moments
• 1:09:40
  at which in their late 20s, right, or early 30s when they've done some
• 1:09:44
  extraordinarily aggressive things and you're like, "Oh, it's right before they
• 1:09:50
  were, you know, gonna get their loans forgiven, and they, they, they had to do
• 1:09:54
  whatever they had to do to keep the job."
• 1:09:56
  Fascinating.
• 1:09:57
  James McPherson: Wow, that's interesting.
• 1:09:58
  I noticed that changed the equation was that, they were also
• 1:10:02
  advocating for, uh, H-1B visas.
• 1:10:05
  And I was like, if STEM, if a lack of STEM qualified graduates is a
• 1:10:11
  national issue And you're bringing in H-1Bs while we have 50% of our
• 1:10:17
  STEM graduates not working in STEM fields, you're just suppressing wages.
• 1:10:23
  That's all this is.
• 1:10:25
  And, and, uh, and so Dale then reached out to me and, I thought the maker
• 1:10:30
  movement was awesome, and he's revived it.
• 1:10:34
  He bought it all back, and he's reviving it, I think that's great,
• 1:10:38
  and but his suspicion was similar.
• 1:10:40
  Like, why didn't make, making… And he, he'd been to the White House
• 1:10:45
  for these discussions and he said, uh, you know, "Is welding a STEM
• 1:10:50
  program?" And it, it wasn't, right?
• 1:10:53
  You know, like these are real things
• 1:10:56
  Gregory Treat: I mean, just a part of it is just, is just
• 1:10:58
  wage suppression in general.
• 1:10:59
  You know, when you, when you… You talk about there's that factory in, you know,
• 1:11:02
  near, near Norfolk, um, that has that… Where they… We used to turn out, like,
• 1:11:06
  a destroyer a week or something like this, and now we get one every, every,
• 1:11:10
  you know, 18 months or something, right?
• 1:11:12
  And then you look at the wages, you price the wages in gold for what the
• 1:11:17
  factory workers were making when we were putting out a destroyer a week,
• 1:11:20
  and you say, "Okay, if we had that amount of money for labor, do we
• 1:11:24
  think we could get a destroyer out of this a week?" Oh, yes, we could.
• 1:11:28
  And isn't that interesting, right?
• 1:11:31
  Like, apparently, like, we, we, we could still do this.
• 1:11:33
  We just choose not to.
• 1:11:35
  Um, you know, there, there's some, there's some really fun,
• 1:11:37
  fun facts down that rabbit hole.
• 1:11:38
  I, I, I, I sat in a presentation a while back, I can't, I can't verify this, but
• 1:11:42
  I found it really interesting, basically,
• 1:11:46
  it… there, there is a, there is an amount priced in gold that is, uh,
• 1:11:50
  where you hit replacement fertility.
• 1:11:52
  So you're w- there's a certain amount of wages, and it's stable, right?
• 1:11:55
  At a, at a certain, certain amount of ounces per month or per year, and if
• 1:11:59
  people are making that much priced in gold, they are at or above 2.1, you
• 1:12:04
  know, fertility if in a population that's making that much money.
• 1:12:07
  And this is a super stable relationship.
• 1:12:09
  It's been, you know, there as long as we have the data for it.
• 1:12:12
  And, and I thought, "Huh, well, that's interesting."
• 1:12:16
  James McPherson: That is interesting.
• 1:12:18
  And, you know, in 1973, right, productivity and wages split, right?
• 1:12:24
  And it's just, you know, you know, Johan's, um, point on mill- oh,
• 1:12:32
  millennials are fine, you know, but by what metrics, you know?
• 1:12:35
  And, and the loss of social capital.
• 1:12:39
  I did the math on what the cost was for Catholics when they
• 1:12:44
  got exited from the enclaves
• 1:12:47
  Gregory Treat: Yeah
• 1:12:47
  James McPherson: and, uh, it's billions of dollars of social capital lost.
• 1:12:52
  I mean, if you can really measure that and, you know, they're
• 1:12:54
  good
• 1:12:55
  Gregory Treat: but yeah, it's, it's at least.
• 1:12:56
  It's at least, right?
• 1:12:57
  It's, it's the same things that people do when, when you talk about
• 1:12:59
  what do, what do families lose when, when mom goes to work, you know?
• 1:13:03
  My wife, uh, we had a, we had a medical event in my house, and
• 1:13:06
  so my wife was basically down.
• 1:13:08
  She was bedridden for two and a half weeks and not really able to do kind of
• 1:13:12
  her normal thing for almost six weeks.
• 1:13:14
  And we had help, right?
• 1:13:15
  And we had people that, that, that came in.
• 1:13:17
  We had… You know, we were able to triple the amount of hours we were giving our
• 1:13:20
  childcare, right, and all this stuff.
• 1:13:22
  But, you know, it wound up, like, e- excluding the, the, the actual e- extra
• 1:13:26
  costs of, like, the medical bills and the extra childcare and all of that, just
• 1:13:30
  for our normal expenses, it increased everything across the board by a third.
• 1:13:36
  Apparently not having my wife there to, you know, massage, to stretch, you know,
• 1:13:41
  to stretch the pennies meant that, that it, it, it increased the, the expenses
• 1:13:46
  of my household by at least a third.
• 1:13:49
  And then, and then on, on top of that, we had, you know, the medical
• 1:13:51
  bills and all this, all this stuff, and it was just like, wow.
• 1:13:54
  Wow, honey, this is what you do for me.
• 1:13:56
  Thank you, you know, if I haven't said that, you know, recently.
• 1:14:00
  So, well, thank you so much for, uh, for, for giving me so much of your time, man.
• 1:14:05
  I, I, I, I really appreciate it.
• 1:14:07
  so, uh, any, any… I mean, I think, you know, we're, we're
• 1:14:10
  living in a really interesting time.
• 1:14:11
  I'm, I'm, I'm excited to kind of see where things are going.
• 1:14:15
  Um, and, and we didn't, we didn't get in, in, into AI as much
• 1:14:18
  as, uh, as much as I'd hoped.
• 1:14:20
  But, um, you know, I, I think it's a, I think it's an interesting moment.
• 1:14:23
  I, I really do believe that, that we're gonna see a, uh, new hierarchies
• 1:14:29
  emerge and new, new people that are, that are able to say, "Hey, we're…"
• 1:14:35
  I, I think tech is, is finally gonna defeat finance in many ways.
• 1:14:39
  I think that's what, what AI represents.
• 1:14:41
  Um, and, and, and not that tech will always be better than finance.
• 1:14:45
  Finance has actually, you know, been, been pretty good, all,
• 1:14:47
  all things considered, right?
• 1:14:49
  Um, you know, maybe, maybe, may- like the kings, right?
• 1:14:52
  Maybe we'll miss them when they're gone.
• 1:14:54
  Um, but, um, but I think, I think we're moving in that direction.
• 1:14:58
  And so, you know, my hope is, is that guys like you and me and, and, and obviously,
• 1:15:02
  you know, the, the, the talented folks like, like Johan and Will Tanner and
• 1:15:06
  Ben Black, um, that, uh, that we're… The things that we're doing, the, the
• 1:15:11
  relationships that we're building, the, the recognition of, hey, social capital
• 1:15:15
  is actually valuable and needs to be recorded on a balance sheet somewhere.
• 1:15:19
  You know, one of the interesting things about AI is, is that it probably can do
• 1:15:22
  a better job than we've historically done of quantifying and catching, you know,
• 1:15:27
  the, the… You know, if, if you were gonna reduce the social capital to money,
• 1:15:30
  how much, what would that take, right?
• 1:15:33
  Um, and, and you know, that's a really interesting, that's
• 1:15:36
  a really interesting thing.
• 1:15:38
  So, um, so any, any, any final thoughts before we wrap up?
• 1:15:42
  I've, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
• 1:15:45
  James McPherson: Likewise.
• 1:15:46
  you know, AI… I'm sorry if I derailed off the AI a little bit, but like I
• 1:15:49
  think it's a, it's a force multiplier and it's like the kind of analogous
• 1:15:57
  to the parable of the talents, right?
• 1:15:59
  So who has the force?
• 1:16:01
  What force do you have?
• 1:16:02
  What, what gift from God do you have?
• 1:16:05
  And can you use these tools to multiply your im- your agent or
• 1:16:11
  efficient cause in the world?
• 1:16:12
  there's definitely people with poor teleology who have a lot of talent
• 1:16:16
  and will have a force multiplier, but there are good people in the
• 1:16:19
  world who haven't had a, a voice, and you can, with AI agents, you can
• 1:16:26
  have as many employees as you can build doing different things for you.
• 1:16:30
  And I think that force multiplier will really help, I think, the good people
• 1:16:35
  who don't necessarily have access to capital or large amounts of capital, be
• 1:16:39
  able to, um, have an impact on the world for good, and, uh, it's pretty exciting.
• 1:16:45
  And, uh, thank you so much for inviting me.
• 1:16:48
  thanks so much for inviting me on, and I've enjoyed the conversation.
• 1:16:51
  I look forward to further correspondence and conversations, I hope
• 1:16:56
  Gregory Treat: All right.
• 1:16:56
  Awesome.
• 1:16:56
  Thank you so much, James.
• 1:16:58
  Appreciate it