Great Houses

Alright, everybody, thank you so much for coming to episode three of The Great Houses Forum.

Uh, this is a discussion where, where I've invited several of, uh, the people that, that, that, that are interested in the topic of, of great Houses,
which are multi-generational structures that enab enable people to collectively pursue the missions that they understand themselves, uh, from God.

And we, we, uh, uh, believe it nly.

That this happens within a family structure, but, but there's always room for people kind of outside that structure to, to learn and grow and, uh, and, and, and join in.

So, uh, um, my name is Gregory Treat.

I'm an estate planning attorney, and I've, I've been deeply, deeply interested in the topic of great houses for years now.

I think it's a, a social technology that, that is at the, the, the lack of this social technology is at the root of many of our problems, and that means that being able
to build great houses, being able to think about what it means to join the covenantal economy is a, um, uh, an important solution that, that our world needs right now.

Um, and, uh.

Thank you so much again for, for, for everyone that's joining and for everyone that's listening in.

So we're going through an initial series where I'm gonna talk a lot, and then, uh, once I've kind of set out some, uh, once I've said some, some, some things
that I want to say and get out there in, in the record, then we'll start having, you know, guests on and do some interviews, and that'll be, that'll be great.

Um, so we're, we're talking about this topic of, of joining the covenantal economy and the covenantal economy is my word for the, the web of relationships and systems and institutions that kind of surround a great house.

Not everyone in, in the covenantal economy is a part of a great house.

Uh, but in, but everyone who is in a great house has to be a, a part of the covenantal economy.

They have to be aware that their life is influenced by these long-term iterative relationships.

So, so far we talked about how to see the covenantal economy, right?

So there's, there's two pieces, two episodes I did on, on seeing the covenantal economy.

First was long-term iterative aristocratic games.

And the, um, the, the aristocratic games are games that are, are designed to, to work when you, you develop people over a long-term period.

So if you need to invest in people, especially if you need to invest in them early in life, like maybe, you know, starting before 10 or around six
or seven years old, and then you need to train them for a long time to get certain outcomes or certain skills, that's an aristocratic technology.

Um, if, if they're, because what that creates is there's, if you have to start at six years old and you have to spend a lot of time
and effort learning how to do a technology or learning how to do a skill, that means someone in the older generation is blessing you.

There, there, there needs to be a patron.

There needs to be an aristocrat.

Okay.

And then we talked about Games of life.

Games of life are the idea that, that I think the, the baseline assumption in our culture is that every game is a death game.

Everything, every, it's every man for himself.

Uh, the people that you live with, work with, that you're around, that you're dependent on, uh, will eat you and all games.

You know, if you lose your, the game that you're playing, you're gonna lose your life, your liberty and, and your ability to provide for your family, your, your livelihood, your legacy, whatever.

How, however you frame that.

And that's an incredibly stressful, uh, way to live.

It contributes to a lot of short-term thinking.

It can, it, it means that there's actually no, from a, from like a game theory perspective, there's no, uh, there's no incentive not to cheat because the consequences for cheating are the same as the consequences for losing.

In fact, you know, people, people struggle with this sometimes.

Um, but in fact you have to have some system that sets that says cheating is punished worse.

Then losing, right?

If losing is is for all the marbles, then you have just destroyed your incentive not to cheat.

What you want is a game of life.

And the, the kind of the, the, the quintessential game of life is a game where you're playing with brothers from the same household.

You, you might, you could still compete, right?

This, there, there's, there's no, there's no world in which you get away from competition per se, but you are competing for honor, you're competing for status.

But everyone who doesn't cheat, everyone who, who stays within the rules of the game, has an expectation that they're gonna be able to sit down at a table, they're gonna have a roof over their head, they're gonna
have food in front of them, and then they're gonna be able to provide, ideally for their family in a way that is, uh, that is dignified and, and, and contributes to, uh, to positive prenatal outcomes, shall we say.

Which, which there are some minimum requirements that you gotta hit to convince the ladies in our world to, you know, be willing to go along with you and give you children.

Okay?

So games of life require mediators.

Okay.

And mediators is this idea of a person who, who you have a diagonal relationship with, rather than being somebody that you go to in the media, you're, you're saying you're in charge.

Here's my information, tell me what to do.

A mediator is somebody you go to and say, Hey, I need, I need you to broker a relationship with someone with more power than I have.

And, but I don't have the relationship.

I don't know what they want.

I don't know what they can give me.

I need your help to bridge that relationship in a, in a kind of a diagonal way.

And mediators are, uh, a critical.

Piece of having sustained long-term games of life and really having great houses.

It's, it's one of the, it's one of the things that allows a, a, a great house to be stable and to understand itself and move forward over generations in, in my experience, has been they have some healthy way of, of interacting with the mediation impulse.

There are mediators involved.

They're able to, to function, and they're able to actually grow and accrue personal power in the organization by fulfilling their mediating function.

Okay.

So where we're gonna go today is we're gonna talk about how do you start signaling the covenantal economy.

So we're gonna talk about three, three kind of high level moral concepts, and I'm gonna do my best to define these.

And, and I'm probably gonna define them in a little bit, um, in a little bit different way than you've heard before.

I'm gonna define them may, maybe in a more pragmatic way.

Hopefully, hopefully not in a way that that makes it, uh, unhelpful, but because these remain deeply moral concepts.

But, um, probably this is not the way that you've thought about concepts like honor, virtue and coveting before.

So,

alright.

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna give us the, the definition that I kind of ended with last week.

Uh, the covenantal economy is a set of long-term iterative relationships, stabilized by aristocratic technologies, especially aristocratic social technologies like mediation, which allow you to play games of honor.

Right.

Games of honor is, is, is a kind of related term related to games of life, which we'll get into here.

The question of the day is, how do you signal the covenantal economy?

So I've used a term signal.

So, um, what is signaling?

Signaling is where you indicate that you understand the game that is being played.

You advertise your fitness to be an additional player, and you select when, when you're doing this, you're selecting the role.

You're, you're kind of saying, Hey, I think I could be a good.

Blank in your organization.

I could be a good VP of operations, I could be good at finance, I could be a great salesman.

Right.

You're, you're, you're signaling the role that you wanna play.

And this, this signaling happens not just in job interviews or things of that nature.

Uh, signaling happens in, um, in a lot of different contexts where especially, especially contexts where you're not, the, the negotiation is understated.

Um, the negotiation is understated.

So how do we signal the covenantal economy?

We honor those who fear the Lord.

I'm just going to, going to give it to you.

There's, there's a, a great psalm, Psalm 15, that lays out this marvelous honor code, um, about who, who's gonna live well and be stable and have a long-term relationship with virtue.

And there the, the central verse there is, uh, you know, the, this who despises those and, and you most translations will use a different word.

They'll, they'll use, they'll, they'll despise the reprobate or something of this nature.

That's actually not a good translation.

It, the, it, the despise is the, the verb form.

And then the despise the despicable.

It's the, the noun form of the same word.

So it's despise the despicable.

And who honor the parallelism would be who honor the honorable.

But what it actually says there is who honor those who fear the Lord.

Okay.

So you, you make your decision.

This, this is the central.

Virtue this central means by which you have a long-term relationship with, uh, with righteousness, is you despise the despicable and you honor those who fear the Lord.

Honor is a huge signal noticing honor, caring about honor and appropriately giving.

Honor is the first signal that you are really even qualified to play in, in the covenantal economy when people, if, if you're not, um, if you're not someone
who knows how to give honor appropriately, if you, if you don't know what you should give honor to, you're gonna really struggle in, uh, in playing these games.

So I'm gonna give us a definition of honor.

Honor is a complicated English word, right?

The first, the first of what is honor.

Honor is a word.

Um, honor is a complicated English word.

It, it includes both the actions of giving someone social status.

So, so claiming them, saying they're a good guy, telling people to follow them and listen to them, um, and, uh, the qualities that mean that such a grant of social status is warranted.

Right, because there's, there's people that can be given social accolades that don't deserve them, and that's, that would be dishonorable.

They, they, they lack honor internally.

They lack the internal characteristics that mean that, that people praising them would be a good and justified thing.

So honor tends to appeal to a preexisting moral reality.

Virtue nature duty, we can, there's a bunch of different words we can insert in there and, and critically is not negotiated.

This is a big thing for us.

'cause we, we live in a transactional culture and everyone wants to negotiate now, now you can negotiate honors, you can negotiate the, the, the type of social, you know, positive reaction that you would like to receive from people.

That's, that's perfectly okay.

And, and in, and in many cases kind of necessary.

'cause if you receive honor in a way that, that does nothing for you, you're, you're not gonna be motivated by it appropriately.

But the, the question of what deserves honor in some ultimate sense is not really a thing that can be negotiated.

Okay.

It's, it's, it's something where the parties rather recognize in some apriori way.

That honor is deserved here.

Um, it's very difficult.

And, and, and while you might change, you might have a shift in, in your sense of what is honorable?

A a again, it's not really, it's not, this is not a negotiated thing where somebody presents something to you and you Okay, well, sure.

I can, I can just freely exchange one definition of honor for another.

There has to be a kind of spiritual transformation and, and attunement and alignment.

People use words like that to describe the, the shifts in honor.

Okay.

So in the context of the covenantal economy, what do you give honor to?

Well, you give honor to virtue and, and then, and then that immediately begs the question, what is a virtue?

And I'm gonna define virtue as virtue is a part of yourself that works correctly, where you get what you deserve.

For doing what you're doing and what you deserve.

And this may be in a very narrow category.

A very narrow domain is good in what you intended.

Okay?

That's virtue.

It's, it's things working properly and then having rational cause and effect relationships and that being a good thing that you like.

Um, another way to define this is virtue is the capacity.

You know, we famously in philosophy, they say, uh, is, does not imply ought.

Which there, there's some, there's some force to that, right?

But in fact, if, if that's the only thing that we say, then, then, then life is fairly miserable.

And, and we should just all be nihilists, right?

Which, which is the, the point of the people making that claim, right?

The point of life is to have virtue.

And virtue is nothing.

If it's not, the capacity to make is an ought.

Match up again, not maybe comprehensively not in every domain, uh, but in some manner or regard virtue is, is allowing, is and ought to line up in a, in a pleasant way.

Okay.

And, and the medievals will talk about this, you know, like, like two lovers kissing and these, these kinds of things.

So, um, I, I, I wanna harp on that, that, that in some manner, right?

I wanna make a very important distinction.

So, so when a person has a virtue or, or even we, we will say virtue.

They have virtue, but we don't generally mean virtue in the machiavellian sense, in, in terms of a unitary capacity or power.

We mean a virtue one that is to say one among many virtues, plural.

This is, this is actually a kind of a general principle.

Um.

The, the classical Western tradition, the, the, the, the people that created the freedoms and liberties that we understand as our, as our birthright and the things that we want to have and want to get for our children.

Those people talked about virtues, plural, and powers plural.

Okay?

Which means there's differentiation, there's a possibility for people holding different roles and different powers.

There's the possibility for things to be, you know, for ambition to be matched against ambition for checks and balances to function, okay For certain
people to be good at one thing and not good at another, which creates the possibility that they might need each other over a long, a long period of time.

Okay?

Our enemies, the people that are trying to broadly take away our freedoms and liberties, we'll talk about power, singular virtue.

Singular, okay?

Now that doesn't mean that we don't need power.

Okay.

We, we live in a world where the, the, again, the, the, the incentives, the incentives to lose or the, the, the penalties for losing, the penalties for cheating have been allowed to become the same.

And then we, that which means that we don't, as a practical matter, as we've, as we've all seen, unfortunately, this is, uh, being recorded in early 2026, and America is still reeling from the
realization that, you know, we have not enforced the rules against cheating to the tune of billions, maybe hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of dollars over, you know, these last 40, 50 years.

Um, and that's a, that, that is a, a thing that is resounding through our body politic.

And so the only fix for that is that sort of baseline power that, uh, that, that people talk about.

But in general.

Right.

When we're, when we're building the positive things that we want to get to, we want there to be distinction, right?

We want there to be virtues.

Um, if you're in a point where there's only one virtue and there's only one power, probably the virtue you're talking about is Marshall virtue.

The, the, the ability to, to enact force upon other people, to enact violence upon other people, that's a bad thing.

Now, it's an absolutely necessary thing.

Somebody's gotta have the power, somebody's gotta have that marshal virtue.

Okay?

But, but we, I, I just kinda want to draw that distinction and, and critically, if there is a unitary virtue, it's a, it's a Marshall virtue, it's a violence virtue, it's power per se.

It's not being a super spiritual person, being a good person, being a nice person.

We have enormous amounts of evidence that, that if you reduce everything to a unitary structure.

Some version of pragmatism, whatever is, is, is at that low level of resolution, the closest thing to a unary virtue or a unitary power that humanity has ever encountered.

Now, we don't like living there.

Everyone who lives there works really, really hard to establish a system where that's not the rules as they operate.

That's what winning means, okay?

And, but what that means is people can be horrible humans, very, very bad humans in a lot of different ways, and still be a supreme example of a virtue, okay?

People will look at, you know, um, people will talk about, um, Bezos and, and people hate Bezos, and he's this terrible person and, and he has many, many vices.

Okay.

I'm not, I'm not saying he doesn't have vices, but when you look at why Bezos was successful, he was successful because he, he, he ran his company in a very distinct way.

You know, when, when he was at the helm, you know, they talk about, they, they did these, these memo style meetings Okay.

Where they would write a long form narrative memo, um, and they would come to a meeting.

Everybody, all of these highly intelligent people would read the memo and then they would have a discussion where they were required to use the information
presented in the memo as the basis of their discussion, and they could, you know, challenge it or, but, but they, it was a very rigorous technical kind of meeting.

It was not a PowerPoint presentation.

Okay.

How many people, very few people have been in a corporate meeting like that.

Uh, it's, it's a very rare thing, and I'll tell you why.

Um, this was, this was told to me by a, a, a grizzled old attorney, um, and he said basically it's really nice to be the senior guy in a meeting run by PowerPoint.

Because generally PowerPoint is about making people feel things.

And the smart money is to spend at least a third of the time making the most senior, whoever's presenting right about a third of the PowerPoint presentation is spent making the most senior guy feel nice.

Okay.

That's the purpose of the meeting.

Alright.

Um, and there's a fascinating history there because, you know, there was two groups.

There was the Anglicans, um, and then there was the Germans who are, who contributed to our, uh, our understanding of the Modern Joint Stock Corporation.

And they, they, the, the Germans in particular were like very much set out to create positions where the high level executives, the president, the CEO would receive regularly kind a kind of adulation, a kind of worship in the meeting.

Okay.

And that would incentivize them to want to continue in the position.

But we've, we've kind of run that at our, at our society.

And so now more and more and more of meetings is just kind of worshiping the most senior guy in the room.

And Bezos, you know, didn't, um, didn't, didn't work it that way.

Um, he, he, you know, probably he didn't care very much about the opinion, uh, or the, the, the, the adulation of the, the corporate flunkies that he had hired to run his logistics company.

But, but you know, he was a physics guy.

He was very numbers driven.

Um, but it still amazingly laudable.

Basically he was given the opportunity to be worshiped in a very real sense by highly intelligent people.

Three, four, maybe five times a week.

And he said, no, I care more about running my company in a specific and rigorous way than I do about being worshiped, you know, three, four or five times a week.

That's kind of amazing.

Right.

Very, very, one of the, one of the, one of the human universals.

Okay?

One of the things that is a very reliable feature of human psychology is almost no one turns down opportunities to be worshiped, right?

Like, if a group of people come together and they're gonna say a bunch of nice things to you that bears some resemblance to reality, right?

They're not totally disconnected from reality, um, you're probably gonna say yes.

Does this make sense?

Very reliable.

Okay.

So, so what I'll suggest to you is, you know, some, some variation depending on, you know, which, uh, which theological stream you're, you're, you're coming from.

Um, you know, either, either the first commandment or the first and second commandments.

Um, Bezos was following those commandments, right?

He was, he was rejecting the impulse to be worshiped, which is a virtue.

Now that doesn't eliminate or remove any of his many, many vices, but it explains his success, okay?

So I, I, I, I encourage you to think of virtues as, as, as a constellation, as, as, like each virtue kind of represents one point of light in the heavens, okay?

And if you're familiar with navigation, you, you, you cannot navigate based on just one star.

You, you need, you need multiple stars to give you reference points so that you can move about.

On our, on our fair club, we, we tend to have a, a bias towards spiritual virtues, right?

When we think we say he's a virtuous person, we mean something like the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, you know, kindness, goodness, et cetera, right?

All of these, all of these virtues.

And, and those are incredibly important and incredibly important for creating a, a high trust type of society.

The kind of society that, that, that, that the west was.

And, and can be again, again, if we win.

But there are also marshall virtues, zeal, courage, fortitude, you know, a a something we might call the killer instinct, or the ability to know when to strike, right?

That's a, that's a, that's a Marshall virtue, right?

We don't have good words for that in English 'cause we're kind of uncomfortable with the Marshall virtues.

Um, but we had it in old English and we, and, and, and we, we presumably will have it again.

Uh, then there are intellectual virtues, honesty, consistency, creativity, attention to.

Okay.

All of these are intellectual virtues.

Now, interestingly, I want you to notice something.

Hopefully you can see this even within, within each of those domains.

If you just had one of those virtues, would you think of yourself as a complete and whole person?

Most people would say no.

Most people, when you ask them what are the, they're going to give you a list and it's gonna have three or four, you know, necessary virtues on it, even within one domain.

To be a good spiritual person, you need love, and joy and peace, right?

If you just have love, that is pretty easy to see how that gets unbalanced.

What I'm gonna suggest to you is, is now maybe you can have people that have the spiritual virtues.

Maybe you can have people that have the Marshall virtues, maybe people that have the intellectual virtues.

Then maybe they don't need to be the same person.

Maybe they could be aligned or organized together in some long-term relationship, maybe even a covenantal relationship if you, if you see where I'm going with this.

Okay.

But, but maybe for, for complex organizations, you need, you know, a larger structure to, uh, you, you need more than just one domain of virtues.

Okay?

Because the point that I wanna drive in each of these create success within their domain, but they don't, or, you know, when, uh.

When we tend to think that people do good things and bad things, and the bad things they do are the reason they are successful.

Okay.

That is number one.

That's, that's not a good frame for life, but, but it's also been rejected, like very smart, very serious.

People have contended with the idea are bad people successful because they, of the bad things they do.

And whenever you look into it, every time someone has ever looked into it, it's not because of their vices that they're successful.

It's always, always, always, because they have virtue in that domain, there is no one who does not earn their success.

Okay.

If they're successful.

And I mean, and, and this is why, you know, you see people like lottery winners, right?

And they, they, they have a ton of money.

And then that money flees away from them.

Because, because they have not earned, they have not demonstrated the virtues.

They are not demonstrating the virtues to be at that level of wealth.

And they're, they are going to then make decisions that send that wealth away from 'em.

And, and this is an incredibly, again, this is one incredibly reliable features of human psychology.

So the best book on this that I'm aware of is, uh, the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, which is one of Cs Lewis's top 10 books.

And, you know, if, if you're kind of into that sort of thing, it's widely credited with creating the medieval synthesis.

This was, this was the thing that, that, that really kicked off, um, Christendom as a, as a, as a growing thing, right?

We have, we have, you know, Augustine, he writes the City of God.

He kind of helps people get through, but there there's 400 years where we're really not sure how to build anything.

And all of the people that actually wield political power are kind of breaking rules, but BEUs.

He writes this book and then, and, and that is what enables feudalism.

It's what enables a larger, more complex society, you know, um, uh, Charlemagne and, and all of those guys to, to really, to really get somewhere, okay?

So again, I'm gonna say virtues create success in their domain.

Right?

Now, there are times and places where people get success outside of the domain of the virtues that they have demonstrated.

And we call this a miracle, alright?

Um, there are, and, and, and this can be, you know, the super spiritual person who gets victory over the guy with the Marshall virtues.

That can be a miracle.

But it's also the Marshall, the guy with the Marshall Virtues who finds love, right?

Every single I've known, I've known a bunch of guys that, that had a bunch of Marshall virtues and basically no other virtues, right?

And, and some of them had, you know.

Had a woman who loved them and who kind of made their world work and, and, and introduced them to these other set of virtues and the, and these other, these other principles for creating good outcomes in the world.

And they always think of her as a miracle, right?

Like, nothing that they were doing, nothing that they were good at, naturally earned them.

That woman, they have that sense to them.

Okay?

So we call these, these, these events.

Now they do happen, but they're miracles.

And don't presume the miracle, okay?

If you, if you, one of the, one of the, one of the quickest ways to lose miracles is to show up and say, you know, almighty God, you owe me this.

Uh, you know, that's not a good strategy.

We people have run that and, uh, not a good strategy.

So, okay, so I, I've talked about honor, I've talked about virtue.

I've hopefully I've given some, uh, some good definitions, some good working definitions, uh, so that people can, can, you know, think about this and, and understand what I'm driving at.

In the context of the covenantal economy, giving honor to the correct things is evidence that you can see the connection between the good things an honorable person does and the fundamental nature of reality, right?

So, again, I'm gonna say it one more time.

Possession and development of objective virtues in this view.

This is, this is the, this people here, here, I'm gonna say this.

People may disagree with this.

Every person that I've ever known that has built or, or been able to maintain a great house believes as a fundamental feature of their, their worldview.

That possession and development of objective virtues is what creates all capacity in, in the world in an overwhelmingly consistent cause and effect relationship.

Okay?

So honor is what allows you to signal to a patron that you value some good thing that he does for you that you cannot or will not do for yourself.

Honor, we might call this the internal protocol of a patronage network, okay?

And what you gotta remember as you're, as you're trying to activate this internal protocol is.

The patron believes in his virtue.

He may not believe in other virtues, right?

He's, well, if he's a patron, he, he has evidence, he's trying to believe in other virtues.

He's at least willing to pay other people for their virtues, right?

That's what it means to be a patron, is to look at somebody else who has a virtue that you don't have and say, you know what?

Your virtue kind of sucks at making money, but that's okay.

I see value in it and I'm gonna give you access to money, um, under certain conditions.

Okay, so, so a pat, when a patron has to choose between two potential clients, who does he choose?

Someone who wants what he has?

Money, power, status, or someone who sees the specific virtue that the patron is proud of in himself.

Okay.

So, um, a gar, what, what, what is an example of that?

So, let me give you the example of the real estate developer.

There is a real estate developer in every major city, at least one, sometimes more, who believes in highest and best use, and what, what that means.

He believes that God put him on the earth.

To figure out what, what land ought to be used for and to make it so that it is used for that purpose.

And he wants to control larger and larger plots of land because he knows what people need.

He knows what, how a town should be structured.

He knows how a development should be structured.

He knows where the, where the, you know, some guys like, they kind of describe it almost in like a feng shui kind of way.

That you, you need, you need this here and that here and the, and, and, uh, you know, the grocery store over there and the, the coffee shop over here.

And this is what creates third spaces.

Lots of guys talking about third spaces.

Okay.

But there's a real estate developer that he has a theory of what makes an ideal city or community or whatever, whatever scale he's working at.

And that's his virtue.

Yeah.

So when you wanna interact with the patron, go in assuming that the patron has a virtue.

Okay.

So study him, study the patron, even if you don't know exactly what.

So it's nice, it's handy if you can kind of study a guy and be like, okay.

This is his virtue or you can watch a, a podcast, right?

So, so, uh, and, uh, yeah, so by the way, that, that, that, that story that Jeff Bes about Jeff Bezos that I was telling, he talks about that, uh, you are correct, is is on the, the, the Lex Freeman podcast.

So that, that clips from that were, where I saw these stories and, and again, I had, I had a lawyer, you know, that, that I'm connected with.

Go.

How many people do you think would be, would be able to resist being offered that kind of adulation on a weekly basis?

Not many.

Okay.

So you study the guy, right?

You figure out who he is.

Um, if, if, if you don't have something like that, and I'll note that, you know, so far as I can tell that structure, that strategy that Bezos employed was not something that he talked about when he was in Amazon making money.

Right.

And it's also not clear to me that they're still doing that.

Um, so, you know, this is which, which would explain some interesting things about Amazon's performance in recent years anyway.

Um.

But if you can't find him, you know, kind of giving the secret sauce right?

Then find the projects, look for places, look for times where he did better than he should have, or better than, than people expected him to.

There was some standard, he exceeded it.

And number one, it's just nice to hear where somebody comes to you and says, you know, Hey, you did, you did better than, than than anyone dreamed.

How did you do that?

Right?

Just, just ask him, how did you do that?

You don't need to know.

Um, and what I'll, what I'll say sometimes the, you know, a patron is not gonna be very good at explaining things sometimes.

He'll, you know, there, there's this, uh, there's this scene from, uh, Sabrina, which is a romance movie that my wife loves, uh, with Harrison Ford.

And, uh, they're talking about this new screen technology and Harrison Ford go, they're like, you know, Harrison Ford's character like, well, well, how do you know this is gonna perform?

He just, he looks at them, he's like, how did I know with this technology?

How did I know with this technology?

How did I know with this technology?

I just know, you know, um, and, uh, and, and everyone in the room just kind of nods along 'cause he's a billionaire and he's, you know, he, he, uh, he took the,
I think of the beginning of the movie they talked about, he took the families, you know, me, meager a hundred million fortune and turned it into real money.

Um, which is a great thing.

But if you get to the point where he, he says, I just know, and he kind of grins at you, that's probably good enough, at least for a first meeting.

All right?

Now, over time, most of these guys are gonna have a very intense desire to explain a very intense desire.

But, but the thing is, everyone is asking them about the money and the power and the status.

They don't, that's not significant to them, most of them, most of 'em, they have a fairly tight definition of the virtue that they think entitles them to their, their money, their wealth, their power, their status.

Okay.

So, uh, again, virtues can be different.

And I've, I've said this probably four or five times on, on the podcast.

Uh, but this is the concept as I've, as I've tried to walk people through.

This is where people get tripped up.

We, we assume that virtue is some hyper, super spiritual niceness thing, and we assume that it's one, it's one thing.

The virtues can be different, okay?

In order to connect with a patron, you have to have a virtue.

It does not have to be the same virtue that the patron has.

In fact, I'm gonna give you, you know, it, it's probably a good idea, especially if you're a junior client, unless you've received some kind of hints from the man that he's looking for an heir or want somebody to replace him, which would be a very, very.

Unusual situation for you, right?

Uh, you probably don't want really to strike him as somebody who has exactly the same virtues that he does.

'cause that's reads like competition.

You know, there's a, there's a thinker, um, named uh, Rene Gerard that talks about how similarity is actually the root of, of a lot of conflict, right?

And, you know, you, you have the, you have, you have the, the example of the toddlers with the toy, right?

So you have a bunch of toys, right?

And you have a toddler who's sitting in there and the toys are all kinda look the same.

And the toddler doesn't care 'cause all the toys are the same.

If another toddler comes in and starts playing with one of the toys, the first toddler goes in and he immediately wants to take that toy away.

Right, because that toy now has value because somebody else thinks it has value, right?

And we could, uh, multiply examples from, uh, you know, the, the, the, the gender wars and, uh, the manosphere has provided us with, with, with multiple examples of that on, on both sides, right?

There's certain people that just can't seem to be interested in a woman until someone else is interested in her.

There's some people that can't be interested in a man until someone else is interested in that man.

Um, probably because they, they, uh, they, they didn't grow out of this as toddlers.

Um, so, okay, so the virtues can be different.

So you, you want to, you wanna come to him as somebody who has a virtue, right?

And you believe that virtue entitles you to, to some level of success, that it's valuable, okay?

Uh, but, but it doesn't have to be the same.

In fact, it's, it's useful and beneficial for it not to be the same.

Okay?

And then, and then we'll talk about, you know, the, the honor of a wife or a junior partner.

And, and I think the best way to think about this is, is Proverbs 31.

I have a, I have a, a longer.

Way of thinking about Proverbs 31.

Then I'll, I'll kind of give the, the, the cliff notes version here.

Um, if you were, if you were in the first century, um, and you were, you come to, you came to a city and you have no family, which means something terrible happened to you, right?

Your, your house was destroyed.

You come to the gates of the city and you have the elders of the city.

Sitting there in the city gates and they're conducting business and judging disputes and all of these things, and they see you and they realize, oh, we don't know you.

You're from far away.

Come over here and let's, let's, let's, let's meet you.

Um, and you explain your situation.

Hey, I've got a skill.

I'm a cobbler, but I have no family.

You know, you tell 'em whatever tragedy has happened to you to cause you to be like this.

And, and one of the elders will probably, whoever's turn it is right, unless one of them likes you.

But, but probably there's somebody who, it's his turn to, to sponsor the new guy.

And if he, if, if he likes you, which is, if you have behaved appropriately, if you've respected his position as a, as an elder, then he's gonna give you a job, right?

So if you're a cobbler, the job would be, fix my old shoes, right?

I've got these old shoes.

I want you to fix them.

You know, he, he will make sure that you have tools to do that and everything.

And then he'll give you a symbolic payment for that.

This, this payment is symbolically large.

It, it's probably gonna be enough to allow you to live in the city for two to three weeks, something like this, maybe a month.

Okay?

And sometimes you get the money and you, you give it to the guy that's hosting you.

Or sometimes, you know, the money just kind of switches, switches hands, and it never quite lands in your possession.

Um, but somebody hosts you.

And so you are given an opportunity to demonstrate your skills.

Healthy cultures give people a, a, a opportunity to demonstrate their skills.

Okay, so you do this, you do a really good job on the shoes.

The shoes are shown to the other elders.

The the first elder.

Uh, he's happy with it.

You have done a good job.

So now you have a decision to make, you have to join one of these households.

Otherwise, you're gonna get kicked outta the city.

Okay?

We, we, you're, you're, you're not allowed to just come in and be here as a, as a peasant or, or try to earn, earn property.

You have to adopt a patron.

And a patron has to adopt you.

And this guy, like, he's gonna be responsible for your quality of life.

He's probably gonna be the main person who, who negotiates your marriage.

So he's gonna decide if you get to marry the, the pretty girl or the ugly girl, um, he, whatever political rights you might someday have in the city are, are gonna be dependent on him and just kind of broadly and politics.

If he backs the right horse right the next time, there's a political change in, you know, if he backs the right horse, you're good.

If he backs the wrong horse, then, then, uh, you're kind of out, you know, you're, this is, this is probably how the tragedy that got you here with no family kind of wet, right?

Somebody who, who you were in, in their great house or in their entourage backed the wrong horse in a political changeover.

Okay?

So this guy matters, right?

As a, as a practical matter for throughout most of the ancient world and the, the Christians, you know, modified this heavily, but for most
of the ancient world, you were also expected to convert to the gods or at, at a minimum, to honor the gods of the household that you joined.

That was a, that was a, a fairly basic requirement, uh, for, for most of human history.

So, how do you make a decision about what person you're going to entrust that much of your future with whom you've known for less than a month, by definition?

And the answer that a lot of the ancient cultures would give is, well, you look at his wife, okay, his, you know, and this is one of the uses of, it's not the only use.

I'm not saying that Proverbs 31 isn't for women or anything like that.

It's for sure for women.

But, but there is, there is another way of interacting with us, right?

Which is, hey, this person has given his wife.

'cause one of the things people, they see, the, the proverb 31 woman doing all of those things, none of those things, she's illegally entitled to do.

All of those things that she is doing are grants of power from her husband in an ongoing fashion.

He can revoke them at any time also.

Okay?

So he has given her the right to manage her household.

She's in charge of staff.

She has, you know, the right to buy fields.

She can start a business.

She, she does all these things.

He lets her run the household while he goes and plays politics, okay?

Sits in the city gates, right?

And that's the guy that you want to take is your patriot, right?

Not necessarily because he's gonna give you everything he, he gives his wife.

But, but, but the, the negative way of saying that is if a man doesn't entrust and empower the woman who shares his bed, it is a bad thought that he's gonna share that stuff with you.

Okay, like Mo, most likely he, he's gonna give you less.

The over for sure.

He's gonna give you less than what he gives his wife.

So that's how you decide who to entrust yourself to.

How do you know if a person has a quality organization?

Have they cultivated relationships of honor within their house?

Have they delegated authority and has that gone well?

'cause there's also a training aspect to this, right?

Okay.

So if someone has done this right, they have a virtue, they have developed someone else, probably someone who's their wife or their son or intimately related to them, then you can talk about playing a game of honor.

So games of honor means playing the death game and, and, and as a team, right?

And life is sort of a death game, right?

Like there, there we live in a fallen world, there's an anarchic element to everything.

That we live in.

Um, and, and so there, there are real risks.

People that pretend that there's no, like, one of the, one of the worst kinds of death games that we're currently playing is a game that pretends that there is no death games and there is no risks.

And that if you just follow the rules, that all will all will go well for you.

You know, you'll get, you get a good degree and then a good job, and then a good, you know, family and, and everything will just proceed accordingly.

And there are no risks, right?

And it's like, no, no, there are risks.

There are very real risks in this world, okay?

But it's a, it's a game where your daily experience, the people you are playing with, the team that you're on, that's a game of life.

Your team, your tribe, your house, your company, your crew, there's a bunch of different names for this effect, plays the death game together, okay?

Now, this requires a peer group of economic actors with skin in the future.

So not, not dinks, not double income, no kids.

The death game is between houses.

And this, this creates a situation where it mitigates individual losses.

If your team loses.

And this is, this is something that frankly, the, the Christians did much better than, than most other cultures, right?

The, the Japanese are famous for if your house loses the death game you're done.

Um, which had negative, negative consequences, uh, for them in their, in terms of their ability to maintain certain bloodlines.

But if your team loses, honorable individuals can be absorbed into other successful teams because society as a whole kind of agrees that there are certain useful virtues.

Okay?

So that's, that's the idea of, of honor and virtue.

And that leads up to this idea of games of honor, where every person on the team is there because they have some virtue.

It gives them success in a domain.

And, and we don't all have to have the same virtue.

There's probably a leader.

Um, whose, whose virtue either gives him more money than the rest of us, or more power than the rest of us.

And that's okay because we there playing the game with this team means that so long as the team is doing well, there are minimum outcomes that we will, we will achieve for us and for our children.

Okay.

Okay.

So we're gonna move on to the last concept, but we'll see how, how quickly I can get through this.

Um, the opposite of honoring a virtue is coveting gains.

Okay.

So if you don't honor a thing, then you don't know what virtues produced honor is in some way.

The, the some sense, the, the way that you see the relationship between a virtue and its positive outcomes.

And what this means if you, if you covet things, this means that when you're dealing with people who have different virtues than you, which means they have success
in different domains than you do, that you have no optionality and the possibility of virtuous relationship with people who are different from you disappears.

When you covet something, you want the effect without recognizing the cause.

Remember, the cause of a good is is always a virtue, right?

And, and, and there, there are people that disagree with this, but none of them are building great houses.

None of them are, are even successful at maintaining great houses.

Okay?

Now, I honor does not mean that you forget the friend enemy distinction, right?

Honor does not mean that everyone is on our side, okay?

You can have deep and, and irreconcilable differences in interest and duty between honorable people and, and, and you can potentially have a situation where one of you even, you know, has to, has to leave the field into the casket.

That's the way that works.

But that's recognizing that we could be on different si size doesn't mean that we have to say that they have no honor.

Okay?

That doesn't, it doesn't mean that it often does in our modern world.

Um, in fact, when someone does a hard thing, when they organize large amounts of people into, um.

A common cause.

We recognize that it took a certain amount of virtue to accomplish this task.

And this is true even of people that we intensely dislike, right?

The Somalian fraudsters or the grooming gangs in Britain, right?

You know, people have observed, you know, the, this requires hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people to cooperate in, in.

And people say, well, this is a, it might be a, it might be a low IQ thing they're cooperating on, but how many people do you have in your life that would help you, right?

Let alone help you do something that the, the broader culture sees as bad.

Right?

How many people would take a risk for you?

Um, that's a virtue.

It's a virtue that we don't possess and that we need to reacquire in a hurry.

Okay?

And, and again, I think the, the, the way that, the virtuous version of that, the way that aligns with.

With the Western tradition broadly is we align in a great house, right?

Where, where we don't, we don't, we don't defraud people, we don't engage in, in, uh, in bad things.

But we are able to see, hey, we need to cooperate one another.

Okay?

Unity is, is, is, is an important virtue.

Okay?

Um, so when we appreciate the virtues, the specific virtues, again, 'cause these are, these are specific things that it takes to accomplish that hard thing.

This allows us to understand what it takes to create or acquire the good, which is the effect of the virtue.

Okay?

If you do not appreciate the virtue required to create a good, you fall into magical thinking, you'll begin to think that people do not deserve their wealth and power, or that their power and wealth is infinite, right?

That's basically the two types of conspiracy theories that there are in the world.

Um.

You will begin to think that people, or sorry, but, but if people have only what they can create through virtue, then all that wealth and power have limits.

Okay?

Um, and if they have limits, then that means that they have needs, you can offer them something Now that presumes that you have some, that they have something that you want.

Okay?

Um, and that, that offer, that willingness to negotiate for what they have paired with the confidence that if they fail you to offer you a good deal, that you can and will replace them, right?

If, if they give you a bad thing, then you're like, Hey, you know what?

I'm, I'm gonna go on out, um, and, um, I'm gonna find someone else, or I'm gonna develop internally the capacity to do this thing that you do for me.

That's what, that's what creates optionality, okay?

And that's what you need.

You, you need that, you need that confidence in order to engage in, in, in a game of life.

You need that confidence to, to start connecting with the covenantal economy.

Okay?

And yes, respect.

Respect is probably a, a, a, a better word, but I, I already defined honor, right?

So there, there are people that have nothing you want, but they, they, they have a certain level of capacity.

You might respect them, but not, but not honor them.

Um, 'cause they're, they're accomplishing great and mighty things.

Okay?

So this, you know, honor creates connection.

This can be done as a client seeking a patron, a member seeking honor within the house, and, you know, patrons dealing with each other, kind of between households option.

But one of the things is we, we want that optionality.

We want to understand what people do, and we want to create hierarchy.

No one wants to be told you were the only guy around.

Why did I pick you?

Because you were the only thing that was available.

This is not a very attractive thing to say to a potential patron, to a potential mate, to a potential relationship really, of any kind.

What you wanna say is, everyone wants to be told, I chose you because you were the best out of all the options.

Right.

Communicating.

This tends to look like you have this specific virtue or set of virtues, and you embody those and, and that's the best virtues for where we are, or you embody them the best.

Okay.

The more specific you can be on what virtues you see and are attracted to, the more effective that communication will be.

Okay.

Um, and, and, and that, that, that, again, this, this applies to the patronage dance, this applies to joining the covenantal economy.

This also applies to, uh, to relationships.

So, um, yeah, go ahead.

Db that's such an important point that you just made there.

And as a, as an individual, that as a person that has had a great many employees over the course of my career or direct reports who were, you know, someone else's employee, uh, that, that there has to be a match, not only on.

The first level reality of the gifts and the skills and the things that you just talked about, but the also on a second level reality, that that's what they wanna be accepted and admired.

That's the virtue they want recognized.

Right?

Where I've had that with uh, uh, an employee of mine who at the thing that he did was, was very good, but the thing that really made him exceptional was not his
daily thing, uh, but his, I don't wanna say ego in the bad sense, his positive sense of pride, his sense of self and self-worth was tied into that daily thing.

And when it came out in a conversation, it's like, yeah, what you do there is very impressive, but this thing over here, buddy, you're indispensable with this.

Like, and it was, even if that doesn't happen every day or every week or every month.

Yeah, and you're vastly like, that's like, that's rare.

That's valuable.

That's a virtue.

And, but that was not the thing that, that ended up lowering the quality of our relationship because that's not how he wanted to be understood and admired.

And it was like, whoa.

That's just, that's a complicated dance there.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So we wanna make decisions based on the virtue that you see in someone else.

Whoops.

Um, and offering the virtues that you likewise embody who, who, which can and should probably be different.

This is how you join the covenantal economy.

This is how you signal, Hey, I understand on some level the game that you're playing and I want something from you and, and you want something from me.

But, but not in nego.

Again, one of the things I, I want to emphasize, this is not at least a traditional negotiation, um, as we've understood it, kind of in the contractual west.

We'll talk more next week about, uh, the difference between liberty of contract and duty of covenant.

Um, but this is not a negotiation.

It's more like a key, you know, fitting into a lock.

You want two things that they fit really well together and they go click and it's, let's just, wow.

We, we, we, we really like that.

Okay.

Um, and, and, and this is so much not a negotiation that, uh, that.

Sometimes you don't need or even require the other person to, to respond to you.

So there's a, there's a great poem, um, or I think this is actually a song as well from the founding of Switzerland.

Um, and this is, this is the, the idea of menting your wife and children.

Uh, so this, and it's the origin.

This is the origin of the concept of, uh, one for all and all for one.

The French did not actually invent that the Swiss did fascinatingly.

Um, so this is, this is a, this, this poem is from the, the Swiss have have four cantons of, of, of what would become Switzerland have rebelled against their overlords.

And they're, they're trying to, uh, maintain their political independence and, uh, and an army of nobles has come to kind of put them down.

The host of Nobles was solid, their order both thick and wide.

This frustrated the pious host, one Winkle ride said, if you will element my pious wife and children, I will do a daring deed.

True and dear Confederates, I shall lose my life doing it.

Their battle order is locked tight.

We may not breach it, but I will make a breach for this.

May you element my family forever saying thus, he quickly grasped an armful of pikes on his own.

He created a passage and his life took an end.

He had the courage of a lion.

His brave and manly death was a benefit for the four forest cantons.

And thus, they soon began to break up the battle order of the nobles with hewing and with thrusting.

May God keep his soul.

Had he not done this deed, it would've cost the Confederates many a brave man.

Okay?

And that, that term aliment, right?

That's it's the same root from which we get alimony, right?

Maintaining a woman in her children in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed, right?

So he is saying, Hey, I'm gonna do this.

And, and, and first he says, if you will, element.

And then he says, may you element.

And he, he is, he is laying a duty on them.

The people don't respond, right.

He is saying, I want you, I'm, I'm giving up my life.

To preserve this political, this new political unit, right?

To, to preserve our independence.

And this is the thing that I want from you.

I want you to, to, to meet my covenantal duties to my wife and children, right?

I want you to element my wife and children, um, and, and, and my pious wife and children.

There, there's some, there's some duties.

But, but the, the key point that I wanna drive home here is number one, this is what people are wanting, right?

This is the thing that we're lacking.

If you, if you don't honor that sacrifice, you will get no more sacrifices.

And we have kind of, you know, maybe 80 years of managerialism at this point.

And one of the features of Managerialism is we do not element the wife and children, right?

You can watch Old war movies and, you know, people taking care of widows and orphans and, um, you know, so some guy marries a, a widow from his unit to take care of her.

In some of these old movies, a lot, you talk to like the Gwot veterans, their experience of that was totally different.

There was no one caring for, for the, the, the relatives of their fallen, right?

Like their, their fallen in many cases were expected to, to take care of them when they came home.

Um, and, and their, their, their families were.

But if, if something happened to them and they were a breadwinner, she was expected to move on.

There was no, in many, many, many cases that there was.

And there's always some, there's some, I'm not gonna say there's nothing.

There's legal programs, there's a bunch of things.

But it doesn't seem to be getting the outcomes.

And many g wat veterans that I've spoken to feel this really intensely.

Um, and, and for our purposes, this is not a negotiated thing.

This is, hey, this is what I want and I'm gonna do this and you owe me this.

You have an obligation to give this back to me.

That's what I call the battlefield covenant.

And, and, and you breach it at your peril.

So, um, we'll talk more about next week about what, what the implications of that 'cause we're, we're, we're hinting, you know, if this is possible with a political covenant, right?

Where somebody does something and that imposes duties on those who he has benefited to, to kind of stand in the gap and take up the things that he's no longer able to do.

What if there are other, what if there are other kind of primal duties that if you assume them, if you carry them out, maybe that imposes duties on other people.

So, but we're gonna.

To conclude today, um, how do you signal, how do you signal the covenantal economy?

You despise the despicable.

You honor those who fear, you honor the honorable, which is those who fear the Lord, are those who attain to the highest virtue, right?

Learning to recognize who in your world has mastered the virtues and provided the underlying frameworks that build your world, and give them honor specifically for those virtues.

If there's a king in real estate, give him honor because he is, you know, for, for the good things that he has built.

If there's a king in business, if there's somebody who has, who has built your synagogue or built your city or built your school or built something that, that you live under its
shade, man, you're gonna get a lot farther if you can figure that guy out and, and, uh, and, and give him honor 1, 1, 1 final story I'll tell, and then I'll, and then I'll wrap up
is, you know, there's this, there's a, there was a biopic, um, on Apple, uh, done a couple of years ago, I think, with Seth Rogan and, um, oh, it's not Matt Damon, it's the other one.

Um.

I'm forgetting his name, but Seth Rogan says to, uh, to Steve who's playing, uh, Wozniak, and he says to Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs is talking about firing someone.

He goes, well, you should fire my team because we are also not meeting that, that expectation.

And Steve Jobs looks at him and he goes, Woz, you gonna pass.

Right?

And that just really, Woz is deeply uncomfortable.

Mr. Wozniak is that that doesn't work with his worldview.

That is how kings are.

If you can figure out what virtue, what, what is honorable to a king and build a personal relationship with them, right?

Then they might do things that, broadly speaking, you're a part of a class that they're disadvantaging.

It's amazing to me how frequently, if you can go to them, like the first, the first, the most basic, the most, the most essential thing of patronage is, Hey, you're doing a big thing that would hurt me.

I'm a good guy.

Please don't hurt me.

And if you can build these relationships with high level patrons, uh, or even lower level patrons and say, Hey, please, please protect me.

I'm a good person.

And you've already built that relationship.

You have some history.

You, they, they think of you as a virtuous person and somebody who sees them as a virtuous person.

Man, there's, there's a lot that, uh, there's a lot that you can do there.

So.

Alright, uh, we're gonna open it up for, uh, for discussion now.

Thank you all for, for, uh, and thank you to, to everybody that, that listened to the recording.

If you wanna hear the rest of our discussion, it's behind the paywall.

Thank you so much.