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25. The Architecture of Trust Part 4 · Great Houses

• 0:01
  All right, everybody.
• 0:02
  Thank you so much.
• 0:03
  Uh, welcome to, uh, episode 25 of the Great Houses Forum.
• 0:07
  So we're continuing to talk about the architecture of trust.
• 0:11
  So we'll get in that and, uh, and then, and then we'll, we'll talk about kind of what, what… how, where we are and how we got there, and how I think we need to kind of reestablish the, the framework for where we're going.
• 0:26
  So, so we start with, with the architecture of trust, and I, I wanna put to you: what does a pension fund, a school, and a university lending platform have in common?
• 0:37
  And the answer is, these are all modern replacements for things that the household used to do, right?
• 0:45
  It used to be the household that took care of you in your old age, it used to be the household that was the primary educator, and it used to be the household that, that, that paid, that funded, um, the payments, uh, for, for high-level education like a university.
• 1:00
  Those all used to be household functions.
• 1:03
  And as, you know, over, you know, the last 200, 250 years, we kind of chopped things away from the household, took things away from, uh, what the household was supposed to do.
• 1:13
  We, we created these different programs.
• 1:14
  You know, famously, uh, you know, the concept of retirement and, and, and the pension was invented in Germany, uh, kinda to, to, to make the workers happy, right?
• 1:23
  It was a, it was a, it was a socialist mechanism, where they're, they were doing a bunch of price fixing of wages and all these stuff, and they were bringing on new, uh, you know, the young people were, were coming in and, and needing to be paid something.
• 1:36
  And the old people were like, "Well, if you keep bringing on new people," right, "since we're all now competing, um, then, then we won't have enough."
• 1:44
  And so the, the government introduced this concept.
• 1:45
  "Well, you're gonna retire now." That's, that's where retirement comes from.
• 1:49
  And, and I'd put to you, uh, the biggest problem we are facing right now is we have exhausted a core amount of trust in this system.
• 1:55
  Like, the… In order for this to function, um, you have to believe that on the whole, everything's gonna work out and you're gonna be taken care of, that there's some level of, of, of social security for you.
• 2:07
  Um, otherwise, these programs, they don't really work very well and they kinda tend to create bad outcomes, right?
• 2:13
  And, and, and that's exactly what we don't have.
• 2:16
  No one believes that these systems individually or collectively kind of accomplish the big picture goals.
• 2:21
  Everyone is afraid.
• 2:22
  Everyone kinda has this sense of, "Well, you know, I'm pretty sure this isn't gonna work out super well for me.
• 2:28
  I, I, I'm, I'm concerned that I might lose, uh, you know, access to, to the things that I need.
• 2:33
  The pension won't be enough.
• 2:35
  The, the education won't be the right one." Um, you know, you, you're, you're making these big decisions.
• 2:40
  There's, there's, you know, a lot of pressure on people.
• 2:42
  They've taken on these student loans.
• 2:43
  We'll get to the student loans in a second here.
• 2:45
  Um, and, and what that means is that, you know, sacrifices to prop up this system are, are, shall we say, morally questionable at best.
• 2:54
  So I'm gonna talk to you about three things.
• 2:57
  We're gonna talk about the ordo amoris, uh, then we're gonna talk about guarantors, and then we're gonna talk about the, the, the web of obligation.
• 3:04
  So we'll start with the ordo amoris.
• 3:05
  So, so what are your duties and how do you rank them?
• 3:08
  Okay?
• 3:09
  And of course, um, there's, there's the famous steak versus avocado meme, which is based on the, the, the heat map meme.
• 3:15
  Um, I've talked about that before, and so I just… But I love, I love bringing that up again.
• 3:19
  So w- we, we, we want to be steak people.
• 3:22
  We want to be people that have our highest directives, our highest understanding of our duty and, and what we're supposed to be caring about and working on centered closely around God, immediate family, close friends, the people that you actually live, work, and, and do life with, you know, your extended family, your city, your nation, those things.
• 3:43
  And then your, your, your moral duty kind of beyond those things falls off, right?
• 3:47
  I mean, the, the, the largest circle, right, in the, in the biblical context is the neighbor.
• 3:53
  Um, the neighbor, you know, might, might be literally translated as, as fellow sheep, right?
• 3:59
  Or fellow person who is loyal or owes loyalty to the same sovereign.
• 4:03
  Now, one of the fun things, of course, about the Christian faith is that, that the, the core principle of the Christian faith is everyone owes the same sovereign allegiance.
• 4:10
  Um, that being, you know, God the Father, kind of this, this, this ultimate high, uh, deity authority.
• 4:15
  Um, but in, in terms of your practical ability to minister to people, th- this concept, the ordo amoris is, is, is, you know, very old.
• 4:24
  It was, you know, well-articulated by Aquinas and then, um And then, you know, recently rediscovered by science, as so many things are, as, as kind of th- one of the most consistent ways of, uh, of identifying, you know, leftists from, from, from right-wingers.
• 4:39
  And, you know, famously the, the, in the heat map example, the, uh, the, the leftist, the, the center of the leftist moral concern is somewhere around all animals in the universe, including alien life forms, and all living things in the universe, including plants and trees, right?
• 4:58
  They, they consider those as more, you know, more worthy of moral attention, moral fervor.
• 5:04
  Uh, they consider it kind of their, their duty not to prefer things that are closer in, i- including, you know, their immediate family, extended family, close friends, et cetera.
• 5:14
  Okay?
• 5:14
  So obviously the, the traditional Western frame is, is very different, and I would include in this kind of both the, the, the, the biblical Christian tradition and what you might call, you know, the Greco-Roman tradition.
• 5:26
  Um, really almost all ethical duties start with this concept of you, you have a spirit, you have a breath within you, right?
• 5:34
  You have a name within you.
• 5:36
  And, and all of your ethical duties start with a duty to your breath and your name.
• 5:40
  So y- there's things that, like you shouldn't lie, 'cause lying is, is, is an injury, is, is an offense against your own name, is an offense against your own spirit.
• 5:49
  Uh, you shouldn't abandon the faith of your fathers.
• 5:51
  You shouldn't care… You should, you should care for your physical ancestors.
• 5:54
  O- o- one of the very practical ways that that works out is it sort of implies, and, and most cultures that, that were successful in, you know, doing basic things like building walled cities didn't just imply it, they sort of forcefully, uh, explicitly said, part of your duty is to produce descendants that carry forward the name, right?
• 6:13
  Um, so how do you meet your duties to your breath?
• 6:15
  How do you, how do you have descendants?
• 6:16
  Well, you, you enter the covenant of marriage.
• 6:18
  And, and, uh, you know, it's important to, like, to think about the fact that these two covenants, we're gonna get to some other covenants in a second here, these two covenants are…
• 6:27
  They're very personal.
• 6:29
  They're very individualized.
• 6:30
  You're the primary actor.
• 6:32
  You're, at least as the man, you're, you're, you're, you're kind of the, the, the dominant person that's making the decisions.
• 6:38
  You're deciding which course you're gonna go.
• 6:40
  You're deciding how you're gonna fulfill this, okay?
• 6:42
  Um, the other types of covenants that, that, as, as we kind of, this scales out, right?
• 6:47
  How do you, um, how do you meet your duties to your spouse?
• 6:50
  Well, by joining or, or if necessary, making a household covenant.
• 6:54
  Um, in the ancient world, most people already had a household covenant, you know, presented to them.
• 6:58
  Um, and so their, their kind of, their, their decision-making was, do I join this or do I not join this?
• 7:05
  Not really, um You know, am I, am I, am I gonna be kind of a, standing outside of this thing?
• 7:13
  Um, then you have … So how do you, how do you, um, meet your duties to your household?
• 7:21
  Well, you join a church covenant, right?
• 7:24
  Um, and again, if necessary, you make a church covenant in the, in the Protestant context.
• 7:27
  And even in, you know, until very, very recently, even in the Protestant context, the expectation was, hey, creating a new church or a new denomination or a new religious, you know, covenant was a very unusual thing that would need to be accompanied by, you know, great signs and wonders of God, of things that would be, you know, that would make, make clear that, that this was not just something that you had decided to do on your own.
• 7:50
  And then finally, how do you meet your duties to your church?
• 7:52
  Churches tend to be, you know, fairly squishy institutions.
• 7:55
  Um, in many ways they, they, they … If, if you're doing kind of the, the assembly thing, you're focused on truth.
• 8:02
  You're, you're, you're not spending all that much time, um, excluding people.
• 8:07
  You're, in many cases, trying explicitly to include as many people as you can.
• 8:10
  So how do you solve it?
• 8:11
  Well, you need a, a political covenant to kind of wrap around.
• 8:14
  You need walls around your city, right?
• 8:17
  You need walls around your church, even.
• 8:19
  Um, and I'm, I'm working on an article right now talking about, um, the, uh
• 8:24
  One of my kid's favorite movies is, uh, the Secret of the Kells, right?
• 8:27
  And, uh, obviously the movie, you know, being, being an, an artsy movie is, is, is center-left at best, right?
• 8:33
  So they, they're focused very much on the idea of, "We, we need the book. We need to get the book, and the book will, will save us." Um, you know, whereas the, the guy that's building the wall, the Abbot that's building the wall, he's, he's not the maybe the bad guy, but he's, uh, he's misguided.
• 8:47
  Um, the reality of course is that when, uh, your country is being invaded by, you know, Vikings, you do need walls, right?
• 8:53
  Um, and it was a comb- … Now, you also need the book, okay?
• 8:55
  Give, give, give the, uh, the culturalists their due.
• 8:58
  You need the book.
• 8:59
  But you also need walls and, and, and certainly you need walls, um, in many cases in order to allow the book to do its job, right?
• 9:07
  The, the walls are kind of the first thing that you need, and then you can get to, uh, to the others.
• 9:11
  So, so hopefully you will note, and, and you know, I've, I've, I've made this point on some other podcasts before, um, that household ch- households, churches, and cities, the political arrangements, can last much longer than a single lifetime.
• 9:26
  Indeed, if, if you can accept it, these arrangements, if they're well-ordered, um, it would be much better for you to join them rather than to form your own, right?
• 9:34
  When, when people feel the need to form their own state, right, uh, to form their own church, um, usually they're v- they're, they're very comfortable telling you with, uh, that, that, that, you know, the, the prior arrangement, the prior political arrangement, the prior church arrangement did them great wrong.
• 9:51
  I mean, that's how our country started, right?
• 9:52
  The Declaration of Independence is basically this super long list, um, that, that has, you know, gone on, um- In, in, in, here's all the things that the king has done, um, and that England has done more broadly that are breaches of our, of, of their covenantal duty to us, and then just in general bad things.
• 10:12
  And it's, it's this extraordinary state of affairs because of all the bad behavior that the prior political arrangement had that justifies us doing things.
• 10:22
  Um, I, I would also suggest to you that, uh, you know, we, we don't like to think about this.
• 10:26
  Uh, we, we, we tend to think, "Oh, no, no, p- someone can go out and, uh, start their own household," and that, and that's, that's just the natural order of things, right?
• 10:34
  Leave and cleave and all of these things.
• 10:36
  Um, and, and certainly you need to separate yourself, you know, emotionally from, from your parents and, and focus on your wife and build a, a marital relationship there.
• 10:44
  That's, that's in- in part of your duty.
• 10:47
  Uh, but again, until very recently, and, and e- uh, the expectation was you would remain financially, you know, economically, socially, politically connected with your parents' household for the rest of your life.
• 10:58
  Um, certainly you… And, and, and you would continue even after your parents died.
• 11:01
  Your brothers and you would form a natural political unit.
• 11:05
  That was the political unit upon which all of the Greco-Roman, uh, you know, culture was based, their, their entire political system was based, as well as the Hebrews, right?
• 11:13
  If you didn't have a, a valid, uh, male-led household, you got cut out of the inheritance, right?
• 11:19
  Um, and, and there's this fascinating story about the daughters of Zelophehad and, and, uh, they, they, they kind of talk through there's some extraordinary things that the, the, that women can do to preserve their inheritance.
• 11:30
  But interestingly, they actually have to agree to restrict whom they can marry.
• 11:34
  They have to restrict their, their liberty of marriage, um, in order to, uh, to get the inheritance, which is a fascinating, a fascinating, uh, concept.
• 11:43
  So, and, and then another point that I would make is a lot of people, when they talk about forming their households, when they talk about going out on their own, there's a lot of resentment there.
• 11:52
  There's a lot of frustration.
• 11:53
  It's almost as if we don't really want to be responsible for, for, for doing this.
• 11:59
  We don't like the idea of having to start from zero at every, at every generation.
• 12:03
  And, and this is particularly true, you know, kind of in a modern moment like ours, right?
• 12:07
  In, in a frontier-driven economy where you can, you know, walk 200 miles west and, and land, you know, enough land for you to farm for the rest of your life basically is available for one summer's wages, right?
• 12:21
  I mean, hey, starting your own thing isn't so bad.
• 12:24
  You get in a fight with your parents?
• 12:24
  Just leave, right?
• 12:25
  You don't, don't, don't need to repair any relationships or show any emotional maturity.
• 12:29
  Fine.
• 12:30
  Um, but in the, in the present time, in the, in the moment that we're in, uh, it's, it's, it's hard.
• 12:36
  And, uh, and frequently it is, it is a thing that people are, are resentful about.
• 12:40
  So
• 12:43
  Oops So one of the things is that we have to believe that there is an alternative, right?
• 12:50
  Uh, which is that there is some form of relationship with the broader group which is a genuine covenantal win-win, right?
• 12:56
  And, and this is the, the assumption that, that… There's assumption in, in the pr- traditional biblical frames that the relationship between patron and client was such that because of the relationship, the patron is more able to meet his covenantal duties, and the client is more able to meet his covenantal duties.
• 13:14
  And so what that means is that for, for both of these people, the, the, they're, they're both becoming more stake people by having this relationship, right?
• 13:23
  For both of them, their ability to fulfill their covenantal duties in the inner rings is strengthened, not harmed by the relationship, okay?
• 13:34
  So how do you create these win-wins?
• 13:36
  And, and, you know, the modern m- managerial answer is you increase scale and, and, in a broad specialization.
• 13:42
  There's something called Ricardo's, uh, principle of comparative advantage, which states that countries should specialize… It's interesting that, you know, he starts with countries.
• 13:50
  Um, s- countries should specialize in producing goods where they have the lowest opportunity cost relative to others and trade for the rest.
• 13:56
  This allows mutual gains from trade, even if one country is more efficient at everything.
• 14:01
  Um, now I'll note that, that this, this works out differently for the country that could produce everything as opposed to the country that, that can't produce everything.
• 14:10
  But, uh, but there, but there's a larger problem, right?
• 14:13
  So i- we, in, in the modern capitalist system, you know, we, we kind of figure out what a unit does best in the context of the system that we're in.
• 14:19
  So we have to ask, there's, there's kind of these assumptions here, what is the unit and what is the system, right?
• 14:25
  Is, is the system, is the unit count- countries in a kind of global anarchic system?
• 14:31
  Is it countries in the bo- within the borders of what was once known as Christendom?
• 14:36
  Those might be different things, right?
• 14:38
  Is the unit a company within a city or a nation, national context?
• 14:43
  Is it an individual within a corporate context, right?
• 14:46
  What, what's interesting is, is that this… You know, we'll get into kind of the, the, the formal definitions of it in, in a second here.
• 14:53
  I'd put to you, a- ask yourself, d- is, is this, does this frame actually work for companies competing in kind of the anarchic global system, or is this really based or is, does this really work conceptually better if we were to start with, oh, well, we have a household, we have some common legal structure that binds us all to, to the same purpose and, and, you know, we're either divisions within a corporation or even individuals within a corporation, right?
• 15:20
  'Cause what you need for… And this is from Grok, right?
• 15:22
  What do you need to, to, for Ricardo's principles to work?
• 15:25
  You need trust and property rights, right?
• 15:26
  People must believe that they can keep what they own, produce their own.
• 15:29
  If assets can be seized arbitrarily, there's little incentive to specialize or invest.
• 15:33
  This is, you know, kind of the bedrock for any division of labor.
• 15:35
  Um, then you need con- trust in contracts and enforcement.
• 15:39
  Uh, when you trade goods, labor, or promises, you need reasonable assurance that the other party will deliver.
• 15:43
  This requires impartial courts- courts or dispute resolution, predictable rule of law, and low enough transaction costs that enforcement feels feasible.
• 15:51
  Now, it doesn't have to be perfect, but it, but it has to be, you know, there's some kind of r- it, it's gotta be reliable enough, right?
• 15:58
  Um I, I ask you do, do we have this in the current moment?
• 16:02
  Is this, is this a thing that we have?
• 16:04
  Um, then we need trust in money in the medium of exchange.
• 16:07
  The currency must be stable enough that people accept it for future value.
• 16:11
  Hyperinflation or arbitrary devaluation destroys willingness to trade across time and space, and then you need trust in counterparties, right?
• 16:20
  Or mechanisms that substitute for it.
• 16:22
  So we have personal reputational trust, which works in small communities.
• 16:25
  Institutional trust, which is like brands, credit ratings, legal systems, escrow, blockchains, and that scales it up to strangers in large markets.
• 16:33
  And then, and then, you know, Grok throws in, "In international trade, this includes treaties, WTO rules, or reputation of governments act as partial substitutes." Um, which is just a fascinating, you know, it's a fascinating thing to, to think about, right?
• 16:47
  Um, so we're… What, what we're doing is we're sort of creating some system, and the system is just supposed to work, where we're supposed to all kind of anarchically fall into place, um, 'cause we, 'cause we don't wanna ask, I think, I think many…
• 17:02
  What's really driving this is nobody wants to ask why this worked so well in Ricardo's original frameworks, which were basically, you know, the, the, the countries formerly known as, as Christendom and their colonies, right?
• 17:14
  So there was kind of a, a common culture and, uh, you know, it, it, it'd be interesting to, to think about, you know, what's going on there, right?
• 17:22
  It, it, it's another, you know, modern example of, of this kind of s- specialty is the way that China has organized their cities, right?
• 17:30
  They have different zones that they have designated as, hey, this is the place where we're gonna pursue this one, this one piece of, of the economy, this one industry.
• 17:41
  If you're in this industry, you basically need to move to this city and everyone in, in, in this industry or in its supply chain, to the extent that there's a differentiated supply chain, really needs to move here and, and, and you're still gonna compete with each other.
• 17:52
  There's gonna be, you know, relative competition between companies, but it, it, it's, it's localized.
• 17:57
  There's a geographic element, and that, that geographic framework is set from the top, right?
• 18:02
  There is a, there is a, there is a, you know… It's imposed.
• 18:06
  Uh, that, the markets don't form that, which is, which is interesting.
• 18:10
  And, and, and I think, you know, um, you know, with respect to libertarians on the call, which of these, these, these four things that I've just listed do markets form, right?
• 18:20
  So in the biblical frame, in the kind of the traditional Western concept, this, this was, these types of roles were not delegated to the system.
• 18:28
  There, there was a particular role that was called the guarantor.
• 18:31
  So for the ancients, having the same guarantor, the same ultimate patron, is what allowed lesser long-term covenantal relationships.
• 18:38
  In the absence of a common guarantor, which in the oldest records was, you know, God or the gods, there could be no long-term relationship, and this is, you know, probably most, uh, eloquently stated in 2 Corinthians 6:14-16 Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.
• 18:52
  For what partnership can righteousness have with wickedness?
• 18:55
  Or what fellowship does light have with darkness?
• 18:57
  What harmony is there, uh, between Christ and Belial?
• 19:01
  Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?
• 19:04
  What agreement can exist between the temple of God and idols?
• 19:07
  For we are the temple of the living God.
• 19:08
  Now, uh, one of the fun things about that is those words, partnership, fellowship, harmony, in common, and agreement, uh, were basically the, the, the types of business entities that were possible in the Roman Empire at the time, right?
• 19:24
  So the, the, the Greek has some words.
• 19:26
  It, it's clear when you translate it over to the Latin, there's a participation, a society, a convention, a pars, which is actually the word from which we derive the modern word share, is derived from a mispronunciation of pars, um, as I understand it.
• 19:41
  And then finally, the consensus.
• 19:43
  So, uh, now, a couple of these, um … The- these are basically a, a joint venture, a partnership.
• 19:49
  The third one, interestingly, is a cartel, which is, you know, supposedly illegal in the United States of America, unless, uh, you're in oil or cotton or really any of the, uh, any of the, uh, the agricultural cartels that, uh, FDR set up.
• 20:03
  Those are okay.
• 20:04
  I, I, I, I joke, you know, we … The … It's, it's so helpful the way that they designed the laws around the agricultural cartels.
• 20:12
  Uh, they're not actually cartels.
• 20:13
  You know how we know that, uh, that the dairymen's associations and the cattlemen's associations and the cotton exchanges are not cartels?
• 20:19
  'Cause it, it's in the law.
• 20:20
  There's a law that FDR wrote that says, "These entities are not cartels." Very helpful.
• 20:24
  Very helpful that the government told us that.
• 20:26
  Um, the fourth one is a shareholder, as I said, and then kinda the final one is, is being a board member or a trustee.
• 20:32
  And, and, and, and I should mention that this, this
• 20:36
  What wouldn't just be like, uh, probably the, the, the view of the verse is not saying you can't serve on a board.
• 20:42
  Uh, you can't serve on any board with non-Christians.
• 20:45
  Uh, it'd be more, um, board members, trustees were, were guarantors of the underlying project in, in, in this time, right?
• 20:53
  So you would … You should not step into a position where you are guaranteeing and you can't walk away from a relationship, uh, w- with people that don't share your ultimate goals, right?
• 21:06
  Lots of interesting concepts there.
• 21:08
  Um, you know, so one of the problems with globalism is that we do not have the ability to extend our labor rights regime around the world for non-citizens, right?
• 21:17
  Uh, uh, JC … In Exit, uh, JCB wrote a great article.
• 21:20
  Uh, I think it's like free, uh, free markets for thee but not
• 21:25
  For me, but not for thee.
• 21:26
  And it basically talks about the fact that, um, one of the, one of the things about illegal immigration is when you have illegals in the country, um, the, um-
• 21:40
  then people that employ them are, are exempt from like OSHA, you know, the, the health and safety.
• 21:46
  There's, there's just a lot of things that, um, that the- these are, these are effectively doing end runs around American labor laws and, and, uh, that, you know, and that's one of the reasons why, you know, n- nothing that gets passed actually helps the American worker because any, any institution of sufficient size…
• 22:03
  Now, a small business that employs real people, right, can't do this.
• 22:07
  Um, but, but a, a mid-sized business is gonna just get hammered by it, right?
• 22:11
  Um, so Well, so this is one of the problems with globalism.
• 22:15
  Historically, the guarantor would care because those people were, you know, worship- one or both, usually both, worshipers of his God and soldiers for his armies.
• 22:23
  So anything that prevented them from doing those functions was seen as an attack on the guarantor, and he would, you know, doubtless respond, right?
• 22:32
  This is what the prohibition on coveting, the 10th commandment, is about.
• 22:34
  So you're prohibited from coveting your house, your wife, uh, or your neighbor's house, your neighbor's wife, your neighbor's male and female servants, your neigh- neighbors, you know, flocks and herds, anything that belongs to your neighbor.
• 22:46
  And, and this is a, a microcosm.
• 22:48
  It's kinda like a fractal of the larger, you know, 10 Commandment structure, and really the, the, the structure of the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, um, in that, in that one command.
• 22:59
  And the point is, you know, don't, don't challenge the guarantor, right?
• 23:03
  I- doing this, saying, "Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna covet what my neighbor has," is, is, is challenging the guarantor, and the guarantor's gonna respond.
• 23:12
  And if you don't have that, if people are free to covet because there's no common ultimate moral authority between you, well, you're gonna have a rough time.
• 23:21
  Um, your, your… People are gonna make bad decisions.
• 23:24
  And, and, you know, that's kind of, that's what all modern democracies are dealing with.
• 23:27
  We have no guarantor.
• 23:28
  We have no prohibition on coveting.
• 23:31
  We wouldn't even know how to go about prohibiting coveting, right?
• 23:34
  We have… You know, for, for a lot of people, they would say, "Well, greed is good." Well, greed, you know, the desire for more, is not exactly what coveting is.
• 23:40
  Coveting is, is saying, "Hey," you know, pointing at somebody else and saying, "Hey, I, I don't like the fact that you have that, and so I'm gonna…"
• 23:48
  Not, "I'm gonna go over here and work really hard to acquire things by a legitimate pathway." "I'm going to take what's yours," or, "I'm gonna feel myself entitled to take what's yours." Um, that, that's a really bad way of organizing your, your political structure.
• 24:02
  It kinda tends to, tends to be the death of the political structure itself, right?
• 24:06
  And, and while we're on the subject of the 10 Commandments, this is what the Sabbath laws were about it.
• 24:10
  You can think of the Sabbath laws as a labor regulation.
• 24:13
  So those who employ people are the ones who have to pay for it, who have to figure it out.
• 24:17
  A- a- and the Bible's not under any illusions about this, right?
• 24:19
  It, it knows who's paying for it.
• 24:21
  The command is addressed to people who have sons, daughters, male servants, female servants, cattle, and strangers w- who are within your gates, right?
• 24:28
  Like, all of those people, we're not gonna leave… And there's gonna be no category of person that doesn't have to take the Sabbath off, right?
• 24:36
  Um, and, and this is because if you don't, if you allow, you know, the powers that be to ignore the Sabbath, then you're just gonna lose a, a pretty decent chunk- of, uh, of, of the population.
• 24:48
  They're just not, they're not gonna be able to, to come to church, right?
• 24:50
  So within a d- that's true of the United States.
• 24:52
  Within a decade of blue laws being repealed, essentially all retail workers who do not live with their parents stop showing up at church, right?
• 24:58
  If you're, if you're the frontline retail worker.
• 25:00
  Now, if you're a manager, right, if you're, if you're someone who's kind of climbed their way up the corporate hierarchy, okay, yeah, maybe.
• 25:05
  You probably have the ability to, to get yourself exempted from, from Sunday mornings.
• 25:10
  But the economic reality is that, that, you know, there's gonna be a broad bulk of people who don't have any options.
• 25:17
  This is the best job they can get, and they kinda have to work whenev- when they're told to, right?
• 25:22
  And so if you allow someone to say, "You have to work on Sundays," then that's what you're gonna get and, and you're not gonna see those people in church on Sunday morning.
• 25:29
  Now, if that's a problem for you, like, now, you know, I, I think people, uh, most of the people i- in kind of modern life are gonna go, "Well, what's wrong with that?" Well, consider the fact that, that may- maybe the blue laws were repealed precisely to have that outcome, so you know, as a conservative you might, you might politically care about that.
• 25:47
  Um, but you know, i-i-in a broader concept, if you don't have the power to provide for the people obeying your God, you're, you're putting Him to shame, right?
• 25:53
  So this is why, you know, in, in many communities, and we, we've talked to some of the, the, the last couple o- the last couple episodes were about, uh, we, I talked about the Valerian, the House of Valerius from the ancient Roman, uh, republic.
• 26:04
  But before that, uh, we ha- we did a couple episodes on the architecture of trust.
• 26:08
  And I talked about cer- certain communities, you know, the Amish, the Jewish, um, that do a big deal of providing for their own, and they have to do that, right?
• 26:17
  You either have, y- you know, you either need kind of the power to impose things on the culture at large, on the political unit at large in which you live, right?
• 26:25
  That's, that's kind of one way.
• 26:27
  Um, or the other is you gotta create a parallel, a parallel economy, a parallel system.
• 26:31
  Um, and, and you know, it's interesting to think.
• 26:33
  What is … Does anybody know what the meaning of the word economy is, right?
• 26:36
  We'll get to that in a second.
• 26:37
  So How do you, how do you, you know, how do you create these win-wins, right?
• 26:43
  Uh, the, the neoliberal answer is economies of scale.
• 26:46
  So if we cannot determine with clarity what the comparative advantage of a unit is, right?
• 26:50
  Remember, we got our units and our system, and within the system, the unit's gotta identify compared to the rest of the people in the system.
• 26:57
  I have to decide what I have, uh, what I have a comparative advantage in making and make that, right?
• 27:03
  So if, ideally, the system, I think, or the, the unit would be the individual, right?
• 27:08
  We'd look at a, at an individual and say, "What are you best at, right, compared to all the rest?" Right?
• 27:14
  Um, well, what if you can't do that?
• 27:16
  And, And, and, and many, many people in the modern world cannot do that.
• 27:20
  Well, what we do is in, in liberal ne- neoliberal economics is you just zoom out to a more re- low-resolution view and hope that the numbers become easier to interpret.
• 27:29
  And, and so what that means, when you have low resolution, what does low resolution mean?
• 27:34
  It means a lot of waste and inefficiency, right?
• 27:37
  You're, you're getting specialization.
• 27:38
  Specialization is great, but if you can only… if, if your unit is the nation state, right?
• 27:45
  Wow, that's a low-resolution view.
• 27:47
  Wow, there's a lot of things that you're not accounting for in that view.
• 27:52
  Y- you know, wouldn't it be better if we could say, "Oh, h- here is what, uh, what the individuals in question are, are, are best at"?
• 27:59
  Or, or maybe a better way, if you've got two systems, I, I don't know, I don't know what… I wasn't able to find anybody that's articulated this, right?
• 28:06
  But basically, if you've got two systems and one, one system can only calculate the, the, the, the, the comparative advantage at a very large unit amount, and the other system can calculate, can figure out what is the, what is the comparative advantage at a much lower level of resolution, right, cl- much closer to the individual, even if the individual itself is…
• 28:26
  it's kinda hard.
• 28:28
  Um, the one that can calculate the lower level will… i- is more efficient.
• 28:33
  I, I don't know that, that it'll win, but it's more efficient.
• 28:36
  Um, and, and, and so I, I actually think that's what's going on with China.
• 28:40
  I think that China's, um, you know, calculation or their imposition of, "Hey, we're gonna do things at a city-by-city level," actually, uh, means that they're more, they're, they're, they're more efficient, 'cause they, they basically say, "We want you to sort yourselves," right?
• 28:56
  "If you don't belong in what we have decreed this city is for, then go, go somewhere else," right?
• 29:03
  Um, so- So that's I think what's dri- You know, when people talk about the, the, the advantage, you know, how, how things are working out pretty well for China, I, I, I, I don't think that that is a, a, a very good… I don't think that what's going on there is that China's system as a whole is better, right?
• 29:25
  I think that what's going on is China is doing something that we, we are, we could do a lot better, but we are, we are kind of hamstringing ourselves, right?
• 29:34
  So, and, uh, the very next slide, thank you Thomas, is, uh, is the economy.
• 29:40
  What is the economy?
• 29:41
  Well, economy is derived from the Greek words oikos nomos or household law, the household organizing principle, right?
• 29:47
  And, and, and that meant that, like i- in the original Greek, this was at the level of an individual household.
• 29:54
  The economy was the, the economic activity, the, the productive activity of the house, right?
• 30:01
  Economy now means everyone who is playing the game of specialization together, so in some sense the entire nation, and in some sense the entire world.
• 30:09
  And what I'm gonna tell you is, as far as I can tell, this has only ever really worked within, you know, again, the nations formerly known as Christendom, within a group of people that could in some sense be called the household of God, right?
• 30:21
  Um, and, and the Christian answer I would put to you is to ask you what, what are the gifts of the people involved?
• 30:27
  How, how do we… Let- let's, let's shrink way down.
• 30:30
  We, we, we, um, we need to think about w- how do we make sure that we're being efficient with the deployment of labor?
• 30:39
  You know, um, my friend Mike Faulkner was on a couple weeks ago, talked about, you know, we, we have, uh, all, all financial instruments are ultimately calls on, on, uh, human behavior, right?
• 30:50
  Human, human activity.
• 30:52
  And so the higher quality the underlying human activity of your more and more abstracted financial instruments is, the better for you, right?
• 31:01
  So the, the way that we, the way that we get there is i- and, and, and basically th- and this is kind of, uh, a statement of faith more than it is anything else, but the Christian concept was if you are in the faith, you have valuable gifts given to you by the ultimate patron, you know, Christ our guarantor, and sanctification is the discipline of using those gifts well, right?
• 31:21
  So to put it another way, if you do not see a way of mutually benefiting from the other people with whom you are called to be in a relationship, and, and, and, you know, if… I, I kind of consult with people on helping them understand.
• 31:33
  Basically, the people that you're called to be in a relationship with are the, are the people in, in the heat map, right?
• 31:37
  Like you, you, you have some concept of the order of mores.
• 31:40
  You have some concept of the people that you're supposed to be in a relationship with.
• 31:43
  If you don't know how to mutually benefit from them, then there's a sanctification issue, right?
• 31:48
  It, it may not be you, right?
• 31:50
  It might be them.
• 31:50
  It might be their, their problem.
• 31:52
  But not being able to build a mutually beneficial relationship means that someone is cut off from the, the author of grace, and that is the problem that needs to get fixed.
• 31:59
  And this, this was, you know, basically how people … This is why people that had problems, uh, for, you know, would come to the, to the village priest.
• 32:07
  They would say, "There's something, there's something wrong here, and we need to, we need to figure out how to, how to integrate with each other better because we already have something valuable," right?
• 32:18
  Now Again, you know, the neoliberal answer is, is, is quite different.
• 32:22
  They don't believe in innate qualities.
• 32:24
  They don't believe in, in… I mean, to a neoliberal, even kind of stable specialties are, are inefficient, right?
• 32:30
  Uh, learn to code, right?
• 32:32
  They, they, they don't wanna even acknowledge that, that training has long-term optimization effects, you know, let alone that, that people have innate interests or qualities that make them more able to acquire certain skills and less able to acquire other skills, and that, you know, the, you know, the reality is, is, is, is not just training.
• 32:49
  It's you have… There, there are certain things that you're gonna be better at.
• 32:53
  That means you c- not just can learn it faster, you can learn it faster, but that there is some absolute limit that you're not gonna be able to, to, to get above, right?
• 33:03
  And, and, and IQ, while important and vital, it does not allow you to be equally motivated and attentive in all contexts, right?
• 33:10
  Um, you know, w- what, what do you get when you, um, when you try to force yourself to be interested in something that you don't love, that you don't, you know, model or connect with emotionally?
• 33:20
  And the answer is you get slop, right?
• 33:22
  I mean, that's, that's what's going on there.
• 33:24
  You get, you get the death of taste.
• 33:26
  So requi- recognizing that things have an essential nature which is required to be a Christian should make us better at all of these games, right?
• 33:33
  We should be more able to say, "What is the best use of this person?" Right?
• 33:39
  We, we, we should be able to sort people into the right boxes, and that should allow us ultimately to build hyper-efficient, hyper, um, hyper-productive organizations, okay?
• 33:51
  Now, broadly, um, you know, we, we, we don't do this, right?
• 33:55
  There's kinda two big problems with, uh, with businesses in, in l- you know, the Christian, the conservative, the right-wing.
• 34:01
  You can call it a bunch of different things.
• 34:02
  They're all, they're all basically the same people in, in any given town.
• 34:06
  Um, and there's two basic reasons why people, uh, y- you know, can't scale.
• 34:09
  The first is, is that, is that they have a, a, a very clear sense of their calling, and so they're very suspicious of people that don't share their particular, like, mission in life, right?
• 34:21
  They don't, they don't have an understanding of, "Well, sh- I d- I don't want long-term ownership in my company." And that's great, right?
• 34:29
  Like, it's great to, it's great to have, um, to have that, that concern for your calling.
• 34:35
  Um, but You know, when you, when you say to an investor, "Hey, I want y- you know, to, to take your money for three to five years, and we're gonna double or triple my business. I'm gonna pay you back, right? And then I'm gonna go my merry way."
• 34:50
  What that sounds like to an investor is, uh, is, is sort of the equivalent of telling a woman, "Hey, I wanna get married for, you know, five years, and you can give me a couple of kids, and then we'll kind of split and go our, our separate ways. And, and you'll… Y- I'll have an heir, and you'll have an heir, and, and, and we'll be good, right?"
• 35:05
  If you do that, all of the high-quality women have just left the room.
• 35:09
  Okay?
• 35:10
  And critically, a woman does not need to share your particular calling in every, you know, specificity to be a good partner to you.
• 35:20
  All she needs is the commitment to treat you properly.
• 35:24
  Okay?
• 35:25
  Like, the, the, the, the, the, the problem is, is that people with a, a high sense of calling want everyone to be like them, and most people are not like them, definitionally.
• 35:35
  Right?
• 35:36
  Um, so that, that's number one.
• 35:38
  The, the second reason is they, they don't have a good way of identifying what people are going to be good and satisfied at, right?
• 35:44
  Are, are people working for you, you know, just for the money?
• 35:47
  If, if they're working for you just for the money, then they're gonna be equally happy to go somewhere else and work for the money there, especially if it's more money.
• 35:54
  Um, and I mean, I suppose this would be not too terrible in a system with, you know, a stable currency and, and, uh, you know, our… If our political enemies didn't control a massive money-printing machine, uh, that would be okay.
• 36:07
  Still wouldn't be ideal, but it'd be okay.
• 36:09
  But as it stands, I, you know, I, I, I really, I really get frustrated with people that they're like, "Well, well, it's okay to just have people that are working for the money."
• 36:16
  No, no, you need people that are committed to the same things.
• 36:19
  You need people, but they don't have to be, they don't have to be identical to you in their long-term vision.
• 36:26
  All they have to do is say, "Hey, this is what we want. You're providing it, and, and so we're gonna be loyal to you, and we're gonna, we're gonna stick with you."
• 36:33
  That's all you need, right?
• 36:35
  Um, you don't need them to understand you, right?
• 36:38
  Um, I'm giving relational advice at this point.
• 36:41
  So, you know, unfortunately, uh, the, the, the… We, we share, many, many people in my community, uh, they share a framework that we are all genderless, featureless, identical soul units that get assigned to a gender at birth.
• 36:54
  And, and of course, that's a leftist framework.
• 36:56
  That's the basis of, you know, trans ideology, right?
• 36:59
  Um, they, they, they hate the idea that men and women have different essential characteristics.
• 37:04
  Um, and, and, you know, it, it's, it's important to understand You know, with, with all, with all respect to, to Jordan Peterson, there are different types of people, right?
• 37:14
  Um, there are discrete amounts of, of, uh … There, there are different types of people and, and it's not … I- it's a discrete number and, and as, you know, as my friend Mike Faulkner says, "And it's not 20," right?
• 37:25
  There, there's a whole bunch of different ways of categorizing people.
• 37:28
  You know, you can … There, there's, there's four-type structures all the way up to nine, some, you know, people at seven different types of people.
• 37:34
  Okay, fine, right?
• 37:36
  Um, I'm, I'm, I'm not endorsing anyone.
• 37:40
  I mean, obviously mine is correct, right?
• 37:42
  My, my, my personal framework for how I sort people is, is obviously correct.
• 37:46
  Um, but, but the point is, is that, that people, people sort themselves into, and, and can be sorted into categories, right?
• 37:54
  Um, and those categories are, are useful, right?
• 37:57
  It's, it's important for them to be useful and, and we, we, we can't get mad at them for not being perfect, right?
• 38:03
  Uh, these are, these are … Even the ones that are incorrect, there, there is a certain amount of usefulness.
• 38:10
  Uh, perhaps a better way to think about a framework rather than, than asking is the framework, you know, true, you know, in some absolute divine sense, right?
• 38:20
  Uh, it, it might be the case that the way that someone sees the world, the frameworks that they, they, they use are pre-optimized to a particular calling or a particular function, right?
• 38:29
  So the way that you sort people probably is intimately connected with the thing that you're trying to sort them for, right?
• 38:38
  There aren't neutral sorting criteria, right?
• 38:43
  And then you, you know, you, you're able to move forward and, and say, "Well, now, now we're gonna o- take, take these, these buckets of people." And, and that's true even, you know, you've got like, uh, the platonic, you know, Plato divided people into five different types of souls, right?
• 38:58
  Plato was doing that for a, a particular political purpose.
• 39:02
  He, he wanted people to think about how would you organize a city, how would you organize a political system, okay?
• 39:08
  So if you try to use the platonic frameworks, the, the platonic types of souls for building a business, well, it's not gonna be quite the same be- because a business is not a political entity.
• 39:20
  But there are some similarities, and the things that Plato was noticing will, will help you, right?
• 39:26
  And, and in case anybody doesn't know, the, the pl- the platonic division is you got, you got the philosopher kings, which are, who are virtue-based, and then you've got the, the people that are honor-based, let's call those the warrior class.
• 39:37
  Uh, then you have the people that are, um, you know, people-based, which is like maybe your merchant class, the people that are, that are thing-based, that are focused on, on tangible objects, like artisans, and the people that are pleasure-based, which are your, your, your slave class, if you will.
• 39:52
  Um, people get very upset about that, right?
• 39:56
  It's a super effective framework.
• 39:57
  If you walk through life thinking, "Oh, well, you know, maybe, maybe Plato had something… Maybe Plato was correctly understanding, uh, that there's, there's a bunch of people that fall into each of these five categories," right?
• 40:08
  Uh, maybe you'll do well, okay?
• 40:10
  Maybe you'll do well.
• 40:11
  So
• 40:13
  Um
• 40:18
  So, you know, in The Puritan Gift, um, the, the authors, the Hopper brothers note that, that American factory workers, that- that's workers on the assembly line, would have this habit of gathering around any point where it broke and respectfully offering opinions and all collectively trying to fix it.
• 40:32
  So their counterparts in Britain and Europe more generally would take the opportunity to enjoy a break.
• 40:36
  N- now, this made the American factories more productive objectively.
• 40:41
  Um, and, and, and this, this, this habit, this thing that people would do where, hey, somebody breaks down and literally everybody just kind of moves around and, and, and clusters around it in a circle, and they're all looking at the problem, and you're all sharing, right?
• 40:56
  Um, this is based in many ways on, you know, the Baptist Bible study, especially the Reformed Baptist Bible study, right?
• 41:02
  People would, would have this concept everyone has something to contribute, and even if somebody has nothing to contribute, a, a older, more senior person explaining the principles to somebody who understands less than you is part of a, a way to u- to s- to understand the problem.
• 41:17
  So, you know, you have, you know, these things that, that, um It, when people develop the skill of doing that well in, in, you know, Baptist churches.
• 41:28
  You see that, like, in, in Bible study fellowship today is a great example.
• 41:32
  Uh, you, you can go there.
• 41:33
  Everyone, you know, quickly learns the basics, and then you're all expected to contribute.
• 41:38
  This is a really, this is a really powerful technology, right?
• 41:41
  Um, and, and it has its place.
• 41:44
  The problem is, is that not… The entire world is not, um, a mechanical problem, right?
• 41:50
  The, the entire world is not the kind of things that you can apply, you know, the, the, the, the wisdom of crowds to, as it were, right?
• 41:57
  Um, 'cause it, this is kind of a wisdom of crowds thing.
• 42:01
  In many ways, what we did was we took this cultural habit, we, we sort of took the, the Baptist-y, uh, theology out of it.
• 42:09
  Everyone learned, okay, well, when you've got a problem, you just kind of swarm the problem with people, and you all talk about it.
• 42:15
  And, and at some point, a solution will emerge.
• 42:19
  Um, this, this ha- this was a good solution at a particular time in Ame- in, in the development of American companies.
• 42:28
  It had a, a, a, a outsize impact on American productivity from, let's say, 1910 to 1960.
• 42:33
  Okay?
• 42:34
  Through, through World War II, all right?
• 42:36
  Wonderful, okay?
• 42:38
  That's not the only way of solving, solving a problem, right?
• 42:41
  I- in fact, most of the time… So, so i- so we're still doing this.
• 42:45
  Like, the, the, the point that I wanna make is what we have tried to do is make this the everything solution.
• 42:49
  We have tried to make the Baptist Bible study the everything.
• 42:52
  Now, I'm a Baptist.
• 42:53
  I love the Baptist Bible study, right?
• 42:55
  I, I, I, I love the freedom of it.
• 42:56
  I love the ability to interact.
• 42:58
  It, it works really well when you're dealing with kind of foundational problems that you can, that you can sort back through when everyone in, in the room has a, a common culture and kind of a common knowledge of, of, of the text that we're dealing with.
• 43:12
  Great.
• 43:12
  Okay?
• 43:13
  And so that's true.
• 43:15
  But it's also true that the skill of managing companies, what, you know, the Hopper brothers called collegiality, is, uh, a combination of, of we might call it the Lutheran University, you know, model, a- administrative model, and Presbyterian polity.
• 43:28
  Th- those, those are actually remarkably similar.
• 43:30
  Um, and so where they overlap is kind of how the management structure was done, again, for that similar period, maybe, maybe a little earlier, right?
• 43:37
  Probably American companies started being organized that way from maybe call it 1880, a- again, until 1960, and the, the, the quality movement, the early consultants kinda, kinda tore that down, right?
• 43:49
  So, but the problem is, so, so, but the, but the point is, is that that's, that, in order to do that model, you have to sort people into different, into different types, right?
• 43:59
  So to do the, the, the, the Presbyterian polity model, the collegiality model, uh, one of the rituals that they do and as part of collegiality is you, uh, you, you have the, the junior person talk first, and then you go up in rank and, and, and, you know, there's these kind of complicated, uh, dominance hierarchy ga- games that people play where the first person to speak is, is, is, is admitting that they're of lower rank than the pr- people that haven't spoken yet, and good, good, good times.
• 44:26
  Uh, uh, it was a better world when that was the nature of our corporate politics, let's say.
• 44:32
  Um- So modern frameworks like DiSC, uh, work with the idea that in a conversation or work environment, different people playing different roles actually make modern work more efficient, right?
• 44:43
  And, and so we're, we're okay with that, like, as a, as a conversational, as a decision-making metric, but we doubt our ability to sort people.
• 44:51
  We have a sense of moral hazard about looking at someone and saying, "Here is what you're, you're for." Okay?
• 44:56
  And, and that leaves us with a paradox.
• 44:58
  Now, I, I'm not saying that, uh, a framework that, that, that you can articulate or that you've gotten from your ancestors is correct in every respect.
• 45:06
  In fact, I'm saying it's gonna be wrong in some respect.
• 45:09
  You know, the reality is all frameworks are optimized for a pretty specific situation.
• 45:14
  So if you force everyone in at all time, you know, in all times to fit within, you know, these boxes that you receive from your ancestors, you will harm some people, okay?
• 45:23
  Though not nearly as many as the leftists claim.
• 45:26
  But if you don't sort anyone into boxes ever, you know, y- y- you're, you're, you're not gonna get anything done.
• 45:33
  You wind up needing that massive scale and access to a money-printing machine to obscure the fact that you are still sorting people.
• 45:40
  And, and, and the longer that we run this experiment, what happens is we, we zoom out to a larger layer of abstraction.
• 45:49
  We sort at that layer, and we do it really efficiently because, in fact, we are actually really good at sorting people.
• 45:54
  We know how to do it.
• 45:55
  Like, there's a ton of objective metrics.
• 45:57
  Like, you know, one of the things people say, "Well, what, what job should I start?" Or, "What, what business should I start?" And I'm like, have you gone through, uh, you know, an aptitude test?
• 46:05
  There are, you know, m- almost none of them actually are able to work for HR companies, right?
• 46:10
  But there are, there are these guys that, that, that, that got degrees in what it meant to be a, an HR professional 40 years ago, let's call it, 30 years ago, something like that.
• 46:19
  And they have this immense, you know, barrage of tests which are super cheap now and, and you can, you can get a readout that's gonna tell you what you're gonna be interested in, what you're gonna be good at, what roles in the company you're gonna, you're gonna be good at or struggle with, like, to an incredibly accurate degree.
• 46:37
  I- if you wanna know the answer to that question for yourself, you can get it, okay?
• 46:41
  Um, and you know, there, this, these aren't, they're, they're not free, but I, the, I've never seen one of those things that, that, that the entire package plus the consulting that came after to kind of help you deal with, you know, whatever your, your most, uh, you know, uh, pressing weaknesses were, was less, or was more than $5,000.
• 46:58
  Like, the, the actual testing part of figuring out who are you, where are you going, what are your hang-ups, what are you gonna be good at, what are you gonna enjoy, what are you gonna be interested in, we actually can do that really, really well, right?
• 47:11
  I mean, that's, I mean, all of the whole, the whole, you know, social media ecosystem, the dopamine sphere, we are really good at that, okay?
• 47:19
  But what's happened in our culture is we don't politically allow ourselves, because as soon as you do this, as soon as you sort people, you're gonna create hierarchy.
• 47:27
  You're gonna say, "This person goes in this box, and this box comes with a higher pay scale, higher social status, better outcomes in some respect," and everyone gets mad at you, right?
• 47:39
  So what do we do?
• 47:39
  We, we abstract out to, you know, the working group, and we just evaluate the working group as a whole.
• 47:44
  Well, then somebody notices that certain working groups have a different racial makeup than other working groups, so then you abstract out to the co- corporation.
• 47:51
  And then, well, now we have, you know, programs for minority-owned businesses and women-owned businesses, you know?
• 47:57
  All of these things.
• 47:58
  I, I, I actually, I accept veteran-owned businesses 'cause there's actually, like, a sense, it makes sense to try to leverage, you know, some of the, the skillsets that the US government has poured, you know, millions of dollars, uh, sometimes into, into having these people have.
• 48:09
  But most of those categories are just utter, like, it, it is just a thing that's trying to balance the fact that as soon as you sort, you create hierarchy.
• 48:19
  Okay?
• 48:20
  Um- And, and I think we need to, we need to get past this.
• 48:25
  We need to get to the point where we can say, "Hey, I have the right to sort people. I… Not just the right, I have the duty to sort people, and I'm good at it. I'm at least better than a system that is not trying." Okay?
• 48:39
  So have the courage of your convictions.
• 48:41
  You know, i- in- in the ancient world, the highest form of hospitality was to bring someone into your house and turn them from someone who was unable to create sufficient value to support themselves into somebody who was valuable enough to support themselves, right?
• 48:53
  Um, you know, a lot of people will attribute that to Maimonides.
• 48:56
  I, I mean, it, it… The, the idea that the highest form of patronage was taking a slave and training them, teaching them until they learned enough and grew enough and grew wise enough to participate in the dance of honor with you as a client, like, the, the Romans knew about that 1,400 years before Maimonides, right?
• 49:18
  Um, and, and 'cause, and it does, it… Valuable enough to support yourself does not mean that they did not have longterm, you know, power imbalance relationships.
• 49:27
  They did.
• 49:27
  Everyone did, and everyone does, okay?
• 49:31
  But to, to, to deny someone, to say, "Hey, oh, I, I can't take you in," um, what, i- if, uh, let's assume that the moral qualities are met, that you have some, some level of common guarantor, all of these things, y- we're saying, well, the wisdom of my family and my ancestors and ultimately my god is insufficient to help this person.
• 49:51
  It's insufficient to make this person useful or good or workable, right?
• 49:55
  And obviously, you know, there, there are people that are cripples, there are people that are disabled genuinely, right?
• 50:00
  Um, though, y- you know, in the modern, in a modern information economy, oftentimes there's a, there's a good way, there, there's still ways to, to find value in, in those people and to, to surround them with some arrangement of property, um, some, some capital investment that allows you to, at, at a minimum get, get to where you can feed them.
• 50:18
  Um, but People understood, hey, to say this, and I think this is still true.
• 50:25
  I think when we don't take people in, I think when we refuse people, right, um, we, in some part of our, our minds, we say our wisdom isn't great enough.
• 50:37
  Our God, our God's truth isn't, isn't big enough.
• 50:40
  Like, it, it's not, it's not real enough for me to be able to take people in and, and, and, um, and form bonds and, and, and, and have a way of dealing with this stuff, right?
• 50:50
  So, um, you know, the, again, the way the Christians solved this problem was by focusing on, on the common guarantor, right?
• 50:58
  Uh, 1 Corinthians 16 says, "Now, brothers and sisters, you know that the members of the household of Stephanas were the first converts in Achaia, and they have devoted themselves to the service of the saints.
• 51:06
  I urge you to put yourselves at the service of such people, and of everyone who works and toils with them." Right?
• 51:11
  Now, w- when we say, modern readers read, "Put yourselves at the service of such people," um, you know, they, they think, "Oh, well, you know, this person, uh, we, we should, we should, like, help them when they're in town," kind of a deal, right?
• 51:24
  Uh, like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going to show hospitality to them And, and I'm not saying that Paul is saying that because they gave to the church they should benefit, but he is saying, "Hey, these are, these are quality people." Paul is saying these people have shown themselves to be good mediators in the sense of being like a sub-patron.
• 51:42
  So if you need a patron, and a lot of people need patrons then as now, you should join what they are doing, including, I, I, I would, I would believe potentially joining their household.
• 51:51
  The word for, you know, you know, uh, serve, you know, put yourself in their service is the word from for submit, hupotasso, right?
• 51:59
  From, uh, you know, the famous wives submit to your husbands passage.
• 52:02
  Right?
• 52:02
  Why, why would you do this?
• 52:04
  Why would you submit to somebody that, that has, that has served the church well?
• 52:08
  It's 'cause you have the same guarantor, right?
• 52:11
  Now, I've been, I've been kind of building up a moral case for why you should do this, why you should take people into your house and sort people.
• 52:19
  And, and w- what, what are you concerned about?
• 52:21
  You're concerned about a real thing, okay?
• 52:22
  You are concerned about i- let's call it irreversible opportunity costs, right?
• 52:26
  And you're mostly concerned about this because you're right-wing and moral and all of those things, right?
• 52:29
  If you were just sort of a sociopath, you would just give advice and, and not worry about it.
• 52:34
  Um, I mean, there are, there are, you know, left-wing soci- or th- there, there are right-wing sociopaths, uh, as well, of course.
• 52:40
  You know, I think of the, the, the quiver full movement, right?
• 52:42
  A lot of these, these, uh, these pastors that would give instruction to people and tell them, "Well, do this and do this," and, and they, they absolutely refuse to accept that they had a- any economic responsibility when, when many of those decisions turned out terribly, right?
• 52:56
  And so, you know, kind of in an overcorrection in many cases for this, like the, the, the, the current right-wing movement has this sense.
• 53:03
  If you give somebody a clear determined answer of do this, that you are, you know, morally responsible for them if it, if it doesn't pay off, right?
• 53:11
  And kind of, you know, many people say, "Well, well, I…
• 53:14
  The, the answer is just to make it more transactional.
• 53:16
  It's not my responsibility.
• 53:17
  I, I do the best I can, and if it doesn't work out for them, that's on them.
• 53:20
  They shouldn't have trusted me." And what I want to say to you is this is leading to the collapse of Western civilization.
• 53:26
  That framework, that concept of, "Well, you shouldn't have trusted me," okay?
• 53:31
  That is the hearts of the fathers turning away from the children, which then results in the children turning away from the fathers, which then results in a curse, a devastation of the land, right?
• 53:40
  'Cause, 'cause if children don't defer gratification by trusting in the future, right?
• 53:45
  Like, so be- you know, they, again, some of these, Peterson and some of these other thinkers, they, they talk about, well, sacrificing is trusting in the future.
• 53:52
  It's, it's, it's, it's, it's believing in the future.
• 53:56
  I, I, I think- When I read the Bible, when I, when I read the ancients, I, I would say you're… These, this is categorized more as, as, as trusting the father, right?
• 54:05
  This can be framed as your specific father, a class of father elders, the father of the nation, you know, like a dictator or something or, you know, God the father.
• 54:13
  It, it all works on the same piece of the feudal instinct.
• 54:16
  It's I trust that my father is good, right?
• 54:19
  And so if I, if I defer gratification s- between now and when the deferred gratification pays off, I will be okay, right?
• 54:28
  That, that is built based on an, an idea that there, there is some kind of paternal figure or, you know, potentially that you're a paternal figure.
• 54:36
  But many, many people need more than that, right?
• 54:39
  So th- th- there, th- there are these important questions, right?
• 54:42
  How should my children be raised, and how do I pay for that?
• 54:45
  What am I going to specialize in?
• 54:46
  And, and, and we have to admit, like, there is genuine opportunity cost for getting this wrong or, or for things changing, right?
• 54:53
  Um, how will I be taken care of in old age?
• 54:56
  Who is going to pay for all of this, right?
• 54:58
  And, and, and maybe a better question is what makes it individually rational to engage in high-risk training?
• 55:04
  Um, you know, you can, you can always say, "Well, there's just a huge payoff if you're successful." Um, and what that creates, you know, if you, if you apply this, like, to the military context, what that creates in a military context is mercenaries who are loyal to the paycheck.
• 55:18
  And what that means is if it ever even looks like you're not gonna be able to, to keep that, that high payout, those people will go elsewhere.
• 55:26
  You know, they had this problem in, in the British Empire with the privateers, right?
• 55:30
  Um, if a privateer thought, like, there was a couple of points where, you know, the Crown didn't necessarily want the privateers taking the ships that they were taking, and the privateers, you know, had gotten used to getting really, really high payouts, generational wealth from a single, you know, kind of, uh, raiding voyage.
• 55:46
  And if it looked like the British Crown wasn't gonna pay out, those privateers went elsewhere, and, and many of them, you know, became pirates, right?
• 55:53
  So how do you, how do you avoid, you know, the mercenary problem?
• 55:57
  Well, you, uh, you, you have a guarantee.
• 55:59
  You know, successful military units through the ages have had very intense training casualties, so even the training is high risk, and that had to be paired with dying in training gets the same pa- payout as dying in combat.
• 56:11
  Uh, there's a guy named Tom Kratman, a retired lieutenant colonel from the US Army, um, and an author, um, of military science fiction.
• 56:17
  Um, and he, uh, and a, and a great poster.
• 56:20
  You can find him on Twitter, uh, him and John Ringo and some of these other, these other guys from the, uh, the Baen Books, uh, the Baen Book stable.
• 56:26
  They're still on Twitter, and it's glorious.
• 56:28
  I'm so happy.
• 56:29
  I just wish David Drake was still alive.
• 56:30
  Um, so, so Tom Kratman says, you know, he, he would say in order to really do this, in order to have, like, he… I think he, he thinks there should be, like, a significant number of deaths in training in order to know that you're doing it properly.
• 56:42
  Um, he would recommend the, the, the, even the, the military honors, the medals, right, be granted to training deaths.
• 56:50
  Okay?
• 56:52
  So, and then, and you see, you know, you see a, a similar thing in, in, uh, one of the… As, as I've studied birth rates and fertility.
• 56:59
  I'm not… It's not clear to me, people talk about, well, you know, in times past people were e- economically incentivized to have children.
• 57:04
  It's really not clear to me, frankly, that, uh, that, that, you know, the 20-somethings, you know, husband and wife were ever incentivized to have children.
• 57:14
  What it looks like is the clan, the tribe, the family unit, the household was, was incentivized to have children.
• 57:22
  It, it had people that were able to, to think long-term, to look into the future to say, "Hey, we need more children coming up to, you know, pay for what the household did in taking care of its old people," which, which was how the whole world operated before pension plans were invented.
• 57:36
  Okay?
• 57:37
  Um, those households were able to say, "We're incentivized for you to have children. How do we make it worth your while?" So you have this market intermediary, right?
• 57:47
  And, and what it looks like to me is because we have removed the intermediary, well, now we're just having a market failure.
• 57:53
  There's no one, there's, there's no one that's connecting between the unit that, that gets the benefit of children and the…
• 58:00
  You know, 'cause, 'cause parents in many ways, you know, there's this, this long-term, you know, feminist observation that we have socialized the benefits of, of, uh, raising high-quality children and, and privatized the costs.
• 58:11
  Um, and, and not just privatized, but, but pushed the, the cost of raising children down to the level of the nuclear family which is, is, again, just not how things were done, uh, around most of the world.
• 58:22
  So-
• 58:25
  All right, I'm trying to, trying to wrap it up.
• 58:26
  So what does this look like?
• 58:27
  You know, w- we have a K through 12 education system which is socialized.
• 58:31
  We have college degrees which are debt financed.
• 58:33
  Actually, interestingly enough, uh, the debt financed, uh, uh, when I say debt financed, the, the form of debt that we have in our student loans technically qualifies as debt bondage or slavery under international law.
• 58:45
  The US is not able to sign, um, uh, one of the major, uh, anti-slavery treaties, international treaties, I think it's the second optional protocol to the ICCPR, if I recall correctly, uh, because our, our student loan programs are, are, uh, you know, qualify as a slavery program.
• 59:00
  And then we have, you know, retirement, your pension plans, your 401ks.
• 59:03
  And I think the, the question is, that you gotta ask yourself, is can you do better than socialized K through 12 education?
• 59:10
  Can you do better than, than, than a mass pension plan or a 401k?
• 59:14
  And the answer is frequently yes, right?
• 59:17
  Especially if you're a high agency, high IQ employer type of a person.
• 59:21
  Can you do better than what the system is offering your people?
• 59:24
  Many times yes, okay?
• 59:27
  Um, so what does it look like?
• 59:28
  In, in some respects it looks like, you know, a pension or insurance program.
• 59:32
  Um, it looks like facilitating the education of the children.
• 59:34
  At some point you're gonna have to start a school.
• 59:36
  That's okay.
• 59:37
  That's cheaper than ever, easier than ever.
• 59:39
  Now, the hard one is student loans.
• 59:40
  Uh, you know, it is actually quite difficult to compete with slave contracts in, in, you know, in an eco- economic system.
• 59:46
  You kinda, you, you do need to ban slavery at some point if you wanna be able to do stuff.
• 59:50
  But you can still leverage them, okay?
• 59:52
  You can, you can start, you know, some- something that's gonna meet this need.
• 59:56
  Um, now one of the points I'll… I, I'm giving you examples.
• 59:59
  You know, we have a school, we have a pension company or, you know, pension plan, a fund.
• 1:00:04
  We have, um, you know, a, a loan fund or something that pays for education.
• 1:00:08
  And those are, you know, kind of bro- one to many, uh- structures.
• 1:00:14
  You have, you have one central point where, where a bunch of people come together and pool what they're doing.
• 1:00:21
  Okay?
• 1:00:21
  And that's a, that's a very, that's a very economically efficient way of doing it.
• 1:00:25
  Um, and, and, and you can do kind of these flat companies with, with maybe one or two levels of hierarchy, and that's it.
• 1:00:31
  Um, and that is a result, that's something you can do when the law gives you good limited liability, um, you know, protection, right?
• 1:00:39
  If the law does not give you good limited liability protection, then you're gonna need something more like a, like a, like a chain of guarantees.
• 1:00:47
  You need, you're gonna need something more like the feudal system with a bunch of different players, each of whom have their own little pot, and who can be, you know, reinforced by people above them if they're willing to, to hand over responsibility or hand over, you know, say, "Hey, I, I, I've got to bail out, but, uh, I, I paid you," sort of my reinsurer, um, "I paid you something and, and so now I'm handing over control of this ongoing liability.
• 1:01:12
  I'm passing the buck to you." Right?
• 1:01:14
  Um, ironically, i- if it's, this, you need that, that, that, that tiered system either if the law gives you no limited liability protections for your flat entity or too much limited liability protection because then, you know, the insurance company notices, "Oh, I don't have to pay out to any of these people that are, that are, that are making claims."
• 1:01:33
  Um, in general, and, and, and we'll probably get more into this in the Q&A, you need non-hostile liabilities to travel further than hostile liabilities 'cause you're, you're engaging effectively in a kind of a liability swap, right?
• 1:01:46
  Um, but, but the, the final point that I wanna make is, you know, when you want somebody to accept your framework, you're gonna say, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna create a box for you.
• 1:01:53
  You're gonna live in this box.
• 1:01:54
  You're gonna optimize yourself for this box," right?
• 1:01:57
  You have to have two things.
• 1:01:58
  One, you have to have the right to terminate a relationship for, for immoral behavior, right?
• 1:02:02
  So, uh, you know, may- maybe that means you don't, that these relationships can't be W2 employment.
• 1:02:07
  Maybe that's what it means.
• 1:02:08
  Um, and you have to offer a risk mitigation product, right?
• 1:02:12
  But you can get paid for the risk mitigation piece.
• 1:02:16
  Okay?
• 1:02:18
  Um, so l- l- I'll give you a final example.
• 1:02:22
  Uh, an investment company that was invested in the businesses of, of a, of a series of families long-term, this solves the what will I or my kids specialize in, but you have to be able to train other people in the unique character you want them to have.
• 1:02:35
  You have to be able to give them a, a degree in Eunice, right?
• 1:02:38
  You, what, you have to have them a degree in, in what your family does, right?
• 1:02:42
  Um, then if you want to solve the, the pension plan aspect, you, you need to have a fund, you need to have a, a trust management structure or an investment advisor who's investing your money so that you have enough money to provide for yourself, and you have enough money to provide for your children.
• 1:02:57
  You know, one of the people talk about you need $5 million, right, to, to be stable, right?
• 1:03:02
  To, to, to get some, like, a 4% return.
• 1:03:04
  But if you're doing the generational thing, if you have people coming up, um, then you, you don't just need 5 million.
• 1:03:10
  You need a machine that produces another $5 million per kid, let's say, every, every 20 years or whatever, right?
• 1:03:19
  Um, and then, and then you're probably gonna have to, you know, again, in the current environment, you're probably gonna have to start a school.
• 1:03:24
  You're probably gonna have to start, you know, some kind of, like, a university or get access to a university so you can get government money.
• 1:03:29
  Um, but you do need cut…
• 1:03:31
  If you take government money, you need cutouts, right?
• 1:03:33
  Um, there's, there's, there's a… There are smart ways of, of accepting government money, and there are dumb ways of accepting government money.
• 1:03:38
  And, uh, by and large, starting a charter school and accepting vouchers is a dumb way.
• 1:03:43
  Okay.
• 1:03:44
  But in conclusion, you can incentivize yourself to want other people to succeed.
• 1:03:47
  The idea is, hey, I, I wanna be positioned so that my relationship with my brother, he, he, he is, he is loyal to me.
• 1:03:56
  I have influenced his life.
• 1:03:57
  I have told him, "Hey, this is the thing you need to specialize for," which has an opportunity cost that he is paying.
• 1:04:04
  And in exchange for that, I've made a promise to him that I'm gonna take care of his kids, right, if it doesn't pay out.
• 1:04:11
  Now, do I want to raise his kids?
• 1:04:13
  Do I want to pay for the raising of his kids?
• 1:04:15
  No.
• 1:04:17
  And, and, and the way that I accomplish that is I help him succeed, right?
• 1:04:23
  I help him succeed.
• 1:04:24
  I plan to help him succeed.
• 1:04:26
  I hedge against the risk that he won't succeed.
• 1:04:28
  And, and, and, and the great thing about this is if you can kind of show the person that you're helping the hedge that you're holding in the event that they don't succeed, many times they will pay you additional money to hold the hedge for them.
• 1:04:42
  And, and so what I'm saying is take the money.
• 1:04:44
  That's all I'm saying.
• 1:04:45
  Okay.
• 1:04:46
  So now we are going to move into the Q&A.
• 1:04:51
  Um, and so thank you everybody for, uh, for joining the free portion.