Great Houses

Thank you everyone and welcome to episode two of The Great Houses Forum.

So, the purpose of this podcast is to talk about the nature of that, uh, that wonderful idea called Great Houses and long term to provide, as the name suggests, a forum for people to
discuss how to become great houses, how to join great houses, and, and really how to use this and ancient social technology for the good of us and for our children, um, and our lineages.

So thank you so much for joining me.

Uh, right now we're, we're in some introductory material 'cause I'm gonna spend a couple episodes, or probably six or seven episodes and just go through and lay out some basic terminology for, for the folks that, uh, that are joining us.

And so we're, we're talking about what does it mean to join the covenantal economy?

What are the steps of joining the covenantal economy?

And my, the covenantal economy is my word for the, the, the different type of relationships that people in the Great houses space use to think about who they do business with.

Who do they, they do life with, how they interact with the people in their world.

So there's broadly three steps.

Um, to joining the covenantal economy.

First you gotta see it.

If you can't identify the covenantal economy, uh, you probably can't do any anything else with it.

Then you need to learn how to signal it.

And then finally, you need to learn how to satisfy the, the, the obligations.

'cause one of the, one of the barriers between people that are in the Great Houses space and people that are outside the Great Houses spaces, there is
just a dramatic cultural difference that makes it difficult for people that haven't ever thought about, well, how do I do life in this different way?

What are the assumptions of people in the great houses space?

And so we're gonna, we're gonna think about that together.

So last week we talked about long term iterative and aristocratic games.

Aristocratic is contradicted as, as opposed to democratic or industrial or mass produced.

Uh, some people might say globalism, globalist style games.

Um, we have the, you know, one of the things I'll say is, you know, industrialization has provided enormous amounts of wealth.

It's created a lot of blessings, and we can and should maintain those, but it's also contributed to a lot of social churn, a lot of turnover, a lot of instability.

And that has, you know, led to some, some, some negative outcomes.

I actually think that, that one of the reasons why we, we have such a, a, a problem with fertility in so many of our, of our countries is because people don't see any ability that, that there, it's very hard for them to plan for the long term.

There's no institutions they see lasting very long.

Um, and so, you know, we, we, we want to master the ability to use aristocratic games where it's useful, where it's necessary.

Okay.

And it's also important because it, aristocratic games are, are the kinds of games that you need at, on a business level to, to have generational continuity and be able to keep and maintain your wealth.

If you, if all you have is a, a. A democratic or an industrial model, your your costs are gonna be driven down.

You're either gonna be driven into some kind of bureaucratic regulatory capture, which ironically is a, is a, a type, it's a very immoral type, but it's still a type of aristocratic game.

Or you're gonna have to change your business model to focus not on, on the product that you can build in the short term, but on, on long-term services, long-term, high capital people,
intensive loyalty driven structures that lets you, you know, have, have, have something that's hard to build, hard to replicate, and that allows people to, to trust in you and you and them.

Okay.

So that's what we talked about last week.

And this week we're gonna talk about games of life as opposed to games of death and mediators.

So the, the title of this talk is Games of Life Require Mediators.

Um, and so we'll get into what is, what is a game of life?

What is a game of death and what is a mediator, uh, because it's a, it's a, it's a, a different type of, of organizational structure than you're probably used to, to thinking about.

So, so we'll start as I tend to start these talks.

Um, you know, some of you, some of the people in the audience will, I've, I've given this game of death, uh, game of Life talk.

In a number of different podcasts and then some more private forums.

But a death game is any game where the stakes are your life, your liberty, or, and as the founders would say that the pursuit of happiness.

Now I was raised Baptist and so it's, it's morally required that my three points iterate.

So, so, um, when we say pursuit of happiness, what do we mean?

We mean something on the spectrum between livelihood and legacy.

So if there is a game where losing means you're gonna lose your life, you're gonna lose your liberty and you're gonna lose your, your legacy for kind of the high net worth people or your livelihood for, for everybody else.

Those are very, very, very intense games.

We call this a death game because if those are the stakes, then, you know, aside from, you know, certain people that have strong pacifistic convictions and that's overwhelmingly a religious thing, men will kill rather than lose such such games.

Um, and, and this is a problem because much of modern corporate culture is framed as a war, a war to the knife.

People will read Sun Sue's art of war and, and be be thinking about, you know, in death ground.

And, you know, if, if what we want is for people to play the kinds of bounded games, so, so.

Business, any, any type of structure where you're operating within a regulatory environment, there are rules to that game, right?

Um, and, and if you make the penalty for losing the game worse than the penalty for, um, breaking the rules, what's gonna hap or, or the same as the penalty for breaking the rules.

What's gonna happen is people are always going to break the rules rather than, you know, willingly lose the game, but stay within the rules.

This is, this is a kind of a basic incentives, you know, game theory kind of way of thinking about this.

Um, and, and that's broadly what we see, uh, in, in, in our, our corporate structure.

Okay?

And we'll, we'll come back to that and talk a little bit more about, think a little more of that.

So, games of Life by contrast, are played for honor and for lifestyle.

They, they are, the stakes are not survival.

It's not a fear driven.

Some people might call this an honor driven rather than a fear driven mentality.

So the players are internally motivated by the honor of the thing they are pursuing and the love they have for the people that they're pursuing it with.

Okay?

Now, this doesn't mean that there isn't competition, all right?

Different members within the team are competing, okay?

They are, um, they are winning, they are working, they are doing the kinds of things that they need to, to, to make themselves better, okay?

But they are not.

Um, they, they don't see it as, as a, as a thing that, that might result in them being unable to feed their families.

Okay.

And, and, and the thing is, is that we know that, that actually at the higher levels of performance, probably there are certain people at the lower levels of performance that just need to be driven.

At least that's the, that's the going theory in our culture.

And, uh, a lot of people are, are fairly invested in that.

I, I don't know if that's true or not, but, but certainly at the higher levels of performance, we understand that having people that are, that are
fear-driven, that are very worried, that are, you know, constantly thinking, oh my gosh, I'm gonna lose and then I'm gonna, and then I'm gonna be done.

I'm not gonna, I'm, and there's gonna be some condition that, that, that means absolute personal tragedy, collapse, bad stuff, right?

If that those are the stakes, then you, you're, you're gonna have a problem with, with, again, people engaging in, in this, this zero something.

Well, if losing is the ultimate bad, and, and, and if you would never choose to follow the rules and thereby lose the game because losing the game puts you outta the game, right?

Or, or, or results in immediate personal tragedy, the worst set of outcomes that you could, that you could have, um, then no one's ever gonna follow the rules.

This is, this is, this is, uh, something that, that seems very basic and so I say it multiple times, but it, we really have a problem thinking about how do we make sure.

That there is some floor, some level of protection for people who follow the rules, but don't win the game, whatever the game might be.

Okay.

And, and we think about this in, in, uh, professional sports, right?

So professional sports, the, the highest level of, of the teams, um, is, is those teams that can stop thinking about the fact that they need to compete for their jobs.

And they can play at a, at a really high level because they're playing with the goal of winning.

They're playing for the honor of receiving whatever it is, uh, that they're, that they're gonna play.

Now, there's a lot of people, and they talk about this as one of the great risks in, um, in professional athletics is you have someone that gets paid, they get generational wealth, and then their performance immediately falls off, right?

Because their whole life, they've been driven by fear, and now they have finally gotten to the point where that fear motive is removed and they don't always know how to, how to continue, you know, maintaining that, that, that high level, okay.

The, the classical example, of course is the family business, right?

Um, so the family business, like in the ancient world, you, you saw yourself and your brothers, all of all of the different sons of, of some, some father or father figure as on the same side.

So if you, you know, if you lost, then everyone would lose.

If you won, then everyone would gain and vice versa.

So you, you had every incentive to want your brothers to succeed 'cause that rebounded to your benefit and to your honor.

Whereas if you, if, if someone else lost, people would go to incredible lengths to ensure that they wouldn't lose access to, um, that, that, that their family members wouldn't dishonor themselves, wouldn't shame the family, as it were.

Um, and, and, and people forget that, that, that, that means that fundamentally there something has gone right in the aligning of incentives.

We like systems that can reliably produce people who will think of themselves as, you know what?

I don't want shame and dishonor to attach to my brother, my, my friend, my, you know, fellow faction member, because that means that shame and dishonor attaches to me.

Okay?

So, games of life are a team sport.

Um, you have to have a team one.

That's one of the things.

There's, there's some great books, uh, on the concept of, of, uh, first century honor cultures.

There's a book, uh, by a gentleman named, uh, uh, father Molina, um, which is Culture in the New Testament World.

And then there's another book that we'll get into by David De Silva, honor, patronage, kinship and Purity.

And one of the things that they both communicate is that, that these are team sports and you have to have a team, you know, playing the same rules in order for you to, to play a game of life.

That that's part of what, um, part of what allows this, this type of society to happen.

And kind of to paraphrase, Aristotle is not exactly what he says, but a man who does not need society, a man who does not need a team around him is either a God or a beast, right?

Um, and that's, that's, that's where we find ourselves in the modern, in the modern context.

So, uh, one of my favorite groups in this space is, is family teams there, which is a group outta Cincinnati.

And they, they, their, their catchphrase is, you know, helping men develop their families into a family team on mission.

And, and their core insight, the thing that, that they, they are at least talking about and thinking about is the idea that wins and losses are not individual.

They're, they're team based.

And, and that's broadly true, right?

In, in life if you win and everyone around you loses.

This is, this is kind of the, the classical startup founders dilemma, right?

Um, if everyone around you loses that, that doesn't, like, what, what, what does that gain you?

What is the benefit of that?

When you've climbed to the top of this thing as a solo individual and you've lost all of your family and you've lost all of your friends, or they're, they're all now, you know, basically only interested in you because of your money.

Uh, all of those things are, are, they seem hollow, they seem, they seem pointless.

And that's why we need a team.

Okay?

So either way, uh, the teams that matter all say the same thing, okay?

They, they, we succeed, we fail or succeed together.

And in an individual contest, which is usually some kind of training within the team, your brother plays for honor, and that, what does honor mean?

It means he is agreeing to follow some set of rules, some code.

And he will rather lose than break that code, which means that, that, that losing is not as, in terms of the outcomes for him are, is not as bad as breaking the rules.

Right.

Is losing his honor because his honor is what gives him access to some set of, you know, economic benefits.

You know, protection, housing, clothing, food, you know, some kind of, so social safety net.

I mean, in the ancient world, this was the, the explicit deal.

And, and what, what a lot of great houses are attempting to do is to, to recreate this.

So you would, you would rather lose a contest with your brother, okay?

Because if you lose the contest with your brother, at the end of the contest, you go and you sit at the same table and you basically eat the same food.

Now your brother might now sit at higher at the table.

He might have more social status.

He might have, you know, more control over the family's direction.

Okay?

But you are still at the table.

You're still gonna sleep under this roof.

You still are enjoying numerous and multiple benefits of being associated being a part of this family.

And ultimately you hope for his success because his success is your success, right?

His win is your.

Right.

And this is, you know, one of the, one of the things, and we'll get into this in, in future episodes, one of the things that great houses often have to do is they have to iterate to innovate.

So they have to, they say, well, we, we have this problem, we have this thing that's, that, that's coming down the line.

Some, something is changing in our industry.

Something is changing in the world or the regulatory environment, or, you know, there there's been a new technology invented and we have to figure out how we're gonna respond.

Well, the most efficient way.

So there's, there's basically two ways you can, you can do this, you can iterate in sequence, right?

Linear iteration, and you can try one thing, and then you can try another thing, and then you can try another thing.

And this is very slow, right?

And, and can be very costly, especially in terms of the most precious resource for a decision maker, which is always time.

So what you wanna do is to have multiple streams, parallel iteration, where Group A is trying one thing, group B is trying a similar thing, a
group C is trying and, and, and you have enough continuity, but also enough difference to track, okay, what, what, what is working and what's not.

Because we have theories, we kind of have some sense of what might be changing in our industry.

Okay?

Um, the problem with that there, that, that creates a social difficulty, right?

Which is that one or a couple of your family members are likely to succeed.

And the broad amount, most of your family members are likely to fail.

And if they view it as failing, this can very quickly become zero sum.

So what you have to do is, is to frame it as, hey, we are trying different things.

And, and the goal is for the family as a whole to discover what it is that we're doing.

You know, uh, Thomas Edison has that famous line.

I have not failed.

I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Right?

If you, if you, and, and this is all about framing, right?

If you frame for your families, Hey, we've got this working group and this working group, and this working group, and you know, A through A through B, or sorry, A through
A through G, and, uh, one of them is gonna succeed and all the rest of them are gonna fail, well, then you're gonna have one success and a bunch of failures in your family.

And as in fact, as it turns out, being in in close proximity in long-term relationship with failures is really hard.

It's sort of, sort of is unpleasant, right?

We don't like it.

Okay.

So having your family's a view of different, of the different paths of its children as, hey, we we're hedging our bets and one of us is gonna survive and so long as one of us survives, the team as a whole will survive is a really good idea, right?

And this is true of, you know, some people are gonna go into business and some people are gonna go into politics and some people are gonna go into the military and some people are gonna go into, you know, philanthropic ventures.

And all of those things can be seen as separate strategies.

Some of which are gonna pay off in different generations.

Right.

But we don't always know exactly what's gonna pay off.

Sometimes the best business strategy is to stay in the existing structure.

Sometimes the best business strategy is to go adopt a new technology and, and climb up like a rocket.

Okay.

And the, the main thing is this viewing, this game, viewing the ability to have people doing different things and seeing themselves as all contributing to the same goal requires a game of life.

It requires your family to have a strong mindset that says, we are not, uh, we might be in competition for, for honor and for glory and for status with within the family, and maybe even within the broader society.

But fundamentally, we are all on the same side, and we see each other's success as, as the success of all.

Okay.

And you know, it's really interesting, one of the things that, that, that you see at, at, at, again, these highest levels of performance.

Um, I'm, I'm, uh.

I've been aware of, uh, the, the career trajectories of a number of, of people that, uh, were in the McKinsey consulting space.

So one of the interesting things that happens in, in the, the top level consulting space is when you're on a partnership track, when you have kind of demonstrated
that you're the kind of person that, that, that could be or maybe ought to be a, a partner, what they'll do frequently is put you on a year long sabbatical, okay?

And they'll pay your full salary.

They might even give you a bonus, right?

They'll, they'll, they'll help you accomplish some dream.

Um, and, and, and my, my theory on, on why they do this is they don't want people that are motivated solely buy money, right?

If, if you're working at McKinsey for the salary rather than because you love or need the work.

Right.

Then, then, then you're not quite the right.

You, you might be a valuable associate.

You might be somebody that they really want in their organization, but you don't, they don't want you to become partner.

The people that they wanna become partner tend to be the people that six months into this year long sabbatical, they're like reaching, banging on the door saying, please let me in.

I'm, I'm sitting at my house.

I'm going crazy.

I need to work.

You know, the, the, the, uh, there's a, there's a phrase that I've heard in, in the, in the military context.

Um, you know, lack of a lack of stress, uh, trauma disorder, right?

Or, you know, from PTSD, well, it's, it's L-T-S-D-A lack, lack of it, right?

So there's certain people that they get to the point where a certain level of excitement, a certain level of high stakes, certain level of, of importance becomes normative to them.

And then when they go back to, let's call it normal life, they, they can't hack it, or it's very, it's very psychologically stressful, ironically, for them to be outside of that.

And that's what McKinsey is looking for.

Um, a generation or, or maybe two ago, uh, general Motors, famously, all of their factory managers, um, were independently wealthy.

They, they, they gave them certain stock options when they were kind of working their way up the chain.

And before you became a factory manager, um, you were required to liquidate a, a significant chunk of your stock in gm.

And you were, they, they wanted you to go.

They would teach you how to invest it.

And basically at the end of that process, they would say, okay, you are now independently wealthy.

You never need to work again.

Like we have set you up and, and, and this is amazing, think about this, right?

That not even a factory manager, but like a, somebody that was on the path up to being a factory manager, it was, was able to do that.

But, you know, that's a, that's a, that's a side sidebar, right?

You know, if you, you, you count the, the, the gold ounces that, uh, that, uh, Henry Ford's workers, then it would, it would shock and horrify you, right?

Uh, if you valued their, their wages in, in the thirties and gold.

But anyway, so they were able to do that, and then they would say to these people, these, these factory managers or potential factory managers, Hey, if, if, if what you're doing, if what the reason why you're doing this is for the money you've arrived, right?

And so if that's what you want, you've gotten it.

So leave, you know, you don't, you don't need to stay in our organization anymore.

We are not holding you back.

We are not tethering you.

We, we, there are no golden handcuffs involved in this.

You absolutely can leave and never show up, and you will be independently wealthy for the rest of your life.

But if what you want is to make this a great company, then, then, then press in and, and come alongside us and, and take this factory manager
position, not for the money, but, but in order to make GM and, and kind of, you know, America as a whole, uh, uh, a great place, right?

And then you think about kind of the, the opposite example, you know, uh, Elon Musk and, um, and, uh, Palmer Lucky and some of these top level founders, Peter Thiel has said similar things.

Uh, basically, you know, Elon and and Palmer have both expressed, you know, kind of their frustration with the number of startup founders who have a big exit.

Right.

Um, and, and, and people will, will frequently come back after a 20 million or a 30 million or a $50 million exit, but the number of people who hit a
hundred million dollars or 120 or $150 million that just stop, they go buy a yacht, and they never leave the yacht for the rest of their lives is staggering.

And, and it's actually a little frightening, like when you, when you encounter those folks, um, it's very difficult to, um, or not very difficult.

I, I don't know if, I don't know if difficult is the right word.

It is very unusual.

Uh, it's very rare for people to have a sufficient vision, a sufficient drive that says, Hey, I've gotten all of the money that I could ever spend for the rest of my life, and I'm still gonna
commit myself to a difficult, dangerous, you know, hazardous, maybe morally hazardous road, trying to, um, trying to build something, trying to build a legacy for myself and my children.

That's a, that's a very rare thing, and it's evidence that in their minds, they were playing a death game.

Now, this is really important to, uh, to great houses because what I'm gonna tell you is children will not play death games.

Okay?

Children who are forced to play death games with their family members will either break or they will leave.

Okay?

So, and, and, and, and you see this repeatedly.

Um, now, now, one of the hard things is in order to play a game of life with your children, you have to know what a game of life is.

You have to believe that it exists.

And you, and, and ideally you, you want to have acquired some, some skill sets.

'cause it's a related skill to, and we'll talk about kind of the skill of game of life in a minute.

It's a related skill to, to classical corporate management, but it's not exactly the same.

Like if you're good at it, sort of the difference, you know, I, I say the, the, the difference between, you know, standard corporate
structures and, and, and family patronage structures is kind of like the difference between football, American football and rugby, right?

They, they use a lot of the same skill sets.

If you're highly athletic, if you're talented in both, in one, you'll probably be somewhat talented in the other.

But the, the, the pacing and the, and the level of intimacy and the way that, that the plays work is very different, um, in, in one than in the other.

Okay?

So, uh, obviously not all games of life are familial in nature, but I would say that all familial games are necessarily games of life.

You have to give somebody some assurance that there, that there is a benefit that for keeping the rules and, and losing, you know, the game.

You have to have a way of, of having people who do not prevail in some contest for status or honor, and for them not to become losers or failures.

'cause if they become losers or failures, they will leave your family, right?

If you set something and, and, and people do this right, if you set something up so that only one of your kids can be a success and the rest of them are all losers and failures.

Well, you know, probably all of the losers and failures are gonna leave, or they're gonna stick around and they're gonna behave like losers and failures and who wants that, right?

But this is also true of patronage.

Okay.

So transitioning, uh, what is patronage?

Well, I'm not, I'm not actually gonna fully answer what is patronage.

We're gonna be talking a lot about patronage over, over the course of, of this series.

And then, and then as we get into the Great Houses Forum, patronage is in, in many ways, uh, one of the key skill sets and perhaps the skillset that, that allows people to build great houses
and to, and to incorporate both family members and, and non-family members into larger social structures of loyalty that allow them to, to, to build these multi-generational structures.

Right?

It's, it's, it's a way of aligning incentives and building relationships so that people have an incentives to, to stick around, not just for 10 years or a career, or even a lifetime, but,
but, so they're incentivized to raise their children to show you the same loyalty that they show or to your, to your children, the same loyalty that you that, that they're showing to you.

Okay.

So, uh, a brief definition, and we'll get into this, is patronage is a relationship where inequality is managed through reciprocity and mediators, right?

So, uh, you know, one, one of the things is we, we have to recognize that there are going to be relationships between people of unequal means.

This is really foreign to most Americans and, and most kind of westerners at this point, but especially Americans.

I think, I think largely this is because of the way that we do real estate.

So, in, in America, you know, most houses, most living situations, most residential setups are situated exclusively around people of a similar socioeconomic status, right?

Um, it, this was not the case in any other culture up to, up to the modern age, right?

You have, you have subdivisions where every house in the subdivision costs the same amount, right?

You have, you know, apartment complexes and most apartment complexes are required basically by law to have virtually the same price set within them.

Okay?

So the poor you always have with you, you, you're always gonna have people of differing, you know, socioeconomic statuses.

Um, but what I wanna say is in inequality does not have to mean dystopia.

Right.

It doesn't have to mean abuse, it doesn't have to mean that, well, we, well, we resent one another and that there's an an unbridgeable class barrier between us.

Right?

Or, or it.

And, and, and that doesn't mean that, that again, that, that there isn't a distinction, but that distinction can be seen as valuable and useful.

Um, you know, there, there are a lot of benefits to having in your world, somebody who, who can see things that you don't.

Right?

By the same token, there's a lot of benefits to having in your world, somebody who's, who's more focused on the practical details.

We, we, we need different focuses.

We need different specializations within complex organizations.

And right now we have, we have chosen as a culture to build, the only kinds of complex organizations that we build are these corporate structures that section off one chunk of people's lives.

They're working hours, and then they give people money and they expect them all to figure it all out, right?

I'm gonna give you a set amount of money, then you're supposed to go out in the, in the marketplace and, and, and engage in arms length transactions that are, that are going to provide for you and your family and, and for you to have a good life.

And increasingly what we've seen is that is just not working out, right?

Uh, certainly not for the, the, the amounts of money that most people can afford to pay.

Um, and, and, and people, you know, have a lot of different theories about why this is, or, or how to fix it.

But the, the reality is, is that if you pay people in money, um.

Increasingly, they're going to have a harder and harder time being able to get the kinds of outcomes that you would want for somebody you wanted to be in a long-term relationship with.

Right.

Okay.

So reciprocity.

What is reciprocity?

So, you know, one of the things when we're, when we're thinking about patronage, fundamentally you have to understand the patronage is not a a means of, of paying back in a precise accounting.

It's not a money lender relationship.

Right.

That's that DeSilva and, and I think Seneca, uh, says that it's not a money lender relationship.

What that means is in a money lender relationship, you're expected to pay back, right?

A sum certain of what you were given.

Okay.

And in, in reciprocity it, what what you're doing is, is you're offering back something that is important to the other person and that they cannot do themselves.

Okay?

Um, and, and, and frequently the, the reason why they can do is because it is not because they're physically incapable of doing it.

There's some social reason why they don't want to do it for themselves.

Um, and, and, and when we think about, so what is, what is a te uh, a piece of reciprocity?

What does that look like?

Um, the, the most important, the most common one is, is what's called the testimonial.

Right.

So, so the, one of the, the duties of a client in a patron client relationship in the ancient world was to say to someone, Hey, this is, you know, this person, my patron is a good person.

He helped me when no one else would.

He, he's never broken his word.

He, he was there for me.

You know, one of the, one of the, the incredible things that, that people have seen over the last, um, you know, the last week as, as Scott Adams, um, you know,
went through kind of his final hospice and then, and then ultimately passed away, was the number of people that Scott Adams had helped over the course of his life.

And, and they, they went out and they, they said, Hey, you know, Scott Adams did this for me and he did this for me, and he did this for me.

And he, and he was just a great person.

He was a great guy.

Um, I loved him.

I was loyal to him.

You know, there, there was, there was an incredible outpouring of, of this, uh, this expression of people wanting to say, Hey, I, I want to give back.

Not, not that I'm gonna give back in a way that I'm paying off what, what, what Scott Adams had done for me.

You know, one of the guys talked about that basically, you know, Scott had taken his Twitter had, had, had, um.

Mentioned his Twitter account and drove a lot of the early growth, just kind of skyrocketed him, helped him break through some of the early, 'cause there's some, there's some critical, uh, I'm
told, uh, barriers in terms of, in terms of number of followers and, you know, between a thousand followers and 10,000 followers and so on and so forth that are very, very difficult to overcome.

The, the, the bulk of humans never overcome those, uh, those, those barriers.

And because Scott Adams said, this is a great guy, he's super interesting, follow him overnight.

He was, he was just past that barrier.

Scott Adams just solved this problem for him.

Now, so far as I know, Scott Adams never, you know, parlayed those things into anything.

Though again, at, at, at some level, the, the level, the, the amount of people that Scott Adams had influenced the thinking positively about Donald Trump probably was related
to the, the fact that when he felt he was being mistreated by the medical establishment that, you know, the president of the United States and the Secretary of Health and
all of these people, you know, intervene dramatically in his case, if you'll remember that from, from five or six weeks or five or six months ago, um, that is a patronage.

You know, tho those are the principles of patronage, the principles of reciprocity taking effect.

Right?

And, and, and the main thing here is you want to do things in a way that people receive with gratitude.

So when we think about reciprocity, uh, the, the, the.

The word that they would've used.

The reciproc is kind of a modern word.

It's uh, maybe even a postmodern word.

It's, it's, it's this, you know, the, the, the reciprocation of, of duties.

But what, what they thought about, about this in the ancient world, uh, was, was grace or gratitude.

Um, and so I'm gonna, I'm gonna quote it length from a book called, uh, honor Patronage Kinship Impurity by a guy named David DeSilva.

Uh, just 'cause I find it, it's so helpful and he's so influenced my thought.

I I highly encourage all of you to, to read that book if you haven't yet.

So, uh, so, so we'll, we'll get into it and, and then I'll, uh, I'll, I'll, I'll add comments as, as I, as I feel led.

So here we go.

For the actual writers and readers of the New Testament, grace was not primarily a religious as opposed to a secular world.

Rather, it was used to speak of reciprocity among human beings and between mortals and gods.

Or in most Greco Roman literature, the gods.

This single word encapsulated the entire ethos of patronage relationships.

So, first, grace was used to refer to the willingness of a patron to grant some benefit to another person or to a group.

In this sense, it means favor in the sense of having a favorable disposition towards someone.

In Aristotle's words, grace Ka may be defined as helpfulness towards someone in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself or herself, but for that of the person helped.

Grace can also be used to speak of the response to a benefactor and his or her gifts, namely gratitude.

The Masani demonstrates this usage in his day, Corona, as he chides his audience for not responding honorably to those who have helped them in the past.

But you are so ungrateful, aristos, and wicked by nature, that having been made free out of slavery and wealth, out of poverty by these people.

You do not show gratitude.

The, the word for gratitude there is kaki or the, the, the feeling of gratitude toward them, but rather enriched yourself by taking action against them.

Okay?

And, and obviously grace is this, this incredible word that gets, that gets pull, pulled into the Christian story.

It's kind of the central concept of the Christian story.

This, this, the, you know, as the, as the Calvinist would say, grace, you know, the, the free gift of God.

Salvation is the free gift of God by grace alone through faith alone, right?

And, and.

This is, this was not a religious concept in the, in the ancient world.

It was the, the, the thing on which everything ran.

Okay?

So when we think about reciprocity, we think about grace, we think about people giving to one another and, and, and trying to give in a way that, that always heightens the honorable response that makes people experience gratitude.

Now, you've gotta, you've gotta have a certain, um, there, there's gotta be a certain level of expectation and understanding and cultural overlap.

Otherwise, you know, you're, you're just kind of pouring, pouring money or water into a hole, right?

But, uh, but they, they, they really had this sense of what, what we want is to, to have more people that are capable of playing the game.

You know, because, because when you think about this, um, one of the reasons why grace is the right word, uh, rather than this idea of
something that's owed, there's a, there's a lot of people that are, you know, Giordano Peterson calls it stacking up at the bottom, right?

And, and, and to some extent this is all always true, but we're, we're experiencing that right now.

People are stacking up at the bottom of our civilization.

And as you stack up at the bottom, it's actually really, really quite hard to start climbing up above.

You know, some people will call this the, the replicator problem, right?

So in, in Star Trek.

They have this concept of, of the replicator, which you can, you can make anything, you can make food, you can make metal, you can make weapons, you can, you can just, like, mass production is just a solved problem because you have this, this
replicator, and, and let's assume, I don't, I don't think this is actually true in the, uh, in the, in the Star Trek universe, but let's assume that, that a replicator was self-powered and that it could make more self-powered replicators, right?

It, it, this is the perfect, it, it can, it can perfectly reproduce itself.

So if you have a replicator, what could possibly incentivize you to give a replicator to somebody else, or, or another way to put that is what benefit does giving a replicator to someone else have for you?

Because anything they can do for you, you can do for yourself, at least in terms of material possessions.

If, if, if we are talking about literally any material want, need, or desire, right?

The replicator can do that for you.

So why would you ever give someone that?

And the answer is if you're motivated purely by, you know, sort of like, I, I, I just want the things that I want.

Um, like I, I need, I want everything to come back to me.

I want all of my relationships to be equal and level and to, to die owing no one anything.

And, and, and, and, and, uh, no one owing me anything.

Then you wouldn't, you wouldn't ever do that because you have no need.

There's nothing that this person could ever offer you that you wouldn't have in some sense given to them.

Right?

And again, people that are familiar with the Christian story will find that concept very familiar.

That is explicitly in the Christian concept, the, the state that people are in before God shows them grace.

And, and what I want, what I want to emphasize is this happens I think, more often in human relationships than we wanna admit, especially between parents and children.

Okay?

There is a very real sense in which everything that your children have, right?

Everything that they, that they received, every, all of their gifts, all of their talents, um, comes from you in, in, in the Roman context.

That was an explicitly at the level of theology they viewed.

You know, perhaps there was a, there was a, you could trace the lineage of, of your breath and your, your, your natural gifts, your genetic com, you know, your heritage back to a God up, up at some point in the chain.

But they very much emphasized no, you, you had a primary duty to your parents.

And the Chinese do a very similar thing, filial piety in the, in the Chinese context.

Um, you have a, you have a primal duty to your parents because everything you are is a result of them.

Okay.

The closest thing we have in the modern context is kind of the startup founder and the, and the angel investor, right?

Because the, the startup founder, he might have an idea, he might have all these things, but there are, there are impassable barriers, things that he cannot do without that first seed money, he can't even demonstrate that.

His idea, you know, he, he can't build a, not even a minimum viable product.

He can't even build a proof of concept, right?

So he might have a great idea, but he doesn't have the money to overcome this initial barrier.

And that means that in some sense, the money guy's contribution was necessary to all of his later successes.

Right?

Now, there, there continues to be those barriers, and so people come to the table and you have different, different series of fundraising.

That's how the venture capital game works, or the private equity game works.

But people have this sense of, well, I don't want to be in long-term.

I don't, I don't wanna owe somebody forever.

Right?

And if you say, well, my goal, the, the, the highest value that I have is I don't ever want to owe anybody in a, in a long-term way, what you are doing is cutting yourself off from grace.

By the same token, if you say, well, I don't ever want anybody to owe me forever.

People owing me is icky and yucky, and I just don't, I don't like it.

It feels morally hazardous.

And I, you know, my, my, I might, I might start getting accusations of, of, of, of privilege and various other, you know, other, uh, you know, woke, uh, woke shibas.

Okay.

But grace is very important.

Um, again, and, and, and so moving, moving back to the De Silva book, um, or well, before I move on.

The, the idea of, of wanting to avoid these long term relationships of, of obligation and reciprocity.

What you are saying is, I don't want grace and I don't want to have given grace to anybody else.

Which is not to put it mildly what the west was built on, rather the opposite.

The west was built on the idea of, hey, we want, I have received grace from God, and so I want to extend grace to others, and I'm very comfortable with them owing me because I owe him so much more.

And, and, and I mean, you, you see that, that is not like I expressed that in a very Protestant way, you can find people in, in, throughout the entire scope of, of scripture.

Like the best kings, right?

The best the people that, that, that won in when, when, uh, when the crusader states were, were set up and people, you know, the, the, the Europeans were actually able to establish some level of order and safety in the holy land.

They, the people that were successful in that, they had that exact mindset.

That exact mindset.

Um, so we need grace and we need to recapture this, this, this concept of grace.

So the, the ancient Romans had, had, they had literal gods and goddesses.

Um, the, the three graces were goddesses.

Um, and this is, these are, these are depictions of them.

So, and this is, um, de Silva, but he's quoting Seneca.

So the graces, or some would have it appear that there was one grace for bestowing a benefit, one for receiving it, and, and a third for returning it.

Why do the sisters hand in hand dance in a ring which returns upon itself for the reason that a benefit passing in its course from the hand of the up to hand returns, nevertheless to the giver.

The beauty of the whole is destroyed if the course is anywhere broken, and it has most beauty, if it is continuous and maintains an uninterrupted succession.

The graces are young because the memory of benefits ought not to grow old.

They are maidens because benefits are pure and holy and undefiled in the eyes of all, and the robes are transparent because benefits desire to be seen.

Okay?

And I think we need to re recapture this idea of reciprocity or grace, um, as, as one of the key pieces of having a game of life.

Okay?

If you're gonna have a game of life, you have to get comfortable with owing someone.

In fact, most of the time when you have these games of life, when you have people that are sitting around a table and they, and they say, well, you know what?

I'm, I'm gonna choose to lose rather than break the rules because breaking the rules is worse than losing.

Okay?

Why am I doing that?

Probably because I have some sense of, of, of primal loyalty.

Someone at this table, someone at presumably at the head of the table, right?

The father of this house has shown grace to me, and I owe him so much that I'm willing to, to play a game where I lose.

And I might have, you know, have some, some social status penalties because, not, not just 'cause I want the benefits, but actually because I owe him more, right?

He is the reason why I'm capable of playing this game at all, right?

And so I'm not going to dishonor him by playing the game that he has set me to in a shameful way.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So,

and, and now we're finally getting to the, to the, to the concept of mediation, which I told you we would get to.

So sometimes the most important gift a patron could give was access to an influence with another patron who actually had power over the benefit being sought for the sake of clarity.

A patron who provides access to another patron for his or her clients has been called a broker.

A classical term for this was mediator, and now I'm quoting from De Silva here.

So back to De Silva, Pliny introduces a client of his named Vons, Romanis to Rehan, who's the emperor, with a view to getting Vons a senatorial opponent or appointment.

He addresses Rehan clearly as a client, addressing his patron, and proceeds to ask a favor for Vons.

Pliny offers his own character as a guarantee of his own client's character.

And Han's favorable judgment of Pliny, not of Von who, whom Trehan does not know will become the basis for the emperor's granting of this favor.

Should the favor be granted, Von would be obliged not only to Trahan, but also to Pliny, who will in turn be further obligated to Trahan.

Okay?

So when we, when we think about having patrons, right?

'cause a, because a great house and, and, and a covenantal economy, you're gonna have, you're gonna have these high level patrons.

You're gonna have people who, you know, maybe they're not literally in possession of a, of a replicator, but, but they, they need nothing from you, right?

So how do you come to the positive attention of a powerful person?

How do you attack, attract and retain the patron's ins interest in your,

how does the patron even know what you want or what success looks like for you?

And the answer is the mediator.

Okay?

And when we talk, think about mediators.

You know, mediators did not just help you get a patron.

They were also always on call to mend the relationship.

And this is necessary because there is always a cultural barrier between patron and client.

They come from different places, they have different skills, they have different expectations.

And this leads to breakdowns in communication, right?

And, and, and, you know, pe people, you know, there, there are, there are just so many stories and, and, and in healthy cultures you will
tell these stories with a grain of humor, with a grain of salt, with the, with the ability to recognize, hey, we're different and that's okay.

You know, it's, it's actually a very bad thing that people don't tell jokes about interacting with, with richer people.

Right.

Uh, because that means that, that when you interact with somebody who has no concept of what your life is like.

Uh, it, it can be very difficult to, to negotiate now.

I mean, part of that is also the, the modern industrial age we have, there is a, there is a difference in how, I mean, even, even in the ancient
world, peasants and, and, and nobles lived closer together, saw the same things, experienced the same things, had the same basic dependencies.

The, the, the modern world with its, its kind of like the, the tech digital nomads who are, who are making, you know, five to 10 times what people working in, in, in, maybe we might call it the traditional economy or the service
economy are making who can live anywhere in the world, who's, and, and that allow amount of money allows them to travel and to kind of insulate themselves from the cares and, and, and, and concerns of any particular locality.

That's a very difficult, you know, difference to bridge.

Yeah.

But.

In essence, it's not a new problem.

There's, there's always been a problem of cultural breakdown between people at the top and people at the bottom.

And how do we resolve this?

Well, we resolve it through mediation.

Okay, so I wanna, I want you to think about the idea.

We, we have, um, we have the, the standard, the, the corporate culture with a, with a unitary chain of command.

What is a unitary chain of command?

It it means that, that you, you report to someone and they report to someone, and they, and, and this, this chain goes all the way up to, you know, the head of the organization, we might call it, right?

Who, who gets information, makes decisions, and sends the, the, the, the commands back down the chain, right?

But in a mediation structure, in a, in a patronage structure, that's not actually how information moves.

Information actually always moves kind of diagonally.

So you have someone who's above you, who's your patron.

Okay.

But if you have a concern or, or, or something that you want them to change, right?

Uh, you don't approach them in, if you've got, if you've got an alternative, in fact, you go over to a mediator, right?

And you say, Hey, I have this concern, I have this issue with my patron, and I don't know how to bridge the gap between me and him.

And, and again, you know, going back, if you're, if you're familiar with the Christian story, this is explicitly when they, when the, when the Bible, the New Testament talks about Christ being the mediator for his people.

This is explicitly the relationship.

There is, there is a separation between you and the Father.

You don't have the right to go.

You don't even have the right to appear in, in the court, you know, the, the, in the throne room of heaven and say, you know, please forgive me.

Right?

Or, or, you know, here's why you should, you should be good to me.

You know, father God, you don't even have the right to appear there.

And if you got there, you wouldn't have anything to say.

So you need to go to a mediator, to, to intercede for you, right?

To give you, Hey, this is how we're gonna solve this problem.

And, and generally the mediator is gonna say, well, I'm, I'm getting something from him that I want.

So please give him something that, that, that you can give.

And that, and that's how the triangle works.

But that means that information flows diagonally.

So instead of going to the patron and saying, Hey, uh, this, this thing about my life, which the patron is broadly in control of and feels some sense of responsibility over.

This thing about my life sucks and I want you to change it.

'cause what have you done there?

You've sort of said that the patron is wrong, that he's doing wrong by you.

That he's, he's not giving you enough.

And that's a difficult thing to hear.

And, and it, and it's, it's if you will, if and not, but that's not, it's not just that it's a difficult thing to hear.

Let's assume that you're a patron.

You're, you're, you're not emotionally, you know, immature.

And you can just handle people telling you things that you don't like hearing all the time.

If you allow people to come into your, your court to come into your spaces and say, Hey, you're doing wrong by me, and you do that
consistently, and people don't clearly see how you solve that for them, then it will diminish your, your household's ability to operate.

It'll diminish your honor, and your great house will start to crumble.

Okay?

So a patron who's interested in maintaining his great house does not want people to come and tell him problems unless he can immediately give them a solution.

Okay?

But that means you need some, but, but that, but that, but that means like, negotiation can't happen in that moment.

This has to be almost a, a, a, a a ritualized formalized, you know, very much like a ritual.

This, this is, this is something where I'm, I'm coming to and I'm praying for help.

Please help me with the expectation that he can immediately say, of course, I've already, I've already made, you know, provision for that.

So.

So the, the question is, if, if you don't have anyone you can trust to express things to, right?

If you don't have anybody that you could go to in this diagonal way, which is to say no, if you don't have anyone whose personal power in the organization grows from solving these problems, how do you build, maintain games of life?

And the answer is, it's, it's basically impossible without mediators, it requires superhuman wisdom for a hyper-focused, high iq, high conscientious person.

'cause almost all patrons are effectively that type of person to play a game of life with the overwhelming majority of humans.

It's also really difficult kind of in these peak moments, right?

Where you're relying on the, on the client coming to you, giving you the information that you need to, to know, it's really difficult to distinguish between skill issues and moral issues, and essentially impossible to fix the moral issues.

Right?

And, and broadly it's difficult for there not to be a moral component to, to the distinction between humans, you know, who is gonna tell the wife that she needs to sleep with her husband?

Well, I'll tell you what, not the husband, like, if the husband is the one telling the wife that she needs to do an intimate duty to him, that is not actually going to, to, to improve the situation in any meaningful way at all.

Right?

This is not helpful.

It might be true, right?

But it's not helpful for, for, for these two people to have, to have that conversation 99% of the time.

Okay?

You need a third person who wants your success, but is not the person to whom the the intimate duty is due, let's say.

Um, and, and this, and, and, and this is, you know, as, as I've said, we we're gonna talk about marriage because marriage is the only covenantal thing we have left in Western society.

So you kind of have to keep coming back and relating everything to marriage, even though some of these things, it's not the, the, the best example, uh,
but, but all long-term relationships, all covenantal relationships, and a great house is most assuredly a covenantal relationship require mediators.

It requires this diagonal structure.

And, and, and then, uh, you know, to, to be clear from an, from an organizational sense, that means that you're gonna have to acknowledge, hey, the mediators are gonna exist and they're gonna acquire personal power by solving these problems.

So you, so, which, which doesn't mean that you're gonna necessarily do away with that direct chain of command, right?

There's still gonna be.

A chain of command that's gonna be direct superiors and direct inferiors.

But, but you can, you can acknowledge, hey, there's gonna be these intermediary people and we actually want them.

Right?

So what happens a lot of times in, in corporate structures is somebody will say, well, this person is building a cult of personality.

Or they're, you know, this, this, uh, the, the groups that have used this most effectively are, are hr, right?

HR will kind of set itself up as the, the classic mediator between, you know, the, the, the, the lower person in a, in a relationship and the, and the manager.

And that, that obviously can be very dysfunctional and it has been very dysfunctional in the, in the woke world.

But I think.

One of the things we have to recognize is this, this is a, this is a basic human need.

And you, you, you want people to be able to go to someone and say, and, and, and figure out by talking how they actually think and feel
about a particular person, about their patron without, um, without necessarily having said all of those horrible things to their patron.

And this is because the patron has real power.

And what, you know, we need to ask the question, what if the patron has real power?

What if you have an emotional issue with him?

You need a mediator.

Okay.

And who is the best mediator?

Someone with an unassailable relationship with the patron, depending on the culture.

This is usually the mother or the son.

Sometimes it's the lover, right?

In, in the Christian story, right?

Again, the, the son is the media, our mediator for the, for the father.

And then in, in, in a, an interesting way that the Christian Church, the bride of Christ is his mediator for the world.

Okay?

So I, I, this is the, uh, this is the, the, the way that these things work.

Okay?

So when, when, when you have mediators, there's always gonna be the meeting before the meeting.

Again, don't go to the throne room and invoke your rights.

Unless you are perfect, which you're not perfect, that's not gonna go well for you.

When you ask a patron for something, there really isn't much room for negotiation at that point.

So if you want or need a particular solution or you don't know what a solution is, again, frequently people don't know.

They, a lot of times people have no idea what their patron can do for them.

Or, or in many ways, they'll, they'll ask for something that's too small, right?

There's, there, I I've seen repeatedly people ask a patron to solve their housing problem, right?

And what the patron wanted to do and was able to do was he could have solved that housing problem for an entire town, right?

But, but the, the client was asking him for a solution that really just wasn't worth his time.

And so they, they had bad outcomes.

That's where they needed a mediator.

A mediator could have gone to the patron and said, Hey, this is a problem.

And the patron could have said, oh, yeah, well here's, I've been thinking actually about this.

Here's how we solve this at scale.

Right?

Um, now maybe the patron wants somebody to manage that, that housing project and maybe that, that the person that manages that housing project is not the client.

This is where the client can go find someone else who wants to manage the, the housing project and they can become a mediator to that person.

And you have increased the size of the organization.

Okay?

So games of life are not an accident.

It takes a lot of work to make things happen.

A lot of the same behind the scenes, talks, negotiations, emotional spur outs, right?

And, and in order for people to maintain healthy relationships over the long term, you, you have to allow this to happen.

And you have to allow it to happen behind the scenes.

Right.

You cannot unsay words to someone.

Okay?

But what you can do is create spaces where someone can go into a room with another person who is loyal to the patron and loves the, the client.

And they can, they can spurk out a bit, okay?

They can say some things that they probably shouldn't say, right?

They're probably wrong, but they feel those things and, and, and that enables them to think clearly about, you know, what, what they need and what they want.

And receive counsel from someone who now is informed about what's going on in their heads, okay?

And then they can go and interact with their patron appropriately.

Okay?

So these are normal and necessary, but it is also vital that the respect and public gravitas of the patron be maintained.

So I have come to believe that these two ideas, these two concepts, mediators and games of life, are actually two sides of the same thing.

People a, have, have asked me repeatedly over the last couple years.

Well, how do you get games of life?

How does that happen?

How does that occur?

And I think the answer is at a structural level, there has to be space for mediators in your world.

Those mediators have to be allowed to, again, build their personal power by solving problems in this diagonal way.

And, and that's not a, it doesn't have to be a corruption of the, the, the, the unitary chain of command.

It can be seen as a way of, hey, there's certain types of information that has to flow.

But the nature of this information, the, the kind of, the, the intimate pressures, the struggles, the reasons why this is hard for people, mean that they shouldn't, they shouldn't actually be hashing this out with each other first.

They should hash it out with somebody else and then come back together and solve the problem in a dignified and honorable way.

And that is, you know, as, as, as I've seen it, that is the way that, that you actually get and maintain games of life.

You can sometimes, you can get games of life in a transitionary period without having a, a formal mediator system.

But every single case that I'm aware where someone ha or where a group of people have had a game of life that runs for a significant portion of time, the reason why it's able to run long term is because there are mediators.

They exist, they're allowed to operate, and they are allowed to get honor and to grow in their, again, their personal power in the organization by, by conveying information in this diagonal, in this diagonal way.

Okay.