Great Houses

Gregory Treat: Hello everybody.

Thank you so much for joining me for episode four of The Great Houses Forum.

the Great Houses Forum is intended to be a place where people can join, uh, people that have an interest in the idea of building a great house or maintaining a great house.

And a great house is the idea of a multi-generational family that owns its own businesses, that controls its own destiny, and that is able to
mentor its own children in ways that are aligned with the principles and the, and the beliefs of its founders and, and its prior generations.

So thank you so much for, for coming to this episode.

We're gonna spend an initial period of time talking through some materials and then, and that that'll be released publicly.

And then, uh, there'll be a q and a, which will only be available for subscribers behind the paywall.

So again, thanks so much everybody, and, uh, let's get started.

So we're going through kind of an initial.

Initial several episodes to talk about joining the covenantal economy.

And there's three broad steps to joining the covenantal economy.

First is seeing it, and we spent two episodes talking about what it looks like to see the covenantal economy.

And, and then we're right now in the, the second episode of, uh, learning how to signal the covenantal economy.

Last time we talked about honor versus coveting, we had a great, uh, conversation there and, uh, we're able to, to, to think about what it means to have virtue and
how virtue is actually what allows everyone to get stuff done and to accomplish great things, and, uh, that there's people that, that take different positions on that.

But I'm gonna suggest to you that you can get a lot further with a patron if you assume that they have some virtue and you work with that rather than working against that.

So.

And then we ended with a discussion of, uh, of, uh, Arthur Vaughan Winkle Ride, who was one of the founding heroes of Switzerland and the battlefield covenant that he makes, uh, to, uh, to ait his wife and children.

And I refer to this as the battlefield Covenant.

And so we're gonna talk about that today.

So again, covenant versus contract, and then we'll then we'll get into, um, how some practical examples of what it looks like to have a, a growth business versus, and, and, and then a legacy business.

So gonna start with, with just a reminder of what we talked about at the end there.

Ette, my wife and children, right?

And, and he, there's this great poem where he, he just says this, this phrase, iit, my wife and children iit, my pious wife and children.

Um, and what that means is care.

Care for my family.

The, the word element sounds a lot probably to, to our listeners, like alimony.

That's not an accident.

They're from the same root word.

It, it, it, in some senses, it means literally it means to feed.

But, uh, in a, in a, in a broader sense, it's been understood as to, to undertake the care of, to maintain someone in the lifestyle, you know, as the divorce decrees go to which they have become accustomed.

Alright?

And the reason for this is to preserve the legacy, to preserve the, the heritage of a person who is sacrificing himself, you know, really for you, um, to.

So one of the, one of the things I just kinda wanna say is this is not negotiated right?

That you don't sit down at a negotiating table and say, well, I want this and you want this, and we kind of hash it out.

This is something more primal.

This is something where you, you engage in a sacrifice and you, you throw out your demands and the people either meet what you have asked for or you don't get any more sacrifices like that.

And that, and that's, in many ways, I think the, the circumstance that we find ourselves in here is we have, we have lost, uh, these sacrifices.

So.

Again, I call this the battlefield covenant, breach it at your peril.

So I, I'm using this term covenant, and as I have, uh, I'm striving to do in this series, we're gonna have a definition.

What is a covenant?

Right?

A covenant is an agreement between two parties that involves preexisting duties, usually moral in nature to a third party, usually some kind of
divine, uh, with some kind of divine nature or principle involved, and, and that that constrain and may even override the negotiations of the parties.

Okay, so where did covenants fit in?

we have, we have two structures with two core ideas.

The first is liberal managerialism, right?

Which focuses on liberty of contract and liberty of contracts is a good concept, but we have, uh, we have gotten a bit too much of a good thing here.

All right?

And then there's the covenantal worldview, the covenantal framework, which was we would just call the normal virtuous framework of everyone, right up until about, you know, 10 minutes ago, historically speaking.

And they focused, rather than focusing on the liberty of, of contract, they focus much more on the duty of covenant.

Okay.

So liberty of contract is this idea that you have the most information regarding your own wants, needs, or desires, and therefore any constraint on your decision as to what to contract for and who to contract with, makes outcomes worse.

And, and again, within its proper place within a, a certain set of fixed limits, within a certain set of finite games, we might say this is undeniably true, right?

When you, when you slice off all the particularities of a human being and you're left with a pure Randy and, you know, uh, egoistic actor, you know, economic actor, somebody who has no constraints on their behavior, no relationships.

I, I'd also add no fears, right?

who's just looking at what, what will make me the most profit with no, um.

No biases, no human biases left in the system.

Well, I mean, liberty of contract is, is the greatest thing ever.

Of course, that's not a real person.

It's, it's some hypothetical person.

And, and, uh, you know, perhaps we got close to having some of those people in, uh, in certain points in time in, in our history, but we don't really have very many of those now.

And, and one of the problems is, is that this concept has denied one of the core claims, one of the core moral claims of Western society, which is that certain things are inalienable.

Inalienable, okay?

So that's obviously a reference to the Declaration of Independence.

We, uh, hold these truths to be self-evident that, uh, all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, right?

Among these is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

So that word inalienable, what does it mean?

Well, it means that not only can you not sell whatever thing we are discussing, you cannot even place it under a lien, a limitation of your own rights regarding a thing until you've paid back a certain sum of money.

That's what a lien is.

A lien is.

I, I owe you, uh, uh, you, I receive from you a certain amount of value or money, or I've done you some kind of harm, and I promise that I, until I pay you back what I owe you, I am giving up my right to use, or I'm giving up my right to sell.

Perhaps I'm giving up some bundle of rights associated with a piece of property that I have.

so, I wanna ask you, in our modern, you know, liberal world, do you have anything that is inalienable?

Is there anything that's inalienable in, in, in our daily lives?

Right?

Because, uh, you know, liberal managerialism says, well, you're, you're born as a blank slate.

You're born with a zero balance.

Uh, I, I, again, I'll note parenthetically, unless you want an education or credentials or a house or really any, any of the physical things that you need to live, but in that context, nothing is inalienable.

Which another way of saying that, that, that, that means everything is for sale.

And that, I think is a key insight to, to understanding how we got here, uh, wherever here is, okay?

So the covenantal worldview by contrast says, you are born with obligations and liabilities.

You're not a blank slate.

You're not a zero balance.

And it recognizes a, a most inconvenient reality, again, from inconvenient from the perspective of modern managerialism, which is that you do not become a functioning, virtuous adult without costly input from lots of people that you owe obligations to.

Okay.

Lots and lots of people.

Uh, another word for this is the, or right?

So the, or is a, is a Latin term.

It, it, it means the order of loves and it's a way to think about what are those duties and how do you rank them.

Okay.

And, uh, for those of you who are, have some, uh, some level of, of internet familiarity, I've just put up a picture of, uh, of two plates.

One plate with a, uh, a steak with a meaty part in the center and one plate with an avocado, with the, with the central, the, the larger part of the avocado far away from the center.

Um, and this is of course a reference to the heat map, right?

The heat map meme where people rank ordered.

priorities in terms of who they would priorities, who they cared about most.

Right.

And, uh, famously was an incredibly consistent connection between conservatives ranking the, the, the people that were closest to them, family and then friends, and then community, and then broader, more disparate connections.

And liberals who ranked, you know, I think, uh, all animals in the universe, including alien life forms and all living things in the universe, including plants
and trees equal to their, uh, to their, um, their family and friends, which, which, you know, and people dispute whether, you know, what, what's actually going on.

Kinda what are the psychological things that are, that are driving that claim?

Because DI mean, do we really believe that, that, that liberals don't prefer their family, they don't care about their family at all, when many
liberals, when they get into, uh, positions of power, seem to consistently do lots of things that, that, uh, economically benefit their family members?

Okay.

But this concept of the order of mauras, of, of how do you rank order the different loves or the different priorities in your life, how do you deal
with the fact that, again, there's a lot of people who have invested in you to get you to where you are and you have some level of obligation to them.

Okay.

How do you deal with that?

How do you think about that?

So the, the classical, the classical frame, uh, in terms of the duty of covenant, and this is, I'm, I'm, I'm summarizing and oversimplifying a fair bit, but this is broadly true of, uh, cultures
from the Roman Empire to the ancient Israelites, to the Chinese, uh, to ba basically all of the major imperial, um, structures that, that the Persians had a similar frame of, of reference all
of the imperial structures that built cities and, and, and built an empire had this concept of, of starting with a duty to your breath or your name, that those were kind of similar concepts.

Um, so you have the, the idea here is your breath, the thing that animates you, that, that makes your heart beat and your lungs breathe in and out.

You know, you take a breath in and out and, and, and that power, that capacity to breathe implies some duties to you.

All.

The ancient, uh, the ancient entire ancient world believed that, that that breath was a gift.

Right.

You did not cause your own existence.

Someone else caused you to be being was good.

And so you have a certain set of duties to that.

And one of the, the, the core duties here was don't lie.

Right.

You start with, don't lie.

Another similar thought would be, don't abandon your faith, your kind of religious tradition.

Care for your, your physical ancestors, both the, the ones that are alive and then, and then the ones that you, you usually would have some kind of shrine or some place where you can care for the bones, the remnants of your ancestors or their ashes maybe.

And then, uh, finally, and, and, and most interestingly for our purposes, a very common thing was one of your duties to your breath is to produce descendants, to produce people that are gonna carry forward
that same name, that same breath, that same, some people would, some, uh, cultures conceive of it as an inner flame, but it's a very, it's, these are, these are functionally similar terms for our purposes.

Okay.

So then we ask, well, how do you meet your duties to your breath?

How do you meet your duties to, to that, that are incumbent upon you by being alive?

Well, the the simple way is by entering your covenant, the covenant of marriage.

Right Now, this is not the only thing that you can do to, to carry on your duty to your breath.

Certain cultures, especially as they develop, you know, higher abstractions might say, well, uh, maybe you can take on students.

Maybe you can found a school.

Maybe you can create great art.

Maybe you can, there's something that you can do to that, that, to make something that outlives you all right?

But broadly speak and broadly speaking, it's enter into covenant of marriage, though.

I'll say, uh, one of the, one of the points that, that, that.

That makes that modernity makes this hard and kind of confusing is people fundamentally thought of themselves as tribal groups or familial groups, right?

So your, your household was a more important unit than the individual was.

So you, you didn't usually have an individual duty to carry on your lineage.

Your, your generation or all of the members of your family had a duty to carry on, on their lineage.

And so that tended to fall disproportionately on the firstborn or on the first couple of children.

And if you were, you know, as I say, you know, an heir, an heir and des spare, right?

If you were thesp spare and the second, or third or fourth spare in particular, maybe you getting married and having children wasn't as important because that duty had already been satisfied.

But you remained right.

You remained the spare.

And so if something happened to your brother, if something happened to the, the first couple of people that were carrying on your name, then, then, then suddenly you would be, you would become the focus of that duty.

And that was expected to, to change your behavior, to change what you would do and who you would interact with, um, and, and what your options were.

It constrained your individual decision making.

So go, go ahead db.

B: There are, they're kind of obscure, but there are numerous instances to be found.

Uh, in the, you know, medieval and Renaissance eras of a younger male member of the family had entered into the clergy state.

older brother had died perhaps without heirs or maybe the family in a tragic fire, some situation, and they would then be exempted from their vows, dismissed from their vows voluntarily in the clergy state so they could return to the family and fulfill.

Those duties, a handful of them even became saints because this was like a heroic thing to, Hey, I wanted to do this, but I had to answer the duty of my family life.

Gregory Treat: It would, it would be considered, ironically, selfish in many ways to stay in, to stay in your monastic vows or et cetera, instead
of returning to your family, returning to your ancestral lands, marrying, having children and con and continuing the family line in that way.

Right.

So, um, so when we, when we talk about this duty to reproduce this duty to get married and have children, it, it, it was something that could apply to you individually, obviously, but it was, it was not.

Uh, no culture that amounted to anything and left major records really had, uh, I think in, in the 1950s, we, we had generalized, we had, we had individualized everything, but we still had a pretty harsh concept of the duty to reproduce.

And that produced some, some odd outcomes that, that, uh, I don't think are, uh, are, are in view here.

Okay.

So, but let's assume you get married, you have a spouse, you're, you're having children.

How do you meet your duties to your spouse and children?

Well, by entering a covenant that used to be called the covenant of household, which has to do with labor and land ownership households, um, you know, there's a great book, uh, by a guy named Carl Zimmerman called Family and Civilization.

Um, and one of, one of my life goals is to get the original 800 page tome with all the actual data of that book released and reprinted because, uh, the, the ISI, uh, uh,
200 page update that they, they released as a textbook, uh, I find, I find wanting, but, but so how you meet your duties to your spouse, you enter the covenant of household.

does your household stay in right relationship with the land and the world?

And, and, and by the world, we don't mean like the physical globe, we mean society, right?

We mean, uh, the, the larger culture in which you find yourself in.

And the answer is you join a church covenant or an assembly, or some, some mediating institution.

Uh, universities, uh, also kind of fulfilled this function in many ways that, that, that serves as a, as a forum, as a gathering place for multiple
households, multiple families, multiple factions to come and discuss and figure out so that you're, you're not just trying to hash everything out by yourself.

Maybe there are other people that are not part of your household and are never gonna be part of your household that have figured out solutions to, to the problems that, that you have.

Now, assemblies, churches are famously vulnerable institutions, right?

They're, you know, many, many times the, the priests or the clerics are, are actually bound by vows of, uh, of poverty and pacifism.

Um, and, and.

They don't tend to be able to defend themselves.

Um, and that would also kind of distinguish between like, if, if you're, if you're able to defend yourself as a, as a unit, as a body, um, it's
very difficult for you not to take sides in, uh, in, uh, distinguish, uh, in, in disagreements between the, the factions that compose your members.

And so you very quickly become something else, right?

Um, if, if, if the church is no longer a neutral organization, not not neutral vis-a-vis, it's it's religious convictions or its, or its, uh, terms, but neutral vis-a-vis its members, then it quickly becomes something else.

Okay.

So how do you meet your duties to your church by making a political covenant?

So you, the body of people come together and you, you say, well, we, because.

This is not separation of church and state.

This is in many cases, you form a political covenant to protect your society, to protect what the church is building.

Okay.

Because the church, quad church, it has a great deal of difficulty doing that, right?

And there, and there are obviously are exceptions, uh, to this in, in the history of Christianity.

Uh, but, but even, even for the most marshal of the, uh, the church traditions, we, we tended to recognize that this, this was an exceptional state of affairs and we really wish that there was a separate person to, to defend the political covenant.

Right.

And what is the name for the person that that deals with?

The political covenant.

he's a king, right?

He, he's, he's the defender of the faith.

Right?

Um, so I didn't just make this up.

These are actually in, in the titles.

Okay.

And, uh, he's, he's also tends to be the guarantor of commerce.

You have things like the king's roads and the king's market.

And, and just to be clear, this is not about who will build the roads, right?

To use the, the famous libertarian screed.

It's about who will secure them in an ongoing fashion without devolving into banditry, right?

And, and the person who creates these preconditions.

So you think about, you think about markets, you think about, um, flat places.

You think about these, these assemblies where you have marketplaces of for deals and ideals, right?

The, the marketplace of ideas famously is, is, is language that we're used to in the American context.

guarantees that, that space, who says, well, these people are allowed to talk and these people are just being disruptive and need to be thrown out.

You know, recently in the United States, we saw a bunch of protestors that came into a church.

Um, and one of the things that, that became quickly evident is that when you have protestors in the church, you don't have a church service anymore.

You are not able to do the things that a church is doing.

Right.

And so on some level now, we have had in, uh, in the United States an an incredible, and, and historically very unusual level of respect for law and order, the, the infamous American rule of law, um, which again, works great so long as everyone respects it.

Um, but you know, it's important to, to understand that, that in these, and these.

understandings in the, in the things that built the west.

There is a great deal of difference between a king and a bandit.

The king is, is in many cases, the anti bandit.

Um,

you, and, and, and this gets into, there's, there's some, there's some.

Moral equivalence that can be drawn between bandits, uh, who, who extract protection fees and kings who might get taxes.

And, and the, the, the difference is that a king is actually concerned with protecting the, the, the covenantal duties of the people that are under him.

Right.

He wants to make sure and, and he's gonna extract some money from them.

Sure.

He's gotta pay for what he's doing, but he has some level of awareness of what they need to, to keep doing what they're doing.

And, and, and he believes that him existing makes it more likely that they're able to meet their covenantal duties.

That's what it means that he's a king.

And this is true really of all of the, the, the levels of, of these covenantal structures, right?

if there is such a thing as an order on Morris.

If there's such a thing as an order of loves, then that means that that covenantal capacity can be judged objectively.

You can look at a person and look at their situation and look at a deal they have with somebody else and say, does this contract, does this agreement make you more able to meet your covenantal duties or less able to meet your covenantal duties?

Okay.

And so there is a type of kingship, is a type of monopoly on violence that makes everyone under it more able to, to meet their covenantal duties, more able to to meet and worship their God, more able to work and, and create economic gain.

More able to provide for their wife and children more able to, to, to be in their home and provide that stable environment that allows for the rearing of, of high quality kids, right.

So these are natural covenants.

So what is a priest or a patriarch or a professor?

And I have to use multiple words.

Uh, because one of the things that Western culture did even really in the, in the Catholic territories after the Protestant Reformation, is we became very suspicious of this role at the fourth, you know, the fourth level of covenant.

Um, and so we broke it up into as many different pieces as we possibly could.

And there's, there's more that I could add here, but those were all the ps. Um, so the, the, the, the, the fourth role, the patriarch is someone who teaches men to keep their covenants with God and the land, right?

And, and a lot of times this involves funding or directing funds that have been entrusted to them for long-term projects based on his understanding of what God wants and the land needs.

Likewise, what is a father?

A father is someone who provides for the rearing of children.

This is kind of an economic burden.

And, and this might also apply to grandfather, um, the, the, the.

idea of a father being directly involved in the children's economic provision and the grandfather not being involved in the, the, the children's
economic provision is a, is a very modern idea and linguistically it just kind of vanishes if you go to any language older than 500 years.

So it's regulated by the maternal role.

We talked about that.

Proverbs 31, what is a husband or a man?

It's someone who woos a wife.

Um, and, and, and you get into some of these, some of these interesting circular logic pieces here, right?

Because a wife in many ways is someone whose fathers and bro who has fathers and brothers who could force you to, to engage in a shotgun wedding if you slept with their sister.

Alright?

Um, and, and, and there's this tension there where, where the, this covenantal relationship is between ongoing people, right?

You have to have a certain amount of power on both sides.

That doesn't mean that the individual woman has to have power broadly, she doesn't, but that there has to be some set of covenantal guarantors behind her.

That make this structure work and are willing to apply pressure to ensure that it does.

Okay, so we, we think about the idea of, you know, the, the famous line from, uh, from, uh, king, John King by divine right, I'm king by divine, right?

So some, what, what does it mean for someone to be blank?

To held a covenantal role?

Some covenantal rule by, by divine, right?

So if someone protects your church or guarantees the honesty of your market, what do you owe them?

Do you owe them a King's Honor?

Right?

Do you owe them some kind of taxes?

Do you owe them some kind of cooperation?

Do you owe them some kind of loyalty?

someone creates the economic engine that allows you to raise your children, what do you owe them?

Do you owe them a father or a grandfather's honor?

Um, how does that work?

And, and the, it's important to think about these things because you probably have a father, right?

We don't have kings in America, uh, famously to, despite the, uh, to to hear the protestors wander around shouting, no kings, you, you'd think otherwise, but, but in fact, there are no kings in, in, in the United States of America for now.

Um, but what if someone did the work of a king?

What would we owe him?

What would we owe him?

One of the, one of the questions is, you know, when we're talking about authority here, is our culture thinks that money confers authority.

Uh, the, the question is, what do you have the authority to do?

Is, the answer is what can you afford?

Right.

Um, you know, famously, uh, Jeff Bezos had a house in Los Angeles for many years, and, uh, he put up a privacy fence.

He put up a, a, a bunch of trees that blocked, so you couldn't see into his house.

And these trees are so tall that they, they, they cause shade to fall on the neighbors.

And it's just kind of, this, it's a very, it stands out like you can, you're driving along the street and everything is yay high, yay high.

And then Jeff Bezos house is just exceeding the, the, the scope of the frame.

and Bezos pays the fine for violating the zoning code.

I think every year in January.

He pays it in advance, right.

He's just, he's just got a deal with the city of Los Angeles that says, you know what, I'm gonna do this.

You're not gonna stop me.

And, and we're just gonna come to an agreement that I, I, I can and will just pay for this and you're gonna let me do it right now in, uh, in older cultures and healthier cultures, we would have this idea that responsibility and authority go together.

So, so.

Rather than money, than financial capacity being the thing that gives you authority, it's what are you responsible for?

Especially when that responsibility is given by God, especially when the capacity to meet that responsibility requires a particular set of virtues, right?

if you have the responsibility to care for a woman, if you are her husband, what does that give you the authority to do?

If you are the father of children, what do you have the authority to do?

Do you have the authority to do business?

Do you have the authority to get involved in politics?

And this is a critical, this is a critical thing to think about.

'cause there's a lot of people that they, they get to a point and they're, they're not sure they have the right, they're not sure they have the authority to take the next step.

Whether that, that next step is starting a business or getting involved in politics or, or, you know, selling something, uh, you know, convincing other people, persuading other people.

Uh, they're not sure if they, if they have the right to do that.

Okay.

And that, and that's because we, we, we get things backwards.

We think, well, I've, I've gotta have already succeeded in order to have the authority to do a thing.

I would propose that what we need is, is a covenantal theory of will, or a covenantal theory of action.

So what do you have the authority to do?

You have the authority to do any elicit actions.

Elicit means things that are authorized by God.

Any elicit actions to meet your responsibilities, to those you care for.

How do you acquire responsibility?

Some level of intimacy, some intimate ritual between you and a vulnerable person.

Okay.

And obviously, you know, the, the, the, the marriage stuff is, is we, we talk constantly about marriage as the, the example of covenant.

Um, because it's one of the only covenants that our culture has left.

And I think there's an obvious, there's an obvious, uh, thing that you can draw there.

But I also wanna talk about, about the covenants of salt.

Uh, in many cultures, giving someone food, and especially salt, was an intimate covenant act, uh, that it meant if you'd given somebody salt, you
receive salt from them for some set period of time, usually one to seven days, the recipient would then be under their benefactor's authority.

They were expected to treat that person as their father.

His house is their household, his people as their people.

Okay.

And that means that by, by participating in something, then that allows you.

To, to that, that, that imposes upon you certain obligations and critically you didn't sit down and negotiate those obligations.

They're just kind of set in front of you.

Okay?

And, and, and the people, the cultures in which this operated would've said, these, these are natural obligations.

They, they, they occur and it would be, it would be wrong.

It would be a denial of what's, of what's right and virtuous to not give this level of honor.

Okay?

Now, obviously these are culturally conditioned, they're sort of culturally negotiated, but if they work, when they work, it's very interesting because it sort of implies that, uh, something unusual is happening.

You, you have, you have arrived at an unusually correct answer.

Okay?

So.

So take, think about it negatively.

If you cannot meet your responsibilities to your wife and children without playing politics, do you have a duty to enter the political game?

Right.

Are you allowed to say, well, you know, I, you know, I, I, I can't unless I, unless I play political games, I can't do this and I can't do that, and I can't do that for my family.

But you know what, I'm just gonna, just gonna, um.

I am just gonna sit here.

I'm just gonna sit this one out because I don't, I, I, I don't have the right to do this.

I, I think the question we would ask is maybe you not only have the right, maybe you have a responsibility.

And then the final thing, the final point to get us again, really where everyone on earth and, and, and certainly where all the people that built
the world that we enjoy, is if someone else sacrifices their, their, their life or maybe just their ability to fulfill their covenant of marriage.

If they, if they take on a heavy penalty, they lose their life, they lose their liberty, they lose their ability to provide for their family to create a political covenant or a political outcome that allows you to meet your covenants of marriage and household.

What do you owe that person?

Okay.

What do you owe them?

And this comes back to, to the element my wife and children.

Do you owe them menting, your wife and children?

And what does that mean?

And who's, who's, its enforcer, right?

And, and basically all of the cultures that were successful, certainly all the cultures that that, um, achieved anything that we would recognize as Liberty said, God is the enforcer.

We, we, we, we have some level of fear that if we don't do this, then, then bad things beyond our kin will happen to us.

Um, and, and, and that, and that's a pretty common, you know, the, uh, when you try to talk about sacred things, when you're like translating
the Bible into Chinese, you, you bump into this word that's associated with money for the widows and children of fallen soldiers, right?

Uh, because this is a, this is a universal thing.

If you, if you have a culture and you want people to sacrifice for you, then you need to, you need to have some, some assurances that the
people they leave behind are gonna get taken care of, are gonna, and, and not just taking care of in the sense of them, them surviving.

You know, we, we had some.

Obscene things that were said and done in, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, where people were, you know, openly calling for Erica Kirk to be killed specifically so that his children would be put in foster care.

'cause they believed that if those children were put in foster care, they would be trained to think and speak and believe things that are totally different from what Charlie Kirk would've wanted.

And this is the final death, right?

This is, this is effectively a, a a a a mimetic genocide, right?

If you, if you kill someone, one thing.

If you kill someone and his lineage either dies or is, is is memetically harmed so that they, they hate the things that their father loved.

Well, that's bad like that, that, that's, that's in some sense worse.

And it's almost worse for them to be around and hating everything though though, there's always a possibility for redemption, right?

So.

If you cannot meet your responsibilities to your wife and children without a particular economic actor, there's someone who, who is a market maker or a, a a a aggregator.

They, they, they have some level of means of production.

Um, if you cannot meet your responsibilities to your wife and children without that guy, what do you owe them?

Do you owe them a grandfather's honor?

What is another word for grandfather?

And I would say the other word for grandfather here is patriarch.

See, the feminists were telling us, you know, they, they, they were telling us what this whole game was about all along.

It really is all about the patriarchy.

Ladies and gentlemen.

This is, this is what we're fighting about, right?

Who is going to be the economic guarantors?

All right?

Who is going to decide?

'cause eco, one of the things e economic guarantors do is they decide mo uh, effectively how many children you can have and how those children are gonna be raised.

This is, this is a universal truth, and we may not like that.

Right.

We may, we may, I think what we've done in our culture is we're so uncomfortable with that reality that we, we've hidden it, we've covered it up.

what, what, what happens when you cover up that reality?

It doesn't mean that it goes away, it just means that, that you no longer have any visibility of what decisions those people are making about you and your family.

So we really do need to rebuild the patriarchy.

That, that is one of the ways of framing this project.

So if we wanna rebuild the patriarchy, if we want to have games of life and games of honor, uh, first we need to have, we, we, we,
if, if you're gonna be successful in that, you really need to think about who is in the household versus who are the higher links.

Right?

Another way to ask this is, who are your maid men?

Um, and what I wanna say, I think there's a, there's a temptation to say, well, everyone that works for me, everyone in my sphere, everyone in my family is a, is, is, is a maid man there.

And, and it's like, well, for most businesses, for most people, that's not the right answer.

That's, it's simply not true.

Right.

And I would also say the reason you want it to be true is 'cause you've got some, some liberal egalitarianism in your heart, and you should probably, you should probably work on that.

Okay.

Um, but e and even for businesses in, in like financial or professional services, uh, where it's technically possible if you, if you structure thi you things
properly, um, you can have a, a financial or professional services business where everyone that actually technically works for you is, is, is a made man.

But even in McKinsey, right, which is a, a consultancy, uh, a professional level, uh, entity.

They don't do this for all their employees.

They only do it with the par at the partnership level.

Right?

Those are the people that have, that have demonstrated that they're, they're qualified to play the game of life.

They're, they've demonstrated an, an honor that says, we, we know, we have demonstrated, we have proven to ourselves.

Um, that, that, that we are going to be able to trust you.

Okay.

Alright.

Um, so again, just to, just to reiterate, if we wanna rebuild the patriarchy, we gotta think about who's in the household, who's the hiring a hiring?

everyone is gonna be in the household.

Certain people are gonna be hirings and that's okay.

That's just a part of life.

Uh, and that's true for most businesses.

That'll be structural.

We'll talk about that in a second.

But even if you have a, uh, the, the kind of of business where you could have everyone that was a W2 employee, everyone in your in your system could technically be a, a made man, could be a part of your household.

You probably want there to be a journey.

You want there to be a, a level of qualification that people, um.

You know, have to go through to, to get to, to being one of the people that you, you're gonna trust that they don't need to be motivated by fear.

Okay, so we're gonna talk about growth versus legacy businesses.

So a, a growth business is a business where the goal is to build the paper value as much as legally permissible without it being, you know, technically a pump and dump.

All right?

Which I'll note is quite a lot like what you're legally allowed to do in terms of boosting the paper value of a company is, uh, is, is an enormous amount.

And then exit by selling the business off to a significant financial actor, some kind of investor type of private equity of venture capital, or sometimes a, just a large financial services group.

So what you need to do is show profits, pay taxes, and exit high.

And you do not need a succession plan, at least not for that business.

You might need a succession plan for your family globally.

'cause you, you're gonna wind up with a bunch of liquid, uh, cash, but you don't need a succession plan in the sense that, that I would use it.

Now the alternative to this is a legacy business, which is a business where the goal is to benefit the larger business structure.

And in a legacy business, you do not need to show large profits.

You do not need to be attractive to the major financial actors.

You do need a succession plan.

'cause your exit is, hey, someone else is gonna come along and they're going to take this over and run it profitably.

Okay?

So when we think about growth versus legacy business, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about, uh, an, an oil change shop.

Um, and there's kind of a standard, if you, if you're successful owner of an oil change shop, uh, there's there, you're gonna, you're gonna get told, here's how to be successful.

Here's how to, how to grow this business.

You're gonna acquire three to five more.

Uh, oil chain shops.

Maybe you're doing that with the assistance of private equity capital or maybe you, you buy, buy them with loans, uh, that a bank gives you, and then you sell them off to, to private equity.

Uh, then you do, uh, with that money, you get 10 to 20 shops and you do what we might call a first level roll up, and you get a multiple, uh, based on the total value.

Uh, if you, if you're successful in that, then, then you can take over those portfolios.

You get a bunch of money, you buy another 10 to 20 businesses, and then another 10 to 20 businesses, another 10 to 20 businesses.

Um, again, going back to the banks and saying, Hey, I know how to manage these assets.

They're not doing as well as they could be under mind management.

Give me the money.

I'll borrow it from you, and then I'll, I'll improve the performance.

And maybe you get a hundred, maybe you get 200, uh, shops together, and then you do a second level roll up.

And then depending on the industry, you know, you can do this maybe three or four times.

Um, but you know, there, there, there comes a certain point where you're just, you're just turning over these, these large portfolios.

In each of these rollups, you get a valuation and a multiple that is based more in the financial markets than it is in the physical market.

Physical markets.

And, you know, you're, you're, you're doing well.

This is the way to make money.

Okay?

This is the startup economy.

This is the default in our country.

You build a business, you expand, you exit by selling it off to moneyed, interest de.

And, and, and, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, especially if you can make money.

This is a wonderful way to make money.

And the powers that be have decided that they're gonna fund it.

So, um, you know, this is, this is the game that everyone is playing, but we need to understand.

is a short term game, right?

This is tops three to five years, right?

This is a short term game.

And for many of the people in your, in your business, this is, this is a death game, okay?

And, and you're, you're, you're treating them as hirelings, which you don't owe them anything, okay?

And you, that's, that's legally true.

It's also, in some sense, morally true, so long as you're not lying to them about, about what you're giving them.

Uh, one way to think about this is how many people at your oil change business can afford a house?

And this, you know, applies equally to your craft coffee shop or your IT support company.

And if they cannot afford a house.

Right.

Uh, then someone else is solving the housing problem for them.

Like, does this make sense?

So if you're, if you are, if the money you're giving them does not solve the housing problem for them, something else, or an ideal, you know, almost always someone else is solving that problem for them.

And that means they owe the other person something.

They may, now, maybe it's 50 50, maybe you're solving half of the problem and somebody else is solving half the problem and they owe both of you something.

in, in, in that circumstance, you don't, you, you haven't provided enough for them.

They're not valuable enough for you to get some kind of undying loyalty, right?

you're not, you don't really want that.

Okay?

But be clear about that in your own mind.

Hey, my relationship with these people is, is strictly transactional.

And if you find yourself in that situation.

Understand the score, understand that you're an at wheel employee and, and these people are not paying you enough.

Um, but, you know, I run into this, you know, again, I think the, the craft coffee shop, I know several guys that run craft coffee shops and they, they kind of, uh, many of them were pastors and some prior incarnation of their lives.

And so they, they disciple their people and they spend a bunch of time and energy discipling their people.

Um, and as a result of their successful discipleship, their people grow and, and acquire different desires and want to get married and have children and have a successful life, which means they leave the coffee shop, right?

It means they are no longer employees of the guy who invested all this time and energy and effort and, and, and heart and soul, right?

In training them.

Which again, if you, if you understand that that's what's happening and you still decide, Hey, I'm just gonna, in a kind of a, in a, uh, in a pay it forward kind of way, I'm still gonna disciple these people.

Well, that's great, but don't get mad when you teaching them to think to, to value better things and to try to make something of themselves means they're leaving your ecosystem.

Okay?

Because, you know, there's how many people at your oil change business?

Probably the, the, the manager, right?

The onsite manager, maybe.

It depends on, depends on the place.

Depends on, on kinda the situation.

Um, and that means that in order for every person that you're successfully discipling, you have to acquire a new, um, a new oil change shop to appoint this new person as a manager.

'cause that's the only job you have.

The only way for this person to work for you and be successful in this sense of, of, of, you know, getting a house and all this stuff is to go and, and, and be a manager at the oil chain shop.

And if there's no manager positions available right now, then they're gonna have to leave.

Now, what will be an alternative to this?

And again, I bump into this problem because there are people that will, that will get really excited about mentoring.

They really want to do right by their people.

And they, and they don't stop to think about, well, what, how, how many positions in my, in my organization allow you to, to proceed, uh, in the way that I'm recommending that people proceed.

So, so then they, they again, they, they disciple people out of their organization.

we would start, the legacy business might start in the same place.

There's, there's no reason not to, to be an oil change, uh, person.

Um.

But you're going to, of buying a second oil change shop, and you might still buy three or four oil change shops, but you're gonna buy a tire mechanic place, then you're
gonna buy a full service mechanic and then a diesel mechanic, then a four wheel and off road, a tractor trailer rig, and then finally a, a mobile diesel mechanic shop.

And, and, and that, that probably operates out of the, uh, tractor trailer orig diesel, uh, mechanic.

Okay?

And what this does is it creates a pathway for high performers.

Alright?

It allows if, if you have the people at your oil chain shops who distinguish themselves, who are your successful in discipling them, well, then they can move up to the tire mechanic.

Then maybe they can move up to the full service mechanic.

They can then the people that, again, that distinguish themselves as they're working harder, as they're trying to become more valuable.

You can say, Hey, here's a new job in a new organization with a different culture, a different EIN number.

You can move there, you're still working for me.

Right.

You haven't left my ecosystem, which means I haven't lost the benefit of all that time and energy I spent discipling you, right?

Yeah.

and, and again, I'm not, I'm not saying that you have to do this, right?

If you wanna disciple people and accept that they're gonna leave and that's your, your, your giving back, your service to society.

Wonderful.

But there's a lot of people I meet that they do the discipleship thing.

People leave and they're mad.

'cause they, they, they, they're frustrated that this didn't work out the way that they anticipated.

Okay?

But it can work out if you just structure things properly.

Okay?

Another point to make is, is that, uh, these are people like, this is, this is a people based business.

This is a people based strategy.

So many of your legacy businesses can be run at very low levels of profitability.

The point is not to post high profits.

And, and what that means, friends is low profitability generally means low taxes.

Okay?

Now you gotta have ways of having those businesses achieve your strategic goals.

Um, but.

That, that, that's the, that's the name of the game here.

The point is to strategically benefit a key profitable layer, usually by developing people, right?

So you're, you know, we go through this again, your oil changes your intake, right?

This is your, your kind of the top of your, your people development funnel.

Um, your, your evaluating people.

If they show some promise, you move them over to the tire mechanic.

There's a lot of sales in tire shops.

And so you're seeing can they sell, can they interact with people?

What are their people skills like?

Um, you get to somebody who's a full service mechanic, right?

Can they develop a relationship?

Can they have a long-term relationship with whoever's bringing their vehicles in?

And this and that usually is where you can start actually giving those mechanics enough that they can start to settle down, get married, afford, afford, wife, children, house, et cetera.

Um, then again, the diesel mechanic is also usually a development layer, right?

This is, this is how do we, how do we start thinking about more complex things?

You're trusting people with much, much, much more expensive pieces of equipment.

Then you got the four-wheel and off-road, this is probably where you're making your money, right?

Um, and then the tractor trailer, uh, rig is again a development, a development space.

And then you're gonna make your money, your, your most money, and your people are gonna make their most money.

Uh, as mobile diesel mechanics, i i, in this structure and different industries, there's different ways of, of slicing this.

This is just an example, right?

To understand, hey, you could be structuring your, the, this is the same number of, of of businesses right now.

You might have to fight with the bank a little bit more because the, it's a, it's more complex.

Uh, but, but you can draw out, hey, here, here, globally is where I'm making my money.

So, so you can still oftentimes access bank funding.

You can sometimes even access private equity funding.

Um, but this allow, this means that as you disciple people, as you develop people, as they show themselves to be hardworking and skilled in all of these things, you can offer them opportunities.

And they don't have to leave your ecosystem.

So these, these very, very valuable people that you have spent a bunch of time and energy developing, discipling, whatever you want to call that.

They don't have to leave your ecosystem, okay?

Now, know what game you're playing, all right?

Um, and, and kind of at this point as we're talking about, we're talking about signaling, right?

We're talking about interacting, um, with, with the covenantal economy.

Just because a woman is attractive and a man is interested, does not make her his wife, right?

Just because you are a worthy client, right?

And you have a capable patron, you, you know, someone who is a capable patron does not mean that you are their client and they are your patron.

All right?

If you are playing a death game, play it with honor, right?

Recognize, Hey, I don't owe this person anything.

This person doesn't owe me anything.

All right?

But always be looking for the game of life around the corner, and if you're playing a game of life.

Rejoice.

Okay.

And this has made, you know, more complicated because patrons have every incentive to be illegible in the current environment, right?

Uh, you know, sometimes I, when I'm, when I'm talking to, to, to families that are in a position to be patrons, um, sometimes, you know, it feels like I'm giving them some version of the Morpheus talk, right?

The, the Morpheus 10 Neo, right?

Every man, woman, and child who has stood up against an agent has died, but you're gonna be different, right?

Um, have every incentive to be, to be illegible, right?

Sympathize with that.

Uh, now recognize also that we, we live in a time of changes.

Um, you know, as we, as we talked about in earlier episodes, there, there more and more of our society actually runs on aristocratic technologies.

And that means democratic social structures won't work, won't be able to efficiently access those technologies, whereas more aristocratic, more elite.

structures are going to be able to efficiently access those, those technologies.

So, so there is gonna be a winner.

There are gonna be people who are able to do this.

Um, so sympathize with the patron's, desire to remain illegible, but work hard to signal around at work hard to say, Hey, hey, are, are you, do you own a business like this?

'cause 'cause one of the, the things to recognize is there's no rule that says you have to pick one of those games.

You can have a guy that's buying up oil change businesses and selling them.

'cause that's the piece that's easy to, to roll up and sell.

And on the side, he has this string of strategically aligned, you know, legacy businesses, right?

And if you go looking for that, you might be able to find your way into a very different relationship with the same person.

Okay?

don't blame the patron for the death game.

The patron didn't create the death game, This is, this is how the world was.

It came to him as he found it.

Um, how much he fights against the death game.

Okay.

always be willing, always signal that you, you understand, Hey, I see your virtue.

I understand that what you've done entitles you to something.

If you want to claim it, if you want to, if you're willing to, to be that, to enter into this, this type of, this different type of relationship than our standard, our standard, you know, postliberal, managerial contracts and go looking for that.

This is how you signal the covenantal economy.

You find ways of communicating to patrons, Hey, is there this kind of thing in your structure?

Do you own another business?

Do you own this?

Don't get mad if you're in, if you're in the oil chain shop, right?

And there's one position that allows you to feed your wife and kids successfully and you don't have it, But ask, Hey, how do we get here?

Is there a way for me to, to get what I need and not leave your organization?

Look for mediators, look for all those things.

So, alright.

Um, that concludes my, uh, prepared remarks on this.

So we'll, uh, we'll move into the discussion time.

Again, thank you everyone, uh, who's listening to us on the on the Public Podcast.

If you want to hear the q and a, please join us.

Uh, please, uh, subscribe@greathousesforum.com.