Great Houses

Gregory Treat: All right, everybody.

Thank you so much for joining The Great Houses Forum.

Uh, today is episode five.

We're gonna be talking about the pillars and levels of a great house.

So for these last few weeks, we, or this last, this is the fifth, uh, week we've been going through this.

We've been talking through what it means to join the covenantal economy.

And I've been laying out some basic principles of, of what is the covenantal economy.

And the con, the covenantal economy is, is my name for the, the network of relationships that surround a great house.

And, and a great house is a multi-generational approach.

It's a, it's a family that has begun to assume their responsibility to society and begins to, uh, to exert power in, in many ways.

So, and we'll, we'll actually get into, I'll, I'll give you guys a, a more practical definition, uh, a more in-depth definition of a great house today.

That's, that's one of the things we're getting to today.

So, uh, last time we talked about the difference between covenant, uh, the duty of covenant versus the liberty of contract.

And then we talked, I gave, I gave an example kind of walkthrough in depth, um.

Growth versus legacy businesses and, and, and how we think differently about those things, right?

So a growth business would be kind of your typical rollup, but you just acquire a, a bunch of similar businesses and then, and then sell them off to the, uh, to the, the large financial institutions that are at the top of our world.

And, uh, a legacy businesses structured a little bit differently.

It tends to think about the progression of people, uh, that way as you disciple people, as you develop people, as you put your unique stamp and your kinda strategic insights into the
people that you're working with, then instead of losing that, all that work when they leave to, to go off to, you know, greener pastures, you actually have a bucket that you can catch them.

And so that you enjoy some of the benefits of the, the hard and difficult work of kind of moral formation that you've engaged in.

So.

So this week, as I said, we're gonna talk about the pillars and the levels of a great house.

So conceptually, I'm gonna start with, um, with a question why pillars.

I'm gonna talk a lot about pillars today.

I'm gonna talk about pillars and a number of different contexts, and we are gonna mix our metaphors a fair bit here.

Um, and, and the reason for that is that the concept of a pillar is part of an ancient image of a city or civilization, right?

So I have here on the screen this, uh, kind of heavenly city picture, uh, that, that AI helpfully generated for me some months ago.

And it's got, you know, these pillars that are awri, you know, rising out of the clouds.

And then on top of the pillars are, is a, uh, is a flat, um, a flat spice, a uh, a a flat area where, where then there are houses on top of it.

And then covering the whole thing is a, is a nice translucent dome with a, with a.

A little bit of sci-fi stuff kind of sitting in there.

And this is an important image for us, uh, because it shows up all over Western art.

It shows up in, in, in, in a lot of, of stories and fiction and, and images.

And there's a reason for that.

And, and, and the reason for that is that these are the three institutions of the West, right?

The three institutions of the west are represented in this image.

So the, the, the, the first institution is the multi-generational family or the household.

And, you know, again, I'm gonna define that a little bit more today.

And they're the pillars, right?

That, that in this image, they're the, the structural places that the, the structural, um.

Things that, that allow you to build on top of them.

The, the, the nicer things in life, right?

Then you have the church or the assembly is the, the flat place upon which you can build people with buildings.

Um, you, you can, you can build, uh, marketplaces for deals and ideals.

You can have legislatures, you can have all sorts of, you know, you, you, anytime you need a level playing field to figure out what you believe or to have some kind of contest or to
rate order things, that's the, the thing that the church creates and provides this, this neutral, not, not in a virtue sense, but neutral in a, let's figure things out kind of a sense.

And then the state is the dome, right?

And, and, and as I, I always say when I'm explaining this image, we want our dumps to be light and thin and transparent, right?

Because if, uh, if they are thick and, and heavy and, and opaque, then life gets very bad for the people living under that.

Dot, okay.

This is a very old image, very important image.

Um, and we'll, we'll, we'll come back to it, right?

And, and I wanna just take a moment to, to observe a difference between the modern world and the ancient world that kind of gave rise to these ideas in the modern world, we're it used to flat places, right?

Have an image here of a parking lot and there's parking lots, roads, floors, and buildings.

We assume a, a kind of very tame, predictable world, the kind of road that you could, uh, roll wheels on.

So, uh, I recall, you know, I grew up as a, as a, in a dairy farming family.

And, uh, so I spent a lot of time out in fields.

And, uh, I remember when I was, uh, becoming a lawyer and I, I. Entered the world, I entered the realm where there would be people who, they would get out of their car and they had their, their like their suitcase, their, their, their briefcase on wheels.

And they assumed that wherever they were gonna go, there was gonna be like, like not just, and not just any wheels, but like real thin roller wheels.

The kinds of wheels you have to have on a, on a very flat concrete or a nice marble service.

And that they'd be able to, you know, find an elevator or what, however they were gonna do it, that they were not going to encounter any rough territory.

It was all gonna be the kind of flat space that you could roll wheels on.

So we assume that that's kind of our default, our cultural default is we assume these flat, you know, in, in some sense it's even almost frictionless spaces.

But that is not the world, and it's certainly not the world that the, that the ancients, uh, lived in or thought about.

So the ancients saw things very differently.

They, they assumed a cold, crooked, jagged, cruel world.

You know, I, I have an image up here.

The first image I have is of, of a, a mountaintop kind of craggy.

There's some, there's a lot of exposed rock.

There's some places where there are trees you could not take, you know, your wheeled suitcase over this terrain.

That wouldn't work, right.

Um, the assumptions of modernity don't work here.

Okay.

And then.

Probably an even better primal image is, uh, is one of, of chaos.

Some chaos in the, in the ancient world had had some craggy rocks, but it also had water.

It had the high seas, it had a storm running and, and, and lightning overhead.

And, and again, in this environment, you don't get those nice flat places that you can take your, your, your little wheeled suitcase over.

That's, that's not gonna work here.

You need to build in this chaotic space, something that creates the civilization, that kind of in modernity, we assume.

Yeah.

So, uh, and, and, and how do you do that?

What do you, what do you build, what do you use to, to elevate yourself out of the, the chaotic, uh, state of nature that, that the, the reality presents itself to us in while you, you use a pillar, right?

So when you're building on top of a tilted or shifting foundation, then before you can build your buildings, you have to start with pillars and the foundation.

Um, we do this with piers on, on the water today.

There's this, uh, place, I think, I think it's off the coast of Florida.

And, uh, for whatever reason, they, they built this large pier out into, uh, out into the waterways, and then they built buildings and they have kinda this little strip mall and, and restaurants and the whole bit on the water.

And you can, uh, you, you have to walk down the pier to get to it.

Um, so that's, you know, that's.

That is closer to what the ancients assumed they were doing.

They assumed they were finding cruel, crooked, jagged, watery spaces, and they were building pillars.

And then once they had elevated themselves from the default, then they would be able to build your, your flat places upon which you could build more sophisticated civilizational things.

Okay.

So, uh, and again, I I've, I've got the, the main image that I've gotten, um, for, for the, the Great Houses Forum, which I, I've, I've posted a number of places.

I've got my, my round table with my knights, with their swords in the middle.

And then kind of off to the top left, I've got a banner and off to the top right, I've got, I've got another one of these cities on pillars.

Right.

Um, and, and I, I wanna say this, that in, in the ancient world, uh, in the ancient mind, the, the pillars of that city and the men that are, that are sitting around the table, around the round table.

These are the same thing, right?

They, they, these are not distinct concepts.

They, they think of those men as the social pillars.

Those pillars are to their society, to their social order, uh, what the pillars are to the city, right?

To these, these, these floating cities.

Yeah.

That's the primal image that I want to give you.

And, and, and every time that I've given a presentation like this, I get messages over the following weeks of people saying, oh my goodness.

I see, I, I, I see this now.

I saw this in this piece of art.

I saw this in that piece of art.

And, and, uh, usually it's like things I've never heard of.

But, but I, I, I just want to tell you, these images are so deep and they're so widespread in Western civilization.

It's a, it's a really cool thing.

So hopefully I'm giving you a little bit of a secret decoder ring to, to start noticing all the world in which you, uh, live was built.

Yeah.

So the other thing is, you know, I've said that that households are a pillar.

Well, which they are, but, but households also contain pillars.

So there's kind of a fractal relationship here.

So households are the pillars of society at large, but when you zoom in, each household has at least four pillars.

Uh, and, and we would think of these household pillars.

These are certain necessary functions that all have to be happening for that larger societal role to be fulfilled.

Okay.

That, for that, for that generational goal, and again, the goal that we're, we're aiming for here is basically can be basically summed up as a.

I want to create a structure where I can enter into a deal with you.

Right?

And one of the things that we're thinking about, one of the things that we are in some sense, assuming or banking on, in, in making this deal is that my children will be trained to a high level of excellence.

Your children will be trained to a high level of excellence, and that they will, at least one of my children, will be suited to fill basically the same role that I fill.

And at least one of your children will be suited to, to fulfill basically the same role you fill.

And so that in 20, 40, 80 years, our descendants can be playing more or less the same game accounting for changes in technology and all of that, right?

Uh, but that's, that's the goal here.

So how do you, how do you get that right?

Um, so I, I, as I, as we are all learning how to use ai, I, I told AI what I wanted, um, and, and it grabbed this, this image, which is kind of a zoom in of the, uh, the floating city.

I have in the main graphic for the Great Houses Forum.

And so we have creation of wealth.

Um, productive property, uh, evangelism and recruitment and discipleship training.

And those are the four functions that have to be done in order for a house to, to stand on its own.

If, if any of these four functions are, are totally outside of your control, then you are dependent upon that in a way that's, that's make that mean.

You might be, it might be a healthy dependence, it might be a, a negotiated dependence, but you are dependent in a way that you gotta be aware of.

Okay.

And then, um.

The three levels of of a, of a house.

So we start with at the bottom level, we have a good house, right?

And a good house basically means you have a compelling vision.

You're on the great houses form, you're thinking dynastically, you're building generationally.

At least that's your goal.

You've probably convinced your wife or your son or your brother that this is a good idea.

It's, it's you and maybe one other person.

Um, it's not just living in your head, but you've got a compelling vision and, and you've got something that you can share and that resources are added to your situation you can build upon.

Now, once you get a compelling vision, you start building, um, you're gonna, you're gonna start to get to the level of, of the household.

And, and I want you to think of the household as the house that holds, right?

So in, in, in modern life, we tend to assume, Hey, I, I've got a relationship with this piece of property, I've got a relationship with this person, and that relationship is just gonna end at some point.

There's gonna be an exit and I will no longer, I will have converted whatever this relationship was into money and I'll have gotten out.

Okay.

And that's just kind of a necessity for, for most people in our world, they have to do that.

They don't really have any options.

But if you, if you start building generationally, you start building, you know, legacy buckets so that you can take advantage of people.

Once you've discipled them, you're gonna get to the point where it's like, oh, well now if I wanted to, I could hold onto that property.

I could hold onto that person.

I could have a long-term, mutually beneficial arrangement.

And it doesn't have to end.

When you've gotten to that point where you can hold onto people and hold onto property and there doesn't necessarily need to be an,
an expected end date other than, you know, death and all of that, that sort of thing, then you have achieved the level of a household.

Okay.

And, and, and therefore you've gotten some level of generational transfer.

Now there's a big gap between a household all the way up to, to a great house.

And a great house is basically the way I would explain it is that a great house is something that's politically relevant.

Okay?

It's a, uh, it's a a and.

A entity where people that are not your family will join you specifically because it raises their status.

So, um, and I, I meant to actually move on here.

So here are the, here is a, uh, probably a way that's easier for everyone to read.

So we have, again, the four pillars are creation of wealth, right?

So you gotta be able, if you're gonna, if you're gonna have any kind of generational thing, you gotta be able to create wealth at the lowest level, right?

At the level of a, of a compelling vision.

This might be just being able to maintain a, a good job in our society.

A, a high, high earning the kind of job that will allow you to own property and perpetuate yourself, right?

Um, at higher levels, that's, that's likely to mean something more advanced, business ownership, et cetera.

Um, then you've got, um, evangelism or recruitment.

You gotta be able to, to persuade people to join your thing.

Most importantly, you gotta be able to persuade, you know, the people you live with, your wife and then, and then ultimately your children, and then ultimately your grandchildren.

And, and as I said, other people who are gonna join what you're doing.

Okay.

The third pillar is gonna be some kind of productive property.

Ideally, you want productive property that's aligned with your method of wealth creation, right?

Another word for productive property might be that some of you will be familiar with is, you know, the means of production.

To use the Marxist phrase, right?

But productive property is probably a better frame.

It's it's property where you put in effort, you're able to manage it wisely, and it gives back to you with abundance.

Okay?

And finally, the last pillar, the, just the last essential function that a household has to have is discipleship and training, right?

Um, you have to be able to take people who are at a certain level of skills and upskill them all.

Right?

Uh, and, and, and this does not happen automatically.

This does not happen.

This is a discreet skill and critically, for those of you who were here for our discussion of, of democratic versus aristocratic technologies.

Developing people, discipling people is a skill that liberal managerial systems are broadly terrible at.

Right?

Uh, they're, they're not good at it.

They, they, they can't really manage that effectively.

They can't even, in many cases, tell if they have been successful.

You really need in order to, in order to advance people and take them to the next level or, well, uh, I'll say it.

Liberal managerial systems tend to notice that they have successfully developed people when they leave for greener pastures and a higher paycheck.

Okay.

That's when, that's, that tends to be when they know, oh, we're losing so many people.

We must be, you know, training them effectively.

Um.

But, but a patronage network, again, with a long-term mindset, with a capacity to develop other buckets.

Say, Hey, you're in this spot and I know that, you know, you might not like it super much here, but let's, let's keep you here.

Let's make sure that you're developing and you're growing.

And when you have learned some of the lessons that, that I'm trying to teach you, some of the virtuous skills that I'm trying to get you to learn, there is another place you can jump up to a higher level.

And again, that's what we talked about, uh, last week in the, uh, the, the, the legacy business framework.

So.

And then again, the, here are the three levels for, for each one.

If you've got, um, if you can do this at a, at a basic level, uh, where you're able to feed yourself and clothe yourself and house yourself, you, you, you, you could probably develop a compelling vision.

And, and I wanna say everyone on this call is gonna be able to do that.

They're gonna be able to develop a compelling vision.

All of you who are here are part of, you know, various communities exit.

Uh, they're part of the, the classical society.

They're part of, uh, radical personal finance.

Those groups all have an intense ability to develop their members and provide aid.

Everyone that that is hearing that is on this call is gonna be able to develop a, a compelling vision.

And if you're listening to the, uh, the public version of the recording and you don't feel like you have that, reach out to one of those groups or reach out to me and we'll, we'll get you connected.

There is a way to get yourself stable and then develop a compelling vision.

And then again.

Household is when you've gotten some level of success, that you've got a little bit of a generational flywheel, maybe it doesn't, you know, get you enormous amounts of wealth and power.

Um, but it, it, it gets you what, uh, you know, in, in, uh, a speech that I heard from a, a friend of mine recently talked about in,
uh, uh, the, the decline of Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon, which is a great book in, in, in kind of the, the Western tradition.

He talks about people who achieving an, an honorable rank, right?

Which is, which it has these, these, um, indic stability that they can keep doing it, that their children can arise to the same level, right?

Doesn't necessarily mean that you're wealthy and powerful doesn't necessarily mean that you have, you know, political power in your, in your local structure, right?

But, but if you can achieve the level of household, you have done a great thing, you have done an incredibly virtuous thing.

And the other thing, parenthetically, I'll say, you know, the reason why I'm calling this the Great Houses Forum is I believe that there's more opportunities for people who have been
able to build that, that minimum household structure to advance to a great house faster and, and, and with more potential impact than at any time, probably in the last four or 500 years.

That's my, uh, that's my larger geopolitical analysis.

Okay?

So how do we build these pillars, right?

And so I'm gonna, I'm gonna break these pillars into five stats.

Okay.

And, uh, for those of you who are familiar with, again, I, I talk about the, the covenants.

I've talked about the, um, the, the various levels of covenanting, the various levels of, of, we, we might always call this the, uh, the levels of the order of Morris.

How do you, how do you rank order your moral duties?

And you start with life, uh, you have a duty to your breath, right?

We talked about that, uh, two weeks ago.

You have a duty to your breath.

You have a duty to, uh, tell the truth.

And, uh, and, uh, arguably in, in many of the most successful cultures, you have a duty to reproduce yourself.

How do you do that?

You get married.

How do you be successful in marriage and childr?

You join a household, you join some entity that has the wealth to perpetuate itself.

Even now, the, the vision of the founder, right, may not be towards household.

It may not be towards, you know, the, the, the, the classic Kos.

Um, and, and, and the successful things there.

But this person, uh, if, if he can create economic success for you, you probably owe him something.

You probably owe him some level of honor as the head of your house.

And, and, and you should make that duty, or you should make that covenant if you cannot achieve that for yourself.

Broadly speaking, households will need assemblies, which could be a, a literal church, it could be a chamber of commerce, it could be some way of, of connecting with things, right?

Some way of, of having the, the players in a certain, uh, domain or inter, uh, industry come together and discuss problems that are too big for any one of them to solve That, that sociologically what the assembly is.

Um, and then.

Finally you have the, the political covenant, the political entity, the city, the state, the, sometimes people will call this the
nation though, though, that that terminology gets, you have to define your terms fairly carefully when you start talking about nations.

Um, so those are the, those are the five levels of, of covenant here.

And, and, and let's assume that, that I have kind of below here, I have at the bottom a, a slave level.

So if you, if you're a slave, you've fallen into some level of bondage, you can't really get out.

You, you're not really able to accomplish that much.

But not everyone has to be a slave.

Uh, let's hope you're a son or a daughter and, and, and you're, you're, you're in relationship with a virtuous father who's going to be able to set a path in front of you that you can use to advance yourself

and.

Let me move on to the next slide.

So, so the way that you do that tends to be the mastery of some kind of principle, right?

So, um, broadly speaking, and, and, and I'm drawing, I should note here, I'm drawing heavily from the, the reformed tradition, uh, the, the,
the folks like Gary North and Dennis Peacock and some of the, the, the, the reform Protestant tradition of a way of thinking about this.

Again, Catholics will have their own way of thinking about this.

Orthodox will have their own way of thinking about this.

All Christian traditions, all, all successful Western instantiations are gonna have a way of thinking about this.

But this is the one that I'm the most familiar with and, and I've kind of.

Zoomed out to try to make it generally applicable, though.

I'll also note, uh, this is the particular tradition that, uh, that built the United States.

Uh, so there's a great book by the Hopper brothers called The Puritan Gift, which documents how in many ways we sort of borrowed, uh, Puritan and Presbyterian church culture and imported it into our, uh, our big corporations.

The, there are great engines of wealth, like General Motors and General Electric and some of the, the, uh, the, the great engines that the, the great companies that built the United States, particularly in, um, in the World War I, world War II context.

Okay?

So if you can't figure out, if you don't have the, the, the moral capacity to imitate a, a father and sacrifice for him, you're probably not doing very well.

Okay?

But you, once you master those two principles, you're gonna be a son or a daughter, okay?

Um.

If you learn, if you wanna level up, uh, to being a husband or a wife, you're gonna need to learn to love and respect, right?

And, and, and as I've said before, you love and respect is not just for husbands and wives, it's also how partners deal with each other, right?

So you're gonna have a somebody who's in the dominant position and somebody who's in the vulnerable position, and at some point in, in the, the relationship that that positioning is gonna switch for some period of time.

This is what's called counterparty risk or the contractual cycle.

And then at the end, it's gonna switch back.

And the better you can be at playing both of those roles, the, the, the more money you can make, the more relationships you can maintain, the more long-term one-on-one relationships you can maintain.

Okay?

Um, now when you wanna level up, uh, beyond, beyond one-on-one relationships, you're gonna need to be a father or mother, right?

And, and, and the, the essence of that, that parenting level or that manager level, is learning how to refine and nurture what we call this training people.

Okay?

Above that you have patriarchs and matriarchs and patriarchs and matriarchs are able.

So if a father and mother are able to look at somebody and say, this is what's in you, I'm gonna get, get what's in you out of you, then a patriarch
and a matriarch are able to say, well, I'm going to add something to you, or I'm going to fix something that's broken into you and get better results.

Okay.

This is the, this is the, uh, the, the, the father of adult children.

Right?

And then finally, the, the highest level, the, the principle of ruling and anointing.

Your, your, your king or a priest.

And, and I'm using very kind of, uh, spiritual theological language here.

So let's, uh, let's talk about, uh, various, various instances of what this, this could look like.

All right.

So let's talk about in all of these ways of playing the great game, but, uh, let's, let's say you just focused on family.

So, uh, if you, if you can, uh, master the first level of family, you're gonna be able to keep your job, you imitate and sacrifice, uh, and, and have that virtuous relationship with some employer, um, and they're gonna pay you a certain amount of money.

You're gonna be able to keep your job.

If you master the second level, you're gonna be able to keep your wife the third level.

You're gonna be able to keep your kid.

Fourth level, you're gonna be able to keep your adult children.

I'll note parenthetically, the first three levels, that's kind of like normy conservative American, right?

You're gonna get a, keep a job, keep your wife, keep your kids, and your, your, and, and then you're, you're expected to just kind of send them off for larger, more important, more noble, higher status institutions to mold in shape.

All right?

But let's assume you didn't do that.

Let's assume you did the very un-American thing of keeping not only your adult children, but also your adult grandchildren.

So if you have a decent amount of children and they had a decent amount of children, you have a clan of 50 to 60 people, plus maybe another 50 spouses.

Um, and, uh, we have a, we have a, uh, like a friend that, uh, maybe on this call, I don't, I don't, uh, see him at this exact moment, but, uh, one of his life goals is to, uh, is to have a hundred grandchildren.

Right?

So, uh, that that's a, that's a pretty extreme goal.

That's a pretty great goal.

And, and I, I wish him the best of luck.

So let's, let's assume you were you.

As successful as my friend.

You've got 50 grandchildren, um, and another 50 spouses and their friends, and you decide that you're irritated at the local city councilmen and the local school board, and you all show up at the next town hall, right?

So this starts you the, by the way, I've, I've done political organizing and you, you always send the younger people out first, right?

And they kind of tend to start with, so I heard you're so stupid, you're gonna do a stupid thing like blank, right?

And, and every member of the family that's present gets there five minutes and they get to talk and they get to criticize.

Um, and then finally the great-grandfather kind of steps up to the stage and, and he says, now I don't want to hear anymore about this.

We're not gonna do this.

Right?

And, and many cases when you do this in real life, like, uh, this is less so now, 'cause like the school boards have kind of gotten injured or they're, they, they, they've gotten more hardened as people did this.

But for a while there, when you went to a school board, if you got like 50 or 60 people to show up and just criticize them all night, like people would resign.

You get done with a meeting and people are like, I'm, I'm outta here.

This was supposed to be like a fun, safe, you know, usually left wing appointment.

I could draw a salary and have some of these benefits and I didn't really have to do any work.

And this is very seriously unenjoyable.

I don't wanna do this no more, I'm out.

Um, and then you get to replace half the school board, which is, which is lovely.

Um, but you, the next morning you get a very polite invitation to the mayor's office.

Right.

And why would you, why would you get that invitation to the mayor's office?

'cause you just flexed on the local political establishment and the mayor, whether he is a Republican or a Democrat, it doesn't matter.

He wants to know what you want so that you never do that to him.

Okay.

And if you did it to the mayor, then you'll, you'll hear about it from a city councilman or some, some politician will reach out and want some level of assurances that, Hey, you're, you're not gonna do that to me.

'cause that was really awful.

We, we didn't like that.

Right.

Um, so then, then, um, let's say you have a, a church or, and, and I'm using church here again in a, in kind of a broad sociological sense.

So you have assemblies, which are, their churches are one form of assembly, chambers of commerce, or another form of assembly.

Grassroots political parties tend to be an assembly, and they all have the same five stage life cycle.

Um, so you start with a church plant, right, with some charismatic leader, uh, who's who's, who's.

Airing the fire and people are, are, are gathering around him.

Then you have the second level, the missional level where you solve, uh, whatever the local issue is, there's gonna be some kind of grand injustice that's happening.

And, and you gotta attack that and say, yeah, this is wrong.

And sometimes all you have to do is say it's wrong.

Uh, sometimes you have to do something about it more directly, but you, you solve some local issue.

Uh, if you're able to do that, then you're able to, to evangelize, right?

Because now people have heard of you, they've heard of your name, you have a certain level of moral authority from solving the problem, and you're, you know, your, your evangelism spikes.

Or if it's a more traditional organization, you get a bunch of sales.

But there's a great book called, uh, uh, the Starfish and the Spider by a gentleman named Ori Broman, where he basically talks about how to use
this type of structure, this type of decentralized organization as your sales organization for whatever, you know, whatever marketing you're doing.

Then, then the fourth, uh, level is kind of the, the pastoral level.

This is the, this is the level where you, you, you have a clear vision for your people and it's gonna take them some period of time to get there.

There's a lot of one-on-one mentoring.

This is, this is, you know, in the church life cycle, this is the long 20 year walk of the pastor where he's got people that acknowledge, Hey, you know, I need to stop drinking, or I need to stop this, or I need to stop this.

But, you know, this is kind of how I, I live my life.

And you have to reestablish habits and, and, and build new ones.

And that can be a very long-term process.

If a guy is able to endure through that, um, and, and, and get to the end of that kind of pastoral cycle, he'll have a teaching church.

And this is where you start getting public influence in the city.

A lot of times you start like a university or a college or a publishing house or a a a film studio, right?

So there's that, that big church, I think it's in Alabama that did, uh, fireproof and uh, and war room and some of these kind of christiany movies.

Um, and they, that one church, like that's their thing, that they are able to have this disproportionate, uh, influence actually not just in their city and state, but nationwide.

And, and they went through this period and, and this was the project that kind of manifested, uh, for them.

So if, if you're the pastor of that fifth level assembly, again, whether it's a formal church or a chamber of commerce or something of that nature, well, the morning after the great-grandfather and his Klan visit the town hall or maybe the night of, right?

The mayor's staff is calling you to come and mediate between the political establishment and the great-grandfather.

And so you too are in the mayor's office, right?

And this, this, um, this structure, right?

This is, this is dealing with that, that the, the, the third and fourth pillars, right?

The, the evangelism and the discipleship pillars.

That's what an assembly is good for.

So you don't need separate organizations to do that.

This one institution that you've built.

And probably do both.

Now, it might do one much better than the other, right?

And so you may need shoring up of one function.

You know, most, most churches, ideally churches, would all evangelize really well and disciple really well in the real world.

Most churches kind of pick one and they're really good at one and they're, you know, hopefully Okay.

At the other, yeah.

So then, uh, another, another way of expressing the same thing is the real estate developer.

You know, many people have realized that uh, different levels of real estate are really about the relationships that you can maintain.

So if you one house, you have a relationship with the house and, and as I said, the house is your baby, right?

And you do everything for the house, right?

You take care of it.

You're over there all the time.

Now you can do that with one house, uh, you know, one single family residence.

At a certain point you're getting like 3, 4, 5 houses at five houses, you probably have a handyman, right?

Uh, it would take an extraordinary amount of time and energy and usually the kind of professional who can get the initial capital to invest in five houses is not going to spend all of his time.

Fixing toilets and various things, he's gonna have a handyman.

And so you gotta maintain that relationship with that handyman.

And critically, that relationship with that handyman is an imbalanced power relationship, right?

There are moments where you have the whip hand over the, the handyman, and there's a moments where, you know, where the handyman is dependent on you,
and there's moments where you're dependent on the handyman, and you have to be able to, to handle the social stress of both of those roles, okay?

At a certain level, you get a larger, uh, you know, real estate portfolio, you might join into the multifamily, right?

And, and when you have multifamily, the tenants are your kids, right?

Like this is the third level of, uh, of, of, of that organization.

Then above that is the investment group where you're managing investors who are a little bit higher level.

Um, and then finally, you know, if you, if you can be a developer, if you can look at a raw piece of real estate.

Um, and you can see what would be the highest and best use of this real estate, or close enough that you're able to get a bank and then investors and then other people to actually develop it for you.

You can, it make incredible amounts of money.

Um, and, you know, if that great-grandfather's mad about zoning or some fundamental changes being made in his town, and, and a lot of time he either disagrees or, or, or frequently doesn't understand what the real estate guy is doing.

Uh, he doesn't understand your plans, and so you too potentially are in the mayor's office.

Um, uh, many, many, many times when this this sort of thing happens, there is a real estate component and, and the, the grandfather is, is mad at the, uh, at the real estate developer.

Uh, now one of the things that, when we we're talking about those four pillars, right?

This would be the real estate is quintessentially productive property, right?

Uh, so that's why you invest in real estate.

It holds value and it generates, uh, ongoing cash flow, ideally with less and less.

Day-to-day work, though again, somebody is doing that work, it's just, hopefully not you, but, but this is the, the, the productive property.

It can also be your method of wealth creation.

Right?

Um, that's, that's, unfortunately that was very true, uh, 20 years ago.

It's, it's more and more difficult to have real estate be a method of wealth creation for most people.

They have some other method of wealth creation and then real estate is their, their productive property, their store of value.

And it, it, it's the thing that they, a lot of 'em, they'll, they'll use it for tax offsets, but that means if you're using real estate for taxes, remember you have to have income from somewhere.

Some, there's gotta be income for the, for the tax justification to make sense.

Yeah.

Then finally we just kind of have the straight businessman, right?

Uh, if, and, and, and basically the way that, that, that this works is in my experience is if you don't understand really how to, how to imitate and sacrifice, then, then, then depending on where we are in the country, uh, you're making less than $50,000.

Uh, you are, you are probably an EEC in an economic hole that you're never gonna climb out of, right?

Uh, that $50,000 is where a lot of people find themselves.

They would actually prefer to make less money and wind up on welfare.

Yeah, that's kind of a hard place to be.

And there are, there are places in the country where even a hundred thousand dollars won't materially improve your lifestyle and, and allow you to start accumulating wealth so that you can eventually climb out.

But if you learn how to imitate and sacrifice, you build a relationship with, with a, a father figure in a business.

Um, and assuming he's a good father, which is, you know, not always a justified assumption, but what are you gonna do?

I'm gonna break, make more.

Right?

But if all you can do, if all you can give that institution is imitation and sacrifice, well, you're probably gonna hit a, a, a wall or a ceiling, a around a quarter of a million dollars.

Like, no matter how loyal you are, no matter how faithful you are, no matter how, how much you just sort of virtuously imitate your father, if you can't
maintain long-term relationships with other people, uh, that are of benefit to the institution that you're working for, you're not gonna make more than $250,000.

Like no one can afford to pay you that right.

Um, if you for that, that that next level, if you can maintain relationships with one-on-one people, you're probably gonna hit another ceiling around, uh, $750,000.

This is where a lot of professional lawyers, doctor, independent doctors, uh, lawyers, doctors accounts, they kind of talk out, right?

Because they, they, they don't really know how to, how to manage a team.

They don't really know how to train, but they're really good at billing hours, right?

And so, um, if they're working a lot of the time and they've got a good billable rate, they're gonna top out at $750,000.

Um, this is the, the professional trap, as Kiyosaki would say, if you learn how to maintain a team, you're gonna be able to, to, to go up to maybe 2.5, maybe $10 million, um, $2.5 million in income, $10 million in revenue.

That's about what you'll hope, you know, you should be able to generate with a good team.

Um, and as that team grows and a team that you can manage effectively, and then, uh, but in order to, in order to advance past that $10 million mark.

You're gonna need to learn how to manage managers, genuinely develop an executive management structure, have layers in your organization, and then you, you're gonna hit another wall somewhere between where you are.

And then this varies by industry, but somewhere around $25 million in income, um, and a hundred million dollars in, in revenue.

And if you can break that a hundred million dollar wall, well you, you have mastered the, the, the arch, right?

And, and, and this, you know, this has been observed by a lot of people.

You know, the team that gets you to a million dollars is not the team that gets you to $10 million.

The team that gets you to $10 million, not the team that gets you to a a hundred million dollars.

And the team that gets you to a hundred million dollars is not the team that gets you to a billion.

All right?

But if you got this kind of earning capacity, right, then you too are probably in the mayor's office trying to figure out how to solve the problem, right?

And, and you have the resources to do it.

So other people have invited you there.

Okay.

And then finally the, the, the, the another way of building one of these pillars is to have, you know, different types of resources, right?

So you have, uh, spiritual resource, and I've drawn this from, um.

From, uh, James E. Hughes Jr's, uh, family, family Wealth, family Trust, that whole, that whole series of books.

So, uh, we start with spiritual resources.

And spiritual resources are what you believe about God, the universe and everything.

Um, and you know, we've all met people that had very negative things that they believed and it kind of tanked them.

Uh, but, but if you believe good things, then you, you have a, the potential to, to move in a good direction, right?

And this is the foundation.

You can't really get anywhere if you don't have a solid spiritual foundation.

Um, then you have internal resources.

And internal resources are, are not things that you just believe about God, the universe and stuff out there.

It's about what you have, have instantiated in your being.

Like, you know, I've known, I've known a bunch of people that claim to be Calvinists, right?

Sovereignty of God, all that bit.

I knew one guy.

He lost 90% of his net wealth in the stock market in a day, and he went home and slept like a baby.

He met, he actually took time to meet with me right the day after he'd had this huge loss.

And I figured out kind of about halfway through the conversation like this has just happened to him.

And I was like, why are you sitting here meeting with me?

This is crazy.

What are you gonna do?

And he is like, you know, God's in control.

And he really believed that, like, I don't think it raised his heart rate.

Like he, he had, he had internalized the ability to, to have a, a big dip in, in the number that that represents his, uh, his net wealth.

And, and he was okay with that.

Yeah.

Got internal resources, you got people with great courage, got people with great fortitude that you can just keep going no matter what seems to hit them, right?

And, and so if you master those resources, you're probably gonna have tangible resources, right?

Tangible resources are great plants, property and equipment that would allow our world to work.

Above tangible resources are intellectual or intangible resources.

These are the, the methods, systems, processes, the way that we use property and, and, and people, and, and, and how do we organize 'em in virtuous arrangement.

And then the highest level of resources, right, um, is, is reputation And, and think of reputation.

One of the, one of the, the ways that I explain reputation is that if you're, if you're doing a deal, if everyone in the deal always did all of the due diligence that they rationally should have.

The transaction costs of all deals would be so great that no deals would ever happen.

Right.

That's the uh, that's the reality.

You're gonna have to trust somebody at some point.

I mean, at a minimum, you've gotta trust the lawyers and professionals that are doing the due diligence.

In order to do that for you, right?

And, and, and it's, it gets really murky when you start asking, well, why, what, what is the, the rational basis that you have?

Did you test their capacity for all of these things?

And how would you do that?

Right?

So there's a, there's some circular things.

Well, one of the cool things about this, this principle is you can bring people into a deal that are high trust people and everybody, they might not trust each other.

Everybody in the room will trust this person.

Uh, that may not mean they like that person, right?

The, the frequently there's a godfather effect.

You gotta bring somebody into the deal and everyone believes that everyone else in the room is gonna work really hard to avoid offending or screwing that person over because we have some suspicion that this would be bad, right?

Um, and, and, and, you know, you know, obviously that the hope is that there's nothing illegal or unlawful going on there, but, but there are, there are lots of deals that rely on this, this sort of trusted person effect.

And that's a, that's a reputational resource, okay?

So if you can operate in the reputational resource level, you acquire wealth of that kind.

And another name for that is authority, right?

This means that so many people trust you, that not only do you not require money to solve your problems, but you can solve other people's problems without money and increase your re relational authority while doing it.

Okay?

And some, and, and, and, you know, some of you that are on the call will, will immediately think, ah, this, this sounds a lot like politics and political power.

Yes, it does.

Isn't that interesting?

Um.

And, and the, and again, the, the background point that I'm making is all of these structures, all of these pillars are ways of playing the great game.

Okay.

And, and, and they also fulfill a function in your house, right?

So if you've got, if you've got, uh, a big family, you that, that's taking care of, you know, your recruitment and evangelism, and
probably you're pretty good at discipleship, at least for other family members, what you may, you may not be very good at wealth creation.

Frequently, the, the, the families that have, that have maximized on family in, in the last 50 years are not very good at wealth creation.

Uh, they, they may not be very good at at, at productive property.

They haven't probably acquired something though frequently they've held on.

One of the secret success of family is being able to hold on to especially, uh, family seats, old ranches, old, uh, you know, apartment buildings, you know, some of these, these backwoods.

Properties where people can physically come and live, uh, if they, if they must.

Right.

And many of them will have a second house or, or their, their main house in the city.

But if, if they're between houses or they have a financial setback, they get divorced or they lose their job, something bad happens, they move back onto the family property.

And, and, and it may, it may not be the, the kind of quality of life that they would like to lead, but uh, but that's incentive for them to get back in the game and, and, and try again.

Right.

Um, you again, real estate is gonna be, is quintessential productive property in our current system.

And sometimes for some people it could be a method of wealth creation.

Um, your, your, your ability to work this to, to build flat organizations, assemblies, that's gonna be evangelism, that's gonna be discipleship.

Um, and especially evangelism.

The, the way that these kind of flat organizations work is they're really, really good at marketing, probably better at marketing than anything else in our system.

Okay.

Um, and then obviously you just have business earning income levels.

Right.

If you can build a business, that's your, that's kind of the quintessential method of wealth creation.

Where a lot of business owners will struggle is, well, how do I maintain my family?

How do I recruit and, and disciple my own people that are, that are loyal to me outside of the context of this particular business venture, which likely has an expiration date on it?

And how do I get productive property, right?

Because there's a ton of businesses that, that are doing pretty well.

They might even be making, you know, five, $10 million in revenue a year.

And you look at them and it's like, man, you don't have it.

And you've got you and you've got a team and you're, and you're making good income, but you have no assets that, that could possibly be used to perpetuate this or even really to justify a strong buyout.

And that that's a really hard thing, uh, for people to go through.

Okay?

So all of these are ways of playing the great game.

Again, each of these are ways to build maybe one to two pillars of your household wealth creation, productive property evangelism, recruitment, discipleship training.

And here's the other thing I'll say.

You probably cannot build more than two of these structures in your lifetime, right?

And, and, and remember to, to get to the level of a great house or even probably a strong household, you need all four functions.

And, and you need them at least at, at, at enough level that you can get the, the flywheel going.

So, how do we solve this problem?

This is the problem.

We solve it through covenant, okay?

Covenant between generations, right?

Covenant with, with your heirs, where you're actually rationally approaching your heirs and making sure that this is a good deal for them to carry on to continue what you're doing.

And then covenants between, between men, between people in your world.

Um, and, and you understand again.

You are dependent upon them, right?

You're negotiating some level of dependence, but dependence is not always a bad thing.

Again, you know, the first rule of risk management is that you can't get rid of risk.

All you can do is allocate it.

Right?

Um, and that's really good.

That's a, that's a, that's a good frame for thinking about kind of the, the, the dependence in this, in this, this covenantal framework that I'm putting, putting for you.

You probably can't get rid of dependence.

All you can do is triage it.

All you can do is address it and, and, and engage with people.

Figure out what they're doing, and, and, and ask for the promises, right?

Ask for the promises and see what you get in, in return.

So.

In the modern world, we are, we are all Ronan, right?

Uh, and if, if we fall, we fail.

And all our bonds are forfeit.

You know, one of the, one of the worst things that I saw in the, uh, the, the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, uh, was people,
there was people online that were, that were calling out number one for his wife to be assassinated, which is just a horrible thing.

And then specifically for his children to be placed in foster care.

So that they could be educated according to a leftist mentality, and they, and they thought that would just be the, uh, the worst thing that they could do.

That that would be true triumph.

That would be the, the extermination of Charlie Kirk's name and his legacy and, and the end of his line, which, I mean, that's, that's a heck of a thing to do to somebody, right?

Um, and I wanna, uh, oppose that.

Recently Mike Cernovich posted, you know, if something happens to me, my wife and kids are protected, right?

My, he doesn't, he doesn't specify how, oh, I have theories.

Uh, but, uh, but he, he doesn't say how, but he asserts that he's got this Saul, right?

So that if someone takes him out or throws him in jail or something bad happens to him, his wife and kids will be taken care of.

He has thought about, how do I element my wife and children?

And, and he's done that for, for him, that's a solved problem.

Okay?

So.

If we have covenants and if we keep them, then other men stand surety for our bonds.

This is how we satisfy the covenantal economy by choosing to solve these problems with promises from men of demonstrated character.

Okay.

And, and I wanna, I wanna note that there's, there's a, there's a concept here that, that I've, I've kind of danced around.

I don't, that I've explicit, uh, explicitly stated it so I wanna state it here.

The capacity to engage in these types of covenantal relationships is, is to a man.

What pair bonding is to a woman.

We, we could call this the, your, your capacity for honor bonding.

Right.

And like with the pair bond in the female context, it can be damaged.

And if it is, the man is almost worthless despite any, any skills he might have.

Right.

The, the only thing that can manage somebody whose honor is damaged is the liberal financialized managerial systems that, that we have all around us and that, and that are broadly collapsing all around us.

This is why in the ancient world breaches against grace, breaches against, uh, the, the patronage interactions between patron and client were considered an attempt to destroy the structure of society itself.

Okay?

Like in, in, in a healthy society that understands, hey.

This is the capacity.

It's, it's, it's born in most people.

There might be some people that are born without it.

Um, you know, we, we would call these people a storge or, or, or they, they are, they, they are lacking in filial affection or, or, or piety.

And, uh, in the, in the, in the first century, you know, Rome, uh, that would've, that, that carried the same connotation as sociopath or maybe even psychopath does to us in the modern con.

This is a person who cannot be integrated into society, right.

Um, and, but if you were the per, if you're going around and you're doing things that create people that have damage to their capacity to honor bond, oh, we don't like you at all.

Right?

You, you, you are creating problems.

Uh, you know, there there's some, there's a line of thinking that I've, I've, I've en engaged with that basically said that some of the, the, the, the vampire, well werewolf
kind of origin stories, the origins of those types of myths are trying to communicate what happens when people violate the social covenant at, at a, at a, at a deep level.

You create these people that they're people and they look like people, but they don't have souls, and they'll attack you randomly, or, or they're people in, in, in daylight.

They're good, but you know, a couple times a year or maybe once a month at night, they'll go crazy and try to eat you, right?

Um, and, and, and, and we don't like folks that go around creating these, these accursed beings, right?

This is, this is bad for society.

So.

We have to recover within ourselves, the capacity to believe in the covenant to solve problems.

You, this is a social technology.

Covenant is a social technology.

And to be faithful to that solution, even to our hurt, you know, many people have, uh, have studied the, the, the crusades and, and when you understand kind of the, the technical levels of society at that time, the
ability to send that many people that far away and, and feed them and clothe them and house them and do the logistics and the banking, I mean, in some senses, it, it drove incredible advances in those, uh, those domains.

But the, the ability to do that, the underlying social technology that they use to fill in the gaps, to keep things running, to keep things working, while they figured out more in depth how to do this was covenant.

It was the, the, the futile consensus.

It was that, that that loyal honor bond between the, the, the lord and his leisure.

Okay?

And if we can't do that, then we're just LARPing.

Right?

Um, and this is, this is what makes all the, the legacy legal structures make sense, right?

So, you know, the, the, the, the foundational legal structure that, that comes up in the legacy space is called the trust.

And as I often tell my clients, you need a certain level of trust, the utilize the legal structure that we call a trust, or you need a person that you trust in order to have a trust.

If you don't have anyone that you trust, then the, the, the, the legal structure that goes by that name is not gonna work well for you.

Okay?

So in this case, you know the legal profession, it really is telling you what you need.

It's right there in the name.

Just read the label.

Trust this thing requires that as a resource, okay?

And this is the key difference between legacy families and what they call new money.

You know, so many of you have heard my story of how I, I left the, the firm that I was with because I really wanted to help families get from the, the new money status into the legacy status.

And, and while the firm that I was with was doing excellent legal work, we were giving them the same legal structures, the same, same tax strategies, the same everything.

We were doing the legal standard at a very high level, but it wasn't having the outcome of moving people from the legacy status to the new money status.

And, and in many cases it was because these families had no one that they could trust.

Okay?

So again, and, and I've, I've, I've, I've mixed my metaphors.

I've given you a bunch of things to think about.

There are so many, what, there are so many resources to help you think about this and develop your capacity, this capacity within yourself.

If you know, if you've got the secret decoder ring, if you can start to look for pillars in a foundation, you know, pillars, flat place is dome.

And you can start to look for, you know, grace as a, as a method of, of of social connectivity.

Um, this is what the bulk of the Western tradition, including the Bible is about.

It's all over these scriptures.

And so if you can open yourself up to this possibility, if you can say, Hey.

This is a social technology based on deep structures in human nature, right?

There's a, there's a, a friend of mine, leader of exit, um, who said, calls this the futile instinct, right?

Um, which is if you go to his substack, you can read about the feudal instinct.

Incredible, incredible discussions.

So if you come open yourself to this, your history will come alive and harmonize with your experience in ways that you could never have imagined.

There are lots of practical ways to do this.

We'll get into some of them, uh, next week and then, and then that'll kind of carry us on into the series.

We'll talk about what is the great house?

How do you do this?

How do you think about it?

Um, but at its core, you are promising others and seeking promises from others that your descendants and their descendants will be such
excellent people, that they will be able to keep serving the same functions in their house and in, and their house in, in the larger society.

And this is what it means.

To be a pillar, okay?

This is what broadly the Great Houses Forum is about, right?

Because this is, this is not the easiest thing in the world.

Gentlemen, if I, if I told you that I'd be lying, right?

We, I want, I want this place to serve as a venue for those men who are taking on this mighty task and building the future to learn from history and each other.

So I want, we want to be the pillar, be a pillar that builds pillars.

This is how we bring stability to our world.

And so, thank you everybody.

Uh, that's, that includes the, uh, the, the prepared remarks.

And so everyone that's listening on the, uh, the free public version, uh, you're gonna have to join the pa, get behind the paywall to, to hear the, the rest of it and the, and the q and a.

So thank you so much everybody.